How to Be a Sister

two angry cats, and my spouse, Brendan, who insisted on playing his guitar in the truck cab, so I had to drive for thirteen hundred miles with one hand guarding the right side of my head. Now we all lived in Oregon, a mere five hours from my childhood home. I was nearer to the family tree, but not much closer to figuring out what I was supposed to do about Margaret.
She was on my mind a lot that first year, even at the most unlikely times, like when I was supposed to be working. Jobs were scarce in the beautiful little tourist town I moved to, so I took any kind of work I could get, including teaching English to migrant fruit pickers and working in a brownie factory, although I was trained for neither. I also wrote some stories for the local newspaper. They asked me to do a couple of features for the bridal guide, the kind of pieces that the regular staff would refuse to do, the kind of story I had balked at when I was a salaried newspaper person myself. But as the new freelancer in town, I was grateful to be working at all. So I knew I should be paying attention to my assignment instead of letting my mind wander to my big sister. But I just couldn’t help myself. She ran amok in my imagination, just as she had in my life.
As I worked my way through the interviews for the bridal stories, one wedding planner made a really big impression on me with her kind of no-bullshit approach to putting on the Big White Dress Show. She was very tall, blonde, and had that kind of Germanic competence that made me believe she was capable of just about anything. If the bridal party got caught in traffic, she could pick up the limo with one hand and wade to safety. That’s the impression Teresa made. Maybe that’s why I found myself dying to ask her the most inappropriate questions during our interview.
The topic of my story was second weddings, and we had kind of wandered into the territory of difficult relatives. I found myself wanting to ask, “So what would you do, then, after seating the ex-stepmother-in-law of the bride, I mean, and somebody started, I don’t know, running around the church and singing or something? Or what if somebody started laughing really hard during the vows? A guest, I mean. An adult. How would you handle that?”
I really did want to know the answers. Teresa seemed like she might be the one person who could help me sort out what had happened in my own past. Hashing things out with her might be a kind of bridal morbidity and mortality session, like what hospitals have to assess why people died. Although it wouldn’t change what had already happened, I was comforted by the thought that somebody else might have known how to handle things. In the end, however, I figured this line of questioning could kill the flow of the interview, so I didn’t ask.
I thought about my own wedding, years before. It was hard to believe that I was no longer in my twenties, but back then it was harder for me to believe that I’d ever get married at all. I was shocked by the fact that I liked anyone enough to spend seven days a week with him without wanting to do him bodily harm. I’m not the most patient person, and this was, after all, a man who borrowed my toothbrush, lost my apartment keys, frequently stepped on me as he was crossing a room, elbowed me in the face every time he put on his seat belt, locked me out of the apartment for hours at a time, or, alternatively, left my apartment door wide open when he left so that any of the junkies in my building could have let themselves in to make a sandwich or smoke some crack. This was Brendan—generally an hour late for everything while I was fifteen minutes early. Somehow, it seemed, we belonged together.
Like many young people, I hadn’t given much thought to the marriage part of things. I figured that would take care of itself. I had more important things on my mind. I was worried about the wedding, the cake, my sister, and her autism. And not necessarily in that order.
MARGARET WOULD APPEAR to love weddings. She shows great enthusiasm whenever the topic comes up. But the truth is, Margaret loves wedding cake. To her, the entire affair—the invitations, the fancy clothes, the sacred vows, the touching family photos, the lavish banquet, the general hullabaloo—is meaningless, tiresome filler. She focuses her energies completely upon that magic moment during the reception when the lovely couple finally cuts the goddamn cake and lets everyone else have a piece. Nothing wrong with that, is there? The trouble is, everything that happens before the fork hits the plate doesn’t interest her much. It’s downtime, really. A tedious waiting period most often filled, depending on her mood, with laughter or tears, and not the quiet, happy, wedding kind.
When we were growing up, I don’t recall that Margaret made a scene at anyone’s wedding reception. Which isn’t to claim that she didn’t make any memorable fuss. It’s just that by that point in the evening she had so much competition that it’s likely any outburst might have gone unnoticed. Irish Catholic receptions are really just one big scene, after all—a big drinking, fighting, dancing scene. More than once I heard my grandmother say on the way to the car after one of these high-energy, boozy affairs, “Oh, wasn’t that lovely! And nobody fell down.” Her parents owned a tavern after (and during) Prohibition, which is one reason she didn’t drink until she was almost seventy; this woman has seen it all, so she knows what she is talking about.
But wedding ceremonies, even for rowdy Irish Catholics