About My Sisters (11 page)

They weren't entirely off the mark. In the period preceding Déja's birth, both of them had jobs at the same time, an uncommon arrangement for our family. Prior to this, they had traded off working and staying home with the kids, so that one of them
was always with the children. Quite often, my mother worked and my father was home. When she was pregnant and when my siblings were infants, my mother was home and my father worked. When I was about thirteen, though, my parents felt comfortable leaving me in charge and, when they could, they went to work together. Since Maya and I were in school during the day and the other two had not yet started at that point, my parents worked night jobs in hotels because they never believed in child care—never believed that the care or raising of their children should be left in any way to strangers. Had they really been motivated to make money, I suppose that my parents could have alternated shifts so that they could always have had jobs at the same time, but that was never an appealing prospect for either one of them. Although they had plenty of arguments, often at high volume and with great drama, the fact was that my parents didn't like to be apart for very long. They have always been each other's favorite people. The kind of working arrangement that would have them greeting and parting at the door on their way to their different shifts wasn't a possibility for them. Besides, they viewed jobs only as a financial means to an end rather than as careers. As far as I could see, for most of my life, their children were my parents' career and family bonds were of paramount importance to them.

Although time, the disparate personalities of all their children, and a changing attitude toward money have gone a long way to pummeling and reshaping this philosophy, the essence of it remains true for both my parents. When, after many years of struggling to get into print, I published my first book, my father pointed out to me that, “At the end of your life, it won't matter that you've written a book. What matters is that there are people who love you and that you love the people who love you. That is the real accomplishment.” And by “people,” of course, he meant family.

This was a difficult ethos for me to swallow at the age of fif
teen, when all I could dream of was the day when I'd have my own identity apart from the family unit. My parents rejected any such notion and seemed concerned, even worried, that I'd be having such thoughts at all. My mother, particularly, became incredibly rattled if I mentioned going away to college after high school, getting a job, and, especially, wanting to date (although we never called it that—it was always referred to as “having a boyfriend”). And so, for the first time in my life, I found myself unable to talk to my mother about my feelings. This was doubly distressing for me because I'd always felt that one of my mother's best virtues was her ability to listen to her children, as well as a genuine interest in what they were saying.

My father was definitely out as an advisor, being the primary enforcer and arbiter of all moral standards. He didn't allow earrings, leg shaving, or cheerleading, so it was more or less pointless to even broach the subject of, say, dating, with him. It's worth noting here that my father always considered himself very liberal and considered his house very free and unconstrained. And it was true, there was a constant exchange of ideas happening in our house, but my father was very clear that mine were as yet unformed. I was his first teenager, after all, and when I was going through my teens, he was still fond of saying things like, “You're not old enough to know who you are right now.”

I didn't have much luck cultivating the kind of best-girlfriend relationships I saw among my schoolmates at this point, either, although it wasn't for lack of trying. For one thing, I could never find enough common ground with these girls to gain secure purchase there. When it came down to it, my family really didn't fit into any of the social categories in our area, which meant that I didn't either. Which is not to say that we were so strange that we really stood out, because we didn't. But there was a collection of little things that made me feel as though I was always a half step off the beaten path.

For example, our town bordered a ski resort and ski weekends were major winter social events. We didn't ski. This was an alien culture to us. My parents would sooner have parachuted out of an airplane than strapped on a pair of skis and they simply couldn't understand why anybody else would want to either. The only person in our family to even attempt it was Maya. After she spent an afternoon dragging up and down the slope in her pink ankle-length sheepskin coat, she gave up the idea forever.

We had also just become vegetarians in a place that was known for its deer hunting. In fact, the seasonal parade of cars with freshly killed, still-bleeding deer strapped to their roofs was a major contributing factor to our decision to stop eating meat. Our revulsion over what was considered to be not only a fine sport but also a natural way of keeping the deer population in check wasn't an attitude that went over particularly well with anyone else.

Aside from all of this, we just didn't have the kind of collective identity that could have shoehorned us into any particular category. We'd come from everywhere generally and nowhere specifically and never stayed anywhere for long. Social distinctions were important to the girls I knew. More important, even, than what one had to bring to the party in terms of personality. I could never figure out where those social lines were drawn, which ones I could cross, and which ones defined me. I suppose this might have been basic garden-variety teenage alienation, but, even though I occasionally accused myself of being “typical,” I'd had no experience with it and didn't know what to do with it. I was the leader of the pack in my family, the one who always had to go first, and there were no footsteps to follow. In one of the many ledgers that would serve as my journals, I described it for myself this way:

If there was one person who might have been able to understand all this, who might have been able to say, “Yes, it's just like that for me too,” it would have been Maya. She had always been my confidante as well as my foil. But in the dark winter days when I was caught between fourteen and fifteen, Maya was too far away from her own adolescence to understand my sense of suffocation and yearning to breathe air that was different from that in our own house. At least, this is what I assumed and it was an assumption she never tried to dispute.

During the previous summer, when we'd been living in a sterile but overpopulated apartment complex, I'd had my first flirtation with one of the neighbor boys, something I'd made her swear on pain worse than death to keep from our parents. It was an innocent bit of fiction as those things go, existing mostly in my head, but the spark itself was enough to warrant parental hysteria. Maya hated carrying that secret around, almost as much as she hated the boy himself and the very idea that I would be interested in flirting with him at all (let alone
kissing
him or anything as revolting as that). Maya could never understand how coquetting it up with some gangly teenager would be more appealing to me than playing jacks with her on our big redwood dining room table while Marvin Gaye's greatest hits cheered us along. I would have explained it to her if I'd had any idea myself, but my behavior, along with the motivations that spawned it, was as much a mystery to me as it was to her.

At any rate, her disgust over the whole thing put her squarely in the too-young-to-understand category for me, as well as establishing a sort of off-limits zone for all future conversations relating to romantic involvements. But my natural inclination, almost from the day she was born, was to tell Maya everything. Despite my sense that she didn't understand what I was feeling and was vaguely disapproving besides, I didn't want to stop our constant conversation. So the two of us developed a sort of communicative silence that would play an important role in our relationship from then on.

I'd pull out my journal and write furiously while Maya lay on her bed opposite mine, reading one of her mysteries. When I couldn't write anymore and sat staring into the blue space of our bedroom, Maya would come and sit next to me, both of us resting our chins on our knees, saying nothing. Sometimes she put her arm around me. Sometimes she just sat close enough so that our shoulders were touching. If our silence went uninterrupted for long enough, she would suggest a cup of tea or putting my hair into a French braid and we always ended up doing one or the other. I put my journal away, shoving it between my mattress and box spring. It was a hiding place in plain sight, really. Maya always knew it was there. But she never once read it.

My journals became the only place where I could dump all the feelings I couldn't express to anyone else. I filled two of them that year, each entry more angst-driven and frustrated than the last. Sometimes, the journals themselves became part of the frustration. “Just sitting here in gray depression,” I wrote.

For a while after this, the entries got much shorter. “I wish I was dead,” I wrote one day. The next day's entry read, “I really wish I was dead. I think death has to be better.” The third in this series consisted of an entire page filled with the words “I wish” over and over again until the last line, which said, “I was dead.” I worried a bit about writing this down because, although I knew that Maya would never read my journal, I wasn't as convinced about my mother—with good reason. When I turned eleven, my parents gave me a diary for my birthday, complete with a lock and tiny key. I loved that diary more than any other present I'd ever received and wrote in it religiously every day of the year, leaving it out, near my bed, foolishly believing that its lock would protect my secret thoughts from prying eyes. But no. My mother read it, “cover to cover,” as she hastened to tell me. It was phenomenal to me that she felt she had every right to read my diary and made no secret of it, but what was even more stunning was that she
took issue
with its contents, berating me for saying terrible things about her and my father in its pages. I don't remember now what those terrible things were, because, after our argument over the diary (during which my mother insisted, “And I'd do it again!”), I burned it, page by page, in the fireplace. It was a violated and ruined thing after that and I couldn't stand to have it near me.

Because I was compelled to keep writing, I started hiding subsequent journals in various spots around my bedroom, sometimes leaving decoy journals in plain sight that charted events like the weather and what hits were on the Top 40. Even with all these precautions, though, I didn't feel entirely safe about writing down my innermost thoughts in plain language anymore. I started writing in code, using metaphor and allegorical short sto
ries to describe what was going on. Despite this, though, I assumed that everything I wrote from then on was going to be read by someone else and so, from that point on, I wrote with an audience in mind and tailored even my most boring journal entries so that they would be interesting to that audience. It was in this way that my mother became, indirectly, my first and best writing teacher.

It was in anticipation of this audience that I stopped writing that I wished I were dead. In those terms. The thought of my mother discovering these feelings and then sharing them with my father was worse than the thoughts themselves. So I started writing stories full of suicidal ideation, becoming progressively more detailed as I really started to explore the concept itself. Suicide fantasies started becoming a form of escape. I couldn't have said then where I was heading with all of this. I knew only that I was miserable, guilty about being miserable, and blind as to how to make it any better.

Right around this time, close on the tail of the first spring thaw, my mother announced that she was pregnant again. What I found peculiar about this was not that she was pregnant (I'd certainly seen
that
movie before), but that she was so delighted about it. This was a
planned
pregnancy. At my age, when one out of every four girls I knew was either sneaking off to Planned Parenthood to get birth control or dealing with the consequences of not using it (there were plenty of girls calling the help line that year), it was a bit strange to think that my mother and father were intentionally adding to their family.

My parents are among the very few people I've ever known who actually planned their children. It's still difficult for me to imagine what that decision-making process must have been like, even though both my mother and father have, jokingly, described it as going something like this:

“Shall we have another baby?”

“Yes, okay, let's have another baby.”

Maybe there was more to it than that and maybe not. My parents have always loved the very idea of babies, as well as the notion that, together, they could make new people. By 1977, they already had four children, broken by our ages into two sets. Maya and I, in our teens, formed the original set. Lavander and Bo, who were only eighteen months apart and inseparable from infancy, formed the second set. They were still little, but no longer babies when my mother conceived again. Lavander had already started school and Bo was right behind her. In other words, there was no baby in the house and so my parents decided to make one more.