Shred Sisters

by Betsy Lerner

Here I was again, on the sideline of another crisis Ollie created, staged, and starred in.

I loved to police the people in line at Chuck’s salad bar, observing how well they adhered to the honor system.

It wasn’t a crime, but it stood for everything I couldn’t stand about her.

I was too slow and methodical for Ollie. Even woozy on pain medication, she couldn’t stand waiting for anything.

Ollie already knew how to exert her power, and my parents, beguiled by their little girl, acquiesced.

Olivia and I fought as if the world existed to fuel our rivalry.

I was desperate to be included, but I was the skinny, clumsy, bespectacled soldier who gets picked off first by enemy fire in every war movie.

I couldn’t lie the way Ollie did. If anything, I had the opposite problem, telling too much truth, speaking far beyond the required response to any question.

The smallest details about her life intrigued me: the silver ring on her middle toe, her black nail polish, the way she could talk and floss at the same time.

Her braces would come off at her next visit, but even so she made a display of her suffering.

The late-afternoon sun was going down, burnishing Ollie’s silhouette. I was well acquainted with the pose, hip cocked, hand on hip.

One time she sang “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story at the top of her lungs in a crazy frenzy and slammed all the stall doors shut until a lady came in and we collapsed laughing. Those were the times I lived for.

I knew I could never enter my sister’s world. She was daring and reckless.

It seemed as if my classmates had collectively decided over the summer to wear jeans to school on the first day and trade in their lunchboxes for brown bags.

I had also learned too late that my greatest crime in school was raising my hand too frequently, saying the answer with too much certainty, and always getting it right.

Miss Breen was the opposite of my mother, who opened gifts slowly, her bird-head tilting this way and that, deciding if the worm pleased her.

The trust between me and Miss Breen was broken; I saw that she was firmly in my mother’s camp as someone who believed I needed to be fixed.

I was desperate for another chance, certain I had missed the opportunity of a lifetime, though not exactly sure what it might have been.

I was convinced the owners would throw us out, but nothing bad had ever happened.

Ollie said it was better than sex, and I solemnly nodded in agreement, though I was still trying to fathom the actual logistics of intercourse. (The word “penetration” terrified me.)

She shed her layers of defiance and anger around him; sometimes she was even sweet.

“How did you get to be so good?” It was a compliment that felt like an accusation.

My mother’s body was a human bayonet, rigid with anger.

It was classic Ollie; she had a gift for making you feel guilty for something she had done.

I was not the kid who was going to touch a hot stove or stand too close to a ledge.

At fourteen, I knew I was too old to indulge in these make-believe scenarios, but they were familiar and soothing, little worlds I lorded over.

Her intolerance wasn’t about impatience; her mind just ran faster and more furiously than mine.

She wanted a worthy opponent, and I folded too easily, never giving her the fight she was spoiling for.

Ollie’s absence was more suffocating than her presence.

With every disappearance, my parents recalibrated the idea of normal as it shifted beneath us.

Our household had become a filling station, a place where Ollie refueled before taking off again.

My father’s kindness and even keel had always been my mother’s ballast. Now those same qualities inflamed her.

I knew he wanted me to say yes, and I obliged. No one really wants to hear that you can’t find a way to fit in.

Small flowers of panic erupted inside me.

“You’re the only one telling the truth,” she said.

Had my biology teacher singled me out because something repellent in him sensed something repellent in me?

I sat down at my desk and contained my anxiety, praying that they wouldn’t drop it and full of rage for being so utterly defenseless, and beyond that the feeling most difficult to manage: humiliation.

As a game, she’d talk fast to make him write faster, as if she were the puppeteer and he the puppet.

I had the profound sense that if I tried out, blood would pour from my mouth.

Sometimes I guiltily hoped she would die; our grief would have an end point.

My mother believed in marriage the way some people believe in the Declaration of Independence.

She had always said late afternoons were the happiest time, as she watched the light drain from the sky, peeling potatoes or carrots at the kitchen sink, gazing at the trees in winter, burnished by the copper sun.

I’d withdraw or go blank rather than show my feelings, and people assumed I either had no emotions or was snobbish.

Had I been pushing people away, or was it the other way around?

I feared that people could tell I was a virgin, which was somehow worse than being a virgin.

By then I knew that cutting Ollie off was like cutting off his own supply of oxygen.

You could call it a pattern, though it was more of an algorithm: Ollie would steal something, smash something, cause a disturbance.

My research required patience and diligence, the two qualities I had cultivated since childhood.

One evening, as the group gaped over a particularly beautiful sunset, one of the researchers came over and said, “Shred, you gotta make time to smell the roses.”

One of her hoop earrings had come undone and she fixed it by feel, turning the hoop through the fleshy part of her ear.