A TALE OF TWO SISTERS
A marvelous thing happened one Wednesday morning in October, just after I blew in from yoga class.
My husband said, “Your sister called.” The very thought of a message from my sister Joyce has been known to make me quiver with alarm. I brace myself for a replay of our ancient, crazy-making script (her cajoling, my refusal; her tears, my lofty sigh). I remember the fierce, proud love that the sound of her voice unlocks in me. Then I yield to a surge of shame at what we might do to each other. Oh, for God’s sake. What is it about the two of us — responsible grown-up women, trying to do our best — that can turn so destructive when we speak?
That morning after yoga, I forgot all about those past conversations. I poured myself a coffee, settled in my favorite armchair and called Joyce back at her house on a mountainside in California, two time zones away from my condo in downtown Toronto. “Happy birthday,” she said.
I’d forgotten. It was October 20; I had just turned 57. And something in me had softened. It had happened so slowly that I missed the first signs, just as I missed the first hint of lines around my eyes. At 57, I had finally found the wisdom, or maybe just the sheer good sense, to embrace possibility instead of standing guard against pain.
My little sister was almost 53 (although in my mind she remained the pesky kid who used to borrow my clothes without asking and spill her milk all over my side of the dinner table). She has always remembered this day, no matter where in her travels she has just alighted, or what kind of commotion she’s embracing with her customary zestful resolve: a pie-baking class in her kitchen, a solo campaign to bring girls’ basketball to Guatemala, a book tour of 18 cities in two months. Why is it that Joyce, with her frantic schedule, has never forgotten my birthday while I, who have time for long walks that lead nowhere in particular, so rarely stay on top of hers (or anybody else’s)?
I’m told we look like sisters, but I’ve never seen the resemblance. It’s our lifelong differences that hold my attention. I’m reserved; she’s flamboyant and expressive. I fret over every decision; she’s bought houses faster than I’ve bought shoes. I’ve been married for 36 years to my first love and best friend; she’s long divorced, always coping single-handed with some crisis or other. When we spoke on my 57th birthday, she’d just been hit with an obliterating plumber’s bill for a broken septic system, yet she said, with the brave, battered exuberance I’ve always loved in her, “Things are never so bad that I can’t have fun.”
There’s no one I phone every day, just to catch up, so I don’t really envy the women — I’ve known a few — who are always calling their sister. Still, I wish Joyce and I felt free to call each other for no reason but the pleasure of connection. I hope we’ll get there someday. In fact, I haven’t been so hopeful in years. But it probably can’t happen quite the way I’d like it to, because the pleasure we find in each other is tangled up with two lifetimes’ worth of rivalry and disappointment.
She has something I’ve always lacked: irresistible, effortless magnetism. Only my sister could find love on a Greyhound bus, while entertaining her daughter with such uproarious tales that a dashing and warm-hearted stranger was moved to tap her on the shoulder and say, “You must have dinner with me tonight.” And he’d been looking at the back of her head! I’m not in the market for romance myself, but if anything happens to my husband I’d be wise to get a dog. Arriving at a party, I’ll head for a quiet corner and engage one sympathetic soul in a heart-to-heart about books. Joyce always heads for the center of things.
Correction: the center follows her. People just have to meet my sister. And from the moment she entered my life, I knew it. How piercingly adorable she looked in her bassinet — skin the color of gingerbread, eyes like pools of melted chocolate. Our parents exclaimed at her beauty while I longed to bite off her little cookie head.
I thought I wanted a baby sister; I had name all picked out — Daphne, from my favorite Greek myth, about a nymph who prizes nothing more than her freedom. When Apollo falls in love with Daphne, she’s so determined to avoid his embraces that she turns into a tree. Daphne was my kind of heroine. Like her, I shrank from embraces, and my coolness had become a family joke. But my baby sister proved to be annoyingly cuddly. She curled herself against our mother’s bosom as if she intended to stay there forever. Even against our father’s bony chest, she found a place to fill with her tawny roundness.
She’d barely arrived when I announced — with a certain astuteness, if not with the purest of motives — that my baby sister didn’t look like Daphne. She would need another name, and she already had one: her middle name, Joyce.
One week old and she’d already lost her name to a controlling older sister. But of course I was nursing a loss of my own. Until Joyce came along, I too had been something of a charmer, albeit on a more modest scale. I used to tell stories that delighted our parents’ friends, and then I went quiet, just like that. In the charm competition, I’d been beaten by a baby.
Our contrasting traits became the stuff of family legend. Joyce was the cheerful, try-anything dynamo, ready to throw her arms around the world. I was the anxious, morose one, Eeyore to her Piglet. When our mother served pie, I scrutinized the slices, ready to protest if Joyce had a crumb more than I did. The pie symbolized what I really craved: the undivided attention of the woman I loved more than anyone else in the world.
I was six when our mother lost patience with this. As Christmas approached, she taped a chart to the fridge door. Across the top she’d drawn cartoons representing all my nasty habits (mostly forms of meanness to my sister). For every infraction, I’d get an X on the chart. The number of Xs would determine what I found under the Christmas tree. Joyce didn’t have a behavior chart (explanation: “She’s only two!”). Compounding my silent fury, she would jump up and down when our mother reached for the special pen used only to blacken my name. “X on da chat!” she would trill, to everyone’s amusement but mine.
On Christmas morning I unwrapped a quilt for my doll, quickly handmade by our mother with a sheet of foam rubber inside. Then I looked at the quilt she had made for Joyce’s doll, exquisitely puffy and finished with silk thread. Joyce didn’t notice the difference, but our mother made certain that I did. “You had too many Xs and you’ve paid the price,” she said. I had a hunch even then that this deliberate slight was not Joyce’s fault, but I blamed my sister anyway. Blaming our mother, the trusted source of everything from bedtime stories to Band-Aids, was unthinkable to me.
At least I had talents Joyce didn’t possess: I drew, danced and wrote elaborate fantasies. Our parents exclaimed at my imaginative powers. Wouldn’t you know, Joyce set out to leave me in the dust. And she did. She wrote one-woman variety shows and staged them in our living room, complete with spoof commercials, while our parents applauded with feverish delight. They’d been craving the distraction that Joyce provided: our father was an alcoholic, prone to rages and impenetrable gloom. We never talked about the reason for “Daddy’s moodiness,” and high-spirited Joyce could create the illusion that all was well in our family.
With my melancholy nature and constant complaints about imaginary illnesses, I compounded our parents’ unspoken desperation. Yet Joyce looked up to me, eager to hear my pronouncements on dollhouse décor and the rules of Monopoly. She made an acceptable playmate for a boring afternoon — but only until my friend Christina dropped by. Then I’d slam my bedroom door in Joyce’s face with a shiver of triumph. Our mother used to plead, “Rona, be patient with your sister.” Fat chance. Joyce had robbed me of enough already. She would eventually steal even my favorite author.
Nowadays, even people who don’t know my sister often know one notorious detail of her history: her brief and wrenching love affair, at age 18, with the then 50-something author of The Catcher in the Rye. What people don’t know, of course, is that Joyce had never read The Catcher in the Rye. But Salinger didn’t want to talk about books. He just wanted to meet the winsomely precocious sprite — barely out of high school and already a famous journalist — whose photo he’d seen on the cover of The New York Times Magazine.
That’s my sister for you. Not even the most famous recluse in modern letters could resist her enchantment. Thank goodness J.D. Salinger didn’t sweep me off to his lair on a New Hampshire hill, to subsist on sliced cucumbers and barely cooked lamb. Still, at the time, his fleeting adoration for Joyce reopened my ancient wound.
The year I turned 11, our mother fell dangerously ill with pneumonia. One night I stood in the doorway of Joyce’s room, watching her sleep. She had buried her face in a pile of stuffed animals that filled half the bed. I knew she needed comfort, which made two of us. If our mother died, we’d be left with our father, who burned the pots and drove drunk. At seven, Joyce shared my secret fear. Still, it didn’t cross my mind to clear a place for myself beside her and put my arms around her. That would have forced me to admit the terrible bond of our helplessness.
Our mother didn’t die of pneumonia. She died of a brain tumour nearly 30 years later, in the pretty Victorian house that her second husband had bought for her. She had moved to Toronto to be with him. Joyce and I had already faced our father’s death, but the loss of our mother, who had always been the steadying hand of order in the family, threw us into a maelstrom of anger. We reverted to the roles we had played as children vying for our mother’s love.
Joyce, at 35, was the buoyant creator of cheer in the midst of anguish. Arriving in Toronto with her computer and her CDs, she took on our mother’s care with the same full-tilt multi-tasking that she’d formerly brought to her living-room variety shows. She decorated our mother’s breakfast tray with posies from the garden, she pushed the wheelchair in the park, she baked her special poppyseed cake, smiling as if this were an ordinary family reunion.
Meanwhile I searched for a quiet place where I could speak with my mother before the tumor silenced her forever. About to turn 40, I still longed for her attention. Hands-on care was not my strength, so I would sit with her in the garden, scribbling furiously as she dictated farewell letters to her friends.
The crisis flared as our mother grew weaker. My stepfather and I believed she needed round-the-clock nursing care. Joyce was determined to remain the primary caregiver even though she was running out of strength. Her smile tightened at the corners as the house throbbed with her efforts: the whizzing Mixmaster, the increasing struggle to get our mother down the stairs and into the wheelchair. It seemed to me that our focus had shifted from helping our mother die to sustaining the fiction of her place in the world outside her bedroom.
When I tried to discuss this with Joyce (gracelessly, I’m sure; my strength was also gone), she would burst into tears and leave the room. She thought I was cold and ungrateful for all her hard work; I thought she was hysterical. In my way, I too rode a surging tide of emotion that kept pulling me under. I remember telling Joyce, with ferocious conviction, “Your behavior is making me physically ill.” I remember my husband telling me, “When you talk about your sister, an ugly look comes into your eyes.”
I cringed, knowing he was right. But I also knew — along with my stepfather and a number of friends — that our family couldn’t go on like this.
Our stepfather wrote Joyce a letter setting firm conditions on her time with our mother: when she could visit, where she would stay (with a neighbor, not in the house). He had my support. In Joyce’s eyes, her own sister had betrayed her. Even worse, I was leaving her alone in the world. The letter reached Joyce while her husband was ending their marriage. She later told me, “You did violence to me.” I did, and knowingly — but also to myself. I felt not unlike the desperate outdoorsman who, pinned by his arm beneath a fallen tree, took out his utility knife and cut off the arm.
I didn’t want to see Joyce, but I had to. Our mother’s death soon required us to empty our mother’s house, which brimmed with her copious possessions. While Joyce and a friend drove to Toronto in a van, I made a number of executive decisions, none involving items she’d mentioned. I promised the teak table to a woman who had loved our mother and warmly remembered her dinner parties. It turned out that Joyce had other plans. She wanted to give the teak table to her friend, but I refused to break my promise. Joyce bristled with tearful fury, then took off.
At the time her reaction made no sense to me. How could someone who didn’t know our mother trump someone who had cherished her for years? I thought Joyce and I had been fighting about the claims of two people outside the family, when the real issue involved a power struggle between ourselves. As the older sister, I assumed the right to make certain decisions, like a queen donning her mantle. This has been my habit ever since I claimed the right to change the channel on our parents’ black and white TV. No wonder Joyce was wild with frustration.
We had entered our most difficult years. Until our mother’s death exposed the unresolved conflict between us, we could trade family gossip on the phone for an hour at a stretch (this happened just often enough to create the illusion of closeness). Every summer my husband and I would rent a cottage near Joyce’s house in New Hampshire, so our son could get to know his cousins. Now Joyce had moved to California, and the Maynard family had shrunk to ourselves.
We had never been close, as we both should have known from those summer visits. Every time I looked forward to Joyce’s madcap stories and unquenchable energy. Every time I’d hurt her feelings her by needing a break from the barbecues and outings she planned for us. She seemed to want something from me — a two-hearts-as-one intensity — that I didn’t want from her. It was easier to keep my distance.
We were both in our forties when Joyce called to say she was coming to Toronto. To Die For, a movie based on one of her books, had been chosen to open the Toronto International Film Festival, and the producers were flying her in for the gala. Mixed emotions tugged at me — eagerness to see Joyce, fear of her expectations. She’d want to stay at our house, but we’d already tried that once and I had felt overwhelmed by her sheer nonstop busyness.
My home has always been my refuge from the world; she transformed it, with the best of intentions, into backstage on the opening night of a mega-musical. I remembered Joyce in my kitchen, with the phone under her chin, a pastry blender in her hand, flour everywhere and the stereo at full volume, juggling her complicated schedule while I waited for things to calm down so that I could start the rest of our dinner. She’d been baking me one of her transcendent pies, so it seemed churlish to not to be grateful. But if I let her stay with me again, we would both pay the price for my annoyance. Could I help with her hotel arrangements?
No. She wanted to stay with us. Was that so much to ask from her only sister? Her voice trembled; I knew she was crying.
All night I agonized. I couldn’t bear to hurt my sister — or to lose myself placating her. Then I remembered the hotel at the end of our street. My husband and I would move stay there during her visit, leaving Joyce the run of our house. We’d come home in the morning to have breakfast together; we’d take Joyce out for a pre-gala dinner. That’s exactly what we did, and to me it felt absolutely right. But not to her. She couldn’t let the matter drop. At my kitchen table, she pressed me to explain why I wasn’t the welcoming sister she wished I could be. If I really loved her, wouldn’t I want to share my home with her?
Some time after that, we stopped speaking. I’d been on my way to California, hoping we could meet for dinner, when she e-mailed me to say that she would have to pass. My presence in her life — skeptical and distant instead of ebullient and accepting — caused her too much pain. Better we should love each other from afar. Her decision saddened me, but I was not about to argue. We brought out the worst in each other.
I can’t recall how many years our silence lasted. I only remember Joyce’s birthday greetings, which continued to arrive by e-mail on October 20: “dear r, happy birthday. I hope it was a good one. love, j.” The wording never varied. Had she programmed her computer to remember this day?
In the years of our silence, I’d have said I didn’t miss her. I had another challenge on my mind: editing Chatelaine, where my monthly column had won a loyal following. Readers often wrote, “I feel as if you’re my sister.” What would they think if they knew I had a sister with whom I no longer spoke? They didn’t even know she existed. In my column, I had shared the true story of my life except the chapter on Joyce. It was just too vexing and would never fit on one page.
Meanwhile thoughts of my sister kept tugging at me. Sometimes between meetings I would visit her website and click on “A letter from Joyce.” I must have been on her mind, too, because one day she called to ask, “So whose idea was it that we weren’t speaking?”
“Yours, of course.” I had to have the last word — the time-honored prerogative of older sisters.
Looking back on my life as a sister, I’m struck by the importance I’ve attached to the four years between Joyce and me. When we were growing up, four years meant the difference between ABCs and cursive writing, ankle socks and pantyhose, Disney movies and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Four years were the mountain from which I looked down on a know-nothing kid. I cultivated an air of regal authority that served me well in my editing career. Junior staff understood that if they let me down, I would give them “the look,” which I had practiced to withering perfection on Joyce.
At 55 I left my editing job to become a full-time writer-my sister’s career for more than three decades. I no longer needed “the look,” any more than I needed the designer suits that now hung at the back of my closet. The boundaries of my life began to soften and shift. I discovered how the sunlight streams into my home as winter gives way to spring. I reread The Catcher in the Rye and decided that Holden Caulfield, who had seemed so endearingly sensitive in my teenage years, was in fact the lonely prisoner of his own merciless judgments.
Wondering what Joyce was doing, I sat down at the computer and clicked on “A letter from Joyce.” There I read — along with untold thousands of strangers — that Joyce was moving to New England. Then we’d be in the same time zone and I could fly up for the weekend. I thought of all the things I didn’t know about my sister-the book on her bedside table, the most-played songs on her iPod, what she was doing about menopause (perhaps it started during our silence). I was probably the only person living who remembered her birth, yet her adult life was a poignant box of mysteries.
Suddenly it struck me: I missed her. Wouldn’t you know, she’d been missing me, too. A day or so later, she called on my birthday. She’d already changed her mind about moving to New England, but her bright cascade of laughter was just as I remembered.
The wonder to me now is not the rage and resentment that divided us for so many years, but the staunch, insistent love that keeps pulling us together. Joyce and I are equals now, two accomplished, middle-aged women who, between us, have sent four grownup children into the world. Perhaps we’ve always been more equal than I knew, both shaped by the same endearingly troubled family as no one but the two of us will ever comprehend. I saw her feigned sprightliness; she saw my misery. Now we’re finally free to choose which aspects of our childhood to abandon, and which ones to mine as we become our best selves.
Daphne was the nymph who ran away from love. When I took that name away from Joyce, I thought I was getting my own back. But here’s something I didn’t know. My name, Rona, is derived from the Hebrew word for “joy.” So in essence we share a name. I like knowing this. It gives me hope.
First published in MORE, September 2007, along with Joyce’s account of our relationship. You can read it here: https://www.joycemaynard.com/little-sister
