About My Sisters (6 page)

Running away was probably my idea. I'd recently given Maya the kind of swell haircut that can only be fashioned by an eight-year-old and my mother was furious with me. I hated my new school. I hated that I was even
in
a new school. And I never liked the apartment, it was dark and claustrophobic. But even though I might have made the suggestion to run away, Maya had to have been amenable to it. I would never have gone anywhere without her.

It was wintertime and very cold outside, so we put on our fake camel-hair coats with impossible-to-fasten toggle buttons and our giant furry hats that tied with pom-poms. We packed a few items in our matching plastic purses and we were ready to go.

“We're running away,” Maya told our father, who was in the living room watching
Star Trek
. He looked at our serious expressions and winter gear.

“Okay,” he said. “Why are you going?”

“We don't like it here,” I said.

“What about you, Maya?” he asked her.

“What Debra said,” Maya answered. I hoped he wouldn't try to convince her to stay, because Maya always folded long before I did and I wouldn't be able to leave without her.

“Are you sure?” he asked both of us and we nodded solemnly.

“Okay,” he said. “You'll probably need some money.” He dug into his pocket and gave us two quarters each. I was surprised, but also a little suspicious. I had expected resistance, some kind of protestation, or at least a plea to reconsider. I thought he was
making it all a bit too easy. Nevertheless, my mind went to the vending machines in the lobby. There were potato chips and chocolate milk. Fifty cents would come in handy. Maya and I tucked the money into our purses and stood by the front door.

“Okay, bye-bye,” our father said, and turned back to his show. I noticed that Maya had started watching as well and was becoming distracted from our mission. She's always been a big
Star Trek
fan.

“Let's
go
,” I told her.

Once we were outside in the hallway, we hesitated for a moment, anticipating that our father would stop pretending he didn't care and come out after us as soon as we closed the door, but no. There was nothing coming through that door except the tinny TV sound of a transporter beaming someone up from a hostile planet. And so we were off, marching down the hall to the elevator. That was where we ran into real trouble. Neither Maya nor I could reach the elevator call button. Both of us tried reaching, stretching, and jumping, all to no avail. It never occurred to either one of us to look for a stairwell. We'd never used or seen stairs in this building. We lived on the tenth floor and assumed the elevator to be the only means of escape.

“What are we going to do now?” Maya asked me.

“Let's go ask for help,” I said.

Back we went to the apartment.

“Did you change your mind?” our father asked.

“We can't reach the elevator,” Maya said. “Can you come and help us?”

Our father had already been so willing and helpful, I was sure that he'd call the elevator for us at the next commercial, so what he said next came as a shock.

“No,” he said. “If you want to run away, you're going to have to do it yourselves. And if you can't even reach the elevator, maybe you're not big enough to be running away.”

We went back outside, back to the elevator, and still could find no way to get to the button. Sweating in our coats and hats, we were forced to admit we were beaten and go back to the apartment with our pom-poms between our legs. I was miserable, stewing in humiliation. I threw myself on my bed, coat still on, as if some miracle might happen and I'd be spirited away. Maya was no more than five years old at the time and her interest in running away had already waned, but she hated to see me upset or unable to handle any situation. It rattled her and she couldn't get comfortable until she knew I was all right. She looked over at me, a pleading expression on her face.

“Let's play Ma's,” she said.

“Okay,” I told her. “Let's.”

 

Over time, the Mariannas became a channel for what Maya and I heard, saw, and didn't understand in the adult world. Thus, we had games where one or both of our marriages broke up and we consoled each other over the heartbreak. It was always difficult to get Maya to play the “my Harry left me” version of the game, though, because she was consistently uncomfortable in the role of miserable wife. Eventually I was forced to start
drawing
these scenes with my colored pens, creating whole picture books of marital tragedy. This suited Maya much better.

The Mariannas were tireless characters. They had a much greater willingness to sort through the mysteries and contradictions in the world around them than either Maya or I possessed. Together, there was no explanation that eluded them and no situation that they couldn't mold themselves to fit. More than anything else, when they were together, the Mariannas were safe. When we first began, the game would start by one of us saying, “Let's play Ma's,” but that suggestion very quickly changed to “Let's
be
Ma's.” In either case, the response was always “Yes, let's.”

The Ma's were such an integral part of our relationship that I can't remember now what they talked about at their last get-together, whether they were rich or poor, or what country they were visiting. But I do remember, with striking clarity, the day they were sent away forever.

Maya was ten years old and I had just turned thirteen. We were living in New York again (upstate this time) and shared a downstairs bedroom below ground level that didn't get very much light. Grandma had knitted us matching quilts made up of squares in varying shades of blue and we displayed them on our identical beds. We each had a lamp and a stack of books beside our beds and a poster of the ill-fated racehorse Ruffian on the wall.

At night we lay in our beds and giggled in the dark.

“I don't get the joke,” I told Maya. “Why
does
the mailman drive a blue truck?”

“To deliver the mail,” she said wearily.

“Yes, but why blue?” I asked her. “Why is it a
blue
truck?”

“That's the joke,” Maya said. “You know, like why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. It doesn't matter that the truck is blue. He delivers the mail in it. Get it?”

“No,” I said. “I don't get it. It's a stupid joke.”

Maya sighed and rolled over in her bed. I could hear her breathing slow and deep. She still fell asleep before I did and once she was out there was no rousing her. Two years before, when our parents were out for the evening, I saw a mouse dart under her bed and started shrieking, “Maya, WAKE UP!! There's a MOUSE under your bed!! Aaauugghhh!” loud enough to make myself go hoarse. But even though I was less than three feet away from her, she never so much as fluttered an eyelash. I was happy that she got the mailman joke and I didn't. It always made me glad when Maya got things I couldn't figure out. I didn't want to go first and fall asleep last all the time, but
that was usually the role I found myself in—the part I almost always had to play.

At thirteen, that part seemed to be mine permanently. I had just gotten my period. I'd been wearing a bra for a year. I'd started writing long, involved journal entries on whatever bits of paper I could find in the house, scratching out re-creations of daily events until late at night. My favorite book was Edith Hamilton's
Mythology,
but I was also reading my mother's collection of Carlos Castaneda and Gurdjieff. I was fascinated by anything having to do with the occult and took the whole concept of magic very seriously. I believed, in fact, that I had magical powers I hadn't yet learned to use.

But the strongest sea change that summer didn't come from my solitary treks around the inside of my head but from outside, in the form of other girls my age. They were a collection of Tracys, Sharis, and Jodys; clear-skinned lovelies with smooth legs and shoulder-length hair cut into feathers. There were plenty of them living in Patio Homes, the uncreatively named, patio-sporting town-house community we lived in, and even more came up from New York City in the summer when their parents vacationed. Many of them had known each other since kindergarten. I wanted to belong to this group more than I could ever remember wanting anything. But it was a doomed proposition from the start.

My hair was never right, for one thing. It was very long and very straight and neither one of my parents would even consider taking me to get it chopped into some trendy cut. My legs were a problem, too. My father insisted that I was too young to shave my legs so I had to sneak around with my mother's always-dull razor with results that were less than spectacular. The other girls rotated through each others' houses, making a weekend event out of sneaking into their parents' well-stocked liquor cabinets and getting drunk when nobody was looking. I was consistently left out of this party because my parents didn't have a liquor cab
inet. I'd never so much as seen a bottle of booze in our house. Instead, my parents had a bottomless stash of fine Colombian and rolling papers and I wasn't about to divulge
that
information and appear totally strange. Therefore, I was consistently unable to participate in the circular conversations about how wasted Shari or Denise or Jody or I got last weekend (“Did you see how many times she threw up?”). Nor could I chat about my new haircut, the benefits of depilatory creams over shaving or how much things had changed since second grade. What I had to bring to the party was my knowledge of astrology, my ability to read Tarot cards, and the fact that I'd lived in a few different countries. I learned that these were not popular attributes.

Most of the time, I tagged along on the outskirts, struggling to insinuate myself into the inner circle. I invited the girls over, offering tea and cookies instead of alcohol. I allowed them to call me Debbie, although I despised the nickname. For their acceptance, I would probably even have signed it with a big heart over the
i
had anyone asked me to. I gladly participated in the ever-popular fainting game, which was to make yourself hyperventilate and then have another girl grab you around the waist, cutting off your air supply and making you pass out. The girl who blacked out longest was the winner. I banished my disapproving sister Maya to our bedroom for these get-togethers. I simply couldn't stand the why-are-you-selling-yourself-out-to-these-idiots look I saw on her face. She was too young and too immature, I told myself. What did she know of these sophisticated goings-on?

For a while, the girls tolerated me, although they tended to ignore me when we were all together. I often found myself sitting in somebody's crowded living room, outside a circle of matching jeans and sneakers, listening to and observing the conversation rather than participating in it. Occasionally someone
would look over at me in surprise as if to say, “Oh, right,
Debbie's
here,” but there wasn't much attempt to include me and when the girls paired off and went to each other's houses, I just went home. Eventually my best efforts to fit in with the girls failed and they phased me out altogether:

“Oh, Debbie, I'd come over but I'm sleeping over at Shari's tonight and, you know…”

“You don't need to come by, Debbie, because I'm baby-sitting and she only allows me to have, like, five friends in the house at one time….”

I didn't take this well, especially considering that I never really got much of an explanation for why I couldn't be one of the girls. In an ill-conceived attempt to avenge my hurt feelings, I made the mistake of mentioning to one of them that I had the power to cook up a spell or two. Well! Seemed my witchy ways had freaked them out from the start and, in a 1970s version of
The Crucible
, Goody Shari and Goody Tracy banished me from the village for good. I was a pariah. None of the girls from Patio Homes ever spoke to me again. Not even when we were all clustered outside in subzero weather, teeth chattering, nostrils freezing together, waiting for the school bus that would take us to our last year of middle school.

I was crushed.

And Maya?

Maya was in fifth grade, reading Agatha Christie and learning how to dance the hustle in her gym class. She'd started taking violin lessons the year before and really loved her new instrument. She did the crossword puzzles in the
TV Guide
and was partial to jokes of the “Why does the mailman drive a blue truck?” variety. She was not an adoring little sister who wanted to be just like me and my friends. She never could stand those girls and made no effort to hide her disgust.

“Why do you like them so much?” she asked me once. “They aren't very nice.”

“You wouldn't understand,” I told her. But in my confused adolescent heart, I suspected she understood very well indeed.

One cool Sunday, shortly after my disastrous summer with the girls, when I was still trying to work out what went wrong, Maya turned to me, and said, “Let's be Ma's.”

It had been less than a year since the Mariannas had gotten together to discuss their adventures but, at that moment, I couldn't imagine a way to call them back. Had Maya not noticed that everything was now different? I was so dumbfounded that I couldn't even answer.

“Let's be
rich
Ma's,” Maya added, trying to be helpful. There was nothing for it, I had to tell her.

“I don't want to,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked me.

I looked into my sister's face and saw the expectation there and all the years of her following my lead. I'd created the game, but she'd followed me into it and made it ours. Now I was going to have to toss it aside like a dress I'd grown out of. The two years and nine months between us stretched out like an ocean. I'd crossed a line and she was still on the other side wanting to play. And it wasn't really fair, I thought, because there could never be just one Marianna. Once I was gone, it was over. I wished there was a way I could have dragged her over with me. I would have liked nothing more than to have Marianna with me, helping to navigate the rough new landscape where I found myself. If there were anyone who could make sense of the senseless, it was Marianna. But unlike me, Maya was never in a hurry to exit her childhood. She showed absolutely no interest in coming over to my side. I couldn't take her with me and I couldn't go back to the place that I'd just vacated. I wanted to be able to play with her and I wanted her to understand why I couldn't. And neither
option was a possibility because I was simply not sophisticated enough to explain it to her. Why not, her sea blue eyes were saying, why can't we play?