My Three Cousins

Prologue

The year my sister was born was the year I was most certain I would never know what it felt like to have a sister at all.  My mother presented the screaming, red-faced infant to me as if she was a prize but even now I remember I was far from impressed.  There are few things ten-year-old girls are less interested in than newborn babies.  I, however, wasn't the most disinterested person in the room.  My brother, Fitz, stared down at our new sister as if she was a revolting creature someone had dragged in from a mud puddle in the yard.  If she had been a revolting creature from the yard he would have cuddled her like a sister.  At eight, Fitz loved all things disgusting and gross, but had no interest in sisters, older or younger.

Vivian came home from the hospital a few days later and suddenly our mom and her doting dad ran around the house in a constant panic as if the screaming baby was a threat to us all.  By the time she lessened her crying and switched to babbling any negative feelings I had dissolved but I never showed much interest in spending time with the baby or referred to her as my sister.  

This feeling of distance increased every time my mother packed us up and forced the three us to drive across the country to see her sister.  Even though we never made two days at Aunt Maggie's without her and mom screaming and throwing dishes, I was keenly aware of the way they looked at one another with misty eyes when reuniting and how conversations flowed between them, each word belonging to them as a collective instead of to either as an individual.  At times it seemed to me my mom and my aunt weren't individuals at all, even their features seemed to be shared.  When they talked, I squinted my eyes and tried to blur their faces so that I could pretend they were identical.  My mother sometimes talked longingly about identical twins as if it was a disservice to her that she and Aunt Maggie were fraternal.

My sister longing didn't end with my mother and her twin.  The house also served as a shrine to my three cousins: three girls born in successive years who never seemed to spend a minute apart.  The oldest was Joan, followed by practical Ruth, and beautiful Helen.  When we were young people tacked me onto the list, at three years younger than Helen I felt like part of the set to many.  They'd say "four beautiful girls and poor Fitzy tagging along after them."  Even then I couldn't forget that I wasn't one of them.  It was me who was yelled at to watch Fitz and to mind my mother when she was being strict, the girls had no brother to chase around, and Aunt Maggie mostly let them raise themselves.

To make my sisterless-ness worse, those summers always felt lonelier because I longed for the days of running around with them instead of after them.  My mom moved us away that same year that Vivian was born when she met Vivian's dad Hal.  We had lived with Aunt Maggie and the girls since my dad left us, almost exactly one year after Uncle Rodney died.  We all lived in the big house and our mother's raised us not necessarily together, but parallel.  Then as quickly as we moved in, she met Hal and we moved out.  Trading one set of "sisters" for Vivian.  It didn't help that we took a break from visiting during Vivian's toddler years so mom and Hal could adjust to our new life.  Fitz and I were supposed to be adjusting too but we weren't.  By the time we came back for a visit the girls had fully embraced life as teenagers. Joan had learned to drive a car and took her sisters all over town, leaving me back at the house.  When they returned, they cooed at three-year-old Vivian then whispered amongst themselves.

I never wanted to be a sister less, though, than when the call came about Aunt Maggie.  She had died suddenly in her sleep.  The girls seemed panicked on the other end of the line, but nothing compared to the way my mother wailed when she heard the news.  She sobbed as if Aunt Maggie's death was a bad thing inside her she had to get out and eventually her cries sounded hollow.  I thought she would sob the whole drive to Aunt Maggie's house but instead she scarcely breathed as if she didn't know how to use oxygen in a world where she didn't have a sister.  When we got to the house her usual happy smile and misty eyes were replaced with hands frantically reaching into the air for a sister gone invisible.  She collapsed into Ruth, the cousin who looked most like Aunt Maggie, before we made it to the porch.  That trip I cried more than I had ever before in my life, but I couldn't even hear my cries over my mother's and cousin's.  Then we buried Aunt Maggie and the part of my mom that was someone's sister in the family graveyard and drove home.  Once home Mom tried to find normal, but she never did, and she always seemed to be counting down the days until it would be summer so she could take us back to Aunt Maggie's house.