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

but she’d really want cereal. I didn’t have any idea what she really thought most of the time. This was part of the challenge of having a relationship with an adult with severe autism. Lately it had seemed that she always wanted to go with me when I showed up, but sometimes I really couldn’t tell if she was glad to be with me or not, if I should even bother, or if I should just leave her alone. Our last encounter had made me even less sure, but I wanted to keep trying, so on the phone I asked her again.

“Margaret, where do I live?”

She hesitated and then I heard her say, “The river.”

“Yeah, Hood River! That’s right. I live in Hood River!”

“Hood River, Eileen,” she said. “That’s the HOOD River.”

I was ridiculously pleased that she kind of remembered the name of my town. You’d think I’d won a trip for two to Maui, the way I was beaming. While I was savoring this sisterly moment, Margaret said, “Okay! G’bye!” and hung up on me. I laughed and said good-bye to the air, said good-bye to nobody, and hung up the phone.

As I stood there by myself in my quiet house, a little bit of peace leaked into the crack in my heart. For a moment I felt as joyful as Tommy and sister Sue on Easter morning with their baskets full of Easter joy. Whatever her limitations, my sister did remember me. She remembered the sister from the recent past, the one I was trying to be. That gave me hope and the courage to keep trying to be part of Margaret’s life.

Things certainly hadn’t turned out the way I thought they would. But some things were much better than I could have ever imagined. We never quite know what lies up ahead. All we have are these minutes and hours we are living right now, and we have to construct our happiness and our cures out of what we’ve got in our own pockets. Margaret had helped me to see things differently and to understand distinctly how we each need to make our own way. When I thought about my sister and our ever-changing lives, I thought about that old saying about the lemons. I thought to myself, If life gives you sheep, sometimes you just need to make hamburger.

7.

friends and neighbors

The Golden Rule is the guiding one when it comes to thoughtful, cooperative living.

 

—On Neighborliness, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

MY NEW HOUSE in Oregon was just a block from an elementary school that was across the street from a preschool. A few blocks beyond that stood the middle school. From my desk every day I watched a parade of children and teenagers and parents streaming past my house in the morning and again in the afternoon. At lunchtime I could hear the buzz of the playground and the shrieking of little girls testing their power with their voices. If I walked by at recess I could see them having screaming contests with no apparent goal other than to try to be the loudest one. They leaned forward, squinched their eyes shut, and let fly so hard I expected their braids to fall off.

I found it unnerving, this screaming. It made me anxious. I felt the same way whenever I heard a baby cry, because of my own experience with Margaret’s screaming, which often went on all day. The baby might cry itself blue, and the little girls might shriek until night-fall, and I would feel compelled to act. Luckily, I realized that doing anything would have been inappropriate, so I just kept my eyes on the pavement and avoided the playground during lunchtime. The first summer in the new house came as a relief to me, because the children were out of school and it was quiet again. I know this might not seem rational, but for me, at least, it was historical.

Once when I was ten my sister had screamed bloody murder for an entire day about a blue plastic hairbrush. I do mean all day. Hours. So loud and long that someone had called the police. There was a lot of screaming at our house back then, but we lived in the kind of neighborhood where people stayed out of one another’s business. Because of that culture of “don’t get involved,” I know my sister’s screaming must have topped the charts for someone to actually pick up the phone and complain.

It was a warm Saturday afternoon when the police car pulled up in front of our green suburban house with its tidy lawn, white lamppost, and curving walkway. The large picture windows on the first floor looked out on the whole neighborhood peering in at our wild household. The screened-in windows on the second floor were wide open, so it was easy to imagine why someone had called the cops in the first place. You could often hear Margaret screaming for about four square blocks. I knew this because once when she was having a fit, I had walked away from the house to see how far I had to go before I couldn’t hear her anymore. It was a long walk.

One of the cops climbed out of the car and marched up the walkway to the front door, the one nobody used. He rang the bell and, convinced that someone was being flayed alive on the second floor, insisted on coming in. So we all trooped into the bedroom I shared with my thirteen-year-old sister.

“Margaret,” my mother said in her Very Nice Mom Voice—which she somehow almost always managed to use no matter how long Margaret had been screaming or laughing or doing something else that we all really, really wanted her to stop doing—“you were yelling so loud that the policeman came to see if you were okay.” Margaret didn’t even look at her, or the police office, for that matter. Her