About My Sisters (12 page)

When she's in the right mood, though, my mother will sometimes claim that she had Déja for me. It was a way to keep me out of trouble, she says, meaning that, if there was a baby available to satisfy my burgeoning maternal instincts, I wouldn't feel compelled to rush out and have one of my own. “You were at
that
age,” she says. “Who knows what you could have done?”

Naturally, she never discussed any such thing at the time. Nor did Cindy McGill's mother, who was due the same week as mine. Although Cindy and I had been in several classes together at school, we'd had nothing in common until both of our mothers became pregnant at the same time. The uniqueness of this situation drew us together and we formed a tentative friendship. Cindy had only one brother who was four years younger than she was. Things had been pretty quiet in her house for some time. Unlike mine, Cindy's new sibling was not planned. And unlike mine, Cindy's mother continued working at her job in the local department store where, in those pre-mall days, everybody had to shop at some point. Cindy's mother worked in the housewares section and my mother made a point of visiting her there when she was on shift to say hello and compare notes. Although they were around the same age, Cindy's mother
seemed worn, tired, and older than mine. I got the sense that Cindy's mother wasn't exactly overjoyed about her new baby. Cindy merely seemed nonplused by the whole thing and, in this, we were somewhat united. It was a little strange to be anticipating new babies from our mothers at our age and neither of us could quite figure out how these new people would affect the structure of our families or, more importantly, how they would affect
us
. Speculating on whether we'd be changing diapers or wakened in the middle of the night gave us enough conversational fodder for many study halls.

“What do you want?” I asked Cindy. “A boy or a girl?”

“My mom doesn't care,” Cindy said, shrugging. “She just wants it to be healthy.”

“Of course, healthy,” I said. “But we all want a boy. It's definitely a boy.”

“I guess a girl would be nice,” Cindy said. “But it doesn't really matter.”

She spoke like a girl who had no sisters.

 

The weather report predicted a blizzard on the day Déja was born. The air smelled like snow and the sky was the color of gunmetal. We went to school anyway. Up in the mountains it was always business as usual until there were several inches of white on the ground. It was lunchtime and I was working in the vice principal's office, filing papers and trying to catch the eye of a senior boy on whom I'd developed an annoying crush, when my father came to get me. I looked up and he was just standing there, calmly waiting for me to notice him.

“Is it time?” I asked him, suddenly more excited than I'd been for months.

“It's time,” he said. “Let's go.”

My new sister arrived less than six hours later. The storm
never showed up. My father called as I was washing the dinner dishes. I was almost disappointed, having prepared myself for a long night of waiting, wondering, and drama.

“It's another girl,” he said.

“Really?” I asked.

What I'd told Cindy was true. Before she was born, we were all convinced that the new baby was a boy. It seemed like a logical assumption at the time that we'd end up with three girls and two boys. My parents were so sure, in fact, that they didn't even bother debating girls' names and had come up with Dustin as the only choice.

“Yes, another little girl,” my father says. “She's perfect. Ten pretty fingers and ten toes.”

“How much does she weigh?” I asked.

“Seven, eleven,” my father said. “It's a lucky number.”

“What's her name?”

“Well, we're going to have to think about that,” he said.

That decision came the next night. My father sat with me at the kitchen table, coffee in hand, debating the choices. Obviously Dustin was out, but he was still working with the letter D.

“I was thinking about Desiree,” he said. “I really like the sound of it. What do you think?”

“Very pretty,” I said.

“But it means ‘desire,'” he said. “I don't like that. We don't want her to have to start her life with desire. Too heavy.”

“Hmm,” I said. “That's true.”

He went over a few more, sounding out Daisy, Della, Dahlia, and Delilah. Together, we rejected all of them.

“Desiree sounds so nice,” I said. “Maybe we should go back to Desiree. Or, what about Dusty?”

“Dusty…” my father said. “Definitely not. She's definitely not Dusty.” He ruminated a little longer and then, on the back of an envelope, wrote Desiree next to a few of the rejected
names. “Looks nice on paper,” he said. “But what about this?” On the bottom of the list he wrote “Deja.”

“Like déj`a vu?” I asked him. “But then you have to put an accent on the
e
and the
a.
” I added the appropriate diacritical marks and we looked at the result.

“I like it,” my father said.

“But it means ‘already,'” I squeaked, using my limited knowledge of French.

“Well, we
already
have three girls,” my father said. “But still…” He erased the accent on the
a
. “There,” he said. “That's it.”

“Yes, that's it,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Let's call Mommy and see if she likes it. She'll have the last word.”

My mother agreed with us. Already or not.

When Déja came home, nothing changed, but everything was different. Almost immediately, as if there had been some sort of tacit agreement between the two of us, my mother handed her over to me. This wasn't out of a desire on my mother's part to be less involved, because she was very much attached to Déja, as she was to all her children. But this time it was as if I had become a satellite and Déja was the shared link between the mother ship and me. There was never any discussion between the two of us as to how to care for her, what her sleeping and eating schedule was, or how to soothe her. My mother just assumed that I knew all these things and she was right.

Every day, when I came home from the school, the first thing I did was bundle Déja up and take her into the unused family room where we kept the stereo and rock her to sleep under the speakers. Because she squirmed if I sat down, I always stood with her in my arms, watching her eyelashes flutter as we moved back and forth. I recorded songs off the radio for this express purpose. We'd start with James Taylor and Stevie Wonder, and move into Billy Joel and through Boz Scaggs. She was almost always asleep
by the time we got to “New York State of Mind,” but she was so warm and sweet, I didn't want to put her down. I'd hold her like that for hours sometimes, afraid to disturb her peace, afraid to disturb mine.

On the weekends, I had her all the time. I walked around the house with her attached to my hip. I bathed her, changed her, and fed her. She lay on my bed when I did my homework. She sat in her high chair next to me when I did the dishes. When there was a family outing in the offing, I always opted to stay at home with her because it was too cold for her to go outside for long. It was during these times, when we were alone together, that I started talking to her. I spun out my thoughts for her in a way I couldn't tell anyone else. I stopped writing suicide fantasies in my journal or anywhere else. In Déja, a captive but happy audience, I'd found a place where I could share my secrets. It didn't matter that she didn't comprehend what I was saying (although I believed that somewhere in her preverbal innocence, she had a fundamental understanding), because I didn't need answers from her. Her small need for me, her contentment in being with me, was all the response I needed.

Cindy's mother delivered a boy three weeks after Déja was born. For a couple of months, we continued to trade baby news when we saw each other at school. But it was soon clear to me (and probably to Cindy, too) that she didn't have the same kind of relationship with her new brother that I had with Déja. “I guess he's kind of cute,” she said, “but he cries all the time and I don't know what to do with him when he's screaming. My mom takes care of that.” Our conversations became briefer as the weeks went on and soon they were limited to:

“Hi, Cindy. How's your little brother?”

“He's good. How's your little sister?”

“She's great.”

Finally, as if by mutual agreement, there wasn't even that
much. We passed each other in the halls and smiled at each other, slightly puzzled, as if we weren't sure why we even knew each other in the first place. Unlike Cindy, or even my other siblings, Déja and I had developed a bond, the parameters of which fell somewhere short of mother but beyond that of sister. And in my relationship with her, I found some sense of the identity I'd been searching for. Maya claims that all three of our younger siblings spoke her name as one of their first words (after “mama,” “dada,” and, in Lavander's case, “no”), but I know that Déja was different. She was just a little blond thing when she first looked at me, raised her arms, and said, “Deb-deb. Up.” For the first two years of her life, I was always the first one Déja looked to when she wanted to be picked up and carried. And every time I lifted her, she brought me up with her.

 

I watch Déja stride across the stage now, all glitter and mascara, a cigarette smoking between her fingers. My family is absolutely correct in their assessment of her performance. She's very good in this role, beautiful and funny, with an adopted maturity that belies her actual age. Despite the humor in the script, though, my eyes are blurry with tears. It's always this way with Déja, and I suspect that it always will be, no matter how many years are stretched between that New York winter and now. After a while, I'll be able to pull myself out of this sentimental slide and focus my attention on Déja's art and may even be able to tease my notion of her away from the role she's playing. But for this moment, the moment when I first see her spotlighted up there, all I can think about is what I selfishly consider her first role, that of
my
baby sister.

In a sense, my mother is right. Having Déja did keep me out of trouble, but it's not the kind of trouble she had in mind. Déja didn't save me from becoming a wayward daughter or teen
mother, she saved me from myself. I like to think I gave her something back that was worth as much, but I doubt it. She was not quite three years old when I started college and left home to live on campus. My school was only a half hour away and my parents didn't want me to move out, but I went anyway. At that point, I welcomed the separation from everyone in my family except Déja. I felt irrationally guilty about leaving her behind and wasn't sure what we'd be to each other when and if I came back to the fold. My parents could sense what I was feeling. When I moved in with my boyfriend after my first year of school instead of back with my family, my parents were both furious and distraught. We barely spoke to each other for almost a year afterward. Maintaining this fraught silence didn't stop them from putting Déja on the phone, however.

“I miss you, Deb-deb,” she said. “When are you going to see me? When are you coming home?”

I burst into tears after every one of these conversations. And every time he witnessed it, my boyfriend felt compelled to comment.

“Why do you let them manipulate you like that?” he said.

“It's not them,” I told him. “It's Déja.”

“What about Déja?” he said testily. “She's just a little girl and not perfect either, you know.”

“Yes, she is,” I said. “You don't know…you don't understand.”

I never tried to explain it to him—never attempted to make clear how much “just a little girl” (which is how my father often referred to me the year before Déja was born) could mean or how much heart she could possess.

I never tried to explain this to Déja either, I think as I watch her steal another scene. I wonder how much of those early years is buried in her. I wonder not what she remembers but how much she knows. In the last year, I have started talking to her the way I did when she was an infant, which is to say that, once
again, I am sharing secrets with her that nobody else knows. And now she is answering.

The play gets wackier and more farcical as it goes along and I'm soon laughing as loudly as anyone else in the audience. Déja's character gets progressively more sexual and provocative and I'm proud of her for being able to pull it off so well. Before the cast takes its final bow, I've managed to get in a good laugh
and
a quick weep. Can't really ask for more than that.

The audience files out and I'm left sitting in the empty theater for several minutes while I wait for Déja to emerge from backstage. I watch as other cast members come out, chat with each other, inspect the night's ticket take, and drift backstage again. I've almost given up, thinking that maybe Déja doesn't know I'm here, maybe she thinks I left, maybe she left through some back door I can't see, when she comes bursting out. The beehive wig is off, as are the false eyelashes, but her lips are still a particularly hot shade of scarlet and her eyelids a particularly electric shade of blue.

“Where's my sister?” I hear her calling and then, when she sees me, “Debsie!” (a mutation of Deb-deb which seems to have stuck over the last twenty years or so). “What did you think?” she says as she hugs me tight. “How was it? Did you think it was funny? It was funny, wasn't it? Did you think it was good?”

“You were great,” I answer. “It was very funny. I really enjoyed it.”

“Really?” she says.

“Of course, really,” I say.

“Because, you know, I was really nervous that you were coming tonight.”