About My Sisters (29 page)

“Where do you want to go next?” Déja says, interrupting my thoughts and making me realize that, for the last few seconds, I have been able to drive and think about something other than how afraid I am at the same time.

“Let's go home,” I tell her. “I think that's enough for today.”

“Okay,” she says. “You've done really well. Honestly, I thought
you were going to be all over the place, really sketchy, but you aren't. You really
can
drive. Let's go again on Friday.”

 

On Friday, I'm marginally more comfortable as I drive us down to the market to buy some tea. I park in front of the store and we get out.

“Look at that!” Déja exclaims. “That's a perfect parking job. I wish I could take a picture of that.”

“I love parking,” I tell her.

“Why?”

“Because it means I get to stop moving.”

“You've got to get over this anxiety,” she says as we take the same aimless drive we took a couple of days ago, “because you really can drive.”

“Slowly,” I tell her. “There are many years of conditioning here I've got to get over.”

“Well, what is it?” she wants to know. “Accidents you had?”

I tell her about all the times I tried to get beyond my fear and how those attempts ended up in failure. She knows some of these stories, but has never heard them all in detail before. Then I tell her about that day we hurtled down the hill and I did nothing to stop it.

“Oh, but you were so little,” she says. “How could you have known? It wasn't your fault. What were you, like, eight years old?”

“Eleven,” I tell her. “Really old enough to know. I just froze and did nothing. And that's what I feel like every time I drive now.”

“Well, that's terrible,” she says. “But it was such a long time ago and you're really not responsible.”

“I know that intellectually,” I tell her, “but that doesn't mean
it hasn't lodged itself in my subconscious like a worm. Anyway, that's why you're the only person I can do this with. You weren't in that car. I didn't nearly kill
you
.”

“You're not going to drive with Lavander?” she asks.

“I asked her,” I say, “but I don't think so. She's really busy and anyway, I don't think I'll ever be able to drive with Lavander. Driving is so natural to her, it's like an autonomic nervous-system function. I don't think she can understand how anyone else wouldn't be able to drive like that too. I mean, for her, this is incredibly lame. She doesn't know why I can't just drive.”

“That's true,” Déja says. “Lavander's been driving since she was, like, two years old or something. I drove with her a little when I was first learning and she laughed at me.”

“Yes, see, that really wouldn't work for me right now,” I say.

“What about Maya?” Déja asks.

“I don't know,” I say. “She's also got ideas about who I am and what I should do. She's kind of gotten used to me this way, you know? How am I doing with the center line, by the way, Déja? I always feel like I'm too close to oncoming traffic.”

“You're fine,” she says. “Try loosening your grip on the wheel a little. And how does Blaze feel about your driving?”

I laugh. “It makes him uncomfortable because it's so far out of his range of reality. But I think he'll probably get used to it pretty quickly. He wants to drive himself. It's funny, he's the one person I can't imagine ever driving
me
.”

“Who's going to teach Blaze to drive?” Déja wonders out loud.

“I don't know,” I say. “Definitely not me. Daddy would be the best person, although he probably won't want the job. Blaze loves Daddy's style of teaching—eats it up. It's the same style that terrified me as a kid. Go figure.”

“It's true,” Déja says. “Daddy's not easy.” She covers the rearview mirror with her hand. “Quick, what's behind you?”

“Déja, please!” Then I answer her. “A FedEx truck.”

Déja removes her hand and looks at the mirror. “Hey, pretty good,” she says. “It works! Who knew?”

Déja rolls down her window and puts her arm out, hand up on the roof.

“Why are you hanging on to the roof, Déja? What am I doing wrong?”

“Nothing. Relax. I always sit like this, I'm not hanging on to anything. I'm totally comfortable.”

I look over at her and realize that, yes, unbelievably, she is.

“Deb, you have no idea how your world is going to change once you start driving,” she says. “You're just going to be so…
free
. Do you know that? Have you thought about it?”

“I can't get past this right now,” I tell her, taking one hand off the wheel long enough to gesture at the road in front of me. I don't mention that I'm still a little queasy over forty miles per hour and I feel as if the measure of comfort I do have is borrowed.

“I can't wait for you to get there,” she says. “You're not going to know how you even managed before.”

“I'll take your word for it,” I tell her.

 

By the time Déja and I get into her car again two days later, word of the miracle has spread. Maya has decided that she'd like to take me out driving, too. She's got it all planned out how I'll learn to shift on her Echo, which is surprising because she's very protective of that car. I tell her no, I'm not ready to add shifting to my repertoire. I haven't even taken on the freeway yet, thank you very much. “Well, whatever,” Maya says, “but shifting is easy. You'll see.”

After putting me off for weeks, Lavander calls and wants to know when I want to go driving with her and why haven't I
called her to ask. I tell her not to worry, that I know how busy she is and that Déja's got the time. “We can still go if you want,” Lavander says. “Okay, maybe when you have time,” I tell her, knowing that this happens about as often as a hailstorm in summer. I know, perhaps better than she does, that she does not want to take me driving anytime in the near future.

I hear from my mother as well and it is her take that pleases me the most. “Déja's so excited about this,” she says. “She's really proud of herself.”

“As she should be,” I say. I've felt a little selfish asking so much from Déja in this respect, I tell my mother. She's giving me so much more than the use of her car and her time. I am happy to know that she is getting something out of this too, that I am able to give her something in return.

For a while, I am lulled into believing that I
will
become a driver and that it is going to be as easy as Déja predicted. On our third time out, Déja takes me to pump gas. On the fourth drive, I manage to get the car over fifty miles an hour for at least ten minutes. It's all going swimmingly, in fact, until our fifth outing when we finally hit the snag I've been waiting for.

We've pumped gas for the second time and I'm exiting the gas station, turning onto a busy stretch of road.

“You need to change lanes,” Déja instructs, “or we're going to end up on the freeway.”

“Okay,” I tell her.

“Okay, so do it,” she says sharply. “Change lanes.”

I steer casually to the left and Déja yells, “NO! There's a car—oh, shit!” A horn shrieks behind me and my hands go into a death grip on the wheel. My first instinct is to slam on the brakes, but I catch myself and manage to avoid paralysis. Déja is shouting—actually
shouting
—at me.

“NO GOOD, DEBRA! You have to move faster. You can't hesitate—there was a car coming up behind you.”

“You told me to change lanes,” I say.

“Yes, but
you've
got to look and then
move fast
.”

I can't respond to this until I maneuver the two of us onto a quiet, single-lane road. I'm sweating and jangled and any ease I felt at the start of this drive has evaporated. I tell her, “I don't think I can do this. It's not going to work.”

“What? You want to give up? Is it because I yelled? I'm sorry, I just got nervous.”

“It's not the yelling,” I tell her. “Although you've never yelled at me before. Like this, anyway. It's just that I don't think I have the instincts for this. I can't do it.”

“This is just one little thing,” she says. “You can't give up so easily.”

“It's not little,” I tell her. “I'm going to get us killed.”

Déja sighs. “Do you want to go home?” she questions. Yes, I think, I'd like to go home and forget about driving forever, but I don't tell her this because I don't want to let her down. I don't want
her
to feel as if she's failed. These two desires battle it out in my brain where I can feel the beginnings of a major tension headache.

“Let's just stop for a minute,” I tell her, “and then we can talk about the next move.”

We've reached the ocean's edge and so I pull over into a beachfront parking spot, turn off the car, and roll down the windows. Déja sighs again and it blends with the sound of the waves breaking in front of us.

“I need a cigarette,” I tell her.

“What?”

“Come on, I know you've got one in here somewhere.”

“Well, Danny usually leaves one….”

“Yes, Danny smokes. I know.” I look at her, leaving the rest unsaid. Déja, always our family's loudest voice against all vices, also smokes sometimes, and now she knows that I know.

“Do you think it will make you feel better?” she asks, but she's not waiting for my answer, she's already reaching for the secret stash and she's got a book of matches in her pocket.

I light the cigarette she hands me and blow smoke out the window. Then I go one step further and give it back to her. “Want some?” I ask her, and she takes it.

“I can't believe I'm doing this,” she says, turning away from me so that I won't see her inhale.

“Why? Because you don't smoke?” I laugh. “Or because I don't?”

“Well,
you know
…” she begins.

“It doesn't matter, Déja. Do we really need to lecture each other?”

Déja exhales in response and I feel a subtle but important shift between the two of us. I made a bad lane change, she yelled at me, and now we're sharing a cigarette. On the surface these seem like little things, but on a deeper level, we've broken down a barrier I'd always believed was immovable. In this moment, the fifteen years between us have disappeared and we've transcended our first/last positions in the birth order.

I think that as the eldest and youngest, Déja and I have faced the greatest challenge in breaking out of our established patterns of behavior. Among my sisters, it seems to me, Déja and I have always felt more of a need to set an example for each other. We need, in other words, to be
good
when we are around each other. The result is that we shield each other and often hide our vulnerabilities and weaknesses, the aspects of ourselves that aren't up to the standard we've set.

Now, as we sit in the car sharing a forbidden cigarette, those shields are down. There is nothing hidden and no need to hide. Within the hurricane of my insecurity (of which driving is only the most prominent aspect), this is an eye of total comfort.

“Feel better?” Déja asks me.

“Much.”

“Well, if I'd known that's all it would take, I would have offered you one sooner.”

“Yes, but of course one wouldn't want to make a
habit
of it,” I tell her.

“Funny,” she says. “So what do you want to do now? Shall we go home?”

I think about it for a second and then I tell her, “No, let's keep going. Might as well. If you're okay.”

“Me? I'm fine, really. It's you…”

“I'm all right,” I tell her. “It's just hard, you know? This is hard for me.”

“I shouldn't have yelled at you.” She giggles. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. I'm glad you yelled at me. You
have
to.”

“But, really,” she says as I start the car, “I want you to know that I
am
comfortable with you driving. Do you believe me? You
are
a driver, you just don't realize it yet.”

“I know,” I tell her. And I do. I believe her.

christmas

Maya stands in our kitchen surrounded by sugar and vanilla.

“God, I'm good,” she sighs as she pulls the last batch of cinnamon rolls from the oven. “Look at these. They're perfect, even with this stupid, half-assed oven of ours.”

I should mention that our oven has been broken for exactly a year. Only the small top half of this ancient double oven unit is functional. In our house, I am always the one who organizes the repairs, appliance replacements, and carpet cleanings. If it were left up to Maya, queen of procrastination, nothing would get done. When the oven finally gave up the ghost, however, I made a stand. “I don't want to do this one,” I told Maya. “You deal with the oven.” The result is that we have spent the last twelve months baking everything in an area only marginally bigger
than a toaster oven. Somehow, it hasn't stopped Maya from making any of her specialties. In an amazing show of versatility, she has managed to work around the problem without actually solving it. Her cinnamon rolls, the hands-down family favorite, are a perfect example. She packs the last of them into a large plastic container now, dropping plump sticky raisins onto the linoleum. I'm going to have to mop later.

“Okay,” she says. “I just have to take a shower and then we can go.”

“Better hurry,” I tell her, “or we're not going to make it there by ten.”

“Well, nobody else is ever on time anyway,” she says.

I wait until I hear the water running to sneak a warm cinnamon roll and then I turn my attention to the giant heap of gifts sitting near the fireplace. There are dozens of shiny wrapped boxes here, and these are just from me and Maya. I'm going to need at least three large shopping bags to pack all of these up and transport them. I can't imagine what the pile is going to look like when all of us add our individual stacks together under the tree—and there
is
a Christmas tree this year. It's at Déja's apartment and that is where we are all headed for an extended brunch and gift exchange.

What to do for Christmas this year was the source of much family discussion and it started way back at the beginning of November. That was when Maya first informed me that “We've all been talking about it and we've decided to have gifts this year.”

“What?” I said. “Who's been talking? Who decided? I suppose I don't get a say in this at all, right?”

“You know, if you don't want to participate, you don't have to,” she said. “You don't have to get anything for anybody and nobody will get anything for you.”

“Oh sure, like that's going to work,” I said. “I'll be Scrooge, sit
ting off in the corner. Sounds great. Don't make it sound like I have a choice about this, okay?”

“We knew you were going to object,” Maya said, which irritated me even more. “And, just so you know, there's a price limit. Twenty-five dollars per gift.”

“Thank you. I'm so glad that this has all been decided for me,” I told her.

I felt as if my annoyance, which had its roots in the ghosts of family Christmases past, was well justified. Both my parents are Jewish. My mother was brought up in a religiously observant household. My father's upbringing was culturally observant as opposed to religious. Neither one of their families would have ever considered celebrating Christmas. My parents, however, had rejected organized religion altogether by the time I was born. I have been in a synagogue exactly once and that was for my brother's
Miami Vice
–style bar mitzvah, which my parents put together more for the sake of their families (most of whom were still alive then) than anything else.

When I was about eleven or twelve and we were living in the Catskills, my parents started “doing” Christmas. These were specifically nondenominational events. We had lights, a tree, and gifts to go under it. We did not have eggnog, Santa Clauses, or nativity scenes. I don't know how or why this started, but it was extremely popular with all of us. I loved decorating the tree and arranging the presents beneath it. I loved the smell of pine, coffee, and wrapping paper on Christmas morning. And December 25 was the only day of the entire year that I loved snow. When we went back to school after the holidays, we were able, like everybody else, to exchange stories about what we wanted and what we got for Christmas.

As the years rolled on, though, the trees began to get progressively smaller and menorahs started making an appearance as part of the decoration. By the time we all moved to California
when Blaze was a year old, we had what my parents described as a Hanukkah bush. Despite the shifting icons, however, the size and number of gifts never diminished. As my brother and sisters got older and started working, Christmas became a time of frantic shopping and overspending. We started buying multiple gifts for each other. The number of presents started multiplying exponentially, as did the collective debt. It took hours to unwrap everything and there was invariably a skirmish or two when this one felt that one hadn't put as much thought into the gift that she bought for the other one. It finally got so out of control that we started drawing names from a hat so that each person would only be responsible for one gift. This didn't last too long. People cheated, buying side gifts on the sly and trading names. There was a big disparity between the amounts spent on gifts depending on who was flush and who wasn't. Christmas wasn't merry, it was stressful.

Finally, about five years ago, we were all exhausted and threw in the towel on the gift exchange. Christmas, we decided, should be more like Thanksgiving. In other words, a day of family and food. The Christmas brunch was born and, like most family events, was held at my house. As a bonus, we added going to the movies and whatever Chinese restaurant was open for dinner. There hasn't been a complete ban on gifts since then, however. Blaze always gets something from everyone and there are girlfriends and boyfriends passing through who give and receive gifts as well. But there has been an absence of that frenzied shopping mania for the last few years and I can't say that I miss it. This year, my reluctance to dive back into all of that has earned me the title of Scrooge.

I discovered that Déja and Maya (betrayer!) were the main architects of this year's switchback. Maya claimed that she saw “little things for people” all the time that she wanted to buy and she thought it would be nice to have a gift exchange again. Déja
was the one who wanted the trimmings. “That's right,” she said, “I'm getting a
big
tree. We've never had a tree with all the lights and everything.”

“Oh no,” I told her, “we used to have a tree every year, but you missed that. Born too late.” Danny will be here for Christmas this year, instead of with his family in New York, and this is another reason why Déja wants to have a big event. She is trying her best to alleviate his homesickness as much as possible. The strain between his desire to stay and wish to be near his family is growing and Déja doesn't have a solution at the ready.

So, for the last few weeks, we've all joined the ranks of hapless holiday shoppers out there, listening to endless loops of “Jingle Bells” in stores while the bright California sun renders the very notion of snow impossible. I started my shopping with Maya but quickly gave that up after she kept saying, “No, she doesn't want that. No, he wouldn't like that. No, what she really needs is…”

“We need to do this separately,” I told her.

“Fine,” she said. “Since you don't want my help.”

Blaze and I argued for at least two weeks about what gifts he should give. His part of the argument involved telling me that I should give him money to buy the (expensive) items he had picked out for each family member. I told him that nobody expected him to buy gifts since he didn't have a job and didn't earn any money. He should make something, I said. We went back and forth on this for a long time until he finally conceded to my mother's idea, which was that he make a mixed CD with a song picked out for each person. I helped him with this and we made a game out of it. “Let's see if everybody can guess which song is theirs,” I told him. His pile of CDs sits wrapped and ready on the fireplace now, a nice addition to the rest.

I got into it briefly with Lavander over the gift issue as well. (Actually, every member of my family has had a crack at me over my initial resistance to the Currier & Ives Christmas that every
one seems to have in mind. Even my brother weighed in with this statement: “I've got a title for your next book, Deb,
The Christmas I Never Had.
What do you think?” I told him, “I think I prefer
The Birthday I Never Had.
Smart-ass.”). Lavander requested that everyone submit to her a list of gifts that they'd like. In turn, she had designated items that she wanted each person to buy for her.

“No,” I told her. “I'm not doing that. What's the point of getting gifts at all, then? Might as well just give you cash.”

“You are so difficult,” she said.

“I am not difficult. A list defeats the whole spirit of the thing.”

“No, it doesn't,” she argued. “I don't want people to get me things I don't want or need. This way, you know what to get.”

“So, basically you're saying that you don't trust your family to give you things that you'll like?”

“No, that is
not
what I'm saying! Listen, don't you want me to get you something you want?”

“I'll like whatever you get me,” I told her, “because it will have come from
you
.”

“Well, fine, we'll just see,” she said.

It turned out that Lavander's gift was the first one I bought. I got her four aromatherapy candles and a set of wishing stones in a small leather bag. When I saw them, the stones reminded me of the tiny worry dolls that Lavander gave me for my birthday a few years ago. There were three of them in a soft cloth box. “I only got you three,” Lavander said then, “because you're not allowed to have more than three major worries at a time.”

Wishes and worries. Between us, Lavander and I have so many.

I think about this as I put the last of the gifts in bags for transport. Maya emerges from her room, ready to go, and gathers the baked goods from the kitchen.

“You've been eating the cinnamon rolls, haven't you?” she says.

“Let's just go,” I tell her, and summon Blaze to come help me load up the car.

 

There is a wreath on Déja's door and a sea of gifts on her living room floor that extends several feet past the Christmas tree.

“Wow,” is all I can think to say as we walk in and survey the scene. My parents have already taken their places at the table and are waiting for breakfast. Déja hustles frantically between the tree and the kitchen, arranging gifts and pouring coffee. She seems a little wound up, not her usual state of being. Behind Bo's closed door, we can hear the frantic crunch and taping of last-minute wrapping. Lavander comes out of his room holding ruined ribbon and tissue.

“He's beyond help at this point,” she says. She's come by herself today. Tony is with his family in northern California. I remember now that he spent last Christmas with us and that she's been seeing him for a year. Seems both longer and shorter than that, I think.

Blaze wants to dive bodily into the gift pile but my father stops him. “Food first,” he says. “Then presents.”

I suggest that we listen to Blaze's CD while we eat brunch and see if we can identify whom each song belongs to. There is a total of sixteen songs, I tell them, two for each person, and there is no particular order. This gives Blaze something to do while he waits for the ceremonies to begin and provokes much commentary. “Yes!” my mother says as the initial strains of “The Girl from Ipanema” fill the air. “This one's mine.”

“I can't wait to see what he picked for me,” Lavander says.

Bo emerges from his room and places what is clearly a bowl, albeit hastily wrapped, on the pile. “Mystery gift!” he exclaims, and, with that, the party is under way.

“So, Debra,” my father says, as he selects a cinnamon roll
from the rapidly diminishing stack, “I read somewhere that the next
Harry Potter
book is going to be something like eight hundred pages long.”

I take a sip of coffee to fortify myself. I know what's coming next. “Yes?” I say.

“I'm just saying, that's a lot of pages,” he says. “And she just keeps writing them.”

“And?”

“Can't you come up with something like that?”

“Like
Harry Potter
? Books that sell in the gazillions of copies, you mean? I'll just whip some of those up. No problem.”

“I mean, there has to be a formula,” my father says.

“Dad, you can't compare me to J. K. Rowling.”

“Why not? We're talking about books, right?”

I'm getting ready to embark on what I know will be a useless argument, but Déja interrupts me, throwing up her arms and exclaiming, “Yes, this is
my
song! Woohoo!” as Stevie Wonder starts singing “You and I.” Blaze goes rushing over to Déja to give her a hug.

“How are the cinnamon rolls, Dad?” Maya asks.

“So good,” he says, distracted, thankfully, from the topic of best-sellerdom. “I'm telling you, Maya, if you could package these…”

I'm reminded of something my father told my mother recently (which my mother then repeated to me). He said that of all his daughters, it was the most surprising that Maya wasn't married. He just couldn't understand how she hadn't been snatched up. Sure, all his daughters were beautiful and talented and intelligent, but Maya could
cook
. She could bake amazing, delectable treats. What else could a man ask for, really? My mother accused him of being Fred Flintstone and asked him what century he thought he was living in. Exactly, he told her. Men haven't evolved much. They're simple creatures. It's every
thing else that's gotten complicated. I look around the room at my father, Bo, Danny, and Blaze, our four “simple creatures,” and wonder if he's right.