Baby Sister

My first memory of my little sister has dimmed over the years. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen table; arms spread wide, singing “Standing on the Promises of God” at the top of her lungs. Her performance evoked a mixed bag of emotions in me. Irritation, first. She was always skirting the edge of the rules. Jealousy, second. She was charming and gregarious and the baby of the family – three things I would never be.
Fifty years later she created another memory, one filled with irony. She stood on the front porch of that same house, gesturing and shouting at me, calling me “sanctimonious.” I knew exactly what she meant, and I had a deep-seated fear that she might be right. This was, however, not the time to explore my own psyche. Hers was imploding before my eyes, and I had to do something while we waited for the ambulance to make the 13 mile trip from the nearest town.

Almost without thought, I gave back some of the control slipping out of her grasp. In a conversational tone so antithetical to our previous shouting match, I asked her what “sanctimonious” meant. Her pride in her intelligence kicked in, and it was enough to divert her attention from drug-induced ranting to explain the meaning to her less intelligent older sister.

The shouting and the four-letter words stopped. I was grateful for that bit of calm since my mother was sitting in the living room totally disoriented by the vituperation that had been spewing from the mouth of her favorite child. (Mother could battle a six-foot, egg-eating black snake with a hoe and win, but the dark side of human nature defeated her without a fight.)

Somehow, my sister and I transitioned from the front porch to a bench in the backyard. Maybe she took off and I followed her, but however it happened, we sat side-by-side with her head buried in my neck, sobbing like child. I rocked her and babbled stupid, useless words to quiet the demons that stomped around in her head. The siren in the background heralded relief from this drama.

I rode in the front of the ambulance, my body tied in a knot. She had fallen unconscious and halfway to the hospital, the driver turned on the siren. Because of her past histrionics, I had a hard time believing that her unresponsiveness was real.

In the emergency room, after having her stomach pumped and regaining consciousness, she flirted shamelessly with the EMTs who had brought her there and ignored our older sister and me. As with that first memory, I felt irritation, but jealousy had long since been erased from the slate of emotions that I felt for the woman lying on the hospital bed, batting her eyes at a man young enough to be her son.