How to Be a Sister

a little giddy with the success of getting to the restaurant without mishap. Margaret’s routine had been interrupted, and she was okay and seemed happy to be with me. That this feeling was short-lived didn’t make it any less sweet.
Margaret quickly ordered and drank a couple of Cokes. I tried to make small talk—you know, like you would when you are having lunch with your sister. It seemed like the normal thing to do, but then again, I’d been away from home so long that I tended to get my “normals” mixed up. I started asking her about what she had been doing lately. I knew she was training for the Washington State Special Olympics swimming competition, which meant she was spending a lot of time at the pool with her team and her coach. Although she loves to swim, she does not like to talk about swimming. She doesn’t like to talk much, period. And when Margaret is not in the mood to talk, she responds like she’s blindfolded and handcuffed, sitting under the harsh glare of a bare bulb in an interrogation room. Of course, I tried to converse with her anyway.
“Did you go to swimming practice this week?”
Silence.
“Margs, did you go to swimming practice this week?”
“Yes!” she barked, not looking at me.
“Who else was there?”
Silence.
“Margs, who else was at swimming practice with you?”
“Yes! You went to swimming practice!”
She gets her pronouns mixed up, which is not uncommon for someone with autism. She often says “you” when she means “I,” but I usually know what she is talking about. This time there was no ambiguity. She was saying, “Shut the fuck up and let me drink my Coke, for Chrissakes!” But I kept on trying, like an idiot.
“I like your haircut, Margs,” I said. “Who cut your hair? Did Sherry cut it?”
My mother, grandmother, and Margaret have all been getting their hair cut by Sherry for the last twenty-five years or so, and Margaret loves Sherry, but she didn’t bite. Instead, she swiveled her stool to the right, away from me, as if to say, “If I can’t see you, maybe you will go away!” I finally took the hint and shut up. I didn’t want to piss her off, because she might try to leave. Really. At that moment, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her get up and run out the door as if to say, “I’ve had enough of this crap!” I didn’t want her to feel like she had to leave. I also didn’t want her to have to defend her silence by chucking something across the room, like the stainless-steel napkin dispenser in front of us, or the ketchup bottle, or my water glass. I scanned the counter in front of us, imagining the possibilities.
What am I doing, anyway? I asked myself. Who is this chatty conversation for? She obviously didn’t want to talk, and I wasn’t going to get any information from her. She clearly didn’t want any from me. Maybe I was trying to make us seem more normal for the hungover café staff.
As stupid as that sounds, it’s probably the truth. I spent the first half of my life painfully self-conscious about what people thought of us and wanting to seem more normal. And here I was doing it again, thinking that we must look weird, that two grown women in their thirties don’t usually sit next to each other in complete silence at a café. Unless they are fighting. Or really hungover. But I’d also been thinking a lot about giving up on “usually” and “normal,” so I shut up and just sat there drinking my Coke.
Perched on her stool, Margaret seemed happy and quiet after I finally stopped talking to her. She spread the fingers of her right hand and laid them out on the counter in front of her. She pressed all five digits into the Formica, then subtracted one so that she was pressing four, then three, then two, then the thumb went and there was just the index finger. Then she added them back in: one, two, three, four, five. She chuckled to herself as she did it again.
We sat. The griddle popped and spat grease. The fry basket gurgled, the cook moaned, the soda fountain kicked out Margaret’s third Coke. Campy music poured out of small speakers mounted around the room. The fan whirred overhead.
“Hi, Eileen,” Margaret said brightly after a while, as if we had not been sitting there in silence for ten minutes.
“Hi, Margs,” I said calmly, as if I had not just traveled sixteen hundred miles to take her out to lunch.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi, Margs,” I said.
Another silent minute passed.
“That’s Bobby Darrin,” she said.
And sure enough, when I paused to listen, the buttery tones of Bobby Darrin came crooning out of the corner speaker. Just one file of the thousands in my sister’s mental archive of musicians and lyrics that spans decades. I remembered back when she was our house DJ, spinning records during all waking hours, forming the soundtrack of our childhood. Bobby Darrin was a favorite, as were the songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops, and the Electric Light Orchestra. One might hear “Hold on Tight to Your Dreams” on the heels of “What’s the Buzz” or “I’m Coming to Get You in a Taxi, Honey.”
“Yes, that’s right, Margs. That’s Bobby Darrin.”
“That’s Bobby Darrin, Eileen.”
“Yep. That’s Bobby Darrin, Margs.”
We listened together. “Oh, Louie Miller, he disappeared, babe! After drawin’ out all his hard-earned cash. And now MacHeath spends just like a sailor. Could it be our boy’s done something rash?”
“Bobby Darrin,” Margaret whispered to herself and laughed quietly.
Then all of a sudden she said, “Hi, there!” and she smiled at me. Right at me. Not looking sideways and then yanking her eyes back down to the counter like before. Her lovely hazel eyes looked right into my face. She smiled, as if welcoming me. “Hi, Eileen!” she said, like I’d just arrived,