Family dynamics: Sisterly love – Part 2
In the fabric of family dynamics, nothing is more knotted and frayed than sisterly love.
Continuing from Part 1 (obviously)
My sister was the ‘It!’ girl. She spent all her money on the latest fashion, plastic bangles, big earrings, things that had too much or too little fabric. I know this pleased my parents. She was beautiful. She was sexy. She was cool. My parents were also beautiful, sexy, cool. They were charming, flirtatious. Mum in her beehive hairdo, big sunglasses, tight capris pants, curlicues of smoke from a cigarette held just so; Dad in his flares, wide-rimmed glasses, getting people drinks at their endless drunken dinner parties. They were the couple you turned over your shoulder to watch, who you wanted to be friends with, who you wanted to fuck when you picked keys out of a bowl. They loved it when people looked at my sister and said “she’s soooo beautiful!’
Whatever it was that made my parents and my sister cool, well, I’d been hiding behind the door when they handed it out. My sister would look me up and down and say “you are such a dag!” I never cared about fashion. It seemed to change all the time and I could never keep up, work out what was in or out. My sister didn’t follow trends, she set them. She would wear something and others would copy her. In the playground her group was nicknamed by the boys school “the glamour girls.” My group wasn’t worth naming. sisterly love
She would be down the lower grounds, which lay between the boys and girls schools, smoking something. She never did sport. I lodged a cogent argument that I was a conscientious objector to the violence demonstrated in my self-defence class – the only “sport” that I could safely do without injuring myself, without being picked last to be on the team. It was an intellectual school so no-one argued. My sister on the other hand just didn’t turn up. The teachers patrolled the lower grounds for truants and my sister ran away, falling on the asphalt and splitting her chin open. At the doctor’s office I held her chin together whilst he stitched it patiently together. She never did anything by halves. She was always spectacular. sisterly love
Jasmine was charming. She had spunk, attitude. She was funny. People were enthralled. I was enthralled. Everybody was spellbound. When I wanted to find her in a party, I would look for a group of men radiating around a centre, laughing. The centre was my sister. sisterly love
She was smart as well. She drew, she painted, she played the piano. She was brilliant at art, history, music and, of course, social studies. She knew how people worked, she understood, no she set, the social politics of the playground. I was chemistry, physics, extension math and French. The only overlap was English. We both loved to read and write.
I remember she made her twenty-first theme black tie. We decorated the wood-panelled room my parents had designed, with its vaulted twenty-foot ceilings, with thick candles. The wooden mantelpiece above the fire-place glimmered with a dozen tall columns of wax. My sister’s party was the twenty-first. It was full of all the popular beautiful people. It was a giant Coke commercial, saying “Coke is it!” Despite this, she had forgotten something crucial. A dress. It was so unlike her. I had a brand-new dress, slightly small for me, my “aspiration dress” that I was working my way into. It hung in the corner of my cupboard, a little black sequinned dress that I longed to wear. I offered it to her for the evening. She rocked it of course.
By the end of the evening everyone was drunk, the mantelpiece was on fire and her friends were throwing water on it. The precious dress was torn at the seam. She handed it to me the next morning, laughing as she said “at least you’ll be able to fit into it now.”
Things always came easily to her. I remember an impossibly beautiful boyfriend of hers sitting in the study doing her university assignment whilst she sat in the lounge room watching television in her pyjamas. I thought all beautiful people must have this power. family dynamics
By the time she was thirteen, we were all walking on eggshells. The constant refrain of my late teens and twenties was “don’t upset your sister.” No one wanted another screaming row, another door slammed, another weekend ruined. My father was always defending my sister’s outbursts, my mother always trying to reign her in. You couldn’t criticise her without her raging. My parents told me exactly what they thought. When I got ninety-five percent in a test, they asked me “where is the other five percent?” I never took it as criticism. Where was the other five percent? How had I got that wrong? family dynamics
We were close when we were young. I felt resentful of my new shadow when she was a toddler, and protective of her when we started school. I think it started to unravel when she started to wield her power over others. She was always popular, but at one point she had not just friends, she had a fan club.
I was never jealous. It was like putting my head underwater and seeing mermaids and mermen in Atlantis. It was fantastical, fantastic, but I couldn’t breathe. I never wanted to belong there. family dynamics
Still, we were sisters, and for a time I would go to the parties with her, force myself out of my comfort zone. We would dance to too loud music – ‘ “>familyepilepsy, so she can’t take ecstasy. Do you have any coke?” Coke is it! family dynamics
We have barely seen each other since my father’s and my son’s funeral, where she looked glamorous but bored, and not at all since this time last year. Too much has happened. You just can’t walk on eggshells forever. Some time, some how, something gets broken.
Still, today I remember the little girl holding my hand walking to school in her too-big uniform, looking up at me and asking “what’s lesbos?”
Read the letter to Keanu Reeves here.
Wishing you love and all good things x
Be a patron of the arts – oh that sounds fancy
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Wishing you love and all good things x
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