Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 191

You guys,

My older sister called me. Again. 

We don’t typically speak on the phone but she’d been calling a lot lately. I kept waiting for her to ask for some information. Surely she needed something. But all I got was, “So how are things with you?” 

Alexis and I are 17 months apart and shared a bedroom until she left for college. She preferred to sleep in pitch blackness while I was afraid of the dark. We argued nightly over how much to leave the door open “just a crack” so that light could spill in the tiniest bit from the hallway. Alexis preferred to listen to music as she fell asleep while I preferred silence. She played the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack for twelve months straight and fell asleep by Gavin Friday’s Angel. I listened all the way to the You & Me Song, which was somehow louder than any other track on the album, then continued my ceiling staring late into the night. 

It was decided early on—but never spoken—that we would not share friends. I referred to anyone in the grade ahead of me as “my sister’s grade” and we mostly stayed out of each other’s way, unless we were playing field hockey, and even then our coach kept us on opposite sides of the field. 

In our 20s she made comments that would stay with me for years: 

“Not everyone needs to be the center of attention, Charlie.”

“You can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t get paid. If you don’t get paid it’s just a hobby.”

“My biggest fear is that you’ll write a book one day, and you’ll write things about me that aren’t true.” 

These were the bubbles in my head whenever I thought of Alexis. I never talked to her about them and never planned to. I just held onto them, used them to justify our lack of a relationship. 

But she kept calling. She kept checking in. She kept asking how I was, until one day I thought, Maybe I should tell Alexis how I feel.

Often when she calls, one or both of us has a toddler with us. Alexis had her daughter six months after my son was born so we hit parenthood at the same time. Today she called and we were both, magically, kid-less. Alexis spoke for 20 minutes about this and that, then asked how things were going with me. I said, “Actually, there is something I wanted to talk to you about…” 

“...Char? Are you there?”

I was there. But I couldn’t speak without crying so I said nothing. This whole cry-when-I-initiate-a-hard-conversation thing was becoming a pattern. Finally it came out of me, unscripted yet planned for years. 

I rattled off the quotes in my head about her, then she pulled her pistol and fired back something I’d once said to her, from moments I’d long forgotten. Alexis, it turned out, had her own bubbles in her head when she thought of me. 

Years ago when I first wrote a blog, Alexis went through a breakup from a guy she had dated for 12 years. She called me, sad, and just wanted to talk. When she finished speaking I said, “That would make such a good opening for a blog post.” 

In an actual blog post, I wrote that Alexis’ boyfriend had cheated on her, and that she would have cheated on him given the opportunity. After that, she told me she never would have cheated, ever, and I was not to write about her anymore without her permission. 

It seemed, all these years, I only remembered the ways in which I had been the injured party. So I closed myself off, avoided confrontation, and my bubbles solidified into giant highway billboards until they were all I could see of my sister. But Alexis had been injured, too. 

We both made apologies. We both defended ourselves. We listened. We vented. We agreed to have more conversations like this one.

But I can’t help but wonder as I write this, would Alexis feel misrepresented by what I’ve written here? Would she wonder why I can’t just leave her out of my stories? Would she tell me she did not listen to the Romeo & Juliet soundtrack for twelve months straight and then argue with me about creative liberties??

I don’t know, but at some point, before I publish a book and share what I’ve written with my family, I’m going to find out.

—

Until next week,

Charlie