When I was young, every holiday was full of hope and dread. The hope was that my father and my sister wouldn't fight. My parents argued loudly, bitterly and frequently when my sister wasn't around; when she was, she and my father would argue, with my mother and me off to the side, my mother trying every so often to stop them while the sight and sound of her first child and her husband screaming at each other tore at her heart.
I have few memories of either of my parents crying. I have few childhood memories of my sister in which she wasn't crying.
My mother raised my sister alone, with help from my grandparents, for the first several years of my sister's life. I'm sure that they felt like parents to my sister, and that the death of my grandfather by suicide when my mother was pregnant with me was a terrible loss for my sister, who was a preteen when it happened. I don't know if my father ever had a nickname for my sister; he had many for me when I was little. When my grandfather died, so did the person in my sister's life who called her "Twinkletoes."
I never knew what my parents or my father and sister were arguing about. Perhaps the caption that could have been added to every sad tableau of my family was "Why doesn't anyone love me?"
I never in my life spent an hour with my sister during which she did not talk about something that she didn't like about the way she looked. The specter of her supposed ugliness, particularly how fat she thought she was, loomed large over her in her diatribes against herself. Decades after I started hearing them, I found a picture of her as a teenager that showed a beautiful, thin girl of normal and proportionate weight. I was first surprised, then sad, then suspicious. How many other evil, untrue legends spun by family members about themselves and others had twisted so deeply into the minds of the people telling and hearing them that the insisted-upon lies gained power over the truth?
Copyright L. Kochman, March 25, 2015 @ 5:57 p.m./edited, with additions, @ 6:05 p.m.
