She was conceived and formed in the same space I was. Now that that space is gone, she is a kind of living testament: the only being who can corroborate my own memories-that what I believe happened, in fact did. I watched in amazement when they brought her home, a lump of something in a blanket, about the size of a loaf of bread. I fetched her clean diapers for our mother. It never occurred to me to hate her.
I taught her to speak. We sat on the floor in the mote-swirled sunlight through the screen door as I patiently made her repeat: Yellow. Lellow. Spaghetti. Basketti. Hamburger. Hangabur. Her limbs emerged plump from her clean playsuit, her hair flew in soft light-brown feathers from her head like a little wren’s and her deep-brown eyes smiled at me, that button face a study in gentle equanimity.
We faced each other on the floor, playing jacks, marbles, crayons; mapped out worlds, stories, families thriving in cheerfully idiosyncratic straits. We stood facing each other on the back-yard swings, swooping from side to side, a human sandwich for a giant to eat, singing songs to lure the giant. We bellowed the Davy Crockett theme in the public restrooms with the kind of acoustics that let us hear our echoes.
She was a tough little cowboy then in jeans and boots, the brown mane yanked back by a hairpin on either side. She squinted and fussed when my father tried to pose us for his Brownie camera, because those were the days when you had to face the light, and she hated the sun in her eyes. I do not remember a single fight; only the time she jumped out from behind a wall to scare me and succeeded. I cried.
She grew into a knockout brunette, boys trailing her through high school and ever after. Even now, with a fat, grinning baby in her arms and a small child at each side, men stop what they are doing to admire her. I smile and shake my head, but there’s nothing mysterious about it, for she is invitingly rounded and sensuous, with a kind light in her eyes.
She married young, was widowed young and as soon as she could walk upright again in the world of men, they floated after her like bees for summer flowers. She married again, and then once more, and is now a hard-working mother and secretary in a bustling Sierra Nevada town. Her house is full of food, noise, games and toys, laughter. The refrigerator is pasted with photos of the kids, animals, friends, fathers and me.
I have taken shelter in that house over 10 years, from whatever world I was building or fleeing, from Africa, Europe, the South Pacific, from lost loves and lost jobs and new jobs and new loves. When I arrive, vibrating and numb after the long drive, there is always food and wine, medicines and teas and, best of all, three smoldering young faces with three urgent reports to make.
She and I look at each other and know we won’t be able to finish a sentence until much later that night. I have slept on the floor, on the couch, in the kids’ beds, always made fresh for me, under the extra blankets she always remembers to lay over. The dog tries to stash himself underneath the bed, so he won’t be exiled to the cold garage, and he wakes me too early with a cold nose in my neck and a plaintive rowwwr to be let out.
The baby will wake then in the next room, composing his own songs aloud for a while, until one of the boys also wakes and goes to him, climbing into the crib with him, where he will proceed to teach the littler one to speak-they face each other, smiling. Lellow. Basketti.
From my bed in the kids’ room, I put aside my magazine and stare at the posters of Joe Montana, Will Clark, Michael Jordan slam-dunking the very moon into a cosmic basket. I stare at the pennants, the photos of ski teams and soccer teams, class portraits, tae kwon do certificates, boxes of baseball cards, the entire Hardy Boys series lined up in careful sequence, trophies, sacks of multicolored paintballs, catalogs of motocross gear that have gradually replaced Ninja Turtles.
Surrounded by the icons of the boys’ budding lives, all the possibility and yearning and dailiness of them steeped into the very walls, I am consoled as I would be nowhere else. I’m related to these guys. I’m safe here.
She made this home, and she made these children. And in the end, it is her very essence that binds all this together, that makes the rooms snug and welcoming as a fresh-made, warmly blanketed bed. If she left us, God forbid, it would all collapse into cold ash. We know it is the sheer force of her will, the fertility of her heart’s imagination that carves a field of home-ness out of the anarchy of our random lives, her determination alone that buttresses and furnishes and defends this turf with passion and tenderness. We follow her from room to room, the kids and I.
She does not resemble me in specific features-hers are more pert, far prettier, and I have always been relieved to insist that if there’s going to be a beautiful woman stealing the spotlight, I want it to be her. But we are alike in an aura about the face and body, a positioning of bones, a symmetry of hands, coloration and, very much, in voice. When she says “Hello” into the phone with that compassionate lilt in the last syllable, my heart squeezes and my throat constricts because her voice is like a long-distance echo of our father’s burgundy cello tones and our mother’s fluid, golden violin.
She is Andrea Frank Starkey Havens Carabetta, widow, divorcee, happily married mother of three boy-children, all of whom look like a slightly scrambled version of our father, who never lived to know they would exist. She is my only family, my mother, my daughter, source of all safety and sweetness. She is my sister.
We could not be more different. She is country, I am city. She is domestic, her house packed with lush cushions and plants and crystal, her pantry full of tantalizing and comforting possibility; I am a distracted bachelor with a $130 stereo, a few faded posters and what she and I call a mass murderer’s refrigerator. She reads potboilers and adores suspense movies; I receive weekly New Yorkers like eucharist and run from the room when blood is shed on the television screen. The contrast is piquant: nurturing homemaker, bookish ascetic-yet we tap from the same emotional reserve.
By now we know and anticipate each other so easily, so deeply we unthinkingly finish each other’s sentences and often speak in code. No one else knows what I mean so exquisitely, painfully well; no one else knows so exactly what to say to fix me.
One day I told her I was having terrible, inexplicable dreadwaves of panic and existential horror such that even the quality of the daylight made me reel with fear and queasiness. In an instant, she nailed the malady and soothed me the way an expert calms an agitated animal. (Diagnosis: mild PMS, slightly hung over, needing sleep, carrot juice, aspirin and vitamin C. One night’s good rest will flush away this horror, she declared-and it did.)
Say my eyes light up to see a certain kind of soft, oversize plaid shirt in one of the winter-gear stores we roam during holiday breaks, and say we then go on about our lives. What do you suppose awaits me under the tree Christmas morning, long after I’d forgotten my longing? If my birthstone happens to be opal and she has divined that I associate powerful magic with that beautiful gem, who, do you suppose, presents me with my first opal ring?
It works both ways: We take turns. I send her vitamins, Bailey’s Irish Cream, sexy blouses, luxury moisturizers and hair conditioners, earrings shaped like dangling moons and stars, roses made of painted seashells, magazines of science and archaeology because those are her delights. When she went through her New Mexico phase, I plied her with coyote-and-cactus gimcracks from Santa Fe.
Our mutual efforts to please are shameless, and people seldom grasp the mightiness of it, the raw instinct, the unabashed sentiment. When there is an earthquake, when “Around the World in Eighty Days” shows up on TV, when I sell a story, fall in love, skin a knee-I’m on the phone to her.
When the middle child splits his eyebrow in two, when the eldest gets straight A’s or into big trouble, when the baby is witty, when she’s read a passage or heard a joke or eaten something she adored, she’s dialing me up. Last week she coaxed the baby to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on my message machine. All I can offer, by way of baffled explanation: We’re all we have. . . .
I am very grateful to her husband and children, not least for loving her and making her glad, but also for accommodating my fierce bond with her, the oldest bond either of us will ever know, longer and in many ways larger than a marriage, yet full of unapologetic romance. It goes so impossibly deep it seems to reach into places neither of us understands-into dreamlife. We dream of each other, we dream of the children, we dream of our parents and the house we came up in. We talk of it to ease the intensity. It is as if our cells remember that their beginnings were intertwined.
I have styled myself lifelong as a strict agnostic, but as we age, that softens. Perhaps we hovered together like commingled vapors in some anteroom before we became earthly, and perhaps we will after earthliness as well.
I am not sure all this is very typical.
Other people, as I understand it, have fights and feuds and estrangements with their grown siblings; store up resentments over gaffes great and small, refuse to speak to each other for years, even disavow the other’s existence. Some simply have nothing to say to each other. This is inconceivable to me, as it is to her. You can suggest it is because we were caught together, as children-perhaps our souls were soldered together then-in the Pompeii-like moment of losing a mother, and a father not long thereafter. Maybe, and maybe not. Many orphaned children grow up with no particular affinity for one another. You can call us neurotic, compensatory, co-dependent. Fine.
Whatever it is, it is formed. No question that this woman who was a soft-feathered baby and then a radiant coed and then an athlete and adventuress, who whispered goodbye to her first young husband in a hospital morgue, who with her next built a boat from the trunk of a single giant redwood that would sail to the Marquesas and then built a house to live in, who three times let doctors slice open her belly to lift out a fine new son-this woman who came after me from a womb long gone, shares with me now a hopeless and irrational urgency about the use of time, which of course translates as life on Earth.
A wakefulness in time, an embracing of time-a galvanic shiver of awe for the fact that the two little girls in the black-and-white snapshots even made it this far. Awe for the shabby sanctity of the mountain house, for the stately procession of seasons, of husbands and lovers and kids, for the suburban rituals, the struggle to pay bills, the video games and lentil burritos and Desenex and microwave baby bottles-for the whole, brief, wheeling galaxy of fireworks, which can scarcely be told but must be lived. I pray we get old together.
