Chapter Six: Sisters I

1. Duo

When their mother died, Janice was only five. Rhoda, at ten, stepped in and assumed the maternal role, and for the rest of their lives Janice remained fiercely loyal. She was also, I think, somewhat dependent on her older sister. Every time our family relocated, Janice’s family followed within the year. They continued to live within walking distance until, at the age of 78, Janice’s physical condition forced her to leave Florida to live in New York with her daughter Amy. Though terrified of technology to the point of phobia, Janice learned just enough about using a cell phone so she could call Rhoda once or twice a day. Neither of them could bear being so far apart, and at the time of my mother’s death they were hatching a plan to share a room in a senior home near my brother’s new house.

In family lore, the story of the sisters Rhoda and Janice begins with their mother’s death. Thanks to my grandfather, a tyrannical old-school patriarch, I know nothing of what came before then: he told my mother and aunt, “You are never to speak of her again.” Not only did they obey him, but for the rest of their lives they never questioned his orders.

Rhoda and Janice may have modeled a romantic version of sisterhood, but beneath the surface lurked complexities no different from those in my relationship with Linda—only they, true to their time, ignored whatever threatened to clash with the ideal. By the time I was an adult I could clearly see the conflicts they pretended weren’t there. The most obvious of these was that my mother felt responsible for Janice’s well-being, and resented her for it.

For as long as I can remember, I knew—it was common knowledge—that my mother felt caged by her circumstances, that she was dying for some kind of freedom. I put a feminist spin on it, assuming it was my father and we kids who weighed my mother down. Since her death I’ve come to see her situation as far more complex than stereotypical housewife angst: she’d borne the role of mother, at least emotionally, since childhood.

When I was a teenager I read a chilling novel about an “old maid,” The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. When I finished it I was overwhelmed with terror that I might never marry, that I’d end up a dried out, pathetic old prune like the book’s protagonist. I wandered into the kitchen where my mother was cooking dinner and wailed, “What If I never get married?” My mother looked up from the stove, startled. She saw the book in my hand and gave a little laugh. “Just give me the chance,” she blurted, her humor failing to entirely mask the intensity of her hunger. The incident entered the family lexicon as another Rhoda anecdote. Even my father laughed—though whether at my adolescent silliness or my mother’s heartfelt confession I’m still not sure.

She once told me that Jewish men made better husbands because “they’re more lenient.” I cringed at her choice of adjective. Lenient. It implied that all husbands ruled all wives, that the best a woman could do was choose a kind-hearted master. How could my strong independent-minded mother believe this, I wondered, and go on being married? How could she bear it? Fear of spinsterhood was a phase I quickly outgrew. Soon I was more afraid of its opposite.

When I asked my mother what life was like after her mother died, she claimed her mother’s absence was more than filled by the steady presence of maternal relatives. “I was perfectly fine,” she told me, “until SHE came along.” SHE was the woman my grandfather married within a year, a widow with four children of her own. Her name, in a cruel twist of irony, was Lily—which might be one reason her stepdaughters always referred to her as SHE, their tone implying the bold block lettering. As a child I would occasionally hear them talking about SHE, the wicked stepmother, or about their step-siblings—none of whom I ever met.

As the story goes, SHE showered her four biological children—three girls and a boy—with TLC, treating Rhoda and Janice like little Cinderellas. According to them, SHE never bought them new clothes, but made them wear her own daughters’ hand-me-downs, even if they fit badly. Her children never had to do any chores, while the stepdaughters toiled endlessly. According to Janice, SHE was open in her dislike, calling them names and talking nastily—which, come to think of it, would explain where my mother learned to talk to me the way she did.

Neither of them, I’ve just realized, ever said what, if anything, their father did about all this. Him they loved and feared. (Him I knew, and of him I could write a whole other book. Since I’m focusing on sisters here, Great Benny, as my niece dubbed him, will have to wait.)

When I think of the way the two of them presented their life story, as a classic fairy tale with a stepmother straight out of central casting, I can’t help but wonder if it was the unvarnished truth. I suppose it doesn’t matter: if that’s the way they perceived it, then that’s how they experienced it. Certainly much about my mother is explained by the fairy tale: her devotion to Janice, resentment of her children’s needs, her mean streak (actually it was a lot more than a streak). Janice could also be mean to her kids. but she was never, to my knowledge, half as sarcastic and nasty as Rhoda, and the way her kids feel about and treat her now confirms it. Maybe that’s because Janice actually received sustained maternal attention—from Rhoda. Maybe my mother was how she was because, by the time she had children, her well of maternal feeling was severely depleted.

Given their history, it must have hurt my mother that I would have preferred Aunt Janice as a mother. I openly adored her. She was everything my mother was not: affectionate, kind, genuinely interested in the things I talked about. My mother hated to cook; Aunt Janice not only liked it, but was an expert baker. Every year she made me a birthday cake with chocolate pudding inside, something I thought exotic and the exclusive purview of my aunt. She was fat most of her life and always trying to diet, but I thought she was beautiful, with her milky complexion and an upper lip that rounded gently where my mother’s spiked. My mother wore alarmingly red lipstick; Aunt Janice wore pastel pink. Deep lines formed around my mother’s mouth early on, a result of losing all her teeth at thirty; Janice’s face has yet to wrinkle. To a ten-year-old, these physical characteristics were equated with harshness in my mother, gentleness in my aunt. I only began to understand the complexities of their relationship around the same time I discovered pudding-cake recipes on every box of store-bought cake mix.

Despite the complexities, or maybe because of them, their love for one another was deep and genuine. Janice would have done anything for her big sister, literally anything. For her part, Rhoda could have endlessly exploited Janice, but as far as I can tell, her demands were fairly small. Janice laughingly remembers, as a child, playing outside with her friends and dropping everything to run to the store for Rhoda’s cigarettes. Her friends, she says, made fun of her for hopping to her sister’s command, but it never would have occurred to her to refuse.

By the time Rhoda died Janice had been a widow for six years; she told me that losing her sister was more devastating. She was in New York and couldn’t get to the funeral in Florida, and when I called, Amy said she was in bed and wouldn’t talk to anyone.

The wicked step-family story may have been exaggerated, seen as a fairy tale through the eyes of little girls. Janice’s few memories of Lily, distorted over time, are unreliable: she’s idealized her mother the way we tend to do with our dead. Still, there’s no denying their circumstances had an enormous influence on them. It’s well known that girls who lose their mothers young—motherless daughters—are forever self-defined by the loss. Thus, I cannot help wondering how different their lives might have been had Lily lived.

More to the point, how would my life have been different? I assume that, had my mother been sufficiently mothered, she would have been a more attentive, loving mother to me, which would have made a difference in who I was and the choices I made. The older I get, the more I view our personal stories in the context of history: generations of women, affected by the circumstances of the generations that came before. A simple twist of fate, an illness easily curable today, determined the lives not just of Rhoda and Janice, but of their children and their children’s children.

But not quite: More than once Linda and I have turned to each other in astonishment and asked, How did our daughters get to be Mothers of the Year? I don’t know how this miracle came about. I only know that not one of Rhoda’s five great-grandchildren has ever been belittled by his or her mother. They’ve never been called stupid, and never told to shut up. If there’s any hope to this story, this is it: The abuse stops here.

Two years into widowhood, Janice developed neuropathy as an effect of diabetes, which she’d had most of her life. From one day to the next, she couldn’t walk anymore. She’d barely recovered from the loss of the man she’d spent forty-something years with, so on top of the physical deterioration, she fell apart emotionally. She’d lie in bed day and night watching television, crying much of the time. You’d think Rhoda would have been distraught, and to a certain extent she was—but whatever pain she felt was covered by anger. She’d call me up to rant about everything Janice was, or, more often, was not doing, from not following the doctors’ orders to not taking advantage of free HBO to watch The Sopranos. She seemed to blame Janice for her illness.

I went down to the Sunshine State bearing a pile of books on self-healing. My mother stood at the foot of the bed where Janice lay passive and miserable, shouting non-stop. If Janice complained about not being able to stick to her diet, Rhoda would yell, “You have to!” When Janice said the pain medication made her too woozy, Rhoda sneered, “That’s just too bad!” I sat there feeling helpless with my useless books, instinctively wanting to defend my aunt—but, like her, I wasn’t about to overcome a lifetime of Rhoda’s domination just like that. Besides, it seemed like Janice didn’t actually mind being scolded; in fact, everything she said, and the way she said it, seemed designed to elicit Rhoda’s disapproval. As I observed their dynamics, I was struck by a jolt of recognition: Linda sometimes scolded me the same way.

Like our mother, Linda is highly disciplined. She’s been on a diet her whole life, quit smoking without a backward glance, and worked like a dog to save up for a now cushy retirement. I, on the other hand, cannot stick to a diet—I eat tons of sugar and carbs—I’ve repeatedly quit smoking and resumed again, and I walked off any job that didn’t suit me. If I complain to Linda, she inevitably sees every problem as a consequence of my behavior. Unlike Janice, I do mind being scolded—yet I too seem to invite it somehow. And not from Linda only; true to Freudian theory, I’m always cultivating friendships with people who love giving unsolicited advice and tell me what they think I should do.

If Linda and I lived closer to one another we’d be in big trouble; in fact, it was the advent of e-mail that did us in once and for all.

2. Triad (To Be Continued)