“No,” I whispered.
At length my sister and I were told to play outside, so our mother and Haven could reminisce. They reminisced for thirty minutes — I have no idea what was said — then we were called in to say goodbye to Haven, and we said goodbye with that child’s feeling of knowing that someone is supposed to be important but that they are nothing, a dust mote about to disappear into the stratosphere — and our fat mother hugged Haven, and Haven stepped in her suit down the walk and got into her car, and the tan sedan rolled down the driveway, because she had a long trip ahead of her, after all, and had only stopped by our house on her way to the White Mountains, where she would see family. Our mother’s references to Haven were fewer after that, but on the occasions she did refer to her, she’d add, “You met her.”
Whenever our mother said, “You met her,” Leala’s eyes acquired a blank look. Noticing that Leala had put down her book, our mother would say, “You loved her,” because of the gross thing Leala did as Haven left, to save the visit.
In the following years, Christmas cards still came from Haven, and occasionally our mother’s voice would firm up and in reference to something she’d say, “My best friend, Haven.” Soon Leala had a perm, the rage among ten-year-olds, but she still played with Barbie dolls because I demanded it, though often she’d say, “I don’t want to, I’m too old,” until I would come up to where she was lying on the couch reading a book and say, “I have an idea. Let’s play the Mystery of Who Decapitated Barbie,” and she’d say, “How do you play that?” and I’d hold up her decapitated Barbie.
Which is all just to say that it was only Leala to whom our mother said, when she was ten, “Why do you read books all day? Don’t you have friends? Are you a loser? Why don’t you get on your bike and ride it to a friend’s?” although we lived on a lonely mountain road, such that any bike ride to a classmate’s involved a steep, blind-curved ten-mile descent and a ride home uphill, but our mother cleverly placed the emphasis of her challenge in such a way that Leala responded with the only possible answer: “I have friends.”
And our mother would say, “Then ride your bike to them.”
And so Leala got on her bike and rode it to see her friends, except there were no bike paths and twice she got hit by cars and sent to the hospital.
And it was only Leala to whom our mother said, “You’re gloomy, you pout, the reason that you have no friends is that you’re unlikable,” and, “You have bad posture,” and, “Your teeth are yellow, you have yellow teeth.”
And it was Leala who at ten years old cooked a thousand dinners and cleaned up afterward too, in hopes of making anyone happy, and who during each dinner was told by our father that she was not sitting correctly, because she was hunching. “Sit up straight,” he’d say, and it was she who was told by him each night that she was “picking at her food” and told, “You’re lying,” when she claimed she felt sick.
She had worms, of course, from age six to fourteen, Leala, pinworms slipping through her intestines and colon all night, laying eggs and eating her blood and undigested food, and tapeworms, which was why she hunched in pain at the table, but she was too stupid to figure it out, too stupid until one day she looked back at her poop in the toilet and saw one lift its long white head and peer at her, and even then she had to go and ask our mother what it was.
Only Leala was criticized during dinner and only Leala was told she was sickly-looking, ungrateful for not finishing her meal, a loser.
I don’t know what it is to be a firstborn. But I know that when my older sister fell ill, no one helped her. She had to go to five doctors to get a correct diagnosis for Lyme disease, to persuade a doctor to prescribe the one year of intravenous antibiotics she needed to recover, and she had to sue her insurance company to compel them to cover the cost of her medications. She did this while working full-time, and while very sick, by herself. After my sister recovered, she believed, for years, that other people with Lyme disease would want to use the legal documents she’d used to compel their insurance companies to cover treatment, but no one she offered the documents to ever wanted them, including me.
Oldest siblings. Stubborn, deluded, retarded in the cosmic sense.
—
It was 2006. At the time, I had just been hired for a prestigious full-time job teaching creative writing at the Ivy League university. I was putting the finishing touches on a story about a beautiful woman who is set up by her thoughtless older sister on a blind date, which goes badly because the date turns out to have acne. The story had been accepted for publication by a magazine, and the editor and I had decided that the bad blind date should not only have acne, he should be psychotic, and that the older sister should have chosen the psychotic date for the younger sister on purpose, because she is jealous of the younger’s beauty.
“I have a question,” my sister said on the phone, out of the blue.
“Yes?” I said.
“Well,” my sister began, “I’ve been reading your stories.” She meant the ones in my book, which had just come out.
“They’re…good,” my sister said, “I mean I enjoyed them, even though I don’t understand literary fiction, but I noticed that a lot of the stories feature older sisters, and that the older sisters are always horrible.”
“What do you mean?” I said. I paged through the galleys of the story about the bad blind date.
“Well,” my sister said, “in one story, the older sister tries to murder the younger sister by feeding her to wolves. In another, she murders her by feeding her to monsters.”
“Well,” I said. “Monsters, that’s silly. Monsters aren’t real.” “In another,” my sister continued, “the older sister kills some homeless men with a gun and then tries to kill her sister.”
“What’s your point?” I said.
“I don’t mean to attack you,” my sister said, “but why, in your stories, are the older sisters always horrible? Am I horrible?”
“Of course not,” I said.
I immediately felt guilty. I had made the older sisters in my stories horrible. I was not sure why. To cover this, I launched into an explanation of how literary fiction works. I included a sub-lecture about the need for drama, the use of distortion, and the distinction between fiction and reality.
“Okay,” my older sister said, “but in your stories, all the older sisters are evil. I could understand if it was one story, but all of them?”
I moved my galleys around and wondered whether the sexy bit where the psychotic blind date tries to titillate the protagonist’s nipple through her sweater would be used as a pull quote.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s fiction. And”—I paused grandly—“some of those stories were dreams!”
“Okay,” my sister said. “I know I don’t understand fiction.” I examined my galleys, let my pen hover, and crossed out a line. The line was, “Oh please, don’t. I’m not ready for that!” The protagonist says it when the psychotic date, a law student, gives her a shoulder rub while they stand in line to buy theater tickets. I looked at the line. I decided the protagonist should tease the psychotic law student. I changed it to, “Mmmm. Is it raining out? I think I’m wet!”
It was not the fault of literary authors, I said, that they wrote fiction, and fans — including relatives — should not confuse fiction and reality.
“My art is beyond my control,” I said. There was a pause. “Well, I would like it,” my sister said, her voice smaller than usual, lower, “if it’s not too much to ask — I mean I know you can’t control inspiration — if just once, at some point, you could write a story in which an older sister is a good person.”