Usual Sister Stuff by Anne Anthony

Image | Sam Divita

Usual Sister Stuff

 

—She’s so angry at me. I want her to…to like me.

—Usual sister stuff? The two of you haven’t been around each other for years. You’re restoring a lost relationship, Mary.

My sister’s therapist whispers, but walls are thin. He’s mistaken. Not lost, never was.

~

My parents named my sister after the Holy Virgin. Twelve years before her birth, Karl Landsteiner identified Rh, a blood factor antigen. If an Rh-negative mother becomes pregnant with an Rh-positive fetus, she develops antibodies to fight the fetus like an invading virus. The first pregnancy produces few anti-bodies and continues full term, but each subsequent pregnancy produces more which destroy the fetus’ red blood cells. The physicians took forty-eight hours to identify and treat my sister’s condition but the damage was done—partial hearing loss, cerebral palsy, and a predisposition for auto-immune diseases. My mother’s doctor cautioned her that if she had more children, they’d likely be ‘vegetables.’ My sister was second born in a family of six. I am fourth.

~

—I prayed for you. To be born. 

—Mary, I hate when you say that. Like I owe you something.

—I never knew that.

—I never thought to tell you.

~

My sister knelt before a portrait of Jesus Christ and prayed for a baby sister. Every year on my birthday until his death, my father retold the story of my birth swearing that the Angelus rang in the nearby church tower, a sign, he said, of a call to prayer: That we may be made worthy of the promises.

Soon after my birth, seven years after my sister’s, my parents enrolled her in an all-girls. Catholic boarding academy. Every Sunday, she wept before the hour-long ride, clutched the hand of her baby sister before climbing into the station wagon’s backseat. Along the way, Dad stopped at the ice cream store to indulge her sweet-tooth with a hot fudge sundae. Those journeys lasted two years. She cried still when she couldn’t return to her friends at school.

When I left for college, she was working as a housekeeper at a nursing school where she laughed with girls her own age when they returned from class. Her girlish dimples reappeared after she dropped the weight which burdened her teens. With training, she advanced to work as a home health aide. Her life moved forward until a car swerved around the corner, caught her off guard, and she fell, injuring her back which set the course for decades of back surgeries and incomplete recoveries. In her fifties, rheumatoid arthritis invaded her body, damaging her shoulders, her neck, her hips. She fell. She fell again and again. She was sixty-three when she required a wheelchair. A year later, she developed a platelet disorder which caused hemorrhaging if held too tightly.

~

—You can’t grab her by the arms. She’ll bruise. Don’t you have a chair that lowers?

—No. Most people have no problem.

—My sister’s not most people.

~

The dentist and his assistant attempted to transfer Mary into the dental chair to clean her teeth; when she scooted back she fell forward screaming in pain. The dentist attempted to use a Hoya—a contraption to lift her from one place to the next. While they slipped the wrap beneath her, she fell sideways and smashed her shoulder. Call Transport, I hissed, supporting her back with my hands. I felt the crunch of her shoulder bones beneath her skin when she twitched from her cerebral palsy. Bone against bone. 

~

—Why is god punishing me?

—I don’t know. What did you do? 

—Nothing.

—Sure about that?

~

I ran through the Ten Commandments. I exaggerated a few — ‘Did you kill someone? You did, didn’t you, Mary??’ which got her laughing and stopped her tears. We concluded she hadn’t broken one. God’s actions were whimsical and random, not punishing.

 ~

—I feel joy sucked out of my body.

—She can be unlikeable. Who do you want to be to her? 

Today, my therapist explains about being fair to myself first so I may be fair to others. Growing up with a sister with so much need overshadowed mine, she says, and suggests perhaps I became the hero in my sister’s life, not my own. I argue.

~

—Not a hero or angel, or a saint as my four brothers keep saying.

—Well, then, who do you want to be?

—I want to be someone who shows up.

My therapist gets the look: the waiting parent at the bottom of the sliding board, knowing to catch me as I fall into a self-revelation.

— But first, I need to show up for myself, don’t I?

© Anne Anthony

Anne Anthony credits her steady diet of comic books for her ardent belief in superpowers. She has most recently been published in Flash Boulevard, Flash Fiction Magazine, Levitate Magazine, and elsewhere. Her micro-fiction, It’s a Mother Thing, was nominated for Best Microfiction 2024 by Cleaver Magazine. Find more here: https://linktr.ee/anchalastudio.

 Follow Feed the Holy.