Like the girls of “Little Women,” I grew up one of four distinctly different sisters with seven years between us.
The eldest is Sharon. She lives alone in a small town in Mississippi near her son, where she is a local newspaper columnist. She is a night owl, which makes her the sister I can call at 3 a.m. when I am haunted by recurring dreams of a gorilla jumping out of the bedroom closet we shared when I was 8 and she was 9.
Kim is the youngest, with a life most similar to mine. Married to a Midwesterner, she lives in Memphis, where she is a video producer, a gardener, an accomplished cook and the mother of two active 20-somethings. Kim is the one I commiserate with when I wonder if I’ll ever have sway over my adult children again.
As for the sister who shares the middle with me, Susan lives in New Orleans with her musician husband and two cats, where she has a high-stress job at the top of a high-rise on Canal Street. I mention Susan last, not because she is neither least nor best, but because it’s complicated. Trying to explain to normal people what and how we communicate is like trying to make sense of infinity. There is no end or beginning. You just have to get the language.
She’s on her way home from work, accompanied by me on Bluetooth, when: “Wrong wray, writtle rahr!” she blurts.
Only I know, or care, that she has dropped into Scooby-Doo, that a little car has pulled out in front of her going the wrong way on a one-way street and that I will take up the cause.
“Ruh-roh, Rusie,” I respond.
Likewise, when she has to slam on brakes for one reason or another, she will react, this time by shrieking. This makes me scream, which makes her scream again. We scream back and forth until our parasympathetic nervous systems take over, and then we start laughing until we cry.
Susan and I understand each other, a fact of our relationship that only came to pass in later life. My father treated her like a princess when she was young. I was my mother’s pet.
This created an unspoken discord that softened in later years when I started leaving my family in Ohio every year for the two-weekend, world-renowned New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Susan and I would hang together for two weeks, realizing our common obsession for stylin’ with sundresses and bling, then standing for hours in dripping humidity listening to music, sucking on crawfish heads, taking hundreds of pictures and making commentary on everything.
Perhaps just as intimacy-building were the four days we spent in the hospital after the accident that claimed our mother’s life almost 20 years ago. While the other two sisters left every night for a hotel, Susan and I slept side by side on the cold floor of the waiting room next to a Coke machine. When Susan would have trouble going to sleep, I would recite fairy tales to comfort her until I was mumbling in my sleep.
We are reminded of this now during nighttime phone conversations that often end in my snoring.
“I think you’re going Goldilocks on me,” she’ll say.
These days, having given up the fun, but arduous and hot annual trips to New Orleans, my time with my sister is mostly confined to the phone.
This doesn’t restrict us, as Susan is often in the car and takes me with her, in the drive-thru lines at Walgreens and Starbucks, on the parking helix at her high-rise building, on her way to doctor appointments. We also talk late at night when all is said and done.
“What did you eat today?” she will ask from the comfort of her bed, where she is lying with her cats.
“What did you wear to work?” says I from the comfort of mine.
Susan and I talk about the harder topics, about our health, about aging, about loneliness, her cats, my kids, her job, her husband who works and sleeps crazy hours, which is why we have open time at night to talk.
But just as significantly, we talk about nothing. It is this nothingness, bordering on silliness, bordering on third-grade humor, that lifts our lives and levels everything out.
“We’re having Beefaroni,” I start singing one night when we are both beset by the difficulties of life.
“It’s made with macaroni,” she chimes in, then: “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat,” she starts, and before you know it, we are singing about Oscar Mayer wieners, Green Giant vegetables and Slinky.
“It’s Slinky. It’s Slinky. For fun, it’s a wonderful toy.”
Having established a rich new genre of conversation, the next night we sing the theme from “The Brady Bunch,” “Gilligan’s Island” and “Green Acres.”
We sing until Goldilocks shows up, and then we say goodbye about six times and curl into our blankies, fulfilled, loved and seen.
I love all my sisters for all kinds of reasons.
I am lucky to have three of them.
Susan, meanwhile, is the one who speaks Scooby-Doo, unprompted.
“Rye ruv roo, rister. Righty right.”
Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since 1988. Visit her website at www.debralynnhook.com; email her at [email protected], or join her column’s Facebook discussion group at Debra-Lynn Hook: Bringing Up Mommy.
