My name is Ed Nolan and I’m almost seventeen. Edmund Burke Nolan, if you want to be supercilious. (Our priest says I like to use big words and I get them about ninety percent right.) Everything in my life is okay except I have this terrible problem with my sister Shannon.
I’m spelling her name the way most people would. She spells it Sionna ever since the priest told us that’s the real Irish way to spell it. It’s the name of a river and a goddess. Shanny doesn’t think she’s a river.
She’s really Shannon Marie. Or Sionna Marie. She pronounces her second name the Irish way, “the right way” according to her—Marie pronounced like you have a bad cold which has settled in your sinuses sounds like “Maura.”
“Shanny Maura,” says the priest. “That sounds like it might be the name of the woman who held the milk can when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern to start the Chicago fire!”
My sister is quite ineffable. And I looked that word up in the dictionary to make sure I had it right before I typed it into my Apple Macintosh. It’s the right word, for sure. Shanny is ineffable. Not infallible (though she thinks she is), but ineffable.
I’ve always had problems with Shanny. Mostly it was keeping her out of fights. Now … well, that’s what this story is about and my teacher says I’ll ruin it all if I tell you the end now.
Shanny and I are Irish twins, which means I was born eleven months and twenty-nine days after she was. The priest says it wouldn’t make any difference if it had been one year and a day, we’d still be Irish twins.
Mostly Shanny and I get along all right, more like real twins than like teenage siblings. That’s because she’s always been one of the guys, not afraid to climb fences or play basketball or things like that. Now that she’s getting ready to go to college next year she says she’s given up being a tomboy in public. But she’d still rather hang out with the guys than with the girls her age.
I mean, how many big sisters do you know who come around to watch their little brother practice with the other guys on the wrestling team?
The other guys noticed her, of course. Shanny is the kind you notice.
“Hey, Nolan, is that chick your girl?”
“Nah.”
“Then why does she always show up for your matches?”
“She’s my sibling?”
“Your what?”
“It’s nothing dirty. It means brother or sister.”
“She’s no brother.”
“You’re putting us on, Nolan, that chick isn’t your kid sister.”
“You’re right, I’m her kid brother.”
“No way.”
“Really.”
“No way!”
“Hey, sis, you want to meet the guys?”
She came down the steps of the gym grandstand in two bounds. Sure she wanted to meet the guys. I mean that was a substantial component of why she was there in the first place.
You like that? “Substantial component”?
Well, most girls would have been gross about it and become good friends with one or two of the guys. Not Shanny. She took over the whole team. All of them would come to the house to see her or even up to our place at the lake in the summer. Bother Shanny to be friends with the whole wrestling team?
Not an iota. She loved every second of it.
She sings and dances and acts, too. All the guys in the casts think she’s cute, though I’m not sure about the kind of guys who go out for drama.
So how come I have to get her out of fights? Guys make passes and that sort of thing?
No way. Shanny can take care of herself in that arena. I mean since she’s been lifting weights, she’s built, in both connotations of that word. Not muscle-bound or anything like that but strong and tough.
When she water-skis (and she’s the best chick on the beach at skiing) she doesn’t so much skim the water as attack it.
As you’ve probably guessed, she is totally bossy. Extremely so. The priest says that Shanny is rarely in error and never in doubt. He asked her once if she ever lost an argument. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “Well, sometimes my Dad thinks he wins an argument with me. It’s good for his morale.”
The priest says that in another age she would have been a pirate queen or a mitred abbess ordaining priests no matter what Rome said, or maybe even an Irish goddess.
“But,” he says ruefully (don’t bother looking that one up, I got it right), “it’s the 1980s, and she thinks she’s an Irish goddess, regardless.”
Tell me about it.
She’s also very thoughtful. Well, like my mom goes, more of the time than a lot of teenage girls. Like once last summer up at the lake I was really bummed out because my current chick’s mother had put the quietus on her spending the weekend at our house—like there was enough privacy in our place to do anything wrong even if we wanted to!
Well, Shanny knew I was bummed out and knew why and knew that I might demolish a large complement of six-packs, so she organized a surprise birthday party for me—only five weeks late!
So what about the fights I used to have to get her out of. (I know that’s two prepositions at the end of a sentence, but you expect me to say, “fights out of which I got her”?)
See, you have to know about our little brother Jimmy to understand that. Jimmy was born when Shanny was five and I was four. The poor little guy had just about everything wrong with him. The doctors said he’d only live a couple of months and maybe Mom shouldn’t even bring him home from the hospital.
Mom, who is a lot like Shanny, goes, “No way. He’s our kid and we love him, no matter what’s wrong with him, right?”
I don’t remember what he looked like then, though I guess he never changed much. He certainly couldn’t see and probably couldn’t hear and never learned to walk. In fact, even at twelve years old he was no bigger than a baby. And to be objective about it, the little guy did look kind of different. But he was ours and we loved him, you know?
I guess Mom and Dad were a little nervous when they brought him home, not sure how the rest of us would react. Mom said that Jimmy was sick and probably would never get better, but God loved him and so would we as long as we had him. So there were, according to family mythology, two little kids standing around staring down at this strange-looking baby, wondering what we were supposed to do.
Then Shanny took him in her arms and began to sing a lullaby. I don’t remember exactly and I guess I’m superimposing what happened later, but poor little Jimmy would kind of smile whenever Shanny would sing to him.
The doctors said Jimmy wouldn’t last a year at the most. We kept him alive for twelve years. They used to bring all of us kids over to the hospital every couple of months to ask us dumb questions. The priest said later that we were probably somewhere in an article in a medical journal about how families can cope.
Don’t bother hunting up the article because me and Shanny made up funny answers to their dumb questions. Well, Shanny made them up and I regurgitated them.
Mom says that we could have never kept Jimmy with us so long unless all the kids had helped. But all of us know that Shanny was the one who worked the hardest. She told me that she could never remember a time when she didn’t get up in the morning and bathe and dress and feed Jimmy. She wasn’t complaining (when Shanny complains it’s mostly about school being boring! and you can hear her all the way to Comiskey Park) she was merely stating a fact.
I guess the doctors who asked the stupid questions were worried about what the effects of having Jimmy around the house would be on the rest of us. Well, as you can tell, I’m a real misfit, right? I mean I’d be okay if the chicks didn’t dig me so much I had to fight them off by the dozens. And Shanny sounds deprived, too, doesn’t she?
I don’t know what would have happened in other families, but Mom doesn’t exaggerate when she says that Jimmy brought us all together and made us a family.
The problem was other people—kids, grown-ups, well-meaning friends, and not so well-meaning strangers, as the priest said.
That’s where the fights come in.
I mean we walk into a restaurant on a trip somewhere and people would take one look at Jimmy and start complaining in whispers which were just loud enough to hear.
“That child is disgusting.”
I suppose he did look disgusting. He never did grow much after Mom brought him home. His body was misshapen, his face twisted. After a while we didn’t notice. It didn’t matter to us. He was ours and we loved him.
“They should put him away.”
“Why was he permitted to live?”
“How can we eat with him in here?”
My parents would usually try to ignore them. Not Shanny. She would dash over to the table and scream at them, “He’s my brother and I love him and you just shut up.”
Like, wow, huh?
Usually they’d shut up. Occasionally some airhead would go, like, “You poor little thing; you shouldn’t have to put up with that monster.”
That’s when Shanny would start punching and I’d have to pull her off. Mom and Dad would tell her she shouldn’t fight that way, but I think they were really proud of her. So was I, but I was always the one who had to drag her away.
See what I mean, Shanny was always a problem.
It was worse with kids. Grown-ups would usually keep their smart-mouth ideas to themselves. When Shanny got a little older and people would complain about Jimmy being down on the beach, she’d chew them out verbally instead of punching them out.
She’d go, “You’re so uneducated that you make me sick. Don’t you understand that God wants us to love little people like Jimmy?”
For starters.
That would shut them up. Some people would even apologize and ask about Jimmy. Shanny is, like the priest says, nothing if not flexible, so she’d turn on all her “sweet little girl” charm and maybe even make them think a little. She got pretty good at her “canned” lecture after a while.
Kids were harder, especially when, like we were in third and fourth grade, and fifth- and sixth- and seventh-graders—mostly boys but some girls, too—would make fun of Jimmy in the playground or when Shanny would take him out in the stroller.
Well, Shanny didn’t put up with it and it didn’t make any difference how big the kids were. She’d charge them like she was Richard Dent, right?
And who’d have to pull her off before she killed the big kid?
You got it. Little Eddie Nolan.
I was a little punk then. But quick.
I had to be.
’Course if the big punk caught up with me, Shanny would charge back into the fray. Two against one, we Irish twins were pretty good.
Kind of violent, huh?
Well, you see what the priest meant when he said pirate queen. But you know, it worked. The word went out to leave Jimmy alone and people sure did.
And pretty soon parents were telling their kids what a wonderful girl that sweet little brown-eyed Nolan child is. She loves her handicapped little brother almost as though he were a real child.
Lucky they never said it that way when Shanny was around because Jimmy was a real child as far as she was concerned.
And all the rest of us, too.
I found him dead in the bedroom in our house at the lake on Easter Monday morning. The priest goes that no time is a good time to die but Easter is the least bad time. He also goes that we must now think of Jimmy as more alive and more mature than any of us. Why, he’s like, he even knows more than Shannon does.
We all laughed, but I’m not sure Shanny thought it was as funny as the rest of us.
It was hard at the wake and funeral because a lot of people would go how fortunate we were to be free of Jimmy. Shanny, acting real grown-up now, would respond that we thought we were fortunate to have him with as long as we did.
“I was so mature,” she’s like to me later, “that I’m disgusted with myself.”
“I guess we’re growing up, sis.”
“Gross!”
The priest told us that we would mourn for about a year just as we would if any member of our family died. I guess some of us did some pretty odd things that year. But we’re all right.
Mom and Dad were pretty worried about Shanny, which shows how geeky parents can be.
“Maybe it was too much a burden for such a little kid to carry.”
“Ha,” the priest goes. “No way Shanny gets points for a deprived childhood. Not with the wrestling team still hanging around.”
“But what will happen to her?”
“She’ll find some lucky guy at whom to direct all that passionate affection.”
And to Shanny he’s like, “And the guy better be at least as strong-willed as you are.”
“No way I’m going to marry a creep or a wimp.”
“That guy you had around last summer…”
“Well, I got rid of him, didn’t I?”
So how’s Shanny a problem to me now?
If you have to ask that question, you don’t understand my story. You totally don’t understand it.
I’m going to Shanny’s college next year, right?
And she has this need to take care of someone, until she finds Mr. Strong Will, right?
So who’s she going to take care of and protect from all the six-packs and all the chicks who will throw themselves at his feet?
You got it, folks.
Everyone’s favorite Irish twin: poor little Eddie Nolan!