This sister doesn’t share my blood, although we have shared most everything else since we were teenagers, when she fell in love with my brother and became a fixture in my life. At first she might have been nice to me to impress him, although I could have told her it wouldn’t. But I was too busy enjoying her company, starved as I was for female energy in a house full of boys.
She reminded me of Tinker Bell when I first saw her, a tiny pixie thing with blonde hair, gold skin and a slightly naughty look peering out from under straight, thick black eyebrows. She couldn’t sit still, bounced instead of walked, and talked a mile a minute. Laughter burst out of her like sparks, and her perfect white teeth flashed often. She had an energy that lifted our spirits. I learned she had been a gymnast, an Olympic hopeful who lived away from home for training, until she developed bursitis at fifteen. She didn’t wear her dashed hopes on her sleeve, but I knew the battery inside her hadn’t ever been fully powered on. When I met her she was a cheerleader, a role that she played without effort.
Our first solo outing after she started dating my brother was to a beauty salon. She had gotten a perm a few days before which had made her hair puff out alarmingly in big demarcated kinks, and she wanted to get it reversed. She asked me to keep her company and I quickly agreed, having never seen a perm reversed, much less activated. My mother always cut my hair, and anyway it was curly already.
The hair place was across the road from Scott’s Athletic Store, where my brothers and I bought our cleats and sports equipment. I had never been to the other side of the street, where the beauty salon was sandwiched between store windows with neon signs flashing PAWN and PORN. She told me the porn shop was where boys from her school bought their Playboys and Hustlers. I wondered if my brothers had ever been there. Inside the hair salon, I watched in fascination as a woman smeared chemicals on her hair and put her under a heat lamp. I felt like I had entered a strange new world of female rituals, a world previously unknown to me.
We had another defining moment in our relationship, when I told her I had started having sex with my boyfriend and had no intention of telling my mother. She insisted on taking me to Planned Parenthood for birth control, making the appointment and driving me herself. When I came back into the waiting room after it was over, in complete shock from being given my first pelvic exam, not to mention being fitted for a diaphragm, I must have worn an injured look on my face because she was trying not to laugh. Decades later, over a dinner during the holidays, our combined six children having already left the table, she said, mouth full of spaghetti and dark eyes flashing with her old mischief, “Good thing I took you to that appointment too, or you would probably have a thirty five year old right now.”
Her advice over the years has been that of an older sister’s, learned the hard way from her own mistakes. On the morning of my wedding, while I lay under my covers riddled with doubt, she sat on my bed and told me the cold hard truth. “If you’re going to break up, then cancel the wedding. But if you’re going to stay together, you have to go through with it.” A few years later, when I had come home to visit my parents, two children in tow and pregnant with my third, and seriously considering leaving my marriage, she handed me her therapist’s number and said, “Try this first.” But what she said most often when I called her crying was, “Go for a run. You’ll feel better.” And it was always true.
Sometimes she calls me for support. She called me crying when her dad died. She has called to ask me advice about kids, since mine are older. When she knew she needed another way to calm her mind, she called to ask me about yoga. She has called me for travel advice. But mostly I call her for help. Help with things like computers, the furnace, or a prime rib. Help bearing the rawness of my emotions. She has been IT and Google, Martha Stewart and Dr. Phil to me, the first person I call when I don’t know what to do. The person who knows my deepest darkest secrets, my demons and insecurities, a witness to the pain I’ve caused. And yet she still loves me.
Health has become her passion. Daughter of a nurse, a seeker, she searches for different answers to questions when doctors reply unsatisfactorily. She reads and studies and contacts people all over the world to learn about issues that affect her personally, or any of her family members and friends, things like anxiety and depression and paralysis and ADHD and gluten and cancer. She shares her knowledge generously, but I know she loves the puzzle as much as she loves helping people.
Now she is pouring her tireless energy into saving my father’s life. He has Acute Myeloid Leukemia, of which there is supposedly no cure. But she has been researching for months, looking for alternatives to the chemotherapy that is killing him as much as keeping him alive. She recently lit upon cannabis oil, and was telling me about rice cookers and making molds for suppositories if she couldn’t find the exact mix of ingredients that she has discovered to be helpful in treating leukemia. I am not surprised that my father is showing small signs of improvement. If I were cancer, I would hide from her too.
I used to wish for a sister when I was a little girl. And I got one.
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