Once I had a sister.
Actually 2. And a brother.
We were born spaced apart…my older sister is nearly 4 years older than me, I’m nearly 5 years older than my younger sister, who is nearly 5 years older than my brother. We were born with the distance of years between us. And because of this, my older sister and I grew up with different parents than my younger sister and brother—even though we all have the same mother & father. My parents struggled with poverty, with their own youth that was taxed with caring for too many children they couldn’t afford. My younger siblings’ parents could exhale, enjoy taking care of their two remaining children. My parents couldn’t afford to take us on vacations or do things with us, like they could with the younger kids. My parents kept us living feet away from a psychotic pedophile till we were well into our teens, while my younger siblings’ parents moved them to a safe location while they were still young enough to not understand the chaos around them. I clearly remember instances of violence at my mother’s hands….I remember my mother swinging at me, slamming me up against walls, whipping me, just constantly erupting with the force of baking soda & vinegar. But my younger siblings remember a different mother. They remember a mother who had mostly gotten control of herself, whose mental illness had dipped and dimmed as they grew up. And so, my version (and what I assume is my older sister’s version) of events is largely discounted and dismissed as gonzo storytelling.
But this is not really about my mother and father. Or even my other 2 siblings. This is about my younger sister. Her name was Jenny…but she doesn’t let us call her that anymore. She doesn’t let me call her anything anymore. Not even sister.
Jenny, or Jameela as she is now called, was the sister I was closest to. When she came, we had just moved into the farmhouse. My mom would lay my baby sister on a blanket out in the field & I would watch her while my mom pushed haybales for my uncle and his friends to put on his wagon. I would tickle Jenny’s baby feet with timothy, alfalfa…eclipse the sun on her face with my shadow…feed her, entertain her while my mom worked… In a way, Jenny always felt like she was mine.
We shared a room from the time she was born. In the old farmhouse, before my brother came, my parents put us all in a little room off of what they considered the living room. My parents still talk about what a lump my sister was. She never crawled…she just laid wherever my mom plopped her, content. Then one day, a girl full of surprises, she just stood up and walked. When Jenny was a toddler, she would lay on her belly on her crib railing…and then twist her little body around and drop to the floor. She would climb into my bed, pinch the apples of my cheeks and say, “Cheeky balls” till my older sister and I would laugh and our parents would be yelling at us to settle down from beyond the bedroom door that never quite shut. We would try to tell them it was Jenny making us laugh. They would tell us to quit blaming the baby and go to sleep. And then, Jenny would hoist herself back up the railings and get into bed…my parents none the wiser…and I loved her for it, for putting one over on my parents…for making them the joke.
My love for my sister was so strong that my uncle used it. He knew I would do anything to prevent him or his friend from getting to her and so, he would threaten to move onto her if I didn’t comply with whatever perversion he preferred that day. Even beyond that, my love for her kept me silent for years about the abuse I was enduring. I tried my best to protect her from the dysfunctional poisoning of our environment…I still try. I have never and will never tell her about all the abuse I took to prevent her from being used next…
As we grew, I would read The Phantom Tollbooth to her every summer at night. Sometimes I would climb down to her bunk & we would lay in our room with the windows open, smelling the cornfields…2 little girls, in little cotton nightgowns, clinging to each other…as the lightning bugs razed the fields with the light they summoned from within…both of us just a touch jealous of their ability to make the night brighter.
Later, we would stay up in the summer and watch Unsolved Mysteries till we had convinced ourselves that there was unexpected movement in our backyard. Serial killers hiding in trees. Checking all the locks and windows before retreating to our room.
We spoke in a language of inside jokes…mostly made up from misheard lyrics & ridiculous lines from terrible tv. We insulated ourselves from the dysfunction of our family with shared love of pop culture phenomena and singer/songwriters…Ben Folds Five…Rufus Wainwright…Al Stewart. She loved Cake. I confided in her about a boy I was chatting with online that my parents didn’t know about…about boyfriends I had at school, that my parents also didn’t know about. I told her about my dreams to get out of this godawful town and how I would never come back. I told her how much I hated our mother. She was probably my first friend in the world.
Later yet, she became my accompanist. We would play at many area functions together. Me on violin or singing. She on piano. We played well together, anticipating each other’s timing, phrasing. Some of my favorite memories are of the two of us making music together.
Eventually, I went away to college. She and my younger brother came out for siblings’ weekend once. I took them to the Chinese buffet, and laughed as they ate only “American” offerings-like pizza or nuggets. My roommate tried to teach them pool…and then we hung out in my dorm till midnight, when I took them to this all-night doughnut place that used to be in town. Nothing like warm donuts at midnight. The place closed down. I don’t remember its name. I don’t know if Jenny remembers it either. Or if she even remembers that weekend. It was fucking awesome….licking powdered sugar off our lips under the moon, as we walked back to my dorm, feeling like kings.
My junior year, I tried to unalive myself. 4 days before her birthday. In my head, I thought I was doing a huge favor for everyone I loved, because I thought I was too heavy for them to carry. Looking back, I feel a terrible shame for how selfish it was to do that…especially to her. So, while Jenny turned 17, my parents were out in Fredonia having me committed to a psych ward against my will. And when I returned home the next year, we never talked about it. I have no idea if she knew what I did. I still don’t know what my parents told her, if anything—to explain why they had to come out to Fredonia.
The next year, I ended up wasting my senior year on a degree I knew I wasn’t going to complete & then moved home & had a second nervous breakdown in the fall. I tried to get my feet under me by going to community college & working. Both of us ended up going to the same community college at the same time, while working at Wal-Mart. I’m not sure if any of our co-workers knew our name. Instead, people just called us the sisters. No identity outside of each other. We shared a locker at Wal-Mart and would leave humorous little cards to each other in it. Often, the cards were actually intended to be sympathy cards…We would put some little note of encouragement in them & then would sign them, “With associate integrity”—mocking much of the orientation we went through, where “associate integrity” was a constant theme.
When I moved out of the house to get away from my parents, I took Jenny with me. We rented a little crappy apartment on Watson Place…It was a nice, big apartment in a terrible section of the city that was plagued by arson. It was up the road from my husband, Alex. (I kept a separate residence due to his drug addiction issues.) We couldn’t afford much besides a Formica table from the 40’s and a couple chairs you couldn’t trust to hold your weight…a mustard-colored velvet chair from Salvation Army. Our curtains were towels that had been hemmed to fit a rod. Our cupboards were mostly bare. We rarely ate. On the best of days, my younger sister ate like a fucking convalescent….Mashed potatoes with no butter or salt. Plain white rice. Dry cereal. I had my own eating disorder and lived on cheap Zinfandel and the occasional pig-out meal from the Chinese food place up the road, after days of starving myself.
We would have dance parties—the 2 of us holding hands and spinning round and round to the shitty pop music from the early to mid-2000s that reverberated in our empty living room. Several of our favorites are guilty pleasures that are still wedged between my indie pop rotation on my mp3 player. I can’t seem to take them off…. but I can’t listen to them either.
My mom hated how we lived at the Watson Place apartment. She had a key to our apartment that was supposed to be for emergencies only—like to let herself into find my dead body. Instead, she reverse burgled us. It was common for us to come home to items we didn’t recognize. A fresh picked bowl of blackberries on our counter, that drew in the ants. A frozen pork roast in the freezer that I would never cook. A pair of socks left on our bed. Cooking accoutrements that appeared in our cabinets. At one point, despite our pleas for her to not do so—we came home to a real Christmas tree that she set up in our living room. We had no ornaments, so it sat there, bare, slowly dropping needles. My sister & I consistently forgot to water it and both of us refused to be the one to take it down. We insisted we would wait and see if mom did it one of the times she used her key while we were at work.
Ya know, and it was great till it wasn’t.
Alex required more of my attention, as he sunk deeper into his drug addiction. He became more abusive. One night, he had called me while high & told me he didn’t need me to pick him up from work at 11 pm, that he had a ride. I stayed home & drank. He then called me at 11:45 pm, screaming at me for not picking him up—not remembering his earlier phone call telling me not to do so. As I tried to explain he had called me & told me not to come, he told me what a piece of shit I was and how I was fucking useless…just screamed at me till he hung up. Jenny came out and found me on the floor, mid-drunken-panic-attack. She tried to reassure me…but I think she saw the writing on the wall in that moment. That I was going to just keep going down this path with Alex & just eventually allow myself to be absorbed into his misery. Shortly, thereafter, she moved her boyfriend in—without conferring. Or adjusting the rent.
I resented his presence and began spending more time at Alex’s.
One day, I went to my parents’ house and my mom asked if Jenny had told me.
-Told me what?
–Oh nevermind. I shouldn’t have said anything.
-Well you opened your mouth, so just tell me.
–She’s going in the military.
-What?! No she didn’t tell me. When?!
–I shouldn’t have said anything.
My dad walked in, “Oh, you told her?”
-Did everyone know but me? What the hell? I LIVE WITH HER.
My mom murmured, “She leaves in 2 weeks.” My dad just told me to stop being dramatic.
THE FUCK.
I decided not to even say anything to Jenny. I decided to wait…to see if she’ll tell me. Only, a week goes by and nothing is said. Nothing. We eat plain white rice and drink shitty wine that I’ll puke up in the bathroom later and she never fucking says a word. The Saturday before she is supposed to leave, I come home from a long shift at the nursing home to a message on my answering machine. My brother. Inviting me to a going-away party for Jenny at their house in 30 minutes.
Angry, I chose not to go.
She left the next week without ever saying a word to me about it. Left a stack of checks, pre-written out for rent.
She left all her stuff behind. Often, I would lay on the floor of her bedroom…trying to feel something. Other times, I snooped…I was looking for something that would explain why she left like she did. Instead, I found a stash of cards I left her in our Wal-Mart locker. Cards I sent her from college. Then, one day, my parents used their copy of the key to come into my apartment while I was at work and cleaned out her room.
They left the dead Christmas tree. I finally dragged it out to the curb. The living room felt really empty then. In fact, the whole apartment did.
Despite the sense of betrayal I felt, I wrote to her while she was in boot camp. The letters were glassy surfaces to skate over. Because she was in basic training, seemed little point to hash out my frustration at what I perceived to be her abandonment of me. I didn’t tell her how bad things were. I didn’t tell her how I couldn’t afford the apartment without her, so I didn’t sign a lease for another year…how it forced me to move back home with my parents. I didn’t tell her how I finally left Alex. I didn’t tell her how sad it was at my parents, how no one asked me why I’m back there or if I’m ok, even though I was clearly not…I didn’t tell her how I sat out in their yard for hours every day, staring at the woods, with my sunglasses on, crying. I also did not describe to her a scene where I was watching tv, mindlessly, & my mom asked if I would be able to move in with Alex if I left my dog with them…and I had to tell her, after a month of living there without contact with my husband, that… “I …don’t…think…it’s…going to work out with Alex.” I didn’t turn away from the tv, (America’s Next Top Model, I still remember), but it was evident that I was weeping. My mom turned around and went back to working on the computer without saying another word to me. I didn’t say a word about any of this to Jenny….because to be honest, I was still pissed at her—but there was nowhere for me to even put it.
And so, she just kind of stayed away. She moved place to place because of the military. She married her boyfriend without any of us there at the ceremony…and then we had a little reception at my parents’ place. We still wrote letters. Occasionally she texted me a quote from a favorite movie or a line from a song we loved.
Sometimes she disappeared for months at a time where she didn’t respond to texts. It began to become clear something was wrong. Then, she was kicked out of the military for an incident on the shooting range. Some vague happening. Something about her threatening to blow someone’s knee caps out if they take another step towards her. There were vague mentions in her letter about desk duty for the remainder of her time with the army. Like my mother didn’t ask me, I didn’t ask her what’s wrong. I don’t know why. It just seemed….like…it’s…not…going to work out.
At one point, after texting her many times over a span of a month & not hearing anything, I texted her husband. It was revealed to me that she had been in a mental hospital for a couple weeks, but no one in the family knew. I am asked to not say anything. I don’t. If my family is good at anything, it’s keeping secrets.
Our relationship never recovered from any of the blows. I heard from her less and less. I moved on and dated someone else after Alex…and had children. She was not really present for any of it. She made it clear she was disinterested in my domestic life…so I struggled with knowing how to maintain the relationship. Furthermore, I only heard from her when she wanted to complain about some insensitive, itchy-wool kind of statement my father made. Or an argument she was having with our mother. She came home to visit for the first time in years, when Bridget was 6 months old. When my relationship traumatically ended with my ex, she never texted to ask if I’m ok….like I didn’t do for her when she got kicked out of the army. She didn’t text at holidays or on the children’s birthdays. She became more of an idea than a person. In fact, I didn’t see her again till she came home when Rowan is 3 & Bridget is 5.
The visit was a total disaster.
She was not the girl I shared a room with…that I danced to throwbacks with. I don’t know this person. She rolled her eyes, her punctuation to every single thing I said, & made nasty comments in front of my kids about how motherhood is a mistake. When I confronted her about her unprovoked rudeness, she went out in my front yard & refused to come back in till her husband talked her into it. I am regarded as the bad guy who made Jenny cry on her visit home—even though I merely questioned why she kept rolling her eyes and seemed full of contempt for me. The next day, we went to her good-bye party…we drove through floods to get there. She didn’t greet me. After an hour of being ignored, I left. She never even said goodbye.
And that’s the last time I saw my sister.
After the visit, I wrote her a letter telling her how disappointed I was with her visit…how disappointed I was about the lack of closeness in our relationship. It’s a Christmas tree we forgot to water all over again. I tried to explain I just wanted to be close to her again….but she responded with vitriol and made horrible accusations against me in an letter of swirling, irrational irritability. She also brought up a sexual assault that happened while she was in the military. A tuning fork sounds in my head. Perhaps this was the cause of her strange behavior towards me, the distance beyond just the years between us. I responded with another letter and tried to reassure her that I understood, in my own way. I disclosed that I have suffered my own sexual assaults at the hands of our lunatic uncle & that she was not alone in her pain. It was not well received. In my effort to relate, I made a misstep by bringing up my own shit. She responded with one last letter that dismissed my accounts of being assaulted and accused me of trying to take the specialness of her pain away. She wrote that she does not want me to contact her again.
And I don’t.
Mostly.
Except for one letter I sent to her a couple years ago. I didn’t sign it or put my address on it. It was just a sheet of paper on which I had written, “I am as sorry as you are missed.” Oddly, I received a letter from her that same week, as if our letters had crossed paths in the mail. The letter started out with the statement, “You must be really mad, since I haven’t heard from you.” And then a page of attacks. Angry verbs and adjectives.
I miss my sister dreadfully…and her absence is a hole I’ve had to stretch and grow around. I constantly write letters to her that I never send, that I hold onto. There just seems little point in reaching out again.
So why even write about her at all? Why create space anywhere- including a diary entry-for someone who doesn’t want me in their life?
Well…
I’ve been following Postsecret for years. For the uninitiated, Postsecret is a project where people can send in secrets anonymously with a postcard…A selection is culled and posted on a website every Sunday. I have read the secrets on this site religiously for years, as far back as when Alex and I were still together. The project has grown to include exhibits and lectures and a Facebook group. Imagine my surprise when I saw a secret posted the other day that I’m pretty sure was sent in by Jenny.
(In marker: I’ve always wondered why my dad never signs the card.
In pen-my mom’s handwriting: Treat yourself & a friend to dinner. Love, Mom & Dad.)
I recognized my mom’s handwriting first. I know that handwriting. How many hurtful letters and cards have I gotten in that fucking beautiful penmanship? Also, I’m pretty sure my mom has sent me this same card. (She often gives us the same cards year after year…unsure if it’s intentional or not, or if she just forgets. I’ve gotten the same Easter card for about 6 years and counting.) And the other handwriting has elements of my sister’s handwriting in it, as though she was trying to disguise her handwriting.
Everyone on Facebook started commenting about gender roles, assuming it was a statement about men’s lack of effort. All I can think about though, is one of the last things my sister said in one of her poison-penned letters…about how she had sent a letter home to my parents regarding a sexual assault that happened to her while she was in the military…My mother sent a letter back that was clearly all coming from her. She also signed my father’s name—but it was clear he had no input in the letter. My sister was heartbroken that my father never showed up for her, never even acknowledged her letter. (Which doesn’t surprise me. When I sent my own letter about how I had tried to commit suicide because of abuse I had suffered—I got the same treatment: a corrosive letter from my mother, blaming me for the abuse, and crickets chirping from my dad. In fact, when I visited home several months later, the letter revealing I had been sexually abused was sitting out in the open, on top of the microwave with all the other bills and junk mail.) If this postcard is from my sister, and I fully believe it is, it’s about my father’s absence from our lives. And maybe, my mom’s lame attempts to be there.
Obviously, seeing this postcard brings things back up…as evidenced by this long entry.
But all I can do is feel sorry for her. And cry for her.
And, in a way, that reminds me of something important. She may never come back, but the postcard reminds me all the ways we’re eternally bonded. All those things you can’t destroy, all those things you can’t change stretched between us, like a tin can telephone we scream hellos into…but never a goodbye.
Song Choice: All Fall Down by OneRepublic
Loading comments...