My Sister Ellen

My sister hated me.  Was it my brilliance that turned her against me?  Or was it that time when I encouraged her to stick raisins up her nose and my mother had to dig them out.

Ours was not a happy family.  We were always at war with one another, and the action was physical.  How the hell did my parents allow that.  Well, they were physical too.  This was not a picture Norman Rockwell could have painted.  Unless he did war zones.

My sister and I perhaps could have gotten along had we not been forced to share a room when my younger brother was born. I was nine at the time and she was three years younger.  My brothers each got their own room.  We were shoved in together, despite our vehement protests because both of us knew we’d never get along; and in our childhood we never did.  (Plus, may I mention that the room we were jammed into didn’t have heat.  This was discovered only after we had both grown up and left.  So the room was frigid and so was our relationship.)

Kindness was in very short supply in our household, not to mention love, but while my sister suffered, she suffered less than Joe or I because she was “fragile,” as my parents liked to think.  She was as healthy as the rest of us; and, since we never saw a doctor for anything except immunizations, that’s pretty damn healthy.

Ellen was much prettier than I was, taller, thinner, blonder.  I was built like a peasant, short, spreading hips, thick thighs meant to work the potato fields.  “Seventeen” magazine was a big part of my life back then, and my one dream was to own a Pendleton skirt with all those pleats.  I couldn’t do it because the pleats opened.  My sister looked perfect in Pendleton.

Not all our time together was horrible.  There were the two weeks of Girl  Scout camp every summer, when we were away from the hot house of home.  When we were picked up from Girl Scout camp, we headed up to Oneida for our summer of freedom, Ellen to play with Gussie and me with the wild bunch of Artie, Joe and Jeanie.  There was also that wonderful time in Paris, just before my freshman year in college.  We stayed in a hotel away from our parents, went out and got drunk on vin ordinaire.  Ah, good times.

I went to college, she went to college.  Despite being accepted elsewhere, I was forced to go to the University of Michigan because my parents went there and insisted it was the right place for me.  It definitely was not.  It was way too large, and the first two years were taken up with large lecture classes, where you never met your professor.  Ellen, much to my parents’ dismay, didn’t get into Michigan.  So they sent her to Marietta.  It occurs to me that all my siblings had the benefits of a private college education, while I was left to sink or swim among the masses.  Mainly, I sank.

Fast forward a few years.  I had married, Ellen was still looking—until she found someone.  My parents never particularly liked her choice, but then they didn’t like mine either.  Despite the fact that my husband was Jewish and from Israel, my mother insisted he was an Arab because he was born in Baghdad.  Fortunately, my husband couldn’t have cared less about my parents’ opinions about anything.  I only wish I had developed his cavalier attitude.  Constant criticism and fault-finding was par for the course for my mother.

Ellen was going to have a church wedding, as she was marrying a Catholic.  I made the assumption that, being her sister, I would be asked to be the matron of honor.  I wasn’t.  That’s when I knew how much she really hated me.

But time travels on and unravels feelings from the past.  At one point we were both living in Maryland within an hour or so of one another.  I had three kids by then, while she had twin girls and then had her tubes tied.  She informed me every time she left my house, she had a headache because my kids were so rowdy.  I thought they were quite normal, perhaps a bit rambunctious, while Ellen must have imposed a vow of silence on her daughters.

As we got older, Ellen and I started traveling together.   We both loved Snow Farm, our art week.  We took several Road Scholar trips together, and had a relatively good time, lots of laughs, especially when Ellen plugged in the hair dryer at this one motel and knocked out the entire power grid.  

Now where are we in life?  Our parents are dead, our brother is dead, Ellen is a widow and my husband has a brain bleed.  We email every day.  She cleans. I don’t.  She shops.  I don’t.  My children have been through way too much with divorces and deaths.  Her twins never married, and they are her life.

So far, because of the pandemic, we haven’t traveled together, but we will.  And then we’ll discuss our favorite theme.  Ellen has said it best:  “Our parents should never have been allowed to have children.”