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

We were all together, we five. You only stood out from the rest of us when you screamed and screamed and wouldn’t stop. Or when you wandered off on your own and had to be looked for. The panic in our mother’s voice when she called your name into the big, dark woods or down an empty, darkening street made me afraid.

But then we started school and the secret was out. You were my weird big sister. My first and last childhood birthday party was a painful lesson in how others would see you. The girls from my second-grade class trooped into our kitchen for the party, which consisted of a homemade cake prepared by Mom and streamers and balloons tied to the light hanging over the table. Mom hadn’t planned any games like the other mothers always did. Perhaps she didn’t think of it or didn’t have the time. Whatever the case, there was nothing to distract my classmates from you—sitting at the table all by yourself, staring at nothing. Most of them didn’t know you, because you went to a special education class at a public school. The rest of us went to the Catholic school down the street, and my classmates had seen our brothers and Ann. But here you were, the big birthday surprise.

You didn’t look up at any of them as Mom urged them to sit down. Nobody moved. I was used to your staring silence, but the looks on their faces shocked me. They were afraid of you. No one wanted to sit next to you. Not even tall, awkward Daria, who’d always earned a certain tenderness from me because she reminded me of you.

I felt a burning in my chest. A mixture of shame, anger, and guilt. I fled the kitchen and started trying to organize a last-minute treasure hunt. I had to make my party better so that they would stop looking at you like that. In our dark and cluttered basement, I collected a pile of small toys, thinking I could hide them around the house and then put a list of clues together while everyone ate cake. I could do it if I hurried. Tiffany Greco had had a treasure hunt like that at her party the previous month. It was all I could think of. But then Mike saw what I was doing, and we got into a fight over a Big Bird finger puppet, his favorite. He kicked me in the stomach, and I spent the rest of the afternoon locked in the bathroom.

Did you notice any of this? Were you glad when everyone went home so you could go back to your records? Was it upsetting to you to have so many strangers in your house?

At school that year we learned about Lourdes Cathedral in France. The holy water there was said to work miracles, cure afflictions. The blind could see, the lame could walk. It was a miracle blessing from Jesus’s mother, Mary. I started saving my money, thinking that if I could go there and bring some water back, you could be healed.

Our grandmother’s smile was sad when she told me it wouldn’t work. “Keep praying for your sister instead,” she said. Bottled magic seemed like a much better idea, but I didn’t make it to France for twenty years. I prayed every night that you would wake up one day and be normal. Ta-da! “I was just kidding around,” you’d say.

Grade school was a time of plaid. Four of us marched through the seasons in our Catholic school uniforms and knee socks, our red cardigans stiff at the cuff from nose wiping. The year was a cycle of feast days, report cards, Christmas break. You wore regular clothes and took the short yellow bus from the corner. Mom waited with you every morning, holding your hand until the bus came and you climbed those stairs.

When I went to your classroom, it looked like so much more fun than mine—little tables and chairs instead of desks, colorful toys. One of your classmates, an older boy, picked me up and held me in the air, laughing. He seemed like a giant, and when he returned me to earth, I stood looking up at his laughing face. There was playground equipment at your school. The smell of the dark wood and the feel of the coarse monkey bars under my hands made me envious. We had tetherball, four square, kick ball, that was it. It never occurred to me that you couldn’t run out there and play every day at recess like I would have.

In 1975 we both got what our pediatrician said was Yersinia, or bubonic plague, along with hundreds of other children in our town. My crowded hospital room was just across the hall from yours, but I felt homesick for you, because I couldn’t see you. I woke to find you sitting on the floor next to my bed, knees pulled up under your nightgown and your ankles crossed, staring at the floor. Did you come to find me? Later when I woke up, you were gone. I was so lonely, but the mean nurse wouldn’t come, and I pooped my pants. The nice nurse came later and cleaned me up, but I just wanted to be at home with you and Ann in our crowded, messy room.

SUMMER WAS A bright stretch in our year, a patch of sunshine we greeted in bare feet on the wooded lakeshore. From the ceremonious opening in the spring until Labor Day, we were at the lake, and the house filled up with our laughter, traces of the beach brought in on our feet, the sound of the water at night. The days were full of our comings and goings, adventures in the woods, jumping off the cedar dock into cool sheets of water, lunch in wet bathing suits and towels, endless reading in the long afternoons, large dinners with a dozen or