About My Sisters (5 page)

april

I have a dream that I am dying. The dream isn't clear about why I am dying, only that I am gradually but surely fading away. I stand mute in my dreamscape, wondering if there's been some kind of mistake because nothing hurts. And it seems to me that dying should involve more pain. Then I see my son and Maya walking ahead of me. A wave of terrible guilt and sadness washes over me when I realize that I'm leaving my child behind. He needs me, I think, and I'm deserting him. I am failing in my responsibility to take care of him. But then I see Maya put her arm around him and I am completely relieved. I know she will take care of him as well as I ever could. With her, he will be fine and I don't have to worry. But now the real emotion of the dream hits me so hard that my eyes hurt from sudden, ferocious tears. It is Maya who I can't bear to leave. I find my
voice and I call out to my sister, “Won't you miss me?” But I am already dead in the dream and she can't hear me. I try one more time. “If you were gone,” I cry out, “I would miss you so much.” And then I realize that I already do. Now, finally, there is the agonizing pain of separation. How can I go so far away without her? What will I do if she's not there? Who will I tell?

 

For all practical purposes, there was never a time before I had a sister.
Technically
, of course, I was an only child for two years and nine months, but that was more of an obligatory waiting period than anything else. I was more than ready for Maya by the time she was born.

“Can she talk?” I asked my mother when she called from the hospital to tell me that I had a new sister. “Does she have purple eyes?” Of course, her ability to communicate was of the utmost importance. The purple eyes, an afterthought really, would have been an added bonus. But my new sister had sleepy blue eyes, which were disappointingly shut most of the time. My mother has often said that Maya was born tired and that she slept through most of the first two years of her life.

“Not like you,” my mother tells me now. “You
never
slept. I'd put you down for a nap and come in to check on you and there you'd be, standing up in your crib, eyes wide open, staring at me. You never cried, mind you,” she adds, “but it was a little strange how you just stood there, waiting.”

Waiting, I remind my mother, is something I've been doing since the day I was born and perhaps before. My earliest memories are of waiting (with increasing impatience as time went by) for Maya to talk and for her to exit her infancy and play with me. Naturally, given her propensity for it, much of that time involved watching her sleep. Maya's ability to luxuriate in slumber was a gift she shared with my mother and one I never possessed.

We were living in London, where Maya and I were both born, in a large flat in Belsize Park. I remember, with the precision of someone who has witnessed the same scene a thousand times, how, at naptime, my mother put
Songs of Leonard Cohen
on the turntable and lay, still as a corpse, with her arm over her eyes. Maya curled up beside her, lost to sleep, intermittently sucking her fingers. I lay awake, impatient, and fidgeting at the foot of the bed until my mother, moving nothing but her lips, sharply insisted I stop. Leonard wailed on about tea and oranges that came all the way from China and I tried to lie as still as possible. I counted all the square-shaped objects in the room. I counted the knotted tassels on the bedspread. I counted Maya's breaths and matched them with my mother's. Occasionally, I tried to fall asleep, but it never worked. I just ended up staring at the shifting shades of gray sky outside the big bay windows of our flat.

My mother was a big believer in early bedtimes as well as frequent naps. Maya and I were in bed by 6:00
P.M.
every night but Tuesday when we were allowed to stay up for an extra hour to watch
Top of the Pops
on television. Maya was predictably crashed out within minutes even when it was still light outside. Many nights I crept out of bed and sidled down the hall to the living room.

“I can't sleep,” I told my mother. “My eyes won't shut.”

“All right,” she said, “you can come in for five minutes and tell me a story.” She sat at her typewriter, smoking a Players cigarette, composing beautiful poetry I didn't understand on thin sheets of peach-colored onionskin. When I came in, she took out lined paper and a green felt-tip pen and wrote down the stories I dictated. There were always dragons in these stories and they were always eating me or my dolls (they found good girls especially tasty). My mother copied them faithfully and tucked them away with her own orderly typewritten pages. Always too
soon, it was time for me to go back to bed, where I lay next to my sleeping sister watching the shadows turn into dancing dragons on the ceiling.

I admit, I was sometimes so sleepless that I pestered my sister in an effort to get her to talk to me. She made a few valiant attempts to stay up, gurgling nonsense as her eyes closed. Sometimes I simply talked
at
her, trying to involve her in a story I was composing as I went along.

“Maya, what if elephants wore ballet slippers?” I asked her. “What would it sound like? Maya? Are you awake?”

Sometimes, frustrated beyond belief at her lack of alertness, I actually poked her or threw dolls at her bed (softly, of course, because I never wanted to actually hurt her). But this almost never worked. When I
could
rouse her, she woke up frightened and called for our mother, which invariably got me into trouble.

“Leave her alone!” my mother admonished. “It's cruel not to let a person sleep.”

So I learned how to entertain myself during the time I spent waiting for Maya. I started reading and I often practiced by reading aloud to her. When my mother finally stopped insisting that I take a nap, I became very good at passing the hours with a box of crayons, a book, or a pen and some paper. I enjoyed the things I did alone and very early developed ways to sustain myself in solitude that would serve me well right into adulthood.

But I needed my sister in order to feel complete. With her I was one of two, half of a set, and somehow whole.

Sibling rivalry was a concept that never entered into my relationship with Maya. When we were together, there was never a need to compete for parental attention. We had each other's attention and that was enough. We were also born with a sense of complicity. If we disagreed or even argued, neither one of us ever went complaining to our parents. If one of us got in trouble, the other would sit close by and wait until the storm passed.
Whatever possessions we had were better when pooled together. If I got a new dress or a new book, I wanted Maya to have one, as well or my enjoyment of it was severely diluted. This worked in reverse, too. If Maya got a new doll, I needed to have one, too. We had several dolls and each belonged to either Maya or me but it was the community of the dolls that was important to us. We never played with them individually.

At about four or five years of age, Maya was finally able to stay awake through an entire day and had caught up enough conversationally that I figured she was ready for some quality play. For some time she'd been looking at me expectantly with those marine blue eyes as if to say, “What are we going to do next? You decide.”

So I invented the Mariannas, two characters in a perfect game that Maya and I would play, uninterrupted, for years.

The name probably came from listening to Leonard Cohen wail “So long, Marianne” through all those naptimes, but I can't be sure. At any rate, it was a lovely name with lots of syllables and I thought it sounded grand. The Mariannas needed nothing, no props, no play space, not even a house. We could play this game anywhere from airplane and boat to train and car. In fact, it was a game that was often made better by a change in venue. It went something like this:

Maya and I were both grown-ups (or “ladies” as we called ourselves—never “girls” and never “women”). My name was Marianna and so was Maya's (“How funny!” the Mariannas exclaimed when they met each other for the first time. “Both of us have the same name!”). The Mariannas were both married and both husbands were named Harry. The Harrys were never “home” when the Mariannas got together and neither Maya nor I ever invented specific jobs for the Harrys—somehow, this was a detail that never seemed important. It was enough to imagine that my Harry (and so Maya's, too) was always out
doing something incredibly important or dangerous or noble. From the start, though, Maya's Harry was considerably more laid-back than mine. I needed my Harry to be an excellent husband, a dragon slayer even, and a constant source of love, support, and comfort. It was a fairly tall order, even for an imagined man, and so I was occasionally frustrated and complained to Marianna about his failings. Maya, on the other hand, was content to let her Harry just exist on the periphery of our game.

The Harrys often hung out with each other when the Mariannas got together and generally had as much fun as their wives, although Maya and I would occasionally invent disputes between the two of them:

“You know, Marianna, your Harry said something bad to my Harry and now he's upset.”

“Well my Harry said
your
Harry said something to
him
.”

“Really? What was it?”

“I don't know, he didn't tell me.”

When the Mariannas (or Ma's as we started calling them) got together, it was always for tea. Maya and I were both literally weaned on hot tea with milk. Our mother filled our baby bottles with it. And as soon as I was tall enough to reach the stove, I was putting on the kettle and making tea myself. The Mariannas liked their tea strong and something sweet to go with it. McVitie's chocolate digestive biscuits were always popular but in the absence of those, we were happy to eat toast fingers with butter and Marmite, and speculate on what we might do in the future. Part of this future involved children and we added them as we got older and the game continued. I was the first to imagine a baby (Little Marianna) and then Maya had one (another Little Marianna). We followed the girls with a Harry Jr. each. Like the Harrys, our children existed off the set of our game. It would have been unthinkable to approximate babies with dolls, for
example. To do so would destroy the illusion of reality we were so careful to create.

Over our cups and saucers, we discussed where we had been and where we might go. Often, there was little need to exaggerate or embellish because there was no shortage of real life adventures for the Mariannas.

When we went to Spain for weekend trips, for example, the Ma's came with. We slept in a windmill on the island of Ibiza and the Mariannas were delighted (“I
always
stay in windmills when I come to Spain, don't you, Ma'?”).

When we sat in a plane on a runway in Rome, waiting for a strike to be resolved so that we could fly to California, the Mariannas became sophisticated Italian ladies who played with the tray tables and exclaimed, “Bella bambina!”

These trips weren't the only time the Ma's came in handy, however. When I was about seven years old, we started moving around with increasing frequency and not just from house to house—these moves were from continent to continent. London was a starting point, at least for Maya and me, but my mother had come there via South Africa and my father via Brooklyn, New York. We did substantial global hopscotching as they searched for the right place to settle. We moved so often, in fact, that today, my parents are hard-pressed to reconstruct the moves between 1969 and 1971. During that short period, we lived in two different London homes and three in New York. The Mariannas set up in each one of these.

As we grew older and the game became more sophisticated, Maya and I invented more complex surroundings and emotional states for our Ma's. Sometimes the Ma's would be destitute, reduced to wearing rags and eating scraps of bread (we always had tea, though—we'd rather die of hunger than do without tea). We sighed and talked about how difficult it was to exist under these conditions:

“You know, Ma', Harry still hasn't gotten a job and now we don't have any lights! I had to use a candle to read my book last night.”

“Really? That's terrible, Ma'. It's even worse for me. I have holes in my shoes and there's no money to buy new ones. And the floor is so cold to walk on with no shoes.”

“But your Harry has a job!”

“No, he doesn't.”

“Yes, he does.”

“Well, he doesn't anymore. We are very poor.”

Sometimes the Mariannas were fabulously wealthy and put on airs in our mother's mirrored velvet minidresses and platform shoes. This worked out splendidly until our mother discovered that we were popping the tiny mirrors out of her dresses so that they could serve as “jewels” and put a stop to our dress-up. When the Mariannas were rich, tea had to be served by a butler. Maya learned to make tea in short order because in these situations, she was forced to pull double duty as Marianna
and
the butler. Since I never took a turn as the help, it was a bit of a lopsided arrangement, but I considered this one of the perks of my position as older sister.

Occasionally, our Mariannas were famous. Even then, my Marianna sometimes envisioned her fame as a “book writer,” but more often we donned our pink tutus and assumed the more practical career of prima ballerinas.

As time went on, the escape function of our game became more important. The Ma's didn't have parents, for example, who dictated and doled out cruel and unusual edicts. The Ma's were perfectly independent and adult and would never be told what to do. And if we were frightened (raging thunderstorms, parental arguments, or the first day in a new school), the Ma's were extremely useful. The Ma's could blow off emotional scenes as no big deal (“Where
is
that shouting coming from, Ma'? We're
going to have to move out of this neighborhood”) and fierce weather as just another minor discomfort (“It's a good thing that my house was built so that it can never be struck by lightning, isn't it, Ma'?”). Sometimes, the only way out of an unpleasant situation was through our Mariannas. There was the time, for example, when Maya and I decided to run away from home during one of our short stays in Brooklyn.