Shred Sisters

by Betsy Lerner

I knew I could never enter my sister’s world. She was daring and reckless. She slept naked, while I wore pajamas over underpants and undershirts. She scooped out avocados with two fingers and plunged the meat into her mouth. Without hesitation, Ollie would dive off a cliff into a reservoir, jump on a horse and canter into the woods. Ollie was that girl. First in, last out. What no one yet understood was that Ollie had no brakes.

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. I could tell that the teachers sometimes grew weary of calling on me when no one else raised their hand.

We all suspected the bracelet was stolen; that evening marked the beginning of our collective denial.

Another family arrived and started to spread a tablecloth over their poop-stained table; when they heard Ollie, they fled as far away from us as they could get. The curtains had parted, and our family was yet again in the middle of a play we hoped no one else could see.

My mother didn’t believe Ollie was suffering. She always maintained that if Ollie had gone to a detention center after her arrest, she would have straightened out. All this therapy was just a way for privileged kids to avoid legal consequences for their bad actions.

I had regarded my father as a god up until the day Anita Wormer wiped hamburger juice from his chin.

Everything about her, including her hot-pink patent leather Filofax, turned me off. I wondered what would happen if life wrapped its cruel arms around Fiona and dropped a starter house on her head.

“She’s manic depressive?” As Hunt formulated the question, I could hear him struggling with the realization. “Or something. I mean, she’s something.” We didn’t really know what she was. After The Place, Ollie never stayed anywhere long enough to be properly evaluated, never stayed on any medication long enough to give it a chance.

My mother would never have let such details slide. In the months and years after she died, I often saw the world through her eyes, as if I had inherited her mantle of judgment, her scoreboard in the sky. Those were the times I missed her most.

He said it was like a movie of his childhood in some bizarre rewind: going back up a slide, falling up a flight of stairs. He had woken up that morning crumpled in the vestibule of a Fifth Avenue office building as a security guard approached, kicking his shins, telling him to move on.

New York was a Darwinian struggle for everything from parking spaces and corner offices to reservations and real estate. I thought about staying at my table until closing, watching the busboys mop up. As the waitress poured my coffee, she regarded me the way a parent silently scolds a child.

“You’re enabling her,” Anita told my father, using the new addiction vocabulary that had seeped into the mainstream. “What am I supposed to do, disable her?”

No matter how desperately I always wanted Ollie to choose me, I resented it when she summoned me. She had skipped my high school and college graduations, missed my wedding—and my divorce, for that matter. I didn’t appreciate how our dad had deemed her god’s gift to heredity. What had she done but screw some guy?

For Ollie there seemed to be an unlimited cup of possibility, a bank of brilliant clouds against a perfect blue sky, a taut ribbon flickering in the distance. As Dad always said when Ollie crossed the finish line, “Your sister is a winner.”

My sister swims beyond the ocean crest, part-dolphin, part-girl. Gulls circle and fill the air. A cloud asks, what do you know? No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.