Adventures in Sisterhood; Part One

I have two sisters. My youngest sister is 6 years younger than me, and sadly, due to our age difference, we are not as close as I would like. As a child, she was widely regarded as a “handful” by friends, family and caregivers. I think today she would be labeled “Spirited”. My Diminutive One reminds me very much of the way my sister was as a child. Full of beans, smart as all get out, but completely unaware of just how special they are.

This past weekend I was speaking to my other sister about her, and afterwards I was thinking about how we interacted as children. We weren’t mean to her (most of the time). But as older sibling tend to do, we manipulated her to suit our whims and do our bidding, used her as a plaything and a scapegoat, and ignored her when we had more important things to do than amuse ourselves by tormenting her.

There is one story that has become a fond and often told tale in our family folklore. It recounts how my father, when left in charge of us one Saturday morning while my mother went to work, suddenly found himself short one daughter.

My Dad was a blue collar worker all of his life. He worked long hard hours for a barely adequate paycheck. Understandably, when Saturdays rolled around, he wasn’t inclined to do much of anything except indulge in an intimate relationship with the couch and the television. Sometimes, we would join him on the couch, happily soaking up such brain blighting fare as Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Starsky and Hutch, Mannix, and Kung Fu Theatre.

But sometimes, we left my Dad to his soporific entertainment, and went in search of more stimulating activity. We usually found it, because back then, kids knew how to play. We would spend hours constructing villages out of our Playskool sets, or setting up a house for our Barbies with that lovely blow-up furniture that was supposed to make us feel better about not having the Dreamhouse or the Corvette. Or, we’d make up our own plays and create elaborate costumes and sets to act them out. We had an enormous sandbox and we often spent entire afternoons in there with our many gerbils, digging tunnels and creating mazes for them. SIGH. Those were idyllic days.

On the rare occasions that we couldn’t seem to find anything to amuse ourselves, we usually resorted to finding new and interesting ways to exploit Baby Sister, who was always eager and accommodating. I remember sandwiching her between two vomit green vinyl beanbags and sending her careening down the urine yellow carpeted stairs. Our childhood home was a two-story turn of the century craftsman style behemoth, and the stairs were steep and treacherous.

A perfect place to play, in other words. Naturally, decided to send Baby Sister on a test run.

We held our breaths as the S.S Beanbag crested the top step and then gasped with horror and amazement as it tipped over and shot down far faster than we had anticipated. Our hearts leapt into our throats when she crashed into the coat closet at the foot of the steps with bone jarring force. We sat looking at one another in stunned silence. Surely we had killed her. Middle Sister’s eyes began to fill with tears and her lower lip began to tremble.

“Is she….?”

The d word, she meant. We were going to 9 year old jail and we both knew it. The thought of gruel and sack dresses and sock darning made my own eyes water.

“No stupid she isn’t dead!” I said, with far more certainty than I felt.

Suddenly Baby sister emerged disheveled and red faced, but definitely, wondrously, obligingly….not dead.

“Adain!” she cried, clapping her chubby hands with glee.

So we got a reprieve from 9 year old jail, but the wisdom that such an opportunity should impart, is often wasted on the young and invincible. We had many more such exploits, and amazingly, we still made it to adulthood relatively unscathed.

This particular day, Baby sister was eventually found standing quietly in the tub with the shower curtain drawn; hands folded over her little belly and looking for all the world like an apple cheeked friar. Further investigation revealed that her beatific stance was due to the fact that her hands were firmly cemented together with Mom’s oatmeal and honey face mask, the remainder of which was smeared on every visible surface in the bathroom. It had dried thoroughly leaving her quite stuck and quite helpless.

My dad ran a bath and put her in, hoping the warm water would eventually penetrate the mask and free her. It took some soaking, but finally her hands were freed from their glutinous prison.

The supposition is that she, being somewhat inclined to borrow trouble, had gotten into the face mask and had a grand old time creating satisfying peaks and whorls with the obligingly glutinous substance. Ostensibly, at some point, she realized she was going to get into Big Trouble, and climbed in the shower to hide, whereupon her hands dried together.

It’s a pretty solid theory given the evidence, but Middle Sister and I know better.