Worried Sisters

Our sister has always caused us grief. A dyspeptic baby; a nervous, accident-prone little girl, abnormally (so we, at least, thought, even if the doctor pooh-poohed this) sensitive to germs. Sneezing and hacking through every winter. (And where we lived winters were long.) Everything went into her mouth. Take your eyes off her one instant and she'd surely hang or choke or poison herself. Twice it ended in the emergency room. It was all we could do to pull her through childhood. Not a lovable child, but we loved her, of course: she was our sister.

As she grew bigger her problems grew too. She might have been a difficult, clumsy little girl, but at least she was happy. In her teens, she was never happy. The beauty of the family, to her own eyes she was grotesque. She tortured her hair till it began to fall out, tortured her blemishes so that they left tiny scars. She ate too much, and then too little. Grew fat, grew thin, but of course never thin enough. Once, she punched a mirror into shards. Tears at the drop of a hat. Rage at the merest suggestion of criticism. Countless absences from school. Not normal: this time, the doctor agreed. Now there would always be doctors in her life, and medications, new kinds of which kept coming on the market but none of which seemed to help.

She wanted to be an artist—but why put it that way? Were we out to destroy her? She didn't want to be an artist, she was an artist. And it was true that she won a full scholarship to art school, that soon after graduation she was awarded a prestigious young artist's prize. But after this, encouraging signs were few. We could see for ourselves what a hard life it was, especially for one as sensitive to rejection and failure as she was. How would our baby ever survive?

We tried to be supportive, turning the other cheek when she lashed out. We, with our ordinary lives and concerns—we who listened to the wrong bands and read the wrong books and made the mistake of calling paintings pictures—we could hardly be expected to understand her: nothing to do with blood. She often seemed just one long nose of disapproval. We confess that at times she scared us. In those days she affected a drastic look, always in black, her dyed black hair stiffened into porcupine-like quills that said back off, or we'll shoot. She accused us of not caring whether she became a famous artist or not—and what could we say since it was true?

Nobody was more selfish or narcissistic than the male artist, she always said. But that was the only kind of man she went for, and always so recklessly that when the relationship fell apart she fell apart too. And then it was just as it had been when she was a child: she had to be watched every minute.

When she turned forty she kept a promise she had made to herself at thirty: she gave up her studio and stopped making art. She took a job as a fundraiser for a small local museum. Though we would never have told her so, this change gave us hope. For the first time, she began dating someone who was not an egotistical young buck of an artist but a soft-spoken man a few years older than she, who worked for a company that sold office furniture. We could see how much our sister wanted things to work out. She tried not to compare her new boyfriend too much with the other more exciting men she had been with, and to temper her disdain for his job. But the thought that she had settled for this man out of fear that she couldn't do better tormented her. He had no conversation, and certain personal habits that had always annoyed her turned out to be more than she could bear. One day she found a nail clipper and a pile of dirty toenails...