Fury (19 page)

She collapses on my bed with an exaggerated sigh and thrusts a pillow between the holed knees of her jeans. She curls her hand over the round of her belly. “Ow,” she yelps, addressing her navel. “
You
—quit it!” For some reason I can't name, I feel tense already. And I wonder about that, about how I could at once feel so protective of this person and yet so thoroughly rejecting of her.

I imagine the feeling is mutual. The month we'd lived together had been a specific hell, wherein she hadn't been able to resist behaving like a thankless, disparaging child any more than I had been able to refrain from acting like her overbearing mother. When she stopped consuming anything but Red Bull, menthols, and pink Necco candies, I started packing her a daily paper-bag lunch. When she complained of being bored, I dragged her to concerts, book readings, and yoga classes. Instead of walking beside me when we went for a “stroll,” she insisted on traipsing half a block behind me, all the while smoking a cigarette and whispering conspiratorially into her cell phone.

What hadn't she found fault with? She'd whined about my “yuppie, organic, all-natural food.” She'd called my boyfriend at the time as “exciting as milquetoast.”

In response, I'd slammed her on her rather astonishing ability to rot on my pullout sofa for days at a time, watching
Friends
episodes she'd brought on DVD. I bought her a small closet's worth of office-appropriate clothing and watched her eschew it all in favor of tank tops that revealed her bra's upper ambits. At the time, nothing I could do or say or buy for her could wipe the condemning look off her face. Listen to me:
Wipe that look off her face.
I'd started thinking in mean-mom-isms. And she, in turn, had barked back in the language of the spoiled punk (“You don't own me”; “I am so out of here”). No one knew as well as me how convenient it was to use me as our mother's effigy. I often employed the very same method.

We'd shared the same five-hundred-square-foot space that summer, but any real communication between my sister and me had been triangulated, passing entirely through the specter of our mother. Whether she mediated or pitted us further against each other I'm still not sure. She'd call to tell me, “Your sister likes it when you pack her a lunch.” Or, “I hear you made your sister clean the kitchen.” After a particularly vicious fight on my twenty-sixth birthday, Mom had called up and lambasted me for—abuse of all abuses in our family—“trying to make my sister talk about why she was upset.”

During this visit, I take my sister baby clothes shopping. We ride the subway to Park Slope and I give the snake eye to every man and able-bodied woman who doesn't offer my sister a seat. I am careful—perhaps overly careful, perhaps obnoxiously careful—to make sure she has enough water and cereal bars to sate her between meals, to make sure she sits occasionally and puts her feet up, to make sure she doesn't carry any bag that is too heavy. I'm aware that I'm acting like her mother again, but the placater in me just can't accept that she's an adult fit to take care of herself.

In a store on Seventh Avenue, I watch her finger a tiny white bunting suit and feel my pulse flux with envy. I'm not envious that she's having a baby, but rather that she feels equipped to do it.
How does she feel secure enough? How does she know she won't delegate her suffering to her children? How can she be sure that she won't revenge herself on what her latest ultrasound showed was her baby girl? Or make her daughter feel as though it is her sole responsibility to make my sister feel validated?
I am fully aware that I'm already controlling and overly critical of my sister, averse to the helpless devotion of pets, and indignant to the neediness of my dates, and frankly I doubt my potential as a mother.

When I think of myself as a mother the image that comes to mind is that of someone lipsticked and powdered, someone formal, forceful, faux friendly, and frigid, with a homemaker's apron tied over her cocktail dress and an autocratic look on her face. This image, rightfully, fills me with terror. I've long ago let it convince me that I don't want kids. I've let it persuade me that I can and will be perfectly happy delivering not babies but books.

That night my sister and I order take-out Chinese and play Battle-ship while the TV plays white noise in the background. She shares my aversion to stillness and quiet, and, together, we make an effort to fill every minute with distraction.

After credits roll on a late-night talk show, I loan her a pair of flannel pajamas. We curl up on opposite sides of my bed, back to back, an invisible force field between us.

Were we really so opposite? My parents conditioned us to believe that we were stark, polar opposites: one dark and gaunt, the other golden and dimpled; one woeful and sensible, the other uninhibited and flaky. This is just another fiction, very much like the one that insists we aren't close because we're five years apart.

I awake the next morning, still beside my sister, swathed in the afterimage of a dream. In it I was lying in a coffin at my own open-casket wake watching a procession of people approach, kneel beside me, mouth a few silent words, cross themselves, and go. I had been at once factually gone and clinically present. My heart had beat loudly in my ears. I'd felt deficient, self-conscious, and judged. I'd felt like I couldn't trust myself enough to even
know
whether I was really dead. Even embalmed, I'd been convinced that I wasn't exerting enough, wasn't
doing it right
, that I could do better at this business of being a corpse.

Discussing my sister with Alice is a bit like working on an impressionist painting. It's progress for me to describe things in resentment's blunt language, to dip into the shocking and unadulterated color of memories I've tried hard to avoid.

I say: “I can't trust her, I hate that.”

Or: “It's unfair that I'm the one who has to attend every holiday because she misses them.”

“Maybe she misses holidays because you're always there,” Alice counters.

It's my what a painter friend would call my first attempt to let my eye “view the subject” of my emotions instead of “re-creating” it. And yet even my riff of complaints isn't without a conscientious structure. I still think out what I want to tell Alice in advance and walk in with a mental order of business.

This approach doesn't allow me to think any differently about the Lark, my depression, or the truth of my family. If anything, therapy begins to feel like those phone calls from my parents, the ones in which they ring to discuss my sister's latest dramas and traumas, skipping what's going on in their own lives and asking nothing about mine other than the ever grating question, “How's work?”

I tell Alice about our trip to Hollywood.

Shortly before my sister eloped I booked two round-trip tickets to LAX to coincide with her spring break. In my mind it was a kind of early graduation present, and I planned it because I'd thought it was outrageous that a film student and aspiring screenwriter had never seen the vapid beauty of LA.

There might have also been some logic hard at work beneath my conscious mind—something that said the trip could win her acceptance, her friendship, and make us close in a way that we'd never been. And maybe that's why we were both so angry while we were there. I was desperate to prove that I could be sisterly and spontaneous. And sensing the strings attached to the trip, she decided she'd have none of it.

I had picked her up at her gate in a rented candy-apple-red Mustang. I had chosen a gaudy hotel in Beverly Hills. I arranged a meeting for her with a well-regarded film agent—someone who might agree to look at her scripts. I knew only that I wanted to show her a glittering, glossy, and magical time. Excuse me while I reach for infamous last words: I wanted everything to be perfect.

“Young hockey players with unhealthy perfectionist tendencies are particularly prone to fits of anger.” I would read this later in a paper by researchers at the University of Alberta who had studied fighting that occurs among child hockey players. “We found that players run into trouble when their standards are too high. When these athletes make a mistake, they get angry at themselves, but they also get angry and frustrated because they feel that their parents or coaches put an unfair amount of pressure on them.”

In retrospect, I think my sister and I sought in each other a depth and quality of love that no sibling can ever provide. This intensity of affection should come from a parent, and, even then, it has to come in childhood. We needed it, well, needily, and yet we couldn't accept it from each other under any terms. At the core of the matter was not love but anger, a grudge against someone and something else entirely.

I thought she'd been ungrateful, even judgmental. She hated the convertible (“too hot”) and the hotel (“ridiculous”). The local radio station, 103, was “boring.” Pinkberry frozen yogurt was “weird.” At the Troubadour, where I'd brought her to see a band, she'd shot me a withering look between songs and said, “It's like you think you're still a kid.”

Unwilling to tell her off directly—this would have meant surrendering my idea of a perfect, sisterly trip—my road rage expanded exponentially. I revved, swerved, and shrieked by way of the horn while she sat beside me, texting her new husband about what a psychotic I was, her face a sullen mask. At one point on Mulholland Drive, I had to resist the urge to give us a Hollywood end to our misery and plunge us both over the vista.

In the parking garage after the meeting I'd arranged with the film agent, during which my typically swaggering sister had been as friendly as a closed clam, I imploded.

Suddenly all veins, teeth, and bulging eye sockets, I clipped along in a pair of agonizing heels. I had reached the stage of fury where I was gesticulating madly and narrating out loud.: “Did I not set up that meeting explicitly so you could ask for career advice? And what did you do when that agent leaned in and very nicely asked you what you want to do after graduation? You puckered your face, looking totally disinterested, I might add, and said, ‘I'm not sure.'
I'm not sure!
As though you were palm-up at a Venice Beach fortune-teller instead of in a networking meeting!”

I was being controlling, rejecting, almost bullying, but I felt beaten, and bitter, and more matronly than any twenty-six-year-old I'd ever had the misfortune to meet.

In the meeting, I'd indulged an impulse I despised and spoken for her like the pushy stage mom I remembered from my youth: “She's being modest,” I'd told the agent. “She's studied screenwriting at school. She has some incredible scripts. Maybe she could send them to you sometime?”

It would've felt so nice to abandon my role as sister-as-mother. And I'd have loved just as much to see my sister ditch her own as a punk-ass kid.