When my sister, bald from chemo and burned from radiation, came into the recovery room after her double mastectomy at age twenty-six, my mom took a picture. The worst part, other than my mom’s timing (which has just always been weird, like “we’re getting ready to leave a family gathering after a tense discussion and let’s stop and get a picture of us all together” weird and over the decades everyone has kind of gotten used to it), is that she wanted me to get into the picture.
“Mom. No. Really. Please, I don’t…” Mom stomped her foot. Squinted her eyes at me. I sighed. Tilted my head. Smiled into the flash.
So there’s this picture of me looking all tan and healthy, manicured nails and shirt tucked in, leaning over my sister with a wash cloth on her head. Only you can’t really see the washcloth because her skin was so pale they kind of meshed together. I hate that picture, I think as much as my sister does. Right after my mom took it, Heidi started throwing up what looked to be blue Kool-aid. I have no idea where it came from.
My little sister has always been my constant source of torment and joy. I can’t recount how many times I walked in to my bedroom find her and her friend Lynnie, who was orphaned when her parents were killed in a tragic car accident after Christmas shopping one night, with their butts up in the air farting out rotten gas, and then letting it absorb back in. “You. Are. Gross.” I would pound off, desperate to complain, but knowing it would do little good. Everyone still felt bad for Lynnie, and at least she was having fun.
But no matter how many times Heidi stole my clothes or stunk up my room or wiped my deodorant all over the place and blamed it on me (as if!), I’ve always loved my sister’s freckly smashed up nose, and the fact that she would sleep so soundly I could lift up her eyelids and watch her eyeballs roll around while she dreamed. And she has always been riotously full of energy, riding her Big Wheel naked down the sidewalk, falling off porches and breaking her arm, dragging the paper boy off his bike and to the ground so she could give him a kiss. Although I’ve always been a little envious of the fact that, despite her orneriness, she never got on my mom’s bad side like I seemed to, even when she plugged her smudgy nose to swallow down any food that wasn’t covered in chocolate, I’ve always hated that bad things seem to happen to her. Things like scoliosis, and record-breaking ovarian cysts, and breast cancer that I am helpless to do anything about.
Curious, this nature of relationships between siblings. Joseph and his brothers being all wound up over a coat and their dad’s attention. The Jacksons. My own toddlers who will beat the living tar out of each other, but if my son can’t find his cartoon wig to wear on Saturday mornings, my daughter, her own hot pink wig flying around as she searches, will turn the house upside looking for it. And how I, when my sister was being a boss during her rounds of chemo, looked at her browless face and told her she was out of “bandana points” and should shut up if she wanted me to stay for a visit. Mind you, for the two years of her life that she was in the depth of this fight, a giant fist had rammed its way down my throat and through my spine and had twisted my guts into jelly over what I couldn’t do for her.
I found a quote recently, from a 1964 Esquire magazine article about the boxer Floyd Patterson. He was asked to describe how he felt following a second, career bending knock-out punch he had been dealt. He replied: “This good feeling leaves you. You realize where you are, and what you're doing there, and what has just happened to you. And what follows is hurt, a confused hurt... Not a physical hurt--it's a hurt combined with anger; it's a what-will-people-think hurt. It's an ashamed-of-my-own-ability hurt.” It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know about that quote when my mom took that snapshot. If I had, I probably would have laid my head down on my sister’s bandaged, flattened out, tube-drained chest and wept. And I’m not sure I could have stopped, because sometimes being the one left standing is just as mind-cracking painful as being the one who can’t get up.