A Learning Curve

a four-part recounting

There are stories on the bones, but the bones are what the woman considers first. Like the way, over time, many children increasingly develop a habit of rejecting those who initially and most frequently taught them how to react to the world - namely, their mothers; eventually both parents. This seems to be part of growing up, to cut off those supports. A person who keeps discounting those influences, however, remains a child. Parental influences don't need to be bad or good, or even tepid, but they must be acknowledged for a child to become truly separate, an adult.

1. So if a grown woman says, "I remember my mother pulling my older sister's hair and swinging her around in a circle, screaming," she is saying many things, not just an abhorrent memory. She is wondering why it happened. She is saying her mother could be cruel. She is saying her mother's cruelty was unusual enough for her to remember the incident. She is acknowledging her mother as both a strongly abusive person and as someone weak enough to so thoroughly lose her temper with a teenage daughter, a child, that the mother was rendered speechless, screaming and physical.
2. 
   
3. A grown woman who recalls this is recognizing how it shaped herself as an even younger daughter, as a witness to it. She is saying she learned then to be quieter, to refrain from screaming like her mother. She admits her own convoluted, silent, sneaky strengths and weaknesses, spinning in a circle around the figure of her mother, held by the roots of her hair. It is acceptance and denial, a life-long dance with the dangers of the world, a dance in which she sometimes felt central, swinging a worldly occurrence by its hair, and other times felt swung around by the world, helpless in it grasp, hair uprooted but still tethering.
4. 
   
5. She is recognizing each as familiar already, silently borne, familiar because of seeing her mother, screaming, pulling her screaming and revered older sister in a circle by her hair.

When both parents were gone from the family home, her older sister signaled to her somehow, to her and her twin sister too, to put down their books or perhaps even toys and join the older sister in front of the TV set. Her older sister would be finished sitting in her own room, where she often sang along to soundtracks of West Side Story or South Pacific, and she'd gather the younger siblings, the twins, away from their silent and lonely pursuits of lively fantasy and into a place to learn what could be done when the parents were gone.

Her older sister turned the TV on, loud, to maybe American Bandstand or some similar show, and her older sister taught her and her twin how to dance to rock and roll. The older teen and the preteens, they would laugh and smile at each other and gyrate like the older teens on the TV. The three girls would touch hands sometimes, but mainly they watched the TV screen and each other in singular dances to a back-beat, to a thudding heartbeat, to a peculiar feeling of joyful freedom, engendered by an older sister, a teacher already. The older sister released her and her twin from a stiff silence into raucous enjoyment of throwing legs and arms akimbo until a lesson was learned, several lessons - the joy of noise and a happy reaction to it.

There was an even earlier time that wasn't always walked through, wasn't always hidden, but was sometimes danced through, and by the parents too. Those times were barely recalled by the grown woman now. She remembered that her mother and father were attractive, they made an attractive couple, and were one that used go out to dance when the now-grown woman was really very young.

The parents joined an ordered chaos called square dancing in an empty but noisy auditorium downtown. The twin daughters, so young they were in nightclothes and covered with blankets, were brought along. They would lie sleepily on a bench by the wall and watch their parents swing and whirl. The mother wore wide skirts with rickrack on the tiers, and the father wore a matching western shirt. Their dance clothes were red and white, bright among the rest of the dancers. The twins' parents smiled at each other and seemed very happy to "allemande left" or "do si do." The twins themselves felt safe there, fiddle music bouncing off the ceiling and filling the dark night.

In the long ago, the parents also used to host bridge parties at the house, with several card tables set up inside, and outside on the patio. There would be bowls of nuts and ashtrays and candles, lots of drinks and laughter. That was so long ago it was misty in memory, those evenings of companionable competition. Bridge remained a mysterious and adult game to the grown woman, full of "tricks" and "rubbers" and people who exclaimed about the foolishness of their partners.

The woman, mulling over these things, also dimly remembered studio portraits of the older sister at age six or seven. The older sister was dressed in cute dance costumes then, with little hats on her head and shiny black tap shoes on her feet. That sister was a tap dancer too, at least when she was a little girl. The twin couldn't remember ever seeing her older sister tap dance in person, but the studio pictures made her look as cute and professional as Shirley Temple, at least to her younger sister. It seemed there was nothing her older sister couldn't do.

Something happened, perhaps, that made any more dancing a secret activity. Something that stopped the card parties in the house. Something stopped entirely and something else started.

1. 
   

She was young, and it seemed as if her parents drove her and her sisters through a dystopian ruin. The desert the preteen girl saw could just as easily have been verdant orchards, stately forests, or lakeside swaths of green. It seemed like a desert to her. She sat with her twin on the car seat behind their parents. Her older sister sat way in the back of the wagon, clutching a suitcase and bedroll. Every time the preteen glanced back there, her older sister stared out the car window, jaw set in a remarkably determined expression. Her older sister was going away for the summer.

She herself, the younger sister, was devastated. There would be no more show tunes sung in the next room, no more wild dancing in front of the TV set, no more advice about how to properly get rid of unwanted string beans from the dinner plate. No more older sister. It seemed the world was ending and only the unknown stretched ahead.

She was rocked to core. She always thought her older sister, even as much older as she was, seven years, would be there forever. She would later learn this trip was the result of a hard-fought campaign with their mother for her sister to be a camp counselor for three months. It was a narrowly won victory, and the ride to campsite was thick with resentments, ill feelings and sorrow; the kind of atmosphere that made younger children afraid. The grown woman remembered this ruefully, for there was truth in the fear she felt back then. Her older sister would not stop going away until she was out of the house for good.

Even out of the house, the older sister traveled extensively with her husband, staying in various places throughout the world. They usually lived in a gracious and beautiful home in their home state. That home would be a refuge for her little sister more than once; peaceful and quietly correct.

It seemed incorrect to call the twin a "little" sister. The older sister had the father's coloring, dark brown hair and brown eyes, and the mother's height, short. The younger sisters had the mother's coloring, lighter brown hair and green eyes, and the father's height, tall.

Once, in a light statement while walking between the twins, the older sister said, "Now I have my bodyguards." This wounded the young teen on her left a great deal. The wounded twin felt the embarrassment of a youth who'd once been taller than her boyfriend. That shame was unneeded. The older sister soon said she just felt too short herself and it wasn't meant to hurt. 

Perhaps the occasional grief felt by the twin in her adulthood, a sort of despairing, inarticulate loneliness, was also unneeded. The younger sister wondered if it was self-imposed, rather like the divorce her mother demanded from her father. The father repeatedly said he loved the mother, yet divorce left the parents split apart and often alone, for better or worse.

The older sister, despite all her travels, was a bedrock of consistency. That sister remained married to her college sweetheart throughout the many years since those school times. She made the home state her home location. She received her father's and younger sisters' visits with a welcome and hospitality that never wavered. The mother was never seen there.

One younger sister at least, a grown woman thinking about these things, also traveled, on a smaller route, and did what she liked. But for her, people and places slipped away, gone to departure or death, places taken by the unknown. Still, the older sister and even the father always told this younger sister, "Be happy! Do what makes you happy!" She did her best to be happy until she couldn't anymore, at least not in ways that could be seen by others. Was everyone's life like that? What happened when the older sister first left home?

1. The differences were many with the older sister gone from home. The twin sisters attended junior high school and high school without any particular guidance, save that of a preference to be out of the family house.
2. The father, whose voice during parental arguments remained calm in tone even while the mother's grew shrill, took the twins to school every morning. The girls didn't mind getting there an hour early so the father could go to work. Studying both school subjects and the other students was a type of release and relief from the sad state of their mother, left sleeping all day at home.
3. When he took the girls to school, the father sometimes sang along with the radio, often encouraging his daughters to laugh. The father took the girls on outings come the weekends, to ride borrowed horses or watch planes land at the little airport, sometimes to get a hot meal. Movement seemed best. Appreciation, respect and love for the father grew daily.
4. 
   
5. The only consistent movement from the mother was overheard, like the parental arguments. The mother played Solitaire many nights, snapping cards down on a tin TV tray all night long. Cigarette smoke filled the air. The twins were careful to be quiet, as requested. Tired tension was the prevalent feeling.
6. 
   

The grown woman remembered coming home from a Friday night date once, happy, but her twin met her at the front door. One look at her twin's face told her - there was trouble with their mother. She followed her twin to the bathroom door where they stood together, silently looking at their mother, who seemed very small, like a stranger, lying on the bathroom floor. The mother looked up at them, not knowing them, and repeated, "Don't take my babies!" She said the phrase several times to her own teenage 'babies', who were cold with apprehension and the knowledge she didn't see them at all.

The twin who'd just arrived said, "We must get Dad."

The father was in a motel. The twins had seen his room, his work clothes laid across the bed, the little coffee pot going. That night the twins called him during the midnight hour. He said to wait with the mother until someone came to help, and that he'd stay on the phone with them, his youngest daughters. Conversation wasn't remembered, but some measure of comfort was.

It seemed like no time passed, or maybe an eternity did, when two people showed up, both of them strangers. A man and a woman. They took the mother away in their car, telling the teen girls to stay home, things would be fine. Their mother just needed rest.

The father said, "Go to sleep now. It's okay. Good night."

The twins looked at each other, and out at the empty driveway, and they waited in the front room all night, reading or pretending to. The father showed up early in the morning and took the girls out to a silent breakfast somewhere. Or maybe they all talked during the meal. It was just a blank time later on.

The twin who remembered this as a grown woman felt a strange mix of guilt and shame, pity and anger... all of it quickly fading away.

1. Still, there was joy to be had outside and away from home, and when inside, there were always books, and writing and drawing, to explore. The twins rarely saw their older sister, but they both sensed their sister's continued protection, somehow. The explosive events that drove that sister so completely away seemed tempered and perhaps would not take place twice.

The younger girls could go on dates, go to the occasional slumber party, travel to the beach with girlfriends. When they turned sixteen, one of them got a driver's license, and they used the what was still called the family car to cruise the teen spots in town. They did things they were pretty sure were normal.

Their father came and went at the house, and their mother rested and rested until she seemed to wake up a bit, near the time of the girls' high school graduation. That event was done as a family, but not with the older sister. Still, it was a good front and that had a good effect. For a little while. The summer after graduation was spent largely away from home.

1. The twins would both leave that house for good as soon as they were able. At age seventeen, they went off to the university and stayed away, for only a fragment of a home remained. The girls stayed in touch with each parent separately, via snail mail and rare phone calls.
2. And everyone evolved in their various ways.
3. ~~~
   

Of course, there were lingering questions. There would always be lingering questions.

If marriage was a measure of anything, there were marriages. One of the parents eventually remarried. The other fell in love with her married therapist. Both were happy for a spell. The twins each got married twice. At one point, one of them was married to a cowboy from Minnesota while the other was married to an Indian from Oklahoma. The older sister remained married the longest of anyone in that family.

All the sisters grew from girls into the women they became. The good, the bad, and even the tepid, combined to make each woman who she was. The youngest sister was a partial result, even when uneasy, of her parents' union and what they did. She was herself a grown woman now, in command of her own actions.

Some people say the nuclear family is either diminished or explodes from its singular insularity. The grown woman recollecting these things supposes their family exploded apart, yet there was also a gentler fading of knowledge and love.

The parents, as is the way of things, both died. The father died first, with his eldest daughter and one of the twins nearby. The mother was next, with both twins standing by. Such is the flicker of life in the long, slow dance of movement called Time.

1. 
   
2. Still, the twin who thinks these things and tries to write them down wishes very much that their older sister would not journey quite so far ahead of them. That sister seems to be disappearing around a distant corner, the farthest corner we all turn, and the view is dim. The next step is taken as an individual, but the view, it seems, might include each sister, who in turn partially embodies the parents.
3. 
   
4. Perhaps it does include all that. I really don't know. I just know I miss my older sister, and I want to fill the air around her with music, with the joy she taught us so long ago. I want to tell her what I tell my twin, and what I told my father, and what I told my mother. I want to tell her, "I love you."