Essay: Sarah Renner and Elizabeth Lopez
I Will Tell Elizabeth This
Glamour wants to know what makes me me.* Glamour is having an essay contest and they want me, in 4000 words or less, to tell them about a life-changing or defining moment that illustrates who I am as a woman. Sure, I am a girl, a female, technically a woman: menstruation did begin, much to my chagrin, and continues once monthly to this day. I have two protruding mammary glands. But still, I am not entirely certain Glamour is talking to me.
My little sister reads Glamour. She’s the one who told me about the contest. I am confident Sarah reads Glamour online because she cannot afford the subscription. She just finished college, has bills, and is only about to enter the professional job market. She and her partner, Julio, have a beautiful two year old daughter, Elizabeth Marie. Elizabeth has made it obvious to her parents that in order to survive she needs food and any product bearing the likeness of Dora the Explorer. Sarah is also beautiful, striking really—she has hazel eyes and long blond hair with highlights; she is thin and has good skin. Sarah is sweet and bashfully intelligent but fiery when necessary and really what I would think Glamour would like their readers to be like. She is a Glamour role model.
Sarah is younger than me, which puts her currently at 23 years old. When she first came along I felt like I had my life pretty much in order. I was a six year old with an intense sense of priorities. I had a mom that spent lots of time with me, just me, playing and teaching me neat stuff: how to comb my hair, how to cross the monkey bars, how to tie my shoes and whatnot. I had a gramma whose lap I could crawl up into on the porch swing and count airplanes with in the summer night sky. I was a curious child and, wait, no, scratch that...I was a selfish and needy child. There are audio tapes to prove my temperamental nature. There is one especially embarrassing moment when, as a sniffling and congested five year old, I am asked to recite nursery rhymes for the family. I refuse. My aunt retaliates, “Oh, you’re a stinker. Wouldn’t it be neat when you grow up to hear yourself talking when you were little?” Yes, damnit, that would be neat, if only I would stop acting like a little brat. Give it to her, Cathy, I find myself thinking, teach that kid some manners. My toddler self, insolent and stubborn, still refuses to speak. “Talk damnit!” I yell at the tape player. Finally, and only after being told I could have my Rubik’s cube back, did I speak. That’s right, I was that kid. I was the only child just long enough to pick up greedy, only child habits, but then required to relinquish such habits once Sarah showed up. Before her I was utterly content to monopolize my mother’s and grandmother’s time. So when my ma placed my infant sister into my arms, all wiggling and warm, well, I thought she was fascinating but I just couldn’t see how we were going to have time for her. We would no doubt find some family of roaming cats to take her; she yowled quite a bit so I was sure she’d fit in. But my mother and grandmother somehow managed to fit her into my schedule instead.
Although I was raised, for the most part, by women, I managed to turn into a boy at a very young age. When we were kids I played with GI Joes while Sarah would fidget with Barbies, trying fruitlessly to get their shirts to cover their enormous bosoms. I liked to get dirty and clumsily chase footballs or baseballs or basketballs in the street with the tribe of tiny men in our neighborhood while my sister painted her nails and flipped gingerly through magazines with the NSYNC boys staring bashfully back up at her. Sarah did come out for hide and seek and had fun playing tag but from a very early age it was obvious to me that my sister and I were not going to be the sisters displayed on Hallmark greeting cards or the ones who gave each other makeovers. I did once allow my sister to put make-up on me. It was her Christmas present a few years back; I refused to leave the bathroom, allowed no flash photography, and washed it off before any witnesses could regale me with shocked proclamations of “Oh, you look so different,” or “Oh you’re so beautiful,” as though I had just come out of months of facial reconstructive surgery following an all-consuming house fire.
Sibling children seem to concentrate on how to become autonomous beings before cherishing the relationship they have to each other; perhaps especially when they are of the same sex but gendered so differently. My mother never forced us into specific roles; my sister gravitated towards frilly white dresses and became desirous of all the Disney Princess series had to offer while I looked increasingly like a very small, very young version of my grandfather: flannel shirts, corduroys, Lee jeans and baseball caps were my “fashions” of choice. The same year I was an army soldier for Halloween my sister was a bride.
Of course I loved my sister as much as I would have never admitted it, but for the most part that love was displayed in one of two ways: tolerance or protection. I tolerated her presence as she tagged behind my friends and me when we walked to the playground or when we went to the corner store to buy candy and play video games. And while I had absolutely no problem bossing her around or pushing her off the couch, I became the fierce protector the moment any other kid in the neighborhood picked on her. It’s the dual nature of sororital ties: she may be a bratty little sister, but she’s my bratty little sister, and the only person who’s going to bully her is me. And while I might sometimes begrudgingly have cherished the fact that I did have a younger sibling, I also relished my position in relation to her, that of being six years the senior and out weighing her by about 30 pounds as a child. That weight no woman would want to outweigh her sibling by in adulthood really came in handy as a kid. For example, during one wedgie gone horribly amuck, I was able to come up behind her while she was playing Nintendo and give her a wedgie so severe I (accidentally) ripped her underwear right off her. Imagine the scene with me for a moment: I stand behind her, utterly stunned at how well the wedgie worked, a blood-thirsty savage, tattered underwear in my raised hand like a missionary’s scalp, while Sarah lies wailing on the floor in the fetal position. When my mother reached the bottom of the stairs in the hallway and saw this scene, her immediate response to me, “What did you do?!” was met with an incredulous and automatic, “Nothing!” Maybe I should have tried to at least lower my hand or hide the underwear before such a blatantly false protestation of innocence.
While I type this, I think back to how much of a dragoon I was and am embarrassed. Now when I see all those pictures of us in Halloween costumes, at picnics, in front of the Christmas tree, I feel nostalgic, not annoyed. I wish, as I’m sure many other older siblings do, that I could go back for one day and actually enjoy my little sister’s company. But of course we can’t, we get the one chance at childhood and it’s gone while we’re complaining about how little freedom we enjoy. If we only knew that was the most freedom we would ever have.
One picture of my sister in particular conjures in me a deep emotion, one I am not familiar with in regards to her. It is a picture, not of us as children, but of her a year and a half ago. In it she and my niece are at Navy Pier in Chicago standing in front of a Holiday display. Elizabeth is terrified; Santa is a few feet behind her, corporeal, and ho-ho-hoing at the top of his lungs. She cannot take her eyes off him and I am certain (according to the look of abject horror on her face and her tiny white knuckles clinging to the collar of my sister’s shirt) she believes the moment she focuses on something else he will snatch her from the arms of her unsuspecting mother and unhinge his jaw to feast. Poor little Elizabeth will be devoured whole in front of the family while roaming carolers sing “Let it Snow” and unflinching patrons continue to sip their five dollar ciders. Sarah, meanwhile, is more optimistic concerning Santa’s urges and is smiling at the camera. What Elizabeth does not know is that Sarah will sit on Santa’s lap with her to bear the brunt of his holiday wrath of joy and good tidings. Sarah will stay awake with her many nights through cutting teeth and scary dreams. Sarah will catch her from falling off the monkey bars and stop her from running manically, car keys in hand, towards the nearest electrical outlet. If I were a betting person I would take odds that Sarah has gone to at least one of her classes with vomit in her pocket. When I remember this picture of Sarah holding Elizabeth out of harm’s way I am reminded how selfless my sister is. I am reminded how, like the many other mothers in my life, she would do anything to spare her child. It is this Sarah that I know as an adult, and the emotion this image of her and her child inspires in me, unlike so many pictures of us as children, is appreciation. No, not for the various fluids she will have to wipe off of or collect from the orifices on my niece’s body, but because she has managed to grow into a truly inspiring person. Sarah has become, seemingly overnight, a wonderful adult. Initially this was very troublesome for me.
This emotional transformation, from annoyance to appreciation, probably began sometime around the birth of my niece, but I have an inkling it was forming under the surface of things quite a while before that. Much like the process of puberty, Sarah exhibited external behaviors that alerted the outside world to changes occurring inside her body. But this time it wasn’t just her complexion staging a coup or the molding of hips onto her otherwise straight frame, these changes were deeper; they were psychological and they affected both of us. The most startling change in my sister that I noticed was also the most endearing. Sarah somehow managed to grow a sense of humor. She was funny, and in a way not unlike me. First you should know I am incredibly funny; really I am. In fact I have made more than ten adults with fully functioning urinary tracts and complete control over their bladders pee themselves in public, even if only a teaspoon full. In front of said adults I now call that measurement a “peespoon.” So to hear my sister crack jokes at times when previously she would have been silent, in a manner not unfamiliar, well, shucks, I was flattered. Once, when Sarah started making fun of my dad’s small frame (“maybe he should shop for belts in the little boy’s section, or we could go out to the garage and get a piece of rope”) I could hear myself in her. It was Sarah’s quip, she had come up with it, but I could hear my intonation, my sarcasm. She had not just copied me, not tried to imitate me—she had learned something from me. And for the first time I didn’t mind. I was pleased; hell, I was proud (especially because now we could gang up on Dad). It made me feel close to her in a way I didn’t know I wanted to be. It made me feel like her big sister.
The night my niece was born I had been in Iowa for the previous three years, finishing my bachelors’ degree. I was at a friend’s house when my phone rang. It was my mother. Her voice was shaking, “Sarah just called—her water broke,” that’s all she gets out before she begins crying. “Pull it together Ma,” I respond sternly, “Sarah needs you now,” I bark at her. Then I feel bad, why did I speak to her like that? She is about to become a grandmother for the first time; of course she’s going to cry—she’s happy and nervous and excited and I’m sure all kinds of other things she doesn’t deserve to get yelled at for. But this is how I am in situations where I may show emotion, specifically if it entails crying in front of others: I become overly aggressive to keep myself from doing exactly what is natural, human, and what everyone else is doing. If I am around others who are crying, for one reason or another, I yell at them as though I can make them stop crying. As I’m sure you can imagine this tactic usually backfires. I calm down and stop being a tyrant. “Where is she now?” I ask. Mom snivels and says, “Julio is driving her to the hospital; your dad and I are meeting them there.” I tell my mom to call me when she has news. I know it will not be more than three hours, even though this is my sister’s first pregnancy. When the women in my family are in child labor, it is what I imagine a woman would be like if you could load and cock her like a gun. The bullet is out of the barrel quicker than the trigger returns to its resting position. In this case, the bullet is my niece.
Minutes later my phone rings again. This time it is my sister; she is in the car on the way to the hospital. I don’t remember what we said. I remember when she talked it sounded like she was holding her breath. Why don’t I remember what we said? Isn’t that important? Shouldn’t I be able to tell my niece about that when she gets older? ...when you were born your mother called me and we said... Said what? Well Elizabeth, we talked about the weather while your father wondered if he would have to replace the interior in his Mustang. I can’t tell her that. So what, then, can I tell her?
My mother called 45 minutes after our initial conversation. Her words were punctuated by the sound of crying: a baby scream in the background, a yowl from lungs so small they could rest on the head of a Daisy. I’ve heard daisies represent innocence, gentleness, purity—all the things a good baby should be. My grandmother, the first Elizabeth Marie, had daisies throughout her yard and I couldn’t help but think of her at that moment. My niece and my grandmother just missed each other: Elizabeth made her entrance into this world a month after her great-grandmother made her exit. Through writing this I see now that it matters little that I cannot remember what Sarah and I talked about while she was in the car on the way to the hospital. It matters more that I tell Elizabeth about her great-grandmother. It matters more that I tell her about her mother and I as children. And it may matter most that I tell her the way to a really successful wedgie is through a higher center of gravity.
*This essay was originally written for a Glamour magazine essay contest in 2008.
ER
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What stories do you have of growing up with your siblings? Tell us one!
