Sylvia hasn’t spoken to me in five years. Mother wishes we would patch things up before she dies, and God knows I’m willing, but Sylvia is very stubborn. Always has been. She clings to a grudge as if it were the last snack cake, that’s for sure. It is what she is probably best known for. That and her yearly family Christmas photo. Besides, Mother won't die. I've tried. She'll be around longer than Syl'Via, for sure, with all her problems.
When we were young, I remember Syl'Via once not talking to me for weeks because I’d cut her new dress into pieces to make work clothes for my Barbie.
“Barbie can’t muck out the horse stalls in a disco dress or ball gown! She needs clothes made from material that is common to the working class.” I explained.
Even then, as a child, things were so obvious to me. It frustrated me that Sylvia just cried, unwilling to listen to reason. She wailed, holding the torn remains of brightly patterned cotton in her grubby little fist. The leftover cloth could still be used for something. A handkerchief came to mind. I could not hear my own good explanation over Sylvia’s sobbing and snorting. She was hysterical. Like on television. So, I stabbed out one of her eyes with Barbie’s hard plastic leg.
“Kristin gets frustrated because she’s gifted,” Mother explained to Sylvia and the Doctor at the hospital, “Plenty of good people only have one eye.”
“Like Cyclops!” I added.
Mother smiled, impressed by my early knowledge of Greek Mythology. The doctor smiled also, but less at me, and he patted Sylvia’s leg.
Sylvia’s eye socket got infected and they ended up taking off part of her nose. Still she forgave me eventually. She wasn’t stupid, just average.
As we grew older, I liked to include Sylvia in things; things she was good at, like cleaning up after a party or driving me around; accepting blame. She wasn’t asked out much, because she was so hideous to look at. Her friends were mostly the fat kids and misfits; people who smelled strange and moved about in furtive clusters. They didn’t get together outside of school. Mother paid me to take her places,
“Sylvia will be so grateful for any attention she gets, Here...” she’d say, slipping me a $20. "for gas money."
'It’s not that ugly people don’t know the difference between good and bad attention, it’s that they don’t care.' I had that stenciled on a t-shirt for Sylvia when she was in Juvie for burning down part of the school so I could have a 3 day weekend. You’d think $20 worth of gas in those days would have gone farther.
“I wish ugly people would at least accept responsibility now and then for their actions,” Mother chided when Sylvia wanted to plead Not Guilty. “And say Thank You to your sister!”
Sylvia blew her nose on the t-shirt. Looking back now, it was probably the beginning of the end.
I forgive easily. Too easily, I suppose. I was very popular, of course. I’m gifted. I have all my birth organs. During our senior year, I got Sylvia a date for the prom. We laughed with her, not at her, as she’d later claim. We were laughing at Mr. Garcia, her date. English being his 2nd language, at best, he did not understand that it was an invitation and not a work order that he’d received. He showed up to the dance as he always did: in his janitor uniform with a toilet plunger and some vomit absorbing sawdust.
We gave Mr. Garcia and Sylvia the floor as the band played, “Always and Forever”….
The sawdust came in handy because several of us pissed ourselves.
Sylvia stopped driving me after this, stopped cleaning up. Completely. She moved in with her fat friend Kathy-with-Psoriasis for the summer and shortly after she left for college a half mile away. Community college because she was not gifted and so why waste the money. She got her associates degree in something or other.
Of course, being gifted, I went back east. Mother gave me the money she was saving to fix Sylvia's nose so that she didn't get ice cream headaches when it snowed. We agreed that Sylvia could continue to wear stocking masks and plug her face hole with bits of maxipad. I needed to be challenged. My future was very bright.
Somehow in my junior year Sylvia got married. She married a doctor. A neurologist. He was a little overweight, and Asian, but not bad. They bought a huge house on a sizable lake. Mother sent pictures, but I accidentally threw them out with some advertisements. I accidentally burned them. I inadvertently sent the charred burned photos and ads back with their wedding gift: A set of knives and a kitten. The kitten barely survived and it was ungratefully suggested that I shouldn’t have shipped a live animal across the country 3rd class ground, with a gram of cocaine up its ass. It was the drug sniffing dogs that caused the most damage, apparently.
When I found out that Sylvia was pregnant, I came home. Immediately. I pleaded with mother, I begged her almost handsome doctor husband: DO NOT LET A ONE-EYED, HALF NOSED WOMAN RAISE A CHILD! BEFORE ME!
“Maybe instead of the brain-damaged cat, she’d like a puppy!” I suggested.
“Don’t be silly,” mother said. "We're cat people!" Don’t be silly!
Sylvia got larger. Mother doted. “I’m going to be a Grandmother!” she told her friends. “The one-eye thing is not genetic!”
My grades suffered. Sylvia caused me to not be on the dean’s list that semester.
When the baby was born, Sylvia came home so that Mother could “help” for the first few weeks. She and the baby stayed in my old room because it was the biggest. I flew home and got a suite at a hotel downtown. On the 2nd or 3rd day, I visited Sylvia and the baby. Sylvia’s one eye shown with demented misguided pride over this helpless infant, who looked like WC Fields a few hours into detox. I’d brought her a puppy, which she just ignored. It was a registered pit bull, I pointed out, and his face was already scarred from fighting.
“Sort of like you! His name is Carl,” I told her, lifting the 50 pound dog onto the bed, “He’s not good with kids.”
He wasn’t. Not at all. Nor with Asians.
Still, in the end, the result was a truly symmetrical family photo.
