How to Be a Sister

MY NEW HOUSE in Oregon was just a block from an elementary school that was across the street from a preschool. A few blocks beyond that stood the middle school. From my desk every day I watched a parade of children and teenagers and parents streaming past my house in the morning and again in the afternoon. At lunchtime I could hear the buzz of the playground and the shrieking of little girls testing their power with their voices. If I walked by at recess I could see them having screaming contests with no apparent goal other than to try to be the loudest one. They leaned forward, squinched their eyes shut, and let fly so hard I expected their braids to fall off.

I found it unnerving, this screaming. It made me anxious. I felt the same way whenever I heard a baby cry, because of my own experience with Margaret’s screaming, which often went on all day. The baby might cry itself blue, and the little girls might shriek until night-fall, and I would feel compelled to act. Luckily, I realized that doing anything would have been inappropriate, so I just kept my eyes on the pavement and avoided the playground during lunchtime. The first summer in the new house came as a relief to me, because the children were out of school and it was quiet again. I know this might not seem rational, but for me, at least, it was historical.

Once when I was ten my sister had screamed bloody murder for an entire day about a blue plastic hairbrush. I do mean all day. Hours. So loud and long that someone had called the police. There was a lot of screaming at our house back then, but we lived in the kind of neighborhood where people stayed out of one another’s business. Because of that culture of “don’t get involved,” I know my sister’s screaming must have topped the charts for someone to actually pick up the phone and complain.

It was a warm Saturday afternoon when the police car pulled up in front of our green suburban house with its tidy lawn, white lamppost, and curving walkway. The large picture windows on the first floor looked out on the whole neighborhood peering in at our wild household. The screened-in windows on the second floor were wide open, so it was easy to imagine why someone had called the cops in the first place. You could often hear Margaret screaming for about four square blocks. I knew this because once when she was having a fit, I had walked away from the house to see how far I had to go before I couldn’t hear her anymore. It was a long walk.

One of the cops climbed out of the car and marched up the walkway to the front door, the one nobody used. He rang the bell and, convinced that someone was being flayed alive on the second floor, insisted on coming in. So we all trooped into the bedroom I shared with my thirteen-year-old sister.

“Margaret,” my mother said in her Very Nice Mom Voice—which she somehow almost always managed to use no matter how long Margaret had been screaming or laughing or doing something else that we all really, really wanted her to stop doing—“you were yelling so loud that the policeman came to see if you were okay.” Margaret didn’t even look at her, or the police office, for that matter. Her mind was elsewhere, thinking about the hairbrush and the crisis its loss had caused. The cop crossed the room and squatted down next to the bed so that he was on the same level as Margaret. You could tell he was a nice guy. He was young, earnest, and handsome. He wanted to know if my sister was all right. Everything was going to be just fine, he wanted her to know. Could she tell him what had happened? My sister turned her head to look at him and took a deep breath.

THE DAY THE cops came to our house happened to be the same day that my friend Michaela’s parents decided not to move back to California. I’m not saying these two events were related, but back then this kind of coincidence took on magical significance for me and helped explain away the unending small and terrible crises that autism wreaked on my family. Decades later, I was surprised that I remembered this particular day at all but saw that I was arrested by the power of small kindnesses of friends and neighbors. I saw how they made indelible marks on our lives.

Childhood can seem interminable. When I was ten it seemed impossible that anything in our neighborhood would ever change. The houses of the people around us formed the edges of our universe and delineated how people viewed our family. The redbrick ranch next door was a rental property, usually occupied by people who were friendly but kept a polite distance and never stayed long. Two doors down lived our surrogate grandparents, people who always had time for us and opened the door before we even had a chance to knock; we knew we were loved by the Henrys.

The Waldrons, across the street, were older and less interested in playing with us, but always kind. The Reimans gave us stale suckers when we came over to watch game shows; their elegant, shabby house was slowly falling apart and smelled of mothballs. Another neighbor always smiled and waved, but she gossiped about us and told people that my parents were getting a divorce because of my sister. The end of one block had a Boo Radley house that scared the beejezus out of me. Huge, overgrown bushes hid the dark front porch. I could always hear the big dogs they kept in the backyard barking as I walked by. But like the house in Harper Lee’s book, it was really just a sad house. In it lived a pretty mom who worked too hard and didn’t have a husband to help her with her two wild boys. I only saw her walking to and from her car on her way to work. She never spoke to us and seemed not to notice if we waved.

There were many other people in between in this quiet middle-class neighborhood—genuine friends of my parents who cared about me and my brothers and sisters and managed to accept Margaret on some level, despite her differences. The Youngs and the Harms, my parents’ sailing friends, knew her and watched out for her, just like they watched out for the rest of us.

Margaret formed her own special relationships with people, too. The Waldrons supplied bananas to my silent sister, who would pop across the street every now and again. The Henrys treated her like the rest of us, welcoming her into the house and spoiling her with soda and candy. So what if she gobbled hers up and forgot to say thank you? They understood.

Years later we found out that she had often dropped in on the Bateses, a family down the block. Their kids were teenagers when we were in grade school and intimidated the rest of us, but Margaret watched TV with them and made herself peanut butter sandwiches in their kitchen.

An older couple down the bay at our lake house later told us that Margaret would come by and make cookies with them when she was an adolescent. Those were the times when she disappeared for what seemed like forever and scared everybody. No wonder she couldn’t hear us calling. She was busy mixing cookie dough.

As a child, Margaret did not talk much and could not explain herself. So I imagine these secret friends of hers had been surprised the first time she walked in without knocking and helped herself to a snack. But for some reason they were all able to transcend the gaps of regular communication and connect on some level. She formed this social network on her own, without any of us knowing. Did she consider these people her friends, or was it more simple: the house with soda, the people with the bananas, the teenagers with the peanut butter, Deanna McRae with the Percy Faith record?

The McRae household next door had a big and long-lasting impact on my sister, and on me, too. Smaller and tidier than our big, crazy place, the McRae house was my extended living room for more than a decade. Vanessa McRae, my age, instantly became my favorite person in the universe one summer day in 1978 when she moved in next door. And I loved being around her family, too. Their household of four was so calm compared to ours, and that order came from the lady of the house—Deanna McRae. At five foot two and one hundred pounds, she scared the pants off me when I first met her.

When Deanna got mad at her kids, everybody in the neighborhood knew it. I can still hear the sound of her voice the day she told Vanessa and her brother, Jason, that they had to be in by five o’clock for dinner. “VanesSA! Ja-SON! FIVE o’clock! Do you hear me!?” I can hear it now as if I’m still perched in the maple tree I had hidden in. She was so mad at her kids that day that I just assumed I was gonna get it, too. But she also loved to laugh, and when she did she was all sunshine. Moreover, as an adult I understand now that she wasn’t exactly angry; she was just setting boundaries and making rules that she expected people to follow. Period. In my house, nobody had time to ride herd on us, and with Margaret’s autism and my Dad’s short fuse, rules were often a moving target.

Deanna McRae, in her typical fashion, approached Margaret as she would anyone else. She set rules and stuck to them, like when it came to her record collection. Unchecked, Margaret would sprint across the driveway between our houses and crash through the side door. Then she’d rush into the living room, throw open the cabinet, and madly thumb through the family music collection until she found what she was looking for. “There’s Percy Faith!” she’d exclaim. “Okay! That’s better!” And then she’d slam the cabinet door shut and speed-walk out of the house, not speaking to anyone and slamming the door behind her.

This just wasn’t okay with Deanna. So she simply explained to Margaret that she needed to knock on the door, be welcomed into the house, ask permission to search the collection, walk into the living room slowly, and carefully look through the records. She actually walked Margaret through it one step at a time, praising her as she went along. After laying out these rules, she usually let my sister in, as far as I can remember. This was the first time in my life I’d seen anyone get Margaret to consistently slow down. Deanna was like a snake charmer. Of course, Margaret couldn’t really slow herself down all the way, and what resulted was a comical mix of fast-forward and pause. She’d sprint across the driveway and come to a screaming halt in front of the door. Then the knock, and when she was told she could come in, she’d throw open the door and fire her request at whomever happened to be sitting there.

Even if it wasn’t Deanna, she’d say, “Doyouwanttochecktherecordsplease, Mrs. McRae!” With permission granted, she would walk as fast as she could walk without actually breaking into a run into the living room to take care of business. Often she would bang the door shut behind her as she left and, remembering, would crack the door, poke her head back in, and say, “You don’t slam the door!” by way of apology before she slammed it again.

Deanna was tough, but I always knew where I stood with her, and so did Margaret. By the time we were in middle school, most of our parents’ friends were used to Margaret, but I had the sense that many of them didn’t really know what they were supposed to do with her if she misbehaved around them. It wasn’t their fault. We didn’t know what to do, either. We just tried everything, and nothing seemed to work, so we tried something else. Deanna had somehow found something that worked.

As for me, Deanna never told me to stop coming over every day, although she would tell me when it was time to go home. She never told me to stop decimating the candy jar, which sat on the counter, always full of Hershey’s Kisses and Rolos, and made me edgy with its constancy. At my house it would have disappeared forever in five minutes. She just told me to stop leaving my balled-up wrappers in the jar.

There were other things Deanna never said to me. She never congratulated me for being such a good sister, which many adults did when I was growing up. I think they must have felt so uncomfortable about Margaret’s weirdness that they needed to make a hero out of me. “You’re a very good sister!” they would say with tight smiles. I never knew what to say to that. Deanna also never commented on the chaos at my house, which the entire McRae family was privy to given the proximity of our homes. She never mentioned the screaming or slamming of doors. She never said anything about what she couldn’t have failed to notice—that we other Garvin kids were getting the short end of the stick because Margaret’s autism took up so much of my parents’ time and energy.

My childhood did eventually end, although some nights when I drifted off to sleep, I still thought of that perfect hiding place for kick the can that I discovered down by the Youngs’ trailered sailboat. Unfortunately, I found it just about the time the adults decided that we boys and girls were too old to play games that involved hiding in the bushes together in the twilight.

By the time I moved to Oregon, I hadn’t seen many of our old neighbors in decades. Some of them were dead, others had moved away, and a few, like my parents, still occupied the same familiar houses of the South Hill. So much time had passed since we were children that most of the days we lived through had been forgotten. Others were indelible, polished and worn like coins and arrowheads of childhood treasure, many involving Margaret and how people treated us because of her.

MICHAELA’S FAMILY, WHO lived up the block, moved to our neighborhood from California when I was in the fifth grade. Michaela’s dad taught English at a local community college. I remember thinking there must be something wrong with him, because he didn’t scare the crap out of me like dads were supposed to. He was goofy and liked to make his kids laugh. I never saw him wear a tie, either, which made him even harder to take seriously. I once watched with incredulity as he worked a can opener and made us sloppy joes. A cooking dad was something I’d never seen before, like a dancing bear, right there in the kitchen. I wasn’t even sure my dad knew where the kitchen was, let alone how the thing worked.

Michaela’s mom also “worked outside the home,” as they said back then. She always looked really nice and carried a briefcase. I felt sorry for her because she had to go to work instead of staying home as my mom did in her T-shirts and jeans. It never occurred to me that she might have liked her job or that my own mother might have sometimes prayed to Jesus for a professional life that would help her escape a houseful of children.

Whatever the case, these parents were a different breed than I was used to. On the day that the police marched up our front walk, I’d been over at Michaela’s house all afternoon. Right before dinner her folks announced that they would walk me home, which struck me as odd. They had never walked me home before, so I figured I must be in some kind of trouble. Nobody walked children home in my neighborhood. (The closest thing for me was being regularly escorted to the front door by one particular mom who had a harder time hiding her irritation with me when it was time to go home.) Back then we ran to and from our friends’ houses, morning or evening, and nobody worried about us. Sandy Young and I regularly stood at the pine tree between our houses in the hard dark, one foot on the trunk, and raced each other home, thrilled and terrified to be alone in the darkness, but at the same time knowing we were safe.

Maybe Michaela’s parents just wanted to get some exercise, even though this was the eighties, before people knew that exercise was good for you. Whatever the case, there they were, strolling down the hill with their daughter and me on a warm spring evening as if it were something they did every day. That was a Californian for you. They were also holding hands, which made me feel really sorry for Michaela.

Looking back I have to wonder if I said something to make Michaela’s parents feel like they should walk me home and see for themselves what was really going on at the Garvin house. It wasn’t like me to talk about Margaret’s behavior and how it often made me feel like I was roller-skating on a tightrope near the edge of a cliff. It was such a part of my life back then that to talk about it would have seemed as superfluous as telling someone that my family was Irish Catholic—why state the obvious? But maybe when I went to their house that day seeking a little peace and quiet, I happened to mention that someone had called the cops on my sister. Ha, ha, isn’t that funny, I might have said.

MOST PEOPLE, I imagine, are alarmed by screaming. That’s the point, after all; this is how we human beings sound the alarm. The difference between my sister’s screaming and the other screaming I’ve heard since is a measure of quality and quantity. When Margaret had a tantrum, she could hold out for hours.

As a child I spent a lot of time watching her, trying to calm her down, wishing she would stop, but nothing I did seemed to make any difference. I tried comforting her, but often found it difficult to speak in a soothing voice when she was yelling, “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH! NOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO!” in my face. I felt like I did when a fire engine went by, only this fire engine wasn’t going anywhere, so the blaring wasn’t getting any quieter. Standing there next to my own personal four-alarm fire, I struggled to figure out how to turn off the siren. I’d alternate between pleading with her to be quiet and yelling at her.

Either way, she couldn’t hear me. She’d sit there with her eyes closed, banging her hands and feet against whatever she was standing closest to—the floor, the wall, the furniture, herself—not seeming to feel the pain. The force of her screaming was so great that I expected her uvula to emerge, bringing her esophagus, tonsils, and appendix right along with it. Every once in a while, Margaret would open her eyes and focus on whoever was foolish enough to be in the room with her. Our efforts to calm her usually did not comfort her, and so we were just as likely to become targets for her fists and feet. It was nothing personal; we were just in her space, and when her anxieties took over, we sometimes learned to get the hell out of the way, but often not.

We called these episodes “tantrums,” which sounds so benign and friendly. Tantrums were what little kids had when they were whining for ice cream. Tantrum. The word has a nice little symphonic ring to it. It sounds like a small piece of Asian percussion, something that would be played during the special music section at Christmas mass. We needed a better word, but we didn’t have one, at least not a polite one we could use in front of other people.

Sometimes it was hard to know what had set Margaret off in the first place, but this particular crisis had been about the Blue Goody, a small, cheap, plastic hairbrush with bristles on one side of it. Like so many things in our crowded household, it was the only one of its kind. One hairbrush in a house of seven people. My parents were trying to feed and clothe seven of us, and they were frugal people. So it seemed like there was one of everything in our house: THE hairbrush. THE hammer. THE thermos. This singularity carried a terrible significance: if you broke it, lost it, or failed to share it, forcing your parents to spend $1.06 on a new one at Rosauer’s grocery store, you would push the family over the brink of financial disaster and into a breakup of Dickensian proportions. Somehow I managed to believe this mythology even though my father was a senior partner in his obstetrics practice and we owned a lakeside summer home.

But what caused Margaret to start screaming is really beside the point. Her tantrums were often not connected to anything that the rest of us could understand, even after they were over. She might scream for an entire Saturday afternoon, causing a complete uproar as people either fled, struggled with her, or turned the house upside down looking for whatever object it was that might comfort her—a dog tag in the secret pocket of my mother’s purse, the piece of metal from the center of the record player (which she called “the Spindle!”), or the tattered fragment of an album cover. And even when we never found the sought-after object, all of a sudden she could just wind down, take in a shaky breath, and say, “Okay, now. That’s better.” Then she’d go back to whatever it was she had been doing hours before as if nothing had happened. The rest of us would stagger around feeling like there had been a tornado and we were still pulling pieces of roofing and walls off our bodies and prying nails and staples out of our heads and hands.

This is really the clincher. If you yell or cry because you want something or need something or lost something, the people around you want to help. Usually we can help each other, and we take turns comforting each other in this basic way. But if you can’t tell anyone what it is that you are screaming bloody murder about, no one has a prayer of helping you. The result is dual alienation. I have no doubt that the origins of my sister’s panicked rages were very concrete to her, but because she couldn’t explain them to me, there was a wall between us, and we were trapped on our respective sides.

EVERYBODY IN THE neighborhood knew us, so whoever had called the police had to know that it was Margaret who was causing all the ruckus that day. Frankly, it’s a wonder the neighbors didn’t call the cops more often. That they didn’t made it quite a special occasion to see the men in blue on our block, so I’ll bet a lot of people were peeking out through their curtains when the big uniformed officer showed up on our front porch. I know that’s what I was doing. I saw the police car pull up to the curb as I stood next to my screaming sister in our bedroom, wondering who was in trouble. Then I realized he was coming to our house. I watched him come up the walk, and I pressed my nose against the screen as he disappeared under the eave on our porch. I heard the doorbell ring, and I ran to the top of the stairs to watch my kind, petite mother open the front door. From behind the screen, she tried to explain the situation in her calm, reasonable voice. He let her finish, looked at her like he’d heard it all before, and said something like, “Lady, I have to see for myself.” Mom wearily waved him up the stairway to our room, where Margaret had planted herself.

I stood at the top of the stairs watching him climb. It was funny to see a big police officer shouldering his way up the narrow staircase to the second floor of our house, so out of place next to the delicate pencil portraits of our childhood faces in the stairwell. (There were only four; Margaret wouldn’t sit still for hers.) He ignored me as he passed, and I followed him into our peach-colored bedroom with frilly curtains and matching bedspreads, all hand sewn by my mother. Margaret was sitting on one of our twin beds, quiet for the moment and sweating. Clearly this didn’t look like a den of iniquity and torture. It looked like a little girl’s room. My mother came into the room and stood behind him and told Margaret that the nice man was worried about her. And then the nice man went over to where she was sitting to ask her if she was okay. He said something like, “Honey, are you okay? Are you hurt? Can you tell me what happened?”

After a moment of silence, Margaret took a deep breath and looked at him. Then she reared back, grabbed a fistful of bedspread in each hand, and howled in his face: “WHEREEEEEEEEEE ISSSSSSSSSSSSSSS THE BLUUUUUUUUUUUUUE HAAAAAIR-RRRRRRRRBRUUUUUUUUUUUUSH! I DON’T KNOW WHERE IT IS! DO YOU WANT THE BLUE HAIRBRUSH? AAAAAAAAHHHHHH! AAAAAAAAHHHHH!” Then she threw herself backward on the bed, kicking her legs and thrashing around. The policeman fled, his white face a blur as he rushed by me in the doorway. Clearly he had been convinced that there was no law to be enforced here. I gave up, too, and went up to Michaela’s house. Later in the afternoon she and her parents escorted me home.

Were Michaela’s parents coming to look at my family’s demons that day? Were they were luridly curious, genuinely concerned, or just being friendly? Whatever the case, I remember that it was nearing twilight as we headed down Wall Street. Walking in front with Michaela, I felt oddly formal with the adults in tow as we approached the front of my house. Perhaps that’s why I went to the front door, the same one the policeman had gone to, the one that the rest of us never used. I knew it would be locked, but instead of going around to the side door, where I knew my family would be gathered in front of the TV, I reached out and poked the doorbell, just like the cop had.

My mother came to the front of the house and opened the screen door, met Michaela’s parents, and charmed them like she charmed everyone. Margaret, worn out from her afternoon of anxiety, came and stood behind her. At thirteen she was already taller than my mother. She wrapped one arm lovingly around our mother’s neck, smelled the back of her head, and rested her forehead on Mom’s shoulder. She watched Michaela’s parents and watched my mother, and I watched all of them. Every once in a while, Margaret would interject something like, “You don’t scream about the blue hairbrush, Mom.” Or, “That’s good being quiet now, Mom.” And my mother would agree with her. “Yes, Margaret. That is good behaving.”

After they had chatted for a time, Michaela’s parents said good night and walked up the hill in the dark toward their house. I went in the house, my mother shut the door, and we all sat down for dinner. The next day at school Michaela told me that when they got home that night, her parents had taken down the For Sale sign that they had recently put up in the front yard and went inside. She said she didn’t know why. They didn’t move back to California. And the next time my mom went to the store, we got a new hairbrush. A brown Goody, with bristles all the way around.

THE PAST ISN’T singular, a large block of was or wasn’t, did or didn’t, had or hadn’t. It includes many layers compressed over the years. Memory, ours and others, is accurate and misremembered, abandoned and reclaimed. It is like stone itself. If you cut a cross section, you can read the floods and the droughts, years of famine or plenty. In my own cross section I found marks made by these friends and neighbors I’d almost forgotten. And after all that time, I found some of what hadn’t been said to be what I treasured the most.

In Oregon these days were long past from my life, the times when something as inconsequential as a misplaced hairbrush could cause enough of a crisis to marshal my family, the neighbors, and the Spokane Police Department to the same hopeless cause. But for years after I left home, I still lived in the shadow of the other shoe, waiting for some small disruption to swing the balance and make it drop, make the normal life I had struggled so hard to build fall apart in an instant. I felt this way even when I was old enough to know that people have to deal with their own demons, their own crying babies and screaming little girls.

Even Margaret. For all of our efforts, I can’t believe we ever really helped my sister find any peace of mind. Margaret held the key that eluded the rest of us, and when she was able to open the door and return to the regular world, she did it of her own accord, not because of anything we did or didn’t do to help her. When I saw her that first summer after I moved to Oregon, I was more certain of that than anything. I could see that she continued to struggle with the same kinds of things every day, but I knew there was less tumultuousness in her life, and I was happy for her, because she deserved peace of mind more than anyone I knew.

From my old neighborhood, my life moved on: Spokane, Seattle, England, American Samoa, Spain, New Mexico. I watched people come and go from my life, and talismans helped me remember. When I got married, Deanna and Vanessa gave me my own candy jar as a shower gift, generously stuffed with my favorite sweets. I brought that memory of my childhood into my first married home. By the time Margaret first came to visit me there in Albuquerque, the jar had been broken, elbowed off the counter by my lanky husband, who didn’t think I would notice its absence if he didn’t say anything about it. I cried for hours. But lots of things got broken there, and everywhere else I lived. Like the Blue Goody hairbrush, though, these things are nothing more than plastic and glass—replaceable and inconsequential when compared to our memories and the people in our lives, who we struggle to love and be loved by, with their imperfections and through our own.

Sometimes sitting on my porch at night in Oregon, I could hear the frog families croaking across the fence line, the sound of a lone dog barking once, twice, three times. Across the river I heard the whistle of the train as it sped along the Columbia River Gorge, moving east toward Spokane and ever forward in time. I heard the voices of neighborhood children calling to each other across their yards in the darkness. I remembered what I had had before and what I had still, and I held it all in the unbreakable jar of my heart.