Chapter Eleven

Sister Takes Charge



Sometime in her late 70s, my mother began to drink -- a lot. In fact, as it turned out, she was passing-out plastered every night.

Not surprisingly, it was my sister who stepped in to handle the situation.

As we grew up in the innocent and conformist 1950s and early 60s, by the standards of our family Sis was considered difficult. She dawdled--she missed the school bus regularly, drew cartoons instead of doing her homework, “forgot” to make her bed. By the time she was a teenager, our despairing parents thought a private school might better suit her dreamy temperament and sent her to a progressive high school, where her teacher lived in a tree and you could smoke marijuana and not study if you didn’t want to. She had, I was pretty sure, sex.

I, being three years older and, I assumed, meant to set an example, was the good girl. I obeyed all rules. I turned in my homework on time, wrote a dutiful weekly letter to Grandpa and never dared to read under the blankets with a flashlight like Sis did.

I wasn’t an angel, of course, but the bad things I did were—well, wimpy: spending my school milk money on forbidden Hostess cherry pies, flinging myself around the house in exaggerated poses of boredom and aggravation. I was a drama queen, that was the worst that could be said of me.

Truth is, as we passed through the stage of being happy childhood playmates, I was becoming insanely jealous of my sister’s audacity. I wanted to break the rules. I wanted to whisper on the phone in the closet when my parents thought I was in bed. I wanted to risk getting in trouble for not washing the dinner dishes until midnight. But I’d locked myself into the good girl role--which, I sensed, wasn’t going to get me very far in life.

And the more defiant Sis was, the more smugly self-righteous I was. The more jealous I became, the more I picked on her, teasing her mercilessly, scolding her, bossing her around, tattling on her. When my parents weren’t looking, I’d grab her by the shoulders and shake her (we weren’t allowed to hit). It seems I’d made a choice early on: to be the good daughter rather than the good sister. I suspect she has not forgiven me for that.

I was Mommy’s girl. Born while Dad was overseas, I assumed that Grandpa was my father; my mother and I lived with him until Dad returned from the war a year and a half later. So when my sister was born, she was predestined to be Daddy’s girl, the one whose birth he witnessed.

Unlike Mom and me, my sister was interested in some of the same things as Dad, like science and visual art. Mom and I preferred the performing arts and reading. Sis looked like Dad’s mother, tiny and round and olive-skinned, with dark eyes, while I was sallow and thin and looked like Mom and a bit like her mother as well. But those weren’t the only reasons Sis was Dad’s girl. Dad was the quiet, intellectual middle brother among three boys, and his aggressive older brother had picked on him. So family lore had it that Dad naturally empathized with his younger daughter—the one I picked on. Alliances formed. I believed Sis was Dad’s favorite. We both believed I was Mom’s favorite. It seemed like a fair arrangement at the time.

But the relationship between Sis and Mom was much more complicated, more painful for both of them, than I knew. Sis was apparently not just rebellious as a teenager but, according to Mom, as she told me years later, so cold and cruel, so remote, so inscrutable, that at one point Mom had actually considered disowning her. What was I doing while all this was festering? Flouncing about and whining--but compulsively making my bed and getting good grades. Sis’s behavior, Mom went on to explain, recalled painful memories. It reminded her of the abusive foster mother she’d been shipped off to one summer as a little girl, and the caring but stern and temperamental stepmother she’d ended up with in her teens. My mother was subject to all kinds of dark associations from her troubled past, a past that for us, as kids, took on the aura of fable; that lonely long-ago child, all big eyes and Shirley Temple curls in old photos, must have seemed to us like a character in a fairy tale. The concept of dark associations must have been meaningless to us, but by the time we were teens, to Sis—as she confessed to me years later—Mom had become a hostile presence.

My sister lived a wild artist-hippie lifestyle throughout the late 60s, and 70s, until, in her mid-30s, she adopted a baby girl. Suddenly she and Mom became friends, maybe for the first time, and I, the one without children, was the odd daughter out. Mom loved kids, especially babies, and Sis was a new mother who needed her own mother to tell her what to do when the baby had a fever, how to handle a temper tantrum, whether to take her to this doctor or that. She also needed a grandmother for her new baby, and a mother to say, when she was exhausted and frustrated, “I know what you’re going through.” Now Sis visited our parents frequently, and she and Mom had regular long talks on the phone about the mysteries of child-raising. It seemed as though decades of hard feelings between them had melted away. For that brief period of time, we were both good daughters, and I at last felt relieved of the self-imposed burden—and the shameful schadenfreude—of being the reliably untroublesome daughter.

We’d both tried to persuade Mom to quit drinking back when we first discovered her nighttime binges, before we knew what was in store, and Dad too tried make her quit, but nevertheless kept her supplied with vodka. During those discussions, Dad was silent and deferred to Mom, which wasn’t unusual, because Mom’s needs, Mom’s big personality, were always at the forefront. Her response was an amused, tolerant smile; a reassurance not to worry, that she only drank to sleep, she didn’t really like the taste so there was no danger of addiction; a polite thank-you for our concern. I was half convinced—I wanted to be convinced--half worried, willing to be completely helpless. More than that—willing to stick with the program, just as I’d always done.

But one day Mom called me, sobbing. My sister had confronted her. “She said I was nothing but a cheap drunk. She was so cruel to me. She talked to me as though I were the lowliest of creatures,” she wept. “Why? Why did she do that to me?” Aghast, I searched for a response. “She didn’t mean to hurt you, Mom. She was trying to get through to you. We all want you to stop drinking.”

So just like that, Sis was the bad girl again, and I was back where I belonged, the confidante. But now there was no pleasure in that role for me.

Mom continued to sob, repeating, “But why? Why did she talk to me in that tone of voice? I’ll never forgive her. How could she do that to me?” This was getting weirder. Mom was not only asking me to interpret my sister’s actions, she didn’t seem to be absorbing my answer. I’d never seen Mom in this state before. What was going on?

“Promise me something,” Mom said. “Promise me that after I’m dead, you’ll tell your sister how much she hurt me by speaking to me in that cold, condescending way. I want her to know, so she’ll never hurt her own daughter by talking to her like that.” Over the years, Sis had asked me not to reveal to my parents things she’d done, things that would horrify them—things that sometimes horrified me--but this was the first time Mom had ever asked me to make such a promise. I promised.

I started to visit my parents often now that Mom was so strangely distraught. Every time, Mom ended up lying on the couch, weeping. “Do you know why she talked to me that way? Why did she do it? I don’t understand.” I was getting more and more confused. This wasn’t the Mom I knew. I wanted to talk to my sister about Mom’s peculiar ranting, but bound by my vow, I couldn’t figure out how to bring it up.

Eventually Dad threw the vodka down the toilet and Mom was forced to go cold turkey. She was so disoriented and kept begging so piteously for a drink that Dad decided to take her to a neurologist, and sure enough, it seemed there was something wrong with her brain. Now it all made sense: the weeping, the repetitive rhetorical questions--it was physiological, all involuntary, all part of that first stage of Alzheimer’s. But, uncannily, it seemed she’d come full circle, back to fearing my sister, and Sis was once again an unwitting stand-in for the women who’d terrorized Mom as a child.

In time Mom forgot that she wanted a drink, and eventually she forgot who I was, and who Sis was, and who her granddaughter was, and who her husband was and finally she was not at all sure who she herself was. Nor had she any memory whatsoever of her final, terrible rift with my sister. I half-broke my promise to Mom; I did tell Sis what she said, but while Mom was still alive. Sis was surprised and didn’t remember saying anything mean.

Now, when Sis visited our parents, she’d sit peacefully at Mom’s bedside, holding her hand, talking to her as though it were an ordinary mother–daughter conversation, but with basic facts slipped in.

“I’m teaching a high school drawing class in the small town where I live. The kids are such good artists, Mommy!”

“Oh, isn’t that nice,” Mom would murmur vaguely.

She kissed Mom, read to Mom, told her stories, sang to her—at top volume, her mouth to Mom’s ear, which was the only way Mom, deaf by now, could hear anything at all. She helped Mom eat, unperturbed when Mom took her false teeth out and licked them as though they were candy, or spit her food onto the plate and then re-ate it. She encouraged the caregiver to take a break so she could have more personal time with Mom. She drew pictures for Mom and spent nights in a sleeping bag on the dusty living room rug, unfazed by Mom’s nocturnal wanderings and high-pitched, nonsensical chattering. Me, I walked into the house twice a week, right on schedule, hoping Mom would be asleep and stay asleep or at the very least would have her teeth in. I took care of errands and financial business, talked exclusively to Dad, wondered how soon I’d be gracefully able to leave. At the end, when my mother lay in a coma for an entire week, Sis only rarely left her side, while I came and went sporadically.

Sis was the mother I’d never be, never wanted to be. Now, as it turned out, she was also the daughter I no longer wanted to be. So here I was, in this familial square-dance of changing partners, envious again, but in a benevolent way—admiring, pleased that my sister was so patient and loving with her old enemy.

How we two sisters were to treat each other from then on -- with both our parents gone, and with the mutual awareness of that choice between good daughter and good sister that I made so long ago -- is likely to be forever subject to the winds of change, as always.