Sister:: Part One.

I took a memoir writing class my senior year, thinking it would be simple to write about my childhood.  In retrospect, that was stupid.  It was incredibly challenging and emotional.  Obviously.  However, it was also amazing and wonderful.  It was a dozen college kids helping one another shape their stories into something other people can read and relate to. It was pretty unique.  It was magical.  So, Shap, thanks for forcing us to bend our stories into classic story structure, and thanks for all of your truly constructive criticism. 

Here's the first part of my memoir, titled Sister. I wrote it from the perspective of a hyperactive, imaginative, precocious child who was trying to reconcile her intellectual gifts with her need to be a kid. Which is to say, I wrote as myself, at five.  Do me a favor, for my pride as a writer, note that the voice in this particular story is not the voice of Rachel C. Esteban, Bachelor of Arts. No no, it is the voice of a five year old. Or, what I was like as a five year old, properly exaggerated for dramatic effect (but less exaggerated than I'd like to admit). A lot of it, as you might expect, is about being the five year old big sister of a brave boy battling childhood leukemia.  I can tell you now, it ends happily. He lives. And so does she. Not, really, until she's 23 and finally truly on her own. But she lives.

Just Like the Movies

J.J. fell off the swing.

“MOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!” I screamed.  In an uncharacteristically brave moment, I jumped off of my own swing to rush to his aid--only to find that my baby brother had already gotten up, and was taking off at a run towards the slide.  A modified run, I should say.  Playing in the backyard in winter was a special treat which we had spent hours convincing our mother to allow, but it meant that our running was more of a trudging, and falling off the swing meant landing in a snowdrift.  

As the oldest child, about four months away from turning five, I took on my younger brother’s personal safety as my most important responsibility.  My parents were nice, but they weren’t as observant as I sometimes wished they would be.  

“Everything okay?” Mom said while leaning out the back door casually, used to my noisy reactions.  She had the baby on one hip, and he was of course making a sour face at me for interrupting what I’m sure was a very stimulating episode of Barney.  Tony always made sour faces at me.  

“J.J. fell off the swing. But he’s okay, Mom.”

“Okay Mom!” J.J. echoed.  There wasn’t much that could take this kid down.  Three years younger than me, his limited verbal skills were already mostly used to make me stop worrying.  

 “Okay, five more minutes guys.  I’m setting the timer,” she replied.  Timers seemed, to me at least, a bit mysterious. What were the consequences of ignoring them? The one she called the "egg timer" gave me pause in particular. Would something--something unpleasant, of course--hatch when it went off?

Making the most of the time we had left, we hastily piled as much snow as we could about a foot from the bottom of the ice-covered slide, and spent a couple of minutes flying down at lightning speed like we were training for the kindergarten bobsled team.   

When we went in, Mom had laid out hot chocolate for us in the living room, and because we had missed Barney, she put on the Charlie Brown Christmas special for us.  It distracted us while she moved back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, making dinner.  I took out Dance’n’Twirl Barbie, put her on the floor, and watched her sparkly pink dress spin while Tony and J.J. watched the show.  J.J., or Julio the Fourth, was usually just repeating what other people said when he talked, so at times like this I liked to give him some practice conversation.

    “J.J., what is your favorite Charlie Brown character?” I ventured, in my best teacher-voice.
  “Linus,” he replied, in his best toddler voice.  Well of course, Linus.  Both Linus and J.J. had security blankets.  J.J’s was a source of some stress for me.  I lived in fear of what would happen if it were ever lost.  I had no idea what the consequences of a lost blanket were, but I had no intention of finding out. I always knew where it was.  My grandmother had cross-stitched little clowns on it, as well as his name and birth date.  We all had matching ones, though mine had lambs and baby chickens, and my middle name was spelled wrong on it.

“Which is your favorite girl one?” A much trickier question for a two year old boy.  More brutish male toddlers would of course refuse to name a favorite girl character.  J.J. was only two, but I was already preparing him for a future in which women would ask him questions that were meant to test him on unrelated topics. Best that he understand the world the way it really was.

“Peppermint Patty,” he said, without breaking eye contact with the television.  This, I assumed, was because she coached the softball team.  I knew that Lucy was his least favorite, because she was the bossy big sister, and he always laughed when bad things happened to her.  I should probably have seen a connection between Lucy and myself.  However, she was bossy for fun.  I was bossy because the world was a dangerous place.

J.J. had curled up in a little ball with the corner of his blanket in his mouth.  He was beginning to wear away the satin trim, and he had long since turned it from snowy white to dragged-all-over-the-ground-gray.  The ground was his favorite place to curl up, on Tony’s new play rug.  It was a big, flat teddy bear with a giant head that played lullabies.  It was pretty creepy, actually.   It was meant for babies to nap on, but J.J. had the sniffles again, so mom let him use it.  He had gotten a cold from playing outside too much, of course, and was waiting very patiently for mom to bring him a bowl of chicken noodle soup. He was always getting a cold back then.  He was also always patient.   

“Here you go, J. Sit up if you’re going to eat, please,” Mom said as she put a placemat down on the floor in front of him, and put his soup bowl on it.  He sat up on the weird bear rug, and started to eat his soup peacefully enough, but after a minute or so he put down his spoon and started to cry very, very loudly. 

 “MOM! MOM! MOM!” I shouted, in case J.J’s wailing had failed to attract her attention.  She darted into the living room from the kitchen just in time to see J.J. clutch at his right ear and fling himself onto the bear, upsetting his soup and a cup of juice that I had been working on.  His ear, again.  I knew what was coming next.  Mom would get the bright pink hot water bottle, and he would lie on it while we watched a more somber Charlie Brown special that would better suit his melancholy. Perhaps the one where they go to Europe and see Flanders Fields and Linus remarks on the losses of war.  That one was my favorite.  I held out hope that once I was done with kindergarten, I too would be allowed to take unsupervised trips to Normandy.

We watched that tape (apparently it was called What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?) and another few, also Charlie Brown.  This had become something of a tradition.  Even Tony, at one year old, seemed to genuinely enjoy the Charlie Brown specials.  We finished out the afternoon that way, watching those specials straight up to bedtime.  Dad came home from work at some point, and told us that the TV was going to rot our brains. I must have looked alarmed.

“No, it won’t, Rachel.  Julio, why would you say that? She’s going to make us get her an aluminum helmet or something.  Now go take a shower,” Mom snapped back at Dad.  He was a truck driver, and after a sixteen hour shift, he was a little disgusting.  He stomped back to the bathroom in his heavy steel-toed boots.  Those things made so much noise, it was incredible.

I knew that when I heard the sink turn on, that he was using his special truck driver soap.  It was orange, with bits of volcanic rock in it.  I had read all about volcanic rocks, and so sometimes when Dad washed up, he let me use his “pumice” hand soap, too.  It scrubbed all the motor oil and grub off of his hands.  Truckers have to know how to fix their trucks, you know.  So they get lots of motor oil on them.

Dad washed up, and changed into pajamas and socks.  He was much less stompy that way.  He picked up the baby and took him into the kitchen to prepare the spaghetti sauce.  Dad’s spaghetti sauce was awesome, so that night, because we wanted it, mom made the pasta and the garlic bread while dad was at work.  That way, when he got home, he would only have to make the sauce.  Tony didn’t ever mind going into the kitchen with Dad and Mom when it was time to make pasta sauce.  Dad had noticed that Tony stared a little while he made it, so now he had decided to teach him to cook.  It was never too early to learn.

We ate in the living room, because it was just easier than trying to get J.J. to sit at the table with an ear ache.  This meant that Mom and Dad would talk the whole time we were watching TV and make it impossible to enjoy it.  While Mom and Dad fussed about J.J.’s ears always being infected and his new tendency to run a temperature, we watched Why, Charlie Brown, Why? which, while a favorite, is arguably the most disturbing of the Charles Shultz cartoons.

Linus, being the social butterfly of the Linus/Charlie duo, befriends this little blonde girl named Janice, who gets sick.  Later, you find out that she has cancer, and won’t be able to go to school because the chemotherapy makes her feel awful.  It was really sad to watch, but Snoopy pretended to be a doctor and snuck around the hospital, which was cool.  Also, Janice had really pretty long hair, and looked a little bit like a princess, until the chemo made it fall out.  Then she got an awesome hat.  So I liked it.  

I had begun, at this point, to see TV as a very good educational tool.  Not only was it full of handsome princes (and a high number of them that was unrepresentative of the general population) but it also offered me tons of science facts that my parents didn’t know.  This tape was a favorite for that very reason.  It had all kinds of medical info.  

“I remember that day in school when she said she wasn't feeling well. I remember touching her forehead and feeling how warm she was,” Linus said to his bratty sister Lucy.  

Instinctively, I reached over and felt J.J.’s head.  It was it’s current usual just-slightly-too-warm.  I ran through the other symptoms from the episode in my head.  Bruises, did J.J. have any bruises? Well of course he did, his shins were covered in spots. And not just those spots, these weird little tiny red dots, too.  But we weren’t doing anything particularly bruisey lately.  These were just from playing around on our swingset, and I didn’t have any bruises like that, even though I fell down too. I started to panic a bit.  What was happening on TV couldn’t possibly start to happen in real life.  There was a line that things like that didn’t cross.  Princesses aren’t always wandering around in tiaras in need of rescue, fish don’t talk, and kids don’t get cancer.

Try as I might, though, I couldn’t get it out of my head.  Mom and Dad were already talking between themselves about something else, probably the fact that J.J.’s birthday was coming up at the beginning of March and we’d have to have a huge, expensive family party.  I, however, was worrying about whether or not he’d have any hair at his birthday party.  And whether they’d have to stick him with needles.

As the tape ended, and Dad took it out of the VCR and put it into the corvette-shaped novelty tape re-winder on the coffee table, I decided to approach my parents with my concerns. That way, they could give me reasonable assurance that J.J. didn’t have a terrible disease.  They would give me irrefutable evidence that he was perfectly safe and healthy.

“Mom...Dad... I think J.J. has leukemia,” I said in my best grownup voice. Dad laughed a little and gave me his “aren’t you sweet and crazy” look, and Mom suggested to me that maybe I was just paranoid because of the movie.  However, I was not about to let her think I was making this up. Calling me crazy wasn’t going to make me feel any less worried.

“Momma. He’s got a fever all the time.  And those spots on his legs that won’t go away.  Just like Janice. Just like the movie. And he keeps getting sick. And his ears are always bursting.”  I gave her my reasons with a straight face, and was somewhat dismayed to see that, rather than continuing to look at me like I was a child, she started to look a little concerned.  She muttered something about how she was sure he was fine, but the next day when Dad was at work, I had to go with her to Dr. Kauffman’s office, and he took some of J.J.’s blood.  

“Well, Melinda, neither Rachel nor Linus have yet turned five, but if you’re worried, I can certainly have them do a blood smear. Better safe than sorry...he has been pretty sick.”  Dr. Kauffman was a stern, but sweet, doctor with bushy eyebrows and a long, narrow head.  His hair sorta stuck straight up, and intensified this effect.  He always smelled like a tongue depressor to me, which probably meant that he smelled a little bit like lumber.  Maybe he was building a boat or whittling or something in his spare time, but whenever I smell lumber, I think of Dr. Kauffman.  

“And how are you doing, big sister?  Worried about J.J. here?” he said to me with a patronizing smile.  Patronizing was one of my new twenty-five-cent words.  It meant that he was looking at me with a nice face, while thinking about how dumb and smallish I was.  I wasn’t on his good side lately, and suspected that this attentiveness was purely for show.  

Last time I was there, Dr. Kauffman had tried, yet again, to give me a shot.  He decided a new approach might soften me to the experience. Instead of having my mother forcibly hold me down while J.J. pointed and laughed, Dr. Kauffman just kept a firm grip on my shoulder and had me focus on a creepy painting of a clown.  The clown damaged my calm, apparently.  I panicked, and when I caught a sneaking glimpse of the enormous needle that he planned to stab into my tender arm, I knew I had to get away.  So I kicked Dr. Kauffman in the crotch, jumped off the table, and ran down the hall, screaming at the top of my lungs.  

Unlike his big sister, J.J. had no problem with needles.  When they took his blood he smiled bravely.  He straightened his back, like a knight in a movie, and told them it was “nooooo problem!” Meanwhile, I was a wreck.  Why on earth were they taking his blood?  What were they planning to do with it? Didn’t they Janice’s blood in the movie? I couldn’t remember. The whole experience was traveling down a road I didn’t like.

On the bright side, Dr. Kauffman always did right by us.  We got stuck with needles sometimes, but we always got better.  And J.J. obviously didn’t hate the needles like I did. Always my opposite,  J.J. was proud to not cry about shots, and he always got a special treat for being so calm and collected. Mom sometimes called him Joe Cool, like Snoopy, when he got shots.

We went home and J.J. wanted to watch Why, Charlie Brown, Why? again, because now he’d gotten stuck with a needle just like Janice.  He didn’t understand that it was bad to be like Janice.  Janice got sick and lost all her hair!  Did he want to lose his hair? I. don’t. think. so.  I could hardly stand to watch the movie, but Dad had gotten home and I didn’t really want to go hang out with him and Mom in the kitchen.  He stressed me out because he smelled like smoke that day, and I had recently found out that cigarettes could kill you by making you cough so much your lungs exploded.  

So I watched Janice lose her hair.  And I pictured J.J. bald as a cueball.  And the sweetest part of all of this was that I was only worried he’d lose his hair.  A few days later, Mom got a call from Dr. Kauffman, and I got to learn the words “pediatric oncologist” for the first time.  

“Mhmmm....I--...well, I...Yes...Alright, Mt. Sinai Hospital...They’ll be expecting us?...Thanks...um...very much.” My mother's eyebrows, thinner and lighter than the prominent Spanish brows I had inherited from my father, furrowed together in the middle of her face. I didn’t like that look at all.  

“Mom, what’s going on? Why are you talking about the hospital.  Don’t we usually go to Saint Joseph’s where we were born?” I was full of knowledge about my own birth.  Once I figured out that moms actually had to push the babies out of their stomachs (the doctors must cut a hole in their bellies or something to make THAT possible), I felt very indebted to my mother, and asked her to tell me about my birth whenever possible.  As a result, I had a great interest in the first building I ever entered--Saint Joseph’s Medical Center.  

Mom gave me kind of a funny look.  It would be easy to say that she was just worried, but I felt like she was looking right past me and into my brain.  She was very worried, I could tell, so I gave her a hug and asked her if she would like me to read her a story to make her feel better.  Perhaps because I had learned to read so early in my life, Mom always took a special delight in having me read to her.  She loved books like The Secret Garden and Heidi, which she had read as a little girl.  That day, we were in the middle of the Betsy-Tacy Treasury, a collection of books by a lady named Maud Hart Lovelace, which was about the coolest name I had ever heard.  

“It was difficult, later, to think of a time when Betsy and Tacy had not been friends,” I began.  But mom was still worrying with her hands and spinning her wedding ring on her finger.  When it was time for her to leave for work and the babysitter knocked on the door, I was a little relieved.  Mom was kind of wigging out.  Maybe she needed to go have a milkshake or a Slurpee.  Adults are always thirsty when they’re stressed, and needing drinks.  You’d think they’d remember to pack a juicebox or a thermos or something.

“AMYYYYYYY!!!!!” I shouted in genuine delight, and ran to the front door to let her in. Amy had been my babysitter since I was a tiny four-year-old.  She was sixteen, just like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, only without the red hair.  That made her the coolest person I knew.  She and her parents, Mr. Frank and Miss Nancy, lived across the street in the other yellow house on our block.  Our houses had matching stained-glass windows.  Amy was tall (from where I stood) and thin, with thick dark hair that looked just like my mom’s.  I had curls, but they had thick, shiny waves.  Amy had earned a special place in my tiny heart by watching The Little Mermaid with me about three hundred times, even though she hated it.  

“Hello Melinda, and hello miss Rachel!” she said, while trying to free herself from the vicelike grip I had around her legs.  

“Melinda, I just found out that I have to take my grandmother to mass tomorrow, so I can’t sit for Rachel...unless you want me to bring her along? Or my mom could probably take her.”

“Oh no, don’t worry about it.  Rachel can bring a book along to the hospital and just come with us.  It’ll be quick...I think.”  I could see that Mom was rearranging her schedule a little in her head so that she’d have time to get me from school early, in time for the appointment.  I lived around the corner from my elementary school, so Amy could usually just pick me up if Mom needed her to.

Amy and I had our usual fun.  Tony and J.J. only wanted to watch Barney and not do anything fun, so while the TV was on, Amy and I drew pictures.  I designed my wedding dress, in colored pencil.  It was a lavender dress with an empire waist.  There were teal accents at the sleeves, which came to medieval points at the top of my wrists.  Or at least, it was supposed to. It came out looking a bit like a purple nun’s habit.  My imagination had to fill in the blanks a little.

“So what’s going on with J.J. tomorrow?” Amy asked me.  As an unusually well informed child, I found that I was often a very good source of information for all of my secondary care givers.  The second time Amy babysat, I was stung by a bee.  I’m allergic, so I simply told her to call my mother to find out where the benadryl was, get me a glass of ice water, and let me lie down on the couch.  Then, of course, I became appropriately hysterical. Ever since then, Amy had a healthy respect for my ability to know things that a four year old shouldn't know.

“Well.  We watched Charlie Brown and I told Mom that J.J. had leukemia.  ‘Cause, you know, the girl in the episode had leukemia in her blood.  Mom took J.J. to Dr. Kauffman’s office and they stuck him and took out his blood to smear it on something which sounds gross.  And now we have to go to a hospital. But not Saint Joseph’s where we usually go because I was born there.”  When I got going, I sometimes got a little ahead of myself.  

            “Oh...” Amy trailed off and her eyebrows did that Mom thing. I supposed that adults didn’t watch enough TV to know that J.J. was going to be fine.  Amy put us to bed, and I made sure that, before I went to sleep, I had her put the Betsy Tacy Treasury in my backpack, so I could take it to school and then the hospital.