Sisters: And Then There Were Two

Today my sister Leslie is having an operation and I will be sitting in the waiting room contemplating my navel while the surgeons fix what has been broken for a long time.

We were not a close family, that band of five that moved fifteen times to ten states by the time I was sixteen. Actually, much of the time, we didn’t even like each other. Our fights were big, lacking only in physicality. We wouldn’t speak for years sometimes, one or another of us. Then, five short years ago, we started to diminish. First it was my mom, who died of lung cancer, and went out with more dignity and humor and calm than I would have mustered. I liked her a lot in the end. Then it was my dad, of a disease we didn’t know he even had until we read it on his death certificate. And then, less than a year ago, my older sister left — ostensibly by cancer, but really, she was an alcoholic who everyone pretended wasn’t. The carnage she left behind was also swept under the rug of her power in the family. I’m told there is always one in a family who has that power to affect all others. It was her. The secrets of our family — there were so many — are not worth keeping anymore because they were all due to very human flaws and so why bother?

After our older sister died last year, I sent my sister Leslie an email that read “#AndThenThereWereTwo.”

It woke me with a start.

It took away all the anger of deeds done wrong both by me and to me. It put all of our goodness — our happiness — into the two of us, and somehow, I guess because diminished inventory means you treat what is left with much more care, all the things that used to drive me crazy, no longer do.

It’s like all the good from the original five became part of the two of us. And, all the bad things went somewhere else.

We started having brunch on Sundays and reminiscing about things. She is more kind than I when it comes to the deeds gone wrong, but I’m more honest about not pushing them under the rug and trying to see them for what they were so they no longer have power over us. Our combination could rule a nation. OK, that’s an exaggeration but you get the point.

I told her that when we moved to a house with enough bedrooms for us to no longer share, she was scared and I moved back into a…