Stuffed Page 3

“I thought it was a great gift. It was two things and one of them had twelve things.”

  “Well, you should send Lizzie a silver cup for Matthew. That’s what you sent when she had Daniel.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Ask Lizzie to send me back the jumpsuit and the rattles, and I’ll get him the silver cup.”

  “Girls! Girls!” my mother tsks from her chaise.

  “For fifteen dollars more you could have given him a silver cup.”

  “A gift is a gift,” I say. “Why do you have to measure it?”

  “It’s a terrible gift.” My sister’s eyes go dark.

  “What do you think, Mom?” I ask. “You were with me when I got the stuff.”

  Mom thinks. “Actually, I thought you’d get several jump-suits,” my mother says.

  “It cost me three hundred and eighty-five dollars to fly down here to meet that baby,” I say. “I have to buy a silver cup too?”

  I know some sisters who by choice only see each other Mother’s Day, and some who will never speak again. But most are like my sister and me, treasurers of each other’s childhoods, linked by volatile love, best friends who make other best friends ever so slightly less best.

  The nicest thing my sister said to me in the first seventeen years of my life was, “Hey, you know, your legs really aren’t so bad.”

  I can’t see myself without seeing her. Thanks to my sister, I consider myself short. I may be five feet seven, but she’s five feet nine. Since she’s a great athlete, I’m not. When it was her turn to serve at volleyball, the game was over. I played right field with the glove over my nose, terrified a ball would hit it.

  Despite our differences, people called us the Volk Girls. But my sister’s athleticism, academic excellence, and skill at attracting boys forced me to forge my own path. I became a painter. I studied bees. I mastered a stringed instrument made out of goat bladder and had intense relationships with boys who wore torso T-shirts and passed urgent notes in the hall.

  When I was lucky enough to join her magic circle, my sister kept things exciting in ways I never dreamed of.

  “I’m bored.” She’d yawn and people would scramble to amuse her.

  On weekends she’d have three dates a night: the Date, the Late Date, and the Late Late Date. She was the party doll. I searched for soul. The months that separated us were the Grand Canyon. Or was it simply that we were sisters, doomed to polarities, modeling ourselves against each other? My sister is on the board of seven organizations. So I wear Eau de Stay Away. My sister puts on jewelry to go jogging. I wear the same thing leaving the house the cleaning lady wears coming in. My sister would never buy used furniture. I would never buy new.

  I show her my three-dollar tag-sale chairs. I’ve screwed a walnut into the top of each one.

  “Look.” I point to the nuts. “Nature’s finial.”

  At the moment I was screwing walnuts into chairs in New York, my sister was setting fake rubies into chairs in Coral Gables.

  Two thousand miles apart, we both decide to get pedicures, and we both pick Redford Red.

  When I slice off the end of my finger on a kitchen mandolin, my sister says, “I did the exact same thing on a mandolin last year!”

  Being an older sister, she bandaged it herself and never bothered to tell me. Being the younger sister, I called her from the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital, where the top hand surgeon in New York was taking care of me. Thanks to birth order, my sister has something I’ll never have: a need to be brave.

  “Do you realize we can do anything?” my sister says.

  She’s a scuba diver. So now I am too. Last month she got me kayaking. Now I’m a PADI-certified Open-water diver considering buying an Aquaterra.

  This morning she called: “I want you to think about something.”

  “What?” I feel like I’m falling.

  “I want you to take five days off and come down here and we’ll kayak six hours a day.”

  Six hours a day? In a kayak? Can I do that? I’ll have to ask my sister. Because she thinks I can do something, sometimes I can. On the other hand, sometimes I don’t know what’s really me or what’s just not her.

  Every morning she wakes up to a yellow Labrador retriever licking her lips. “Hobbesy! Hobbesy!” my sister squeals, kissing the dog back. Then they go into the bathroom and brush their teeth. Do I truly dislike pets or just not love them enough to share a toothbrush? It’s hard to know, since my sister is my frame of reference.

  Which doesn’t mean she can’t still make me nuts.

  In a restaurant I wipe sleep out of my eye, and she gasps, “That’s repulsive!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you realize what you’re doing?”

  “Well, excuuuuuse me. I had something in my eye.”

  We are sharing a Cobb salad. A huge bowl is between us. My sister is picking out the blue cheese. The blue cheese is vanishing. I wasn’t going to say anything, but now she’s fair game.

  “That’s disgusting!”

  “What?”

  “You’re picking out all the blue cheese!”

  “Oh, would you like more blue cheese?” She stabs some globs. “If you wanted more blue cheese, why didn’t you say so?”

  Walking through the woods last summer, we decide to take a shortcut through a bog. Twenty minutes into it my sister and I realize we’ve made a mistake. Phragmites grass, ten feet tall, has enveloped us. If you stick your arm out, you can’t see your hand. There’s no turning back, because we don’t know where back is.

  “I can’t do it,” I whimper.

  “Yes, you can!”

  “Let’s just scream.”

  “No one’ll hear us.”

  “I can’t walk another step.”

  “Come on! Try this!” That’s when my sister, the Mensa member, invents the Way to Walk Through Phragmites. She locks her arm around my waist, then clamps mine around hers. She demonstrates how to stick your leg in the air, then form an arc with it. Legs synched, we sweep the stuff down one exhausting step at a time.

  “We’re never gonna make it,” my voice wavers.

  She laughs. “If I die first, you can eat me.”

  On a trip to New York we visit our old apartment. “Was it hard to swing?” my sister asks.

  “Piece of cake. I sent a letter ‘To the Occupants of 4E.’ I sprinkled it with phrases like ‘Mem’ry! That strange deceiver!’ ”

  My sister laughs.

  In front of the building we pause on the sidewalk. This is where we learned to roller skate, play hopscotch, jump rope, and ride our bikes.

  “Who was the doorman who gave us Life Savers?”

  “Tom. Who was the elevator man who borrowed our comics?”

  “Jimmy.”

  Inside the lobby I study the bench where she once made me wet my pants by blocking access to the elevator.

  “Who was the super with the German shepherd?”

  “Mr. Korber. Who was the doctor with an office in the lobby?”

  “Dr. Port.”

  Then the elevator reaches four, and we are standing in front of our old front door.

  “Remember when you locked me out?” I say.

  “Yeah.” My sister sounds wistful. “Remember when you sleepwalked to the neighbors, and they found you on their toilet?”

  “The Walds. They had angels on the wallpaper.”

  We ring the bell. A wary couple opens it, and from zero miles per hour I break into racking full-fledged sobs.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “I have no idea why this is happening.”

  “It’s all right.” They look worried.

  “Omigod!” My sister looks around. “It’s exactly the same!”

  “Well, we ripped up that horrible brown linoleum in the foyer somebody put in,” the woman says.

  That was our linoleum, state-of-the-art.

  “May we see the kitchen?” I ask.

  In the kitchen my sister says again, “It’s exactly the same!”

  Not
to me. It looks tiny. Everything looks tiny. But I was turning twelve when we left, and my sister was full-grown.

  “Remember the time I pretended to commit suicide behind this door?” she says.

  “Yeah, but you forgot to hide the Heinz ketchup.”

  We double over laughing. The people move closer to each other.

  In the pantry, we automatically go right. Mattie’s room is a storage closet now. I’d forgotten the wall behind her bed was made of privacy glass. Must have been to let light in, since her window overlooked an air shaft.

  In the playroom, there are picture moldings I never noticed.

  “Remember when we watched Lux Video Theater in here?”

  “We did everything in here.”

  In the hallway leading to our mother’s room, my sister says, “Remember when I crashed through the glass door?”

  “Weren’t you chasing me?”

  The bedroom, which had the same trellised wallpaper Ozzie and Harriet’s had, is peacock blue now, but the bed’s in the same place.

  “I used to love when we were sick and got to spend the day here.”

  “I used to love when Mom let us try on her green velvet robe.”

  “I used to love the way she rubbed Vicks in my chest for growing pains.”

  “I used to love the way she played with my hair after a shampoo. She dried it with her fingers. It took hours. Hours and hours and hours.”

  “You always had short hair,” my sister says. “It took five minutes to dry.”

  The people are following us from room to room. I see pure relief on their faces when we start thanking them for the visit. Then I realize I haven’t seen our old bathroom. I used to think there was treasure behind one of the tiles because it sounded hollow when you rapped it with your knuckles.

  “May I use the bathroom?” I say.

  There’s a pause. They’re not happy. Reluctantly they follow me to the bathroom. I smile at them and shut the door. I rap on the tiles. Still hollow. I flush the toilet.

  Downstairs, I tell my sister I wish she could stay in New York a little longer, that next time she comes, we’ll visit our playground.

  “When we’re older, we’ll have more time for each other,” she says.

  “The best arrangement for elderly people is two siblings living together,” I say.

  “When our husbands are dead and we’re just trouble to our kids, we’ll still have each other,” she says.

  So I tell her this Greek thing. “It’s ancient Greece,” I say. “Your house is on fire. Your mother and father are in it. And your child, husband, and sister. Who do you save?”

  “Your child,” my sister says. “Of course, your child.”

  “Wrong! You can always get another child.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Nope! Your parents are at the end of their lives anyway.”

  “Your husband, so you can make more children?”

  “No way! You can always find another husband. According to the ancient Greeks, you save your sister. That relationship is irreplaceable. You can never have another sister.”

  “That’s a classic example of sophistry,” my sister says. “Reasoning that seems okay but leads to a false conclusion. Yeah. Definitely. That’s sophistry. I think I remember that. The Greeks were famous for it.”

  The phone rings at 6:30 a.m. my sister. “Hullo? Hullo?” No one is there. I know it’s

  “Coffee too hot?” I ask.

  “Ummm,” she squeezes out.

  I take the portable into the kitchen and put my coffee up too. We’ll talk about yesterday. We’ll talk about tomorrow. We’ll talk about our parents, our men, our kids, our work. We’ll talk about our weight, the wisdom of keeping a food diary, how good veggies poached in broth can be and whether we should go to a spa.

  “You can have real coffee at the Birdwing Spa in Minnesota,” I’ll say.

  “Yeah, but you have to go to Minnesota.”

  “The Regency House Spa is near you. I’d come down.”

  “I can’t live a week with no animal products.”

  “What about the Kripalu?”

  “It has cinder-block walls, and they don’t let you talk during meals.”

  “Know anything about the Tennessee Fitness Spa?”

  “Is that, by chance, in Tennessee?”

  We talk till she has to leave to see a patient or another call comes through, or I have to meet my walking friend. We talk every day. Although her take on our past is fixed in amber and mine has no membrane, she’s my memory. There are things only we know. It was she who taught me how to smoke and hide the evidence and bunch socks in my bra. When I woke my mother to tell her “I think I got my period,” in the Jewish tradition, she slapped my face, then mumbled, “Do you know what to do?”

  “Yes.” I lied, then asked my sister. It was my sister who taught me the facts of life by reading From Little Acorns nightly. It was she who beat me up when I howled at the good parts, then kept vigils with me by our bedroom window, waiting for the woman across the alley to take her nightly shower.

  Do I trust her? Does she trust me? I keep a pound of the coffee she loves in my freezer. “I’ve got your coffee,” I remind her when she calls to say she’s coming. Always she packs her own can.

  I don’t know if I could live without my sister. Picturing life without her is not possible. I love her as much as I love me. Ma soeur, c’est moi.

  We decide to definitely diet. To launch it, we leave the world behind and head for three nights at a spa. No sooner do we turn into the driveway than my sister is making friends. She makes friends with the doorman, she makes friends with the bellhop, she makes friends with all the waiters and the startled funk aerobics instructor she drags into a corner and thumps her abs at. I hide and I shrivel, I shrink and I pale.

  “Why do you have to make friends with everybody?” I ask.

  “Why are you so unfriendly?” she says.

  On the nature hike I’m last, she’s first. She scales the Ice Glen singing. People keep running back down the mountain to check on me, “Are you okay?” “Are you sure you’re okay?” At night, after dinner, my sister asks the waiter for two fat-free hot fudge sundaes to take back to our room, where she will simultaneously watch a video and return nine calls from patients who can’t live without her. Then “What happened?” my sister asks about the movie, and I have to break the spell to fill her in. Then she makes a few more calls, and she’s ready to turn out the light. Then she wants to talk. Then she wants to sing Patience & Prudence’s “Tonight You Belong to Me” in the dark. (I’m melody. She’s harmony.) Finally the Volk Girls are ready to sleep.

  “Good night, really.” We laugh, and that’s when I hear it. It’s the sound my sister has always made at night, a sound nobody else makes, a hard swallow that ends with a push of air out her nose.

  Something opens. Something closes. Something opens again.

  I used to time my breaths to hers. Open, close, open. The sound of her breathing is the sound I fell asleep to the first twelve years of my life in the blue room we shared with organza drapes that met like bosomy aunts bending over to kiss us, the room I still dream of, the room I still long for, separated by a night table, one arm’s length from the person Siamesed to my soul—my sister, my half, my beloved Jo Ann.

  Friday night at Great-grandma’s. Back row (left to right): Jerry Lieban, Herman Morgen, Jenny Geiger Lieban, Dad, Albert Wolko. Front row (left to right): Gertrude June Lieban Shultz, Polly Ann Lieban Morgen, Dr. E. Alan Lieban, Mom, Louis Lieban, Ruth Helen Lieban Wolko (Note: The three sisters have the same hairdo.)

  LAPSANG SOUCHONG

  I loved my family because they were family, separate from their behavior in the world or how they treated me. They were mine, I was lucky to have them. Their stories were my history, and their histories were spoken of with reverence. In 1888 a paternal great-grandfather brought pastrami to the New World. In 1916 a grandmother took home the trophy for “Best Legs in Atlantic City.”
My grandfather won the land for his house in a card game with Jimmy Walker and was eulogized in The New Yorker by E. B. White. My father invented the first Hydraulic-powered Double-sided Garbage Can Brush, the Double-sided Cigarette Lighter so you never have to worry about which side is up when you go to light, the first Illuminated Lucite Single-shaft Fender Guide, which clamped to your fender and facilitated nighttime parking by showing you where your fender ended, the first See-thru Wristwatch, and the Six-color Retractable Pen and Pencil Set. (He was sold out by his partner, the mention of whose name in our family is still followed by spitting.) Dad opened the first frozen-food store in Greenwich Village, Penguin Foods. With a war going on, he figured working women would buy frozen food so they wouldn’t need to market every day. My mother was president of the Junior League for Child Care. Everyone was a star in the family galaxy, even Aunt Gertie, whose husband gambled away her money, then died, forcing her to sell dresses at Sachs, not Saks. Aunt Gertie had perfect posture.

  I loved my family because they were Morgens or Liebans or Volks. We were part of each other. So I loved Uncle Al, even though he cheated on his wife. Uncle Al sat back and watched while his sisters scurried to please him. He wove his forearms over his chest, puffing his pipe like a chieftain while they kept his glass filled. Uncle Al was emotionally immune. He tolerated us. If he could say it the hard way, he did. This passed for genius.

  An endodontist, Uncle Al was our family’s only “professional.” In that capacity he was our liaison to the medical world. When anyone had a health problem, even if it had nothing to do with teeth, they called Uncle Al for a referral. He knew the best rheumatologist, the best chiropodist, the best lung man. Uncle Al was famous in our family for two other things as well: the ability to write two different thoughts on a blackboard at the same time—one with his left hand, one with his right—and that he, and he alone, did Erich Maria Remarque’s root canals. When you have someone in your family who sets you apart, that person’s name is rarely mentioned without his credentials. Uncle Al was Uncle Al Who Could Write Two Different Thoughts on the Blackboard Simultaneously. And Uncle Al, Erich Maria Remarque’s Endodontist. I was impressed, even if I didn’t know who Erich Maria Remarque was and whether Erich Maria was a man or a woman.