I’m never quite sure what to say about my sister Cathie. A year and a half my junior, she has been in my shadow all her life--the younger sister, not as bright as the other, the rumor went, but a cute, flirty thing who needed to be coddled like a favorite pet. Unfortunately for those who knew her best, she was not defanged, and she was often as much a source of pain as a source of joy. Since she moved away from me 4 years ago, she has become her own person. No longer is Cathie thought of as just “Eve’s Darling Little Sister” by well-meaning but clueless adults. In one sense I suppose I’m happy for her and her more comfortable personality. But on an entirely different level, I miss the lessons she used to teach me; I miss what we both lost when she left, including our close camaraderie and the strange sisterhood we invented for ourselves.
Cathie was called Dawn when I knew her well--a lifetime ago, it seems. She was Dawn with a capital D: everything about her commanded attention. Dawn was an accomplished manipulator at age 3, when she commanded every second of my newly-divorced mother’s time. It was on my sister’s account that my brother, Paul, and I missed the beginning of kindergarten and pre-school by several minutes nearly every morning. Dawn managed to capture the attention of a patrol car one frosty morn, when she, a fever-ridden brat, crawled to the ajar front door from her nursery in the next room and posted herself, screaming, on the seedy front porch of our rented house. My harried mother returned a few minutes later to find an angry policeman holding an angrier toddler. There were countless other incidents throughout my childhood when I just knew that Social Services would arrive any minute to take us away from Mommy, all because of Dawn and her stupid temper tantrums. Sure enough, Paul and I loved her like a sister, but we weren’t about to let her take our Mommy away from us. We had lost too much at that point already; the divorce of our parents was a fresh wound on our souls. I suppose this was the point at which we began to call her what she was--”brat” was about as vile a name as we could conjure at that time--and tease her. It was a cruel thing, to be sure, but we didn’t trust her much after that. I learned to be cynical about the actions of most human beings at this age, thanks to my sister.
The rest of my childhood was spent going back and forth between sibling camps. Often I was on Paul’s side, bullying Dawn for every nasty, manipulative thing she had done that day until she cried. Then I was her comforter, knowing compassion at last, trying to make amends. My reasons varied: I was sorry for what I’d done; I thought Paul was too hard on her; but most of the time, I wanted to stay out of trouble. She could get me into trouble easily. One crocodile tear from one of those big hazel-green eyes, and my grandmother was after me about bothering my “poor little sister.” Ha! If my grandmother had ever figured out who caused half the trouble among us three kids, Dawn would not have been in such good favor with her.
Dawn taught me more than I would ever teach her. As we got older, she was the first kissed, the first liar, the first to climb a tree, the first to pull all the dangerous stunts. If she had accompanied those who had climbed Mount Everest “because it was there,” she would have led the expedition. The tiny girl with long, unkempt chestnut hair would stand astride the mountain, freckles dotting her cheeks like spots of dirt sticking defiantly to her hands after a mud-pie baking session, and she would thrust a flag into the cold mountain, declaring, “I claim this land for Dawn!” She was dynamic, a fearless pixie. She taught me many life lessons, but the most important was not to be afraid.
In fact, there was only one thing, I think, that she really feared, even though she thrived on both good and bad attention. This attention was from my brother. They never got along well. She was a pesky younger sister-brat; he was a brooding, dour meanie who fussed and fumed at slight motivation. (What a fun combination for little me in the middle!) As the years passed, minor arguments between us turned into fights, and it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt. Dawn began most fights, teasing our brother and laughing at him. Paul became angry, screaming at her, shoving, and eventually punching her until her hysterical laughter turned to tears. I never came between them, except when I feared for Dawn’s physical safety. My mother was always working to keep us fed and clothed at these times, and a relatively colder, more uncaring grandmother always yelled from her post in front of the TV screen for us to quiet down, or else. “Or else what,” I often thought, as I threw Paul out of the room (sometimes bodily) and put my sister in her bed with a cold washcloth over her head. The violence never approached abuse, but the tension between them got to me after a while. I loved them both. I cared especially for Dawn and her impishness and curiosity, but I wished she hadn’t tortured my brother, who may never be free from the pain of our parents’ divorce. I never liked to see her hurt, but it taught me never to take sides in a war which nobody would ever win.
Middle school approached, and I became melancholy. Dawn, my standard of normality in those days, was becoming interested in boys. I had the word on the street that she was officially “cute” among our male acquaintances. I’d known that for years, but it wasn’t until then that I realized that Dawn was, pretty much, “normal,” and I wasn’t. She cared about who liked so-and-so, going to the basketball game, wearing cute clothes, and finding out the mysteries of makeup. I, on the other hand, thought Shakespeare was the greatest thing since sliced bread, considered all boys but one to be incomparably icky, and spent class time with my nose buried in books or with my eyes tracing the trees outside. I decided, based on Dawn’s standards, that I was not “normal,” and retreated behind a veil of quietness for four years. Dawn and her boyfriend, my best friend and her boyfriend, my best friend’s boyfriend’s sister and her boyfriend, and I all went down to the cemetery one day. The three presumably “normal” couples had a kissing contest next to the tombstone of the aunt Dawn and I never knew, her namesake, Aunt Donna Catherine. So while I meditated on the moral implications of the contest and on the meaning of death itself, she chewed on a piece of grass between rounds and talked with an easy grace to our friends.
Graceful, fun, full of life--I never knew how much I would miss her until she left. The summer preceding my foray into high school, she announced her intent of moving in with my father. She also asked us to call her Cathie; it was her first name, she would use it from then on, and there was nothing we could do about it.
My freshman year--the one I so fondly refer to as my “year in Hell”--was my first as a virtual only child. With Cathie went Paul; both were tired of my intelligence infusing teachers with the hope that my siblings would be extreme overachievers too. My smartness, I theorize, came somewhat in part from all those darn books I read when I decided I wasn’t normal; also, my siblings talked so much during my youth, I was almost reading before I began to speak full sentences. Anyway, the important thing was, I was deprived of my sister, my secret sharer. Now I had no one to tell about my latest crush; I could not tell her of my romantic attachment to the 1968 movie “Romeo and Juliet;” my friends and Cathie’s friends never came over to see me, mostly because I wasn’t confident enough to invite them over and just let things happen. Cathie wasn’t there to set me in motion.
When she came back, she was a stranger in many ways. She wore “preppy” clothes and talked with a marked Southern accent. However, I was almost relieved to have a little Dawn back one weekend when I discovered she had stolen $10 out of my purse.
She returned for two years after my 9th grade fiasco. She was a fully developed, mature being now, but that didn’t tamp down her previous traits. She was spontaneously sweet at times, but her main moods were angry, brooding, sullen, jealous, and contemptuous. Most of her anger was towards Mother, who had formed a formidable bond with her only remaining child over the course of that year. Cathie often chid her for “playing favorites” and did all she could to distress her. Notable moments from this era include “Atheist Week,” “I’ll Love You If You Buy Me A Dress Day,” and “I Hate You Forever.” I associate this time with the smells of Cathie’s morning makeup routine, my nagging her to get up and get ready for school, the shunning of her older, “square” sister, and eventually our only common bond: hatred of our chemistry class. We became friends again, but it wasn’t quite the same. We were on equal footing now; I was a mere mortal, she was no longer a goddess, and we knew each other’s old secrets but none of the new. I felt we lost a bit of childhood when I couldn’t even tell her who my latest crush was.
She moved again at the start of this year and underwent a complete transformation. She has either hidden or gotten rid of her vices lately; I have not seen her much in this past year, but what I’ve seen has impressed me. Yet, it saddens me, too. She is now a caged bird, under the restraint of her life under our father, our stepmother, and her renewed Christianity. I have taken her lessons and applied them variously to my life. But I’m not close to my teacher anymore. Soon I’ll be off to college, and what of our sisterhood then? We’ll keep in touch, and she’ll always be my sister; she is settled into her new life, but at the gain of safety, reform, and security, she has had her wings clipped. No longer a bold, fiery Dawn, rising every morning to cause the world a bit more trouble, she is now a tame, sedate Cathie. I have lost a sister, gained her back, but is the change for good or bad? Some lessons are best taught by the example of a fearless pixie-sister. Sometimes, though, the cost of knowledge is the friendship of someone you love.