Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(41)

Seconds later I was vomiting into the bucket that had been placed next to me, but even that felt peaceful. It was a pleasant vomit because it just flew out of me—there was no nausea preceding it, and vomiting itself is an art I had perfected in my twenties. Somehow, I did not end up shitting my pants, so once I was done vomiting, I settled into a sort of cruise control, or artificial intelligence—sitting up and looking back and forth at all the images that were speeding by before my eyes.

    The blues and purples and greens finally settled on the body of water I spent all of my childhood summers on—Katama Bay. The water was dancing and the laughter was echoing up off of it, up to the sky where I was perched. The laughter was my sister Shana’s and mine—as little girls. It was as if I were watching a movie in fast-forward—memories I hadn’t thought about in years but were somewhere in my subconscious. Jumping off the dock on Martha’s Vineyard, tipping each other over in kayaks, looking for hermit crabs on the beach, all with the buoyancy of little girls’ laughter. Nothing ominous. Nothing scary. The laughter was innocent and infectious and uproarious and sweet. That’s what it was like—a film I was watching from the sky. You are outside your life, but it is your life. Every memory is real.

There was a dog running along the beach that I had forgotten we had growing up. I saw Shana in the blue-and-white pinstriped bathing suit she wore all the time, throwing him a tennis ball—and then I saw myself as a little girl, running after Shana with my blonde curls bouncing and then grabbing her leg, clumsily pulling her down to the sand with me. Little bellies filled with dancing laughter. I couldn’t have been more than three, and I was already tackling my sister.

    The dock we used to push each other off of, the little sandy beach we used to play Kadima on. The images were all moving so fast, a phantasmagoria of memories that were all real—memories that were so ingrained in me, that I’d taken for granted and stored in the deep receptacles of my brain. Tears were streaming down my face. I was overwhelmed with love for my sister.

In this moment, I was overcome. I felt the love that Jenny and Dan described—but for my sister, which I hadn’t expected. It was this delightfully perfect reminder of what she and I truly are—sisters who’ve experienced more together than apart. We witnessed how we both have been shaped—that was true intimacy. No self-consciousness, no pretending.

Building sandcastles, digging sand out of our bathing suits, learning to fish, all bundled into the innocence of childhood—before puberty, and boobs, and acne, and boys. How had I forgotten all the times we held hands without even thinking?

All of these images were coupled with this voice in my head telling me that just because my sister wasn’t like me didn’t mean I had any right to judge her. My sister was perfectly happy being a housewife and living in suburbia; the fact that for some reason that bothered me held absolutely no merit.

My sister and I were two different people, and all she ever wanted was my love. I needed to have more patience and more understanding for her, and I needed to love her harder. Love her harder. That’s what I was being told. Be kinder. Be more gentle. Do you know how hard it must be to be your sister?

    Then my thoughts shifted gears to a scene of us on a bunny slope at Vernon Valley Ski Resort. My older brothers and sisters would take us skiing and leave Shana and me in ski school all day. Shana thought that was perfectly fine, but the very notion used to drive me up a wall.

“How could you be okay going up and down the bunny slope on a T-bar while they’re out there having the time of their lives, living it up on the slopes?” I asked her, gesturing with my hot chocolate during one of our ski school snacks. “They’re making a mockery of us. I think we need to teach them a lesson.”

I looked like I was eight, and Shana would have been thirteen, and this would have been our exact dynamic.

Shana wanted to stay put, to follow the rules. I was in an uproar.

“You and I can go skiing on our own. We’re too old for ski school. You’re definitely too old for ski school,” I told her, tossing my hot chocolate in the trash.

“They probably just want me to watch you,” she told me, half assuring herself.

“Or the other way around,” I reminded her. Then I got my mittens and hat, and stormed away from Shana in my ill-fitting ski boots, headed toward anything but the bunny slope.

I remembered the hot chocolate, and I remembered how uncomfortable those boots had been.

Moments later, when I was returned by one of the mountain employees for not having a proper lift ticket, Shana just shook her head and said, “Do you ever think anything through?”

    Watching us together at that age was hilarious. We were both so ridiculous.

Then there was another whoosh of lights that brought me to my sister’s living room. This was different because I wasn’t in this scene; it was a conversation she had relayed to me months earlier in an email.

My father had come over to her house—this was before we moved him into a facility, before he needed twenty-four-hour care, while he was still a homeowner and the proud driver of the same beat-up gold minivan he had been driving since my mother died, with the same used, empty coffee cups that were in there when she died. My father’s idea of a car wash is to drive by one. Why he still needed a minivan and who he was transporting in it were questions none of us wanted the answers to. He would frequently stop by one of my siblings’ homes, wearing a diaper that would somehow always manage to leak, forcing them all to dread his visits and put towels down when he came over. Does it get any more undignified? (Not a question.)