The gift of a shared past
by Stephanie Piper
My sister has called to wish me a happy birthday and to quiz me about old boy friends.
It's a strange juxtaposition of sentiments, a many-happy-returns greeting followed by a staccato inquisition: Who was that guy with the '63 Thunderbird? Did Frank what's-his-name finally flunk out of college? That Bobby? Was he a Beta or a Phi Gam?
Caught off guard, I fumble for the facts of this ancient history. But as we chatter on, I begin to hear a subtext beneath our shrieks of laughter. My sister has called to remind me that while she walks in the world, there is someone who remembers me at 13, and 16, and 20. There is someone who recalls in lurid detail the mini-skirt I bought for New Year's Eve, 1966, and the potted air fern once bestowed on me by an unwelcome admirer. It required no water. It would not die. We dubbed it The Eternal Plant.
She is four years my senior and we have both reached the time in life when there is more past tense behind us than future ahead. We have been close and distant in our decades of sisterhood, our worlds spinning sometimes in synch, sometimes in wildly different directions. She was a Vogue fashion plate, career-driven, single, childless. I was a mother at 21, a badly-dressed, terminally exhausted full-time student groping for a degree. She has never left New York. I have moved often, each time farther from the urban sprawl, the fast-forward energy. She was 37 when her son was born. My children were already half-grown, more like uncles than cousins. We have sometimes gone years without seeing each other.
Birthdays remain a kind of touchstone. We call each other to offer fond wishes, catch up on family news. But under the gift-wrapped surface of our conversation runs another dialogue, hinted at in remembered details of birthdays past. I broke my leg on the eve of her seventh and stole the show, my miniature cast propped on cushions, my dramatic accident the talk of the party. She evened the score on my sixth, organizing the backyard games with her glamorous older friends, luring my guests into their magic
circle. She pulled out all the stops for my 25th, with theater tickets and lunch at the Plaza. I sent her sweetheart roses for her 40th. She taught me how to tie a scarf and write a press release. I filled her in on vaporizers and infant rashes. She traded a corner office for a playground bench; I swapped the laundry room for the newsroom.
It's never been a smooth ride. Our teenage shouting matches were the stuff of legend. I used to envy the sisters of fiction, the selfless siblings of Little Women, the fairy tale nobility of Snow White and Rose Red. Not for them the loud invectives, mixed messages, fierce competition I knew so well.
But not for them either, perhaps, a phone call on an April afternoon. My sister has called to wish me a happy birthday, and to offer me a gift. In the frame of our shared past, she has placed a picture: the long-ago companion of Frank and Bobby, wearer of mini-skirts, recipient of air ferns. The trappings change, she says without saying it. The essence is the self only a sister can know.
April 19, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 16
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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