How to Be a Sister Eileen Garvin (online e reader .txt) 📖

My other siblings and I pondered the ominous, eternal question, “When will she lose it?” We never thought “why” or “if.” We knew from experience that the question was “when.” So we ate fast. We ate to a silent but thunderous cadence: “Can-we-get-through-this-before-Margaret-throws-a-fork-and-Dad-makes-us-leave?” Margaret often came unglued right in the middle of dinner, and it was usually my mother who would extract her from the table. (I’ve often thought this is why my mother never got fat like other moms; she often didn’t get to finish her dinner. She certainly never made it to dessert.) Margaret would get booted for throwing food or silverware or for yelling. Then she’d make a grand exit, sometimes laughing and sometimes kicking and screaming. Or maybe singing. Sometimes she’d even manage to be kicking and screaming while singing and laughing all at the same time. It wasn’t all bad; if every head in the restaurant was still turned toward the door my sister had just been dragged through, nobody noticed if I was quietly digging into my spumoni ice cream, which I wasn’t supposed to eat because I hadn’t finished my dinner. And we never had to wait long for the check, either.

I learned what regular dining was like when I worked in restaurants as a teenager: the process of entering a restaurant, being seated, ordering, and eating was accompanied by quiet conversation and laughter. I observed that this series of events could take anywhere from one to two hours, and that people often seemed relaxed during the entire course of things. It was a joyful experience, a series of pleasant events linked together with harmonious transitions involving small talk, sugar, and salt.

As we grew up, Margaret’s tolerance for public dining improved, but she remained predictably unpredictable. And while we might enjoy the kind of amnesia that comes with time and distance, momentarily forgetting how things used to be, it never took a full minute for us to remember just how bad things could get—like the evening my parents took us to a little German café when we were all in our twenties. There were hardly any other diners there that night, and I’d like to think that’s why the place ended up closing down, not because of what happened while we were there.

We sat at a long table along one wall, enjoying the atmosphere, chatting and catching up like a normal family. The boys and I had been away at college, and Margaret was living in a group home near my parents’ house. We talked and laughed, none of us realizing that Margaret was simmering away at a low boil. Normally she’d clue us into her mood with a minor episode before anything terrible happened. She’d get irritable and maybe stomp her feet or throw something before we left the house, just to let us know she was feeling impatient. This time, however, we were not so lucky. We weren’t prepared when she erupted, throwing her linen napkin high in the air and emitting a mind-blowing screech, the kind that should have shattered the crystal. It only lasted for a second, but it seemed to stop time altogether.

I’d been telling some story, and the sound of Margaret’s scream just knocked the breath out of me. I felt a slick layer of sweat spring to the surface of my entire body—my scalp, my face, my palms, even the soles of my feet. Across the table the stunned faces of my brothers hung suspended above the tablecloth. At that exact moment a nicely dressed, middle-aged woman had the great misfortune to pass our table. She clutched the back of a chair with one hand. The other hand went to her heart. She gave a little cry and her legs started to buckle. The owner of the restaurant hurried over and helped her back to her own table.

Then life started up again. My brothers and parents and I all breathed in and laughed a little hysterically, happy that we all hadn’t, in fact, just been run over by a train or vaporized in a nuclear holocaust, although that’s what it had felt like for a second or two. It was just business as usual. My mother patted my sister’s hand and told her it was okay. Margaret, looking shaky, took a big drink of water and said, “Okay. That’s good manners, Mom.”

Nobody knew what had set her off, just as none of us knew what had calmed her down. All we knew was that we didn’t and couldn’t know, but we still felt like we should know so that we could keep it from happening in the first place. My brother Larry can still duplicate the noise she made that night, and although I beg him not to, he’ll do it every now and then. And then we all laugh and cringe, and I feel like I might cry or throw up, then we laugh some more.

WHEN WE WERE growing up in Spokane, having a relationship with Margaret often felt like living the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, but without the resolution. The same kinds of things happened over and over again, and we never seemed to get anywhere. These were the questions that weighed heavily on me when I thought about spending time with my sister: What will she do? How will it make me feel? How will it make her feel? We were family, because we were born to the same parents. We were closer to each other genetically than to any other people, but what did that mean, exactly? What was she to me, this person who didn’t really have much to say, who seemed to barely tolerate my presence one moment and then turned her bright smile on me the next? And what was I to her?

Autism had made it impossible for us to communicate about any of this. We human beings rely on stories to explain and