It’s been really fun to have my sister here this week. I’ve had to work every day, of course, but she’s done her thing alone during the afternoons and she’s picked me up from work and we’ve had a very good time. She’s almost all the way through the Firefly DVDs (another convert, aha!) and has been getting along well with my housemates. She got a very cute haircut yesterday at my salon and we went to see bellydance last night with a random assortment of friends who ended up all liking each other very much. She says she’s going to start taking bellydance classes when she gets home to Miami and I have no doubt she will rock the dance community there.
It’s easy to be with her, much like it is to be with my mom when she comes to visit. I’m making her sleep on what we’ve taken to calling the dog bed instead of in my bed like I let Mom, but there’s the same sense of slumber party. She has a lot of product on my bathroom counter and she dresses very nicely; when she came to meet me for lunch the other day, her I’m-on-vacation outfit was more put together than my work outfit. Matching necklace and earrings and everything. She’s been enamored of the cool weather (mid-seventies today and she wore a sweatshirt to drive me to work, I’m not even kidding) and the pine trees and the friendly people and the relatively sane driving conditions, the water and the mountains. Tuesday after dinner we walked down to Cupcake Royale and she kept stopping to smell the air and touch the flowers and marvel at the Craftsman houses. “You don’t get this in the swamp,” she said. She and my mom have orchids like other people have geraniums but she stops and stares at what to me, after six years look like pretty ordinary flowers.
I don’t think I really look like either of my parents, but I do look like her. Sort of. She’s about five inches shorter than me and has long red hair, which I think she won’t mind my telling you comes from a bottle. She’s much paler than I am and has, inexplicably, blue eyes. Those details aside, I’m pretty sure when you look at us side by side you can tell we’re blood relatives. Yesterday when we were getting ready to go out we randomly put on the same type of outfit, and we discovered that we had the same shade of lipgloss as well. We used to get mistaken for each other on the phone all the time; I wrote a one-act play about her when I was seventeen or so and that was a main plot point, the similarity of our voices. That’s still there, and certain facial expressions and gestures we both make, that I’m sure we get from Mom. I guess I look more like her than anyone else on the planet.
I moved to California for college when she was sixteen and in some ways she’s stuck at that age for me forever. She ordered some sort of foofy drink last night at the Capitol Club and I had to work very hard not to raise my eyebrows at her for underage drinking, even though, hello, she was much more of a partier when she was a kid than I ever have been or ever will be and it’s her that should be concerned when I have a taste of her drink and immediately make an Eeeewwww face, because probably even that much is enough to make me tipsy. It doesn’t matter, I’m such an older sister. What’s been really strange is to hear her talk about her awesome boyfriend, whom I’ve never met. I can’t quite wrap my mind around the fact that she has a serious grownup relationship; she talks about trust and honesty and the importance of a shared sense of humor…all the things I talk about with other friends who are her age…and I remember driving around the Key in my old car, right before she got her learner’s permit, talking to her about how I wasn’t going to my prom and she’d already been to what felt like seven or eight proms. It’s amazing to me to talk to her like any other of my women friends, to think of her as a woman. She’s sixteen years old in my head but she’s so much more than that and this time together hasn’t really been enough to absorb all that.
She’s braver than me, that’s a main difference between us, back when she was a kid and now that she’s an adult. I have done everything correctly, by the book and on deadline, and managed to make terrible mistakes anyway without having quite enough fun making them. She hasn’t been as careful as I have been but from what I can tell she’s done most things on her own terms and hasn’t spent much of her life apologizing tentatively. We’re both caretakers but she is less tolerant of stupidity and non-commitment and underhandedness than I am. She’s certainly better at seeing stuff like that and putting a stop to it; she gets angry and she’ll let you know she’s angry and she’ll make the changes she wants to make with no excuses and no apologies. She does everything right out in the open, it seems to me, and although I know she has a shadow side as everyone does, she has decided to live her life in brightness, under the clean sun. I often wonder how she does it. I have a lot to learn from her.
She leaves tomorrow afternoon and because of scheduling and holidays with boyfriends and jobs and the three thousand miles separating us on our respective coasts I probably won’t see her again before 2006. I feel like I could spend the rest of the month, the rest of the year, the rest of multiple years getting to know her. I feel that way about a lot of people. You can never truly know someone because people are so complex and strange and wonderful, and it’s a full-time job to understand any one of them. You don’t get to do that, though, even with the people you love the most. You have to make the few days you have with them mean as much as possible, even if mostly you take walks and make dinner and go see bellydance and talk about boys at night before you fall asleep, because there just isn’t enough time, not ever enough time.