“Okay,” I said.
My sister’s throat cleared.
“Of course you know this,” she said, “but the toast needs to be appropriate.”
“Of course,” I said.
Then she said, in a weighing-options-thoughtfully voice, “It’s my wedding, so the toast should probably be funny and light.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Everyone will be making speeches,” she said, “all my friends and Matty’s friends and everyone I love.”
She paused.
“I mean everyone I love besides you,” she said.
I said, “All right.”
She repeated, “I’m thinking ‘light and funny,’ some ‘light and funny’ anecdote would be nice.”
I could tell that part of her was glad I wasn’t coming to the wedding.
She said, “Maybe you could write about something funny that happened when we were kids. Something Matty hasn’t heard.” She paused. “But please don’t lecture about the dangers of fluoride and mercury. For just once, I would like you not to be a health coach, and just to be my sister.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Because when you’re a health coach,” she said, “you can be annoying, and not everybody is interested in hearing about the effects of fluoride.” I told her I supposed that was true. “You know,” my sister said softly, “don’t ever tell Matty I told you this, but he thought you wouldn’t come to the wedding. He didn’t know it was because of Yaddo. He thought you just wouldn’t care about the wedding. He thinks you don’t like him.”
I tried not to think about which of my credit cards were about to accrue late-payment fees, and to think instead about my sister’s future husband, who is an anti-immigration lawyer for the government. I said I liked him.
“That’s why a toast from you to him would be really nice,” my sister said. “To show you like him.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You know,” my sister said, her voice knowing and pea-flavored, “in the eighteen years I’ve been with him, you and Matty have never talked much. I mean really talked. He’d love a note from you. He’s a thoughtful person.”
So I said I wanted to be closer to my sister’s boyfriend, even though I’ve never met a man who is more of a walking pancake. Don’t get me wrong, as a health coach I try to see people’s inner strengths and auras, and I do, when I squint; my sister’s boyfriend is a nice man, a better man than me, since I’m a woman. He’s a smarter-than-average guy who’s managed to be loyal to my sister for eighteen years and who will put up with anything, it seems, but that’s not his fault, because he’s an A blood-type. The A blood-types evolved when agriculture began, and they can digest grains, which is more than an O can say. They also have a strong mind — body connection, and I’ve noticed that a lot of them crave stinky cheese, even though it forms mucus in their gut and gives them allergies, and they also crave tomatoes, even though those give them arthritis, and they think they like steak, a lot of them, even though their intestines are too long to digest it in a timely fashion and it putrefies into impacted fecal matter in their colon. Worse, the whole crowd of A blood-types are followers, and when it’s time to punch a man who needs to be punched, they’ll just sit there and smile as if everything is all right. Truth be told, I felt bad for my sister’s boyfriend. After college, when my sister told him they were moving in together, he said he did not want to, but my sister told him he was doing it, so he did. A year later, when they were attending the law school my sister selected for them, my sister said she wanted a dog, and her boyfriend said he didn’t want one, so my sister bought two Great Danes, and whenever I visited her she’d yell, “Matty! Go pick up the poo in the yard!” Once my sister got pregnant, she told Matty that they should move all the way up to Boulder and commute an hour back to Denver for work, and he said he didn’t want to do that, but they did it, and once my sister had two babies, she’d yell things like, “Matty! Someone needs to put the chains on the Subaru and drive over the Front Range to get the girls at playdate!” and he’d do it, or “Matty, I need you to make dinner!” and he’d make it; but then, my sister’s bossiness was because my sister “saw” all the things that needed to be done around the house that her boyfriend didn’t “see” because he was watching soccer on TV, and my sister did 80 percent of the things that needed to be done herself and merely forced her boyfriend to “see” the other 20 percent. I was ready to be friends with my sister’s boyfriend, but he was boring. I had no animosity toward him but no interest in him; and he had never (as perhaps he had no reason to) shown any interest, not even of the fraternal kind, in me.
I’d heard him say to my littlest niece once, “Your aunt Sonya likes to say funny things. That’s because she’s a writer. Writers make stuff up, so we take her stories with a grain of salt.” I’d also heard him say, to my other niece, “Your aunt Sonya went to school to be a health coach. We hope she gets some clients, so she doesn’t have to come live with us.”
I didn’t have jack to say to my sister’s boyfriend. So after I got off the phone with my sister, I wrote responses to two of my students’ stories. One story was about a student who has angry feelings toward his old-maid writing teacher. The student says to the teacher, “How old are you? Your 40, I found you on Facebook. Your an old maid,” and the teacher responds, “Yes, I have hair on my face. I’m not a good writer so I teach. Now my prime is done, I wish I were dead,” and the student says, “Every dog has it’s day,” and pulls an automatic rifle out of his pocket and shoots the teacher in the head. I typed two pages of praise about the story’s energetic language. Then on the manuscript I wrote, “Jacob, great story. Please avoid clichés such as ‘Now my prime is done.’ B.” Then, in a fit of pique I knew would get me fired, I added a minus to the B. The second story was about a woman who marries her son. They are both the same age, twenty-three, because the woman dies after giving birth and is reborn. After typing up a paragraph of praise, I scrawled on the manuscript, “How awesome that the protagonist’s fiancée is his dead mother who died giving birth to him and was instantly reborn in the same town! Great plot. B.” I tried to think of a topic that would interest my sister’s boyfriend and provide a light, toast-appropriate anecdote about my sister.
Even though my sister is the person I’m most disappointed in in the world, I try to stay positive, and when I considered my sister’s many feats, like the fact that at age seventeen she scored five goals to bring our high school’s lacrosse team to an All New England Championship, and at eighteen won first place in a national debate competition even though she once had a lisp, and that unlike me she owns three SUVs, a Boulder mountain house, a small yacht, three dogs, one horse, and two daughters, it all — and by “it” I mean her accomplishments — came down to the fact that she’s my older sister.
According to www.firstborns.com, firstborns are alike in that they’re bastards, or more often, at least. Beyond that, they achieve, always within the framework of the orthodoxy. Even when they think they’re “insurgents,” they work within the system. I don’t know how many times I explained to my sister that, though she defends wrongfully terminated chambermaids and textile workers when they get laid off, she’s a cog in the corporate machine; she says, “No, I go against the system!” and I say, “Leala, without you the system couldn’t exist.” Lawyers like her “defending” workers, I explained, is what makes a system in which so many are wiretapped and underpaid seem acceptable, and if we didn’t have token “defendants,” we could see our democracy, I told her, for what it is: an ant farm in which humans are milked like aphids.