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

escalator crawled to the ground floor and we held up our big, hooting sister. We kept trying to get her to shut up, which only seemed to get her going again. For some reason, it always made Margaret hysterical with laughter when we got mad at her in situations like this. “Get your hands outta your pants!” and her laughter echoed behind us as we fled the mall, the big glass doors finally swinging shut behind us.

The quiet and holy Catholic church provided another regular venue for Margaret’s verbal showboating. My parents seemed to think a weekly dose of the Holy Trinity was imperative for their young brood, especially Margaret, who, unlike the other four of us, didn’t have religion class every day at school. When I think of it that way, I can understand why they kept bringing her to church, even though my mother often ended up listening to the end of mass behind closed doors in the foyer with the young mothers, their fussy babies, and Margaret.

More than once my sister ran up on the altar and started a lively rendition of some tune, including “Yes, Jesus Loves Me,” before my mother sprinted up and chased her off. Another time, when a visiting priest took a little too long with his homily, Margaret stood up and said, in an exact echo of my mother’s scolding voice, “That’s enough!” Surprised, he stopped, glanced around at the congregation, and, good sport that he was, said, “Well, I can’t argue with that.” And he sat down. That time, everybody laughed along with us.

What’s also remarkable about these songs and phrases is that Margaret’s reproduction of them was exact in tempo and pitch. Every time she said, for example, “EAT your GOD! DAMN! SANDWICH!”—an echo of our exasperated father—she bellowed it grandly, holding each word but the second for two beats. She had a talent for timing, tempo, and pitch that was quite amazing and might have been the envy of some musicians. However, this skill could backfire, because she couldn’t tolerate any music that was even slightly off pitch, like at holiday mass when we had visiting musicians. We could almost always count on some pimply-faced college student to straggle off key during his “Silent Night” trumpet solo. While the rest of us smiled woodenly and prayed to Jesus that he wouldn’t play every single verse of this endless holiday tune, my sister became apoplectic. At the first bad note, she’d stick her fingers in her ears, squeeze her eyes shut, and shriek to block out the sound. “Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

To be fair, that’s what the rest of us wanted to do, too. But when someone is doing their best, it isn’t polite to tell them they suck. My mother would struggle to silence my sister. Everyone sitting near us would pretend nothing had happened, while those sitting farther away would strain their necks to stare at us. The young trumpet player would suffer through the rest of the mass, knowing that as soon as he picked up his horn, that weird kid in the third row was going to sound off like a tornado siren, and the rest of us would look at the floor, look at the pew in front of us, look anywhere but at each other. Because if we did, we would fall apart with embarrassment and laughter.

IN THE HISTORY of my sister’s unholy disruptions, one church outburst took the gold in the Garvin Family Hall of Shame. It happened one Sunday during the sign of peace when we all had our guards down. This is the time during Catholic mass before communion when you turn to the people around you, extend your hand, and say, “Peace be with you.” As a kid I loved this part, because we’d been sitting in the dark for almost an hour, and it was a relief to be able to move around, stretch, talk to other people, and even yawn openly without anyone noticing. I have to wonder if the Vatican II folks stuck it in there to make sure people woke up before the end of mass.

My mother was always at Margaret’s side to facilitate this process, to remind her to hold out her hand, to tell her what to say. But on this particular day my mother must have had her back turned for a nanosecond as she greeted someone. Margaret was sitting near this nice little blue-haired lady, who was, thankfully, hard of hearing. When the woman put out her soft little boneless hand and said, “Peace be with you, dear,” my big sister reached out, grasped her hand, and pumped it up and down as she exclaimed, “I’m gonna KICK the SH—!” and would have finished “—IT outta ya!” had my mother not spun around and clapped a hand over her mouth.

We were so mortified by this outburst that we were, luckily, looking at the floor for the rest of mass and could not see our friends and their parents sitting a couple of pews in front of us, the whole family a quaking mass of shaking shoulders and muffled snorting as they tried to contain their laughter. We’d have been done for. None of them ever forgot this episode, and I’m sure no one who was within earshot ever forgot it, either. Margaret appeared to think about it from time to time, too. While she was still living at home, she’d poke her head in the kitchen door with the non sequitur “You be quiet in church, Mom. That’s GOOD behaving.” Then she would wait for our mother’s affirmation. “Yes, Margaret, that’s good behaving.” And my sister’s head would disappear back into the living room.

MARGARET’S TALENT FOR voice and memory was alternately hilarious and mortifying when we were younger. But by the time I moved to Oregon, I realized how much things had changed. What was once a source of daily embarrassment and stress for me had softened into