To me, the difference between us is pretty obvious. She thinks the
opposite of fire is water, and I think the opposite of fire is no fire.

(Mary Kate Olsen, on being mistaken for her sister)

And there it is, her smile that is also your smile.

(Marlene)

-

One day, I blinked into awareness. I don't remember this day, but if I did, I would probably remember a hardwood floor. I would probably remember the slightly dusty smell that all my family carries in our skin and our sweat, the smell of old houses, cut grass, toasted bread and Jergen's lotion rubbed into the skin seven or eight hours earlier.

I don't remember this day, but I know she was there, because she was always there. She would have had to be, because there was nothing else for either of us to do much of the time instead of be together, so we were.

I took her existence for granted. I never thought about it, never contemplated what not having a sister would be like. I know that I never envied people without sisters. I remember the pressure of the long bones of her forearms under mine when I hugged her, usually twice or three times in a row, short bursts of affection, the way I drummed on her back absentmindedly while she bent over the sink, brushing her teeth.

We were both awkward cakes from the bakery of the Lord, to steal a phrase. We had to learn from other people about why we were weird, the ways in which each of us wasn't good enough. I liked her fine the way she was even though she also kind of drove me crazy, being flittery and naive and painfully earnest and most obnoxiously of all, always, always taller than me. She took my pushiness, my territorialism, my endless lists in stride.

Hundreds of thousands of hours I've spent gradually growing up with her, but none of them really prepared me for becoming an adult alongside her. I didn't and still don't know how to do it. I don't remember how young I was when I noticed she was a little different from our peers, but I was very young. She was too open, too willing to say whatever came to her mind. Deeply hurt when she was left behind or forgotten. She didn't quite fit in, quite find her group. She was taller and somewhat nicer and less crafty than everyone else. Worst of all, she wasn't good at pretending that nothing mattered to her.

Take care of your sister, Mom or Dad would tell me regularly with a meaningful look, and they never had to explain to me what they meant. I am suspicious of people, always have been, and I sensed even then that Anne was not safe in the same way, that she wouldn't hide her needs the way I did, and this made me protective of her in a way I can only describe as feral.

Sisterhood sounds so cozy. I imagine people who don't have sisters, or haven't had or been them for very long, think of pillow fights. Hair braiding. Something to do with beads.

Sisterhood is like someone tied you to another flailing child and then threw you both off the deck of a ship. Then, twenty years later, they hoist you ashore as you vomit salt water, blood running in rivulets down your ankles and wrists, and ask you why you've always been so preoccupied by her wellbeing. Why you don't have better boundaries.

Sisterhood is like being in a gladiatorial ring, back to back, surrounded by wild animals, and after you slaughter everything in the vicinity with teeth and nails and hair you slowly turn around, realize there is one more thing in the ring with teeth and nails and hair, and that the crowd is chanting. Sisterhood is realizing that you want her to save you and for her to be the one that survives at the same time.

So far, there have been no beads.

Are you close to your sister? someone asked me the other day, their lips already curved into an anticipatory smile. I wanted to say, Of course. My wrist is tied to her goddamn ankle. How much closer can you get? Isn't it enough that neither of us has drowned yet? It was all I could do to not take this innocent woman by the neck and shake her, yelling, What do you want from me?

The term crops up in strange places. In carpentry, you reinforce a joist, or rafter, or stud by placing another one alongside it. The sister stud reinforces the one that has been broken or is bowed under weight it can't hold.

Why did they call it a sister? Would a brother stud just make a move on your girlfriend while you buckled under the weight? Why the pressure, the assumption that a sister would do anything about it?

Two stars in a mutual orbit are sister stars. They never touch, but they never leave, each her own inferno in the dead silence of space. Unable to leave or stay, they just watch from either end of an unbridgeable distance.

What if your sister gradually becomes more and more different, and you do too? It's then that you turn to her one day and feel the same way you must have felt at the very beginning, just as the static began to subside, and thought, Who is this person?

Sister ships. Built with the same plans, but sent on different voyages. The Titanic had two sisters. The Britannic sank too, but the majestic Olympic didn't. Did the Olympic miss them, at the end of her long life, as she was torn apart in a salvage yard? Did she feel tied to them still, like she failed her siblings, to have gone on without them? Or was she just grateful to be the one that lasted long enough to see more than the underbelly of the world?

The word sister itself. One of the oldest in any language, its root word recognizable in almost every Indo-European language. At its root, it means one's own woman. One's own woman. What does that mean exactly, though? Whose woman is whose? This is not a hypothetical question.

When she hurts, you hurt. You can't stop it. It invades your dreams, stokes your anger, but you can't protect anyone in any meaningful sense and after a certain point, it's wrong to try, you always do the wrong thing, it's never as simple as you think it's going to be, and it's impossible to deny the rage you have when you realize she (perhaps taking a healthier approach) does not feel obligated to do the same for you. She doesn't owe me anything. She didn't ask to be tied to me either. We came into this world dumb, blind ships, with the same blueprint but different paths altogether.

A former friend once bragged that she was an empath, someone who acutely felt the pain of others as her own. The moment she said it, I knew it couldn't be true. No one who knows what that feels like would brag about it. It's the sort of thing that haunts you, the sort of thing you say in tears to a therapist, want with all your heart to be freed from, not pat yourself on the back for. It doesn't feel healthy. It feels like being out of control, like things will always happen to you via her that you can't solve or fix, that your only contribution is to suffer, that you're not even allowed your anger, which grows ever darker and more terrible against your helplessness.

I remember when my sister was just out of grad school and living in Texas while looking for her first job. I was still in nursing school, so for a few months it was like some backwards version of our childhood years, both of us living with our parents, but always Anne's simmering anxiety about getting out as soon as possible hanging over the house. I remember that winter when she called me a bitch, the first time either of us had ever used that word against each other. I was absolutely being a jerk at the time, but I heard my heart crack anyway and remember feeling the stakes rise. We weren't eight anymore. We could do real damage at twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, things neither of us imagined as children, things neither of us knew how to put back together.

A few months later, I helped drive her up to Colorado. One of the worst blizzards I've seen started as we entered New Mexico. I thought we might wreck my car, my car that was no longer my car because I was leaving it with her, then flying back to Texas. Then I stopped worrying about wrecking whoever's car it was and just worried that we would get stuck in the rising snow drifts and freeze to death, in New Mexico of all places, which would destroy my soul along with my body.

I remember once we finally made it to Denver, she needed to get some furniture out of storage. I remember trying to force her enormous couch frame through the door of her new apartment. It was just me and her and a bemused landlord. It was freezing, I was leaving the next day, all I could think was I have got to get this goddamned couch through this door frame. My whole existence narrowed down to that one thing.

I was filled with this wordless emotion, I don't know what it is, other than I associate it with my sister. It's a sort of secondhand panic, mixed with deep love and a rush of adrenaline- I can help, this is something I can do- and a high whine of resentment. For so many years there has always been a crisis, always a thing she needs more than any other thing and can't get, unless. Unless I help her get it. I feel the ferocity of my love for her and the fury of her never having whatever it is that she wants all at the same time, and I am eight again and grinding my teeth over the boy who bullies her on the bus, fourteen again, worried about how she doesn't know what table to sit at during lunch.

Big bad Kate, she called me once, a way to put me in my place, show me how she knew I wanted to be respected, to be taken seriously, but so often my bravado was overblown and out of place. I responded that she was an ass, proving her point. There was nothing else I could really say, because I know all about the contempt you hold in your heart towards your sibling. You see the gulf between the way they desperately want to be seen and the way they actually are in a way no one else does. You can wield this knowledge, weaponize it in a way that causes tremendous damage. You can protect their vulnerability or you can exploit it.

You can't make her sad, the voice in my head says, but I always do. Take care of your sister.

She told me that I didn't have to worry about her, almost a year ago. She was sleeping on my dining room floor. She'd been unemployed for almost a year. At the time, my love and my fury at her had almost canceled each other out, leaving me with a blankness that exhausted and terrified me. What could I say back to her? Okay. Good idea. 

What I mostly wanted to say was I have never not worried about you. That's not exactly my fault, and it's not exactly her fault, but we have both suffered for it anyway.

But what I wanted to say most of all was Do you ever worry about me?

I don't remember what I did say.

How do you need someone less, so you can love them better?

Sisterhood is the deepest intimacy I have ever known. It's not at all like marriage, where you choose someone, an adult who you know and love and trust, and negotiate a life partnership together. In marriage, you love someone but you don't own their failures, their weaknesses, their sadness.

I never negotiated a life partnership with my sister. We did not meet as adults. We never chose each other. The similarities in our voices, our faces, our gestures are a trap, one that I fall for as often as anyone else does. We enjoy each other, but we are not alike almost at all, something that becomes more and more pronounced as we age. This is not right or wrong but it is damn confusing.

All siblings have a contract. It can be longer or shorter, more or less detailed, but they're all the same in that they predate words or compassion or intelligence or any frontal lobe activity at all. It's not in writing, since it was formed before we could write. It's not anything at all, not stored in a specific memory, not spoken.

If I had to recite ours, it would go something like this: I know what your skin smells like in the morning. You are lying right now but would be embarrassed if I pointed it out. Now you think this person is stupid but you are being kind to them in a tired sort of way. Now you are lying but you would not be embarrassed if I pointed it out. You are being loud because you want attention from that person and you are hoping he overhears you. Now you are just being loud because you really are that excited about that squirrel on the sidewalk.

It's not any more profound than that. I don't truly know what is going on inside her head, but her instincts and impulses are an old second language of mine. I'm not fluent anymore, but I know enough to find the bathroom. It's the sort of thing you know when you've spent the beginning of a lifetime around someone before they got good at editing what they were thinking or feeling, pretending to be the person they think they're supposed to be.

She had night terrors a few times. She crawled into bed with me, and we left the light on so she didn't have to be afraid.

I bit her once. Probably (definitely) more than once, but the time I remember best was when I was in kindergarten. I was pretending to be a dinosaur and she told me I wasn't one, and I had to pull out the big guns lest my bluff was called. What I didn't tell her was that part of being a younger sister is that you kind of always want to bite your older sister. It's so overwhelming to feel everything you feel for her.

This hasn't changed at all with time. Not one iota. I felt that same feeling rising in my throat when she called me a bitch, when I jammed my shoulder against that stupid couch, every time she has hurt me, every time she has needed me. It propels me forward when I want to run away. Maybe she has that for me too, or maybe it's something altogether different. I'll never know for sure.

We walked into adulthood with an arrogance that doesn't amuse me now, expecting to always be close, to always be good. We weren't well equipped with the knowledge about what to do if we didn't grow into those particular versions of ourselves. We just knew we would succeed, would be the best, so we didn't think to work out how.

We didn't bother to contemplate how to adapt to betrayals, or worse, to plain old indifference. We didn't have a plan for unreasonable expectations, for the relationship-destroying assumption that the other would always be there no matter what and so it didn't matter what we did to them. Or just when we simply both decided that we had better things to do, relationships that were easier, more straightforward, more rewarding to us, and turned to tend to those.

Sisterhood is no guarantee of safety, the way I always thought it was. It's another way to get hurt in an endlessly inventive world. Is it so wrong to say that this is different from what I imagined?

That it is exhausting to be captured in orbit, raw from the unrelenting storm on each other's surfaces? Women chained and underwater?  You are never free from your own sister. Even if she died tomorrow, I would dream about her, have conversations in my head with her for the rest of my life. This, more than anything else, has given me a healthy respect for the decision over whether to have children, knowing that I would be creating more inextricable links to the deepest parts of me, the parts I just can't fix by myself.

In so many ways, we are poorly matched. This is no partnership lovingly negotiated. This is two wild cards, two witnesses, two women who only happened to come dripping ashore on the same stretch of bank from some mysterious and unknowable river. If only another few moments had passed, it would have been someone else.

All the quotes I could find about sisterhood were, frankly, stupid. God made us sisters, our hearts made us friends and all that nonsense, as reductive as a Disney version of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. I see sisterhood in Snow White's own mother hungering after her organs, the little mermaid stumbling on bleeding feet, mute and desperate to be loved, every bit as much as I see it in brighter stories of renewal.

The only quote that felt right was from one of the Olsen twins, but still I disagree with her and her sister. The opposite of fire is not no fire at all. It's not water.

The opposite of fire is ash, the one thing that can't burn any longer. One is the fire, and the other is the thing that was left when there was nothing else to burn. The trick of sisterhood is that you never know which one of you is which.

I love her as I love myself. Not in the gentler way I love a good friend, or my husband, or a child. I love her as I love myself, with all the complexity that implies, which means I love her and am furious at her, think she is enough and want her to be better, want her to be fulfilled and happy but, ridiculously, am angry at her for the times she has handicapped her own joy and punish her for this, thereby draining her happiness and fulfillment. Anyone could stand at a distance and harp on how that's unhealthy- and they do- but what I need is for someone who understands these things in her bones to come to me and show me how to do this.

How to let her go. How to need her less and love her better. How to forgive us both for in the end just trying to save ourselves. For not understanding that sisterhood, like family in general, is about leaving as much as it is about loving, endlessly bound in a cycle.

When we were small, we would wake up early in the morning. We crept past our parent's bedroom, to the end of the hall, where Anne would wordlessly get down on all fours and I would step onto her back, pushing the deadbolt with the very tip of my finger until it slid out of place. We opened the door, walked into the dining room. Pushed two chairs together, opened the blinds that covered the glass doors facing the backyard.

Anne crawled up into one of the chairs, and we were so young that I remember she had to help pull me up into the second. And together, without saying anything at all, we would watch the sun rise.

It's such an old memory that by now, it's blurred and bent. One day, I know, it will just be the memory of the memory. But for now, I can still feel the door frame under my small hands as I braced myself, wobbling, and stretched as far as I could, the chilled metal just against one fingertip. I remember how white the morning light always looked, already promising the heat that would soon follow on another West Texas day.

But what I remember the most is her presence next to me, the warmth rising off her body, the downy hair on her knobby legs, the pressure of her shoulder against my arm. The fact that this silent ritual, our witnessing of the sun, would never had happened if we weren't both there, me slipping the lock out of joint, her pulling me up beside her. That we saw something we never would have seen unless we were there together to find it.

Is that the oldest contract of all? Not that we promise to protect each other, to show up for each other, or even to understand each other. Not that we promise to not hurt each other. But that our accidental beginning together, just by rising up out of the river one after the other, we made an extra dimension of life possible. We see things, know things that we couldn't have seen or known otherwise.

Maybe that's what being a sister to another person is, at its deepest essence- not fire, not ash, but a third thing, something I don't yet know the name of. Something blending a window and a witness and a pathway. A way to see the sun rise when otherwise you would have just slept. Someone who witnessed you, walked with you, even if she didn't understand what she was seeing or where you were both going. A presence beside you in the predawn darkness. Nothing more.

Nothing less.