How to Be a Sister by Eileen Garvin (e manga reader txt) 📕

I got used to the stains on the front of her shirts, got used to helping my mother pick out “Margaret-colored clothes” that didn’t show the food stains as prominently. And later, when I was in graduate school and my friend Anne gestured to her own large breasts and referred to them as “the crumb shelf,” I thought of my well-endowed sister and laughed. Maybe Margaret wasn’t so strange after all.

When we were children, Margaret smelled like flowers, moist and powdered after her nighttime bath. She’d swoop around the bedroom in her long cotton nightgown and bare feet. She’d race laughing up the stairs, the family dog yipping with excitement and nipping at her hem, as she shouted, “I be the winner!” She’d collapse in hilarity on her twin bed in the room we shared. When I was in college and we were in our twenties, she was still doing this. These times were better than the bad times—the times when her wailing could last for hours, drawing the neighbors and even the police to our door.

I could remember the feel of her skinny arms wrapped around me as she crushed me into her big, soft belly, cackling at some joke of her own making. Margaret would hug me so hard she’d pull me off of my feet. She would also reach around and yank me up by the neck as if I were weightless. But Margaret hadn’t hugged me like that in years. Nor had she spanked me, pinched me, whacked me on top of the head, or spit on me like she’d used to. When I was home, I no longer walked around the kitchen with my ass to the wall, forever on defense against some silent but inevitable attack. When she was being her noisy self, our father called her Thunderfoot, and yet when she wanted to sneak up on one of us, she had the stealth of a Jedi Knight. But not anymore.

The minutes and hours and days we spent trying to get her to behave, to stop doing the things we didn’t want her to do, were piled up in a closet of our past, gathering dust like her old records in my parents’ basement. It was all meaningless now, though at the time it seemed like scolding her and trying to redirect her behavior was all we did. Trying to be reasonable myself, I might say, “Please don’t hit me, Margaret. That hurts when you do that, and I know you have good manners.” Or in a less composed moment, I might clutch my head and say something like, “God DAMN it, Margaret! Don’t fucking hit me!” She’d just laugh and parrot back, “You don’t hit me! Ha! Ha! Ha!” and then she’d raise her hand to pretend like she was going to do it again and then laugh some more and run away.

Sometimes she tried to behave. I could tell she was trying. And we really tried to think through how to help her understand what we were asking of her. As a teenager, Mike once sat at the table calmly explaining to Margaret why it just isn’t nice to spit on people, especially to spit your dinner on them when they are eating their dinner. The spitting phase was just bugging the shit out of everybody, and he was trying to make her understand. Margaret sat there and appeared to be listening to our brother like a totally reasonable person. She put on a serious face, said “Okay, Mike,” and nodded as though she agreed with him completely that it was a really good idea if she used her polite table manners from now on. Then she took a big gulp of her soda, held it in her cheeks, and erupted in laughter, showering Mike with sugary drink. Mike just closed his eyes, wiped his face with his T-shirt, and left the table without a word. Once during the spitting phase he and our brother Larry tried another tactic—spraying their own drinks back in her face. She thought that was just hilarious. The three of them sat there at the kitchen table, our own Trevi Fountain, spraying soda and juice high in the air and across the room and hooting with laughter.

That’s pretty much how we handled things for thirty years or so. Try this, then that, then something else. This method of instruction was exhausting for us kids and often seemed more than useless. Margaret appeared to stop doing things only when she felt like it. Just when we gave up trying to make her stop, she’d drop some behavior that we’d been trying to break her of for months or years. Like pouring the milk down the sink. Like spitting down the front of her shirt on purpose and wiping it up with her finger. Like turning her music up really loud at certain points on the record so that we all shouted, “Turn it down, Margaret!” Like talking to herself. Like spanking the houseguests.

Why would I miss this kind of behavior? Because it was a part of me, and because it was all I had. This was how I knew my sister—as this gigantic mass of predictably destructive behavior; irrational, unpredictable motivation; and enormous affection. Growing up around Margaret, I always felt like things were about to spin out of control, and I never quite knew how to handle whatever happened next, but I was used to it. I had a recurring dream when we were younger: I was driving in a car down a treacherous, twisting road in the dark. It was icy, and I wanted to slow down, but when I pushed the brakes, nothing happened. Then I realized I was sitting on the passenger side.

I didn’t see my sister much anymore. There’s the old saying, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone. It wasn’t that simple. It was more like you hate Jell-O, and then they take away the