“I suppose there are sisters that don’t compete. I have never met one.” – Lisa Grunwald
“Sisters never quite forgive each other for what happened when they were five.” – Pam Brown
October 2011
I stand at the window in what is to be our room for the next week at the Hotel Vivaldi in Venice, Italy overlooking the Grand Canal. I crank open shutters to the Juliet balcony, soaking in the last of the late afternoon sunlight, watching white cap waves titter and play. A breeze puffs silky curtains and cools my face.
I should be pleased as everyone says this is the best time to visit because the canal does not stink from the summer heat, the wet season is yet to arrive, and most tourists are Italian. But no. I am anxious, waiting for my sister to arrive.
She should have checked in four hours ago. The next and only other connecting flight from Dubai on Emirates to Italy arrives midafternoon tomorrow. She lives in Australia, in a small-town west of Sydney. I live in the United States on the East Coast in small-town in southern Delaware. We both cover long distances, changes in time zones, navigate unknown airports.
I will be sixty-one years old next month. She just turned fifty-five. This will be the first time we see each other in thirty years and she’s not here.
I look down at the street as if she might appear because I will it to be so. There is no message on my laptop computer, nor at the front desk. Using the black Bakelite dial telephone in the room, so reminiscent of my grandma’s telephone years ago, and with the help of the hotel operator, I connect with my husband at home in Delaware. “Hey, it’s me.”
He says, “What’s wrong?”
“She’s not here. Did she call?” I am seated on the bed nearest the bathroom. I thought she’d like the one closer to the balcony overlooking the water and the view of the famed onion-domed Basilica di Santa Maria Della Salute across the canal. I smooth my bedspread although it isn’t wrinkled. His silence at the other end of the line feels ominous, so I repeat the question. Finally, he says, “No.”
“What should I do?” I pick at the corner of my thumbnail, a nervous habit I’ve had since childhood. Old emotions burble up ― resentment and worry ― she will criticize whatever I decide, but I must do something. Maybe she has done something stupid and she’s in trouble. Then I apologize to her silently. I should not be caught in the past, should not make assumptions, not if this week is to be drama-free.
I hear him breathing and he hisses into the phone. “I knew this was a mistake.”
We are going to have a long-distance fight, not the first one about this reunion, but certainly the most expensive. He already expressed his unhappiness about this entire jaunt. He doesn’t trust my sister. He calls her sketchy, his word for a bum.
I won’t admit I too think she is sketchy and worse, unreliable. I say, “Ok, ok, you’re right, but what do I do now?” I am not one to ask for advice and usually not one to take advice, but here I am mewling like an abandoned kitten.
My sister and I are meeting in Venice because after our mother’s death, our stepfather wanted us to get together. He paid for the reunion trip. Venice was her choice.
He thinks it will help me deal with my grief. I prefer the ragged edges of sorrow than feeling like the jiggling control top of the pressure cooker mom used to make her spaghetti sauce.
My husband says he loves me and that I should wait as long as I want, that the cost of changing the ticket is unimportant, so come home if that is what I need to do. His voice sounds tender but frustrated. “I told you so.”
Then our connection buzzes with static. Before I begin to cry because I am so far away, I say, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
The line fails completely, and I am alone, really alone. I re-read her arrival time written in my small Moleskine journal. Perhaps I made a mistake. Booking travel from two continents each in a different day via the internet could have confused me.
But no, today is the day we are to meet.
I cannot sit in the room waiting. I check with the concierge, ask for a map, and leave a note for Barbara, just in case.
I find one of the oldest cloisters in Europe nearby and think I will absorb the quiet and calm of the sequestered square. Unfortunately, along the walls of the shaded walkway, a series of ancient wooden crucifixes of Christ on the Cross reveal historical interpretations of his deep pain and endless suffering. His emaciated body, the rusted nails piercing his hands and feet, tear drops glistening on his face; the torn and dirty loincloth; and the blackened ooze from his wounds, all press on me. I suppose I should have prepared myself better for this visit. But how? I’m wondering how seven days can balance the years of estrangement. What do we do? Play catch up? Regurgitate memories from our childhood?
After my mother’s death, while cleaning her dresser I came upon a letter my sister had written after she learned I was executrix of the “estate.” She suggested I would be so overwhelmed that I’d need help. It would be best, she wrote, to send copies of everything to her, so when the time came, she could be involved.
Over the years she had not visited our mother and her husband stateside, even though they offered funds. Over the years she had not helped care for them or deal with their advancing age. Over the years she created an image of me she hoped would prevail to her advantage.
Simply remembering that letter raises heat on my face as if I am still reading those words, still feeling her manipulation couched in the gentle put down, and her pseudo concern about my abilities to negotiate legal, familial, and emotional challenges. Mother must not have responded, and certainly my sister never broached the subject with me, although one would think that reasonable.
This indirectness is the crux of our problematic relationship, stemming in part from who controls Mom, who can wrest the power, who can wiggle deeper into her heart and her bank account. There is an old comedy routine, from the Smother’s Brothers, about who Mom loves best. It isn’t funny and I have no doubt it is me. Nor does my sister. She knows.
My sister insisted Mom never share news about her with me. Perhaps she was correct. Most likely news from Australia would only reinforce my perception of her as more than slightly pathological.
Mom explained if she wanted any relationship with her, she must obey the restriction, although how would my sister know? Unless I blabbed. Unlikely. I tell my mother my sister is a bully before I ask Mom why she accedes, yields to such strictures.
She says, “you know she drinks.” These few words convey much unspoken guilt and the ultimate rationale for placating her.
During my childhood Mom was sober, at least part of the time, but five years later, after the birth of my sister, I doubt Mom spent a day without hefty nips from a bottle of Gilby’s gin. She has admitted that in those years, she loved the bottle more than she loved us, especially my sister. This is only the tip of our dynamics. Our mother swung between us like a yo-yo, unfair to her and to us, but we were as stuck as she is. My sister took a step away, a large one. Maybe a cowardly one, but she did alter the pattern a tad and I suppose I should be glad for her, but I resent the burden that placed on me. I was here, she was not.
When Mom entered the nursing home, she demanded I not tell my sister where she was, and when we reconstructed her will because of a problem with witness signatures, my mother paused, the pen in the air. “It is a lot of money to leave to someone who doesn’t know how to take care of it.”
I say calmly, “this is the exact will you and Wally drew before. No changes. We just need witness signatures.” I do not offer more. She looks at me, at the papers, and huffs but she signs the will. Two members of the congregation from the church next door volunteered as witnesses and we registered a valid will.
On the first evening in Venice, I eat dinner at Harry’s Bar, famous for past celebrities and literati who hung around the joint. The room is tight, the waitstaff a bit surly, and the shrimp scampi should be called shrimp skimpy. I wonder why tourists are told this place is a must visit.
I realize that they come not for the present, but for what they perceive as a halcyon past, to create Harry’s as it used to be and to glory in those memories. And so, it must be this way with this visit. I will remember what was between us in our youth and not what we’ve become.
I make a mental note not to “know” certain details of my sister’s life that my mother shared, because she needed to talk to someone who knew that past, who might worry about her difficult child, and who would offer understanding.
I come up with several events I should not mention.
- Her month-long stay in the hospital for a severe bout of pneumonia that my mother does not think was pneumonia. Perhaps rehab.
- That she found two boyfriends dead in her living room, not at the same time, still…that screams against the odds.
- That she has been on the dole for years, and lives in sponsored housing.
- Her apartment had been broken into three times; her money, hidden in the pantry, stolen.
- That her boyfriend’s sister punched her in the mouth at his birthday party. She now has a full plate of bottom dentures.
My sister’s life seemed one crisis after another. Always Mom sent her a bit of cash. If I were to think of rat maze box experiments, I could say my sister was rewarded for being needy and broken. Or that she had trained my mother well.
Still, avoidance and judgement seem the wrong way to get through this week. A positive tone is the best chance of enjoying ourselves. I ride the vaporetto up and down the Grand Canal, watch gondola races, and sit in the park close to the dock near the hotel. Bright diamond light shimmers, and I appreciate the clear azure glow. I decide I can stay even if she doesn’t arrive. Birds flock among the shrubs, perch on the slender trees. Everyone feeds them or smiles at those who do. Then I have a small but important revelation. We could catch up by remembering times when we were in concert with each other. No outside forces: no parents, no friends, no boyfriends, nothing between us but DNA and ourselves. I close my eyes and smell the algae water, feel the sun on my back.
She and I are at the Jersey shore, she’s in her late teens and I’m in my early twenties, sharing Bain de Soleil, the best sunscreen gel we can afford. Shrieks from the gulls mix with the slop slop softer ebb and flow of low tide. We step over the spume to wander to the sand bar and bury our feet. We both notice a gull staggering, as if it has a broken wing. We walk closer and see the plastic ring from a six-pack laced through a webbed foot, caught under a wing.
I throw my wide brimmed hat on the bird. It screams but my sister holds it down.
Careful not to be pecked because the bird is flailing and frightened, we somehow release the wing and tug the plastic from the leg. It stumbles and we think we are too late. Water rushes over it and our toes, and then the sea gull opens its wings and flies low to the shore for about ten feet before veering off to deeper waters. We stand together, our bodies casting shadows on the foamy waves before we push deeper into the ocean. My hat is ruined by sand and water and the bird’s sharp beak, but we are laughing. We saved an innocent creature.
This is the memory I hold as she finally arrives, looking almost as bedraggled as that bird. She’d missed her flight because her carry-on bag and her purse had been stolen just before the boarding call. Authorities nabbed the man, saved her luggage but the flight departed without her. She stayed in the airport hotel and had not called because she did not think to ask the concierge for help for an international connection. I pick at that same thumbnail as she relates her tale.
I hug her and smell a stale body, tinged with alcohol. Her bones feel as frail as those of that bird we saved years ago. We go to the room, and I call my husband, assure him my sister is fine, I am fine, we are fine. I don’t admit that already I am exhausted.
He says, “she’ll never change; it is just a few days,’ and, as if he can see me, says, “so stop picking your thumb.”
My sister asks if he is concerned because she was late. I look her dead in the face. Late? That’s how she sees it? Late? “Nah., He wants us to have a good time and I should send him a postcard.”
We ride the vaporetto together heading to Peggy Guggenheim’s Museum of Modern Art, an odd choice in such a famously classical city. Overhead gulls swoop and scream, and when we depart at Academia station, I spot a lone gull perched on the mooring pole. “Look.”
She wrinkles her nose. “They are worse than pigeons, disgusting scavengers.”
I had burnished what I thought was a shared memory. Now it blew away like tissues in the wind. We share DNA but nothing else. Nothing will change between us after this week. I close my eyes, stop picking my thumb, let breezes ruffle my hair, and the feel the water’s spray tingle my face. A frission of relief seeps into the void.
Mary Pauer’s work can be read in the Delmarva Review, Southern Women’s Review, Best of Potato Soup Anthology, among others. Pauer is the recipient of four artist fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, as well as awards from The National Federation of Press Woman Communication Contest, and a nomination for a Pushcart.