Her room came to me in a dream last night. Just a door with a window straight across halfway down the hall in our pokey ranch. A room suitable for a penitent. One who had never committed a sin, and never would, except maybe to listen. There was barbarous cabinetry purpose built on two walls, the weird whirls of unsuitable fir plywood peeking out from the muddy Early American stain. A nightstand, nothing but a cube with a hatch, made from the same awful stuff, standing by the bed jammed up against the wall. Opposite was a closet with doors that slid back and forth if you stuck your finger in a little dish let into the wood. Inside the closet was a scuttle to get in the attic. We’d put a ladder up and I’d weasel up through the dresses made from tissue paper patterns bought at J.J. Newberry’s to get to the little hole to rescue the Christmas decorations every year until I got too big to fit, too.
Her wall had a bookshelf freighted with Nancy Drew mysteries and I don’t know what all. There was a little lacquered jewelry box from Japan, or maybe Korea, that her aunt the EVAC nurse gave her to hold all the jewelry she’d never own.
Her eye tooth and the one next to it was slightly misaligned. It was almost imperceptible, but it made her smile her own. They robbed her of even that with braces on her teeth. Her hair and eyes were the same color brown. She wore it ironed out straight with a part as straight as a ruler.
My mother took me to a dusty hall abandoned by odd fellows to sit on folding chairs along a wall with my legs swinging to watch her dance. She wore one of those glittering dancing bear costumes and tap shoes and a weird spangled dinner plate on her head with a strap to keep it on. When they all danced in unison they were anything but. They made a racket like a hundred typewriters bashing out a hundred different misspelled messages. But she could never possibly be more beautiful than that.
She was the only girl because a mother doesn’t count. My father had some special place in his heart where only she could enter. We wouldn’t bother knocking on that door, even if we knew where to find it. It was like the door to the only bathroom in a house when she was in it. Life was different for her.
She’d enlist her little brothers in her schemes. We sat like imbeciles while she reeled off the rules and laid out the board for Park and Shop, and we’d wander the board aimlessly because she wanted us to. My little brother cried when he got a parking ticket because he couldn’t make up his mind which make of car to buy, and was commanded to stop at two car dealers on the way home. He told her he didn’t know two kinds of cars and she said it was OK and he could go home anytime anyway. But I was a little older and even then I knew there were rules and you can’t always go home anytime.
Mom put Our Bodies Our Selves on her shelf to be her new bible and sent her to some frozen college to fill her head with anything they could conjure that wasn’t Nancy Drew. She spent her life wandering the country looking for some life that was never on offer no matter how many rocks she turned over. Eventually she died alone in a trailer in Arizona of nothing in particular. She can’t be my big sister anymore because I passed her on my calendar while hers stands still.
One never knows when it’s the last opportunity to play Park and Shop with your sister.