I don't see my sister very often, despite the fact that we only live a few miles apart. Our contact consists mainly of frenetic phone calls every few months and sporadic meetings at my apartment to exchange holiday and birthday gifts. Last night she came over to borrow money. Katie is 19, a student working two jobs, living on artificial sunlight and instant ramen. Her credit was temporarily destroyed due to a mixup of social security numbers: a single digit separates hers and that of Carlos Something-Or-Other of Connecticut. Carlos is in debt. My sister is not, but her recent attempts to set up utilities at her new apartment have met with frustration: while the credit situation is sorted out, she is forced to pay astronomically high deposits. She has never asked to borrow money before. I wrote her a check last night and told her to not worry about paying me back until she feels financially secure and comfortable.
Katie moved out of my parents' house last year, shortly before graduating from high school. I am not one given to either stereotypes or superstition, but Katie is both a redhead and a Taurus (the astrological sign, not the car). Once she reached late adolescence, she found it impossible to live with the restrictions placed upon her at home: 10 PM curfews, constant interrogation about where she'd been and what she was doing, never being allowed to just sit and rest. "Why are you just lying on the bed?" my stepmother would demand, "Go...do your nails or something. Do something you like."
My parents believe that if you are sitting still, you are just waiting for death. Even reading is a questionable activity -- if it isn't schoolwork, it's too sedentary to be useful.
I used to read while I brushed my teeth.
I was worried about Katie when she lived with my parents. She seemed surprised and frightened by her own teen angst. My parents seem to have forgotten the existential violence inherent in the adolescent mindset. They, too, were there once, but those memories are wallpapered over. Both of them were married too young to the wrong people. Both of them are volcanic personalities: dormant, quiet, anal-retentive, with a tendency to explode periodically. Normally analytical, rational to a fault, when challenged beyond capacity they go into the blind rage of dreams. They say things that do not make sense. They storm through halls and slam doors. Then they awaken with high blood pressure and a dust rag in hand, wondering at the trembling of their hands.
Last night I was struck by Katie's appearance. She looked like something out of a fashion magazine. Bronze-hued red hair, lush and nearly waist-length. She compulsively twirled a lock of it as she sat on my futon last night, chattering at twice the speed of sound. Brown velvet eyes, kitten-eyes, edged in some dark powder and topped with something luminous and pale silver. Lips softly glossed. She's even got a neatly-done navel piercing and a small tattoo of a hibiscus flower on her lower back.
All subtle, much more so than the heavy dark eyeliner that made me call her Cleopatra when she was sixteen. Her look is now carefully controlled so that she looks like an enhanced version of a real girl. Sort of a healthier version of one of the Olsen twins, with a dash of Britney Spears.
I focus on her appearance here because it made me feel strange and small and flawed in contrast. I've become comfortable with my appearance, but dear lord, my sister looks like a movie star.
She flounced around the apartment, peeking into the bedroom to see if it was bigger or smaller than her new one. She explored the bathroom, and came out waving Matt's bottle of Pert Plus Light Conditioning shampoo. "Whoever is using this...is killing their hair!" she admonished us. "Sodium Laureth Sulfate! It's, like, the second ingredient! In good shampoo, it's nearly the last!"
She works in a beauty shop. I've always known she would. Soon she might be a waitress, and I've always known she'd do that, too.
I perched on my computer chair as Katie finished her self-guided tour of the apartment and landed back on the futon. She was studying me as I was studying her: though we grew up together, and shared a room for fifteen years, we diverged after leaving home. Now, we are dissimilar animals -- both wrapped in the plumage of our respective subcultures and social traits. When we get together, we discuss surfaces: she said my green-and-blue hair was "weird", but then offered to get me discount hair dye from her work. I told her that her skirt would be a collar if it were any shorter, and realized I sounded frighteningly like my dad.
Matt clicked away at Black & White on his computer throughout most of Katie's visit last night, but he cut in a few times with a snort of laughter at our sibling banter, and let us know when we sounded like our parents.
I am Katie's senior by six years. We grew up in the same family, but in two different spacetime locales. She is within herself: that body of hers now taller than my own. I am within myself: shorter and bonier and less fine-featured. We both saw our mother deteriorate, disappear, and we both felt her die from across the sea. When we heard the news, Katie erupted into tears, whereas I sat down in the middle of the staircase, silent and blank.
My sister was my mother's last baby, the child conceived to dull the pain of my uncle's suicide. Or at least that's what I've always believed. Katie was only eleven when my mother fled this, her nightmare United States, for her homeland of England. Katie felt the loss of a parent, whereas I felt a sighing presence ebb within me, and was astonished by the quiet left behind.
What kind of a child cannot love her mother?
Katie is too young to remember much of the chaos in our early family life. She didn't develop the clinical vocabulary I'd picked up by the age of nine: clinical depression, psychotic break, haloperidol, serotonin. Being the youngest, Katie was the taken-care-of one. She didn't feel the need to examine the blueprints of the monster, as I did. My brother and I shielded her from things.
This is all old territory for me. I haven't discussed it with Katie, not for a very long time. She has scars like mine, but perhaps not nearly as deep, and in different areas. She gleefully described drinking close to a whole bottle of vodka in one evening. She doesn't have the visceral aversion to excess partying that I developed somewhere along the line.
Katie and I are existentially minded. We used to lie in our bunk beds talking about how scared we were of the idea of nonexistence. Do normal sisters do this? We are also both terrified of getting older, and we are both frugal to the point of seeming cheap.
Katie doesn't believe in God. Neither do I, but we didn't discuss religion very much at home. Both of us are reluctant, cautious, unintentional atheists -- we did not choose not to believe, we just found that we didn't. I suspect that we both experienced a subconscious sense of loss of dependable authority at a young age. Katie may not have understood the nuts and bolts of the situation, but she did know that our mother could not be trusted to keep us safe. To a small child, parents are gods, in the functional sense. For better or for worse, Katie and I feel fundamentally alone in the universe.
Katie left at 8:30 last night, for a late meeting at work. I found myself wishing we'd had more time to chat. I will invite her over for no reason next time. She will gesticulate wildly and spout the aesthetic merits of coupes over hatchbacks. She will offer me shampoo samples, and I will make Star Trek references. And we will make banana splits and talk about death. | 
