A History of Scars

“Fine, I’ll stop using the card,” my oldest sister told me, irritated, before hanging up.

* * *

When I was a teenager and my sisters were together, they used to play a game with me. Any time I would start speaking, one of them would cut me off. I would begin again, and the other of them would interrupt. I would keep trying to pick up the pieces of my story, and each time I did, another interruption would come, until finally I became so upset I was on the verge of tears. For some reason only I was susceptible to this game—I became visibly upset by being denied my voice, and that I could be so upset was what encouraged them to keep playing it. By the time they both relented, I no longer remembered what I’d meant to say in the first place.

My sisters and I used to play other games when we were gathered together, too. We crowded around our giant PC, to play the CD version of Jeopardy!, in which we would each pick a different computer key to buzz in and then type our answers. We played Scrabble, which, in our literary family, was held in higher regard than more arbitrary games like Monopoly or Life.

I remember the first time I won Scrabble, because I didn’t just win once—we played all night, my oldest sister determined to set things right by winning a game. We’d hung up a giant whiteboard above the wet-bar banister that divided our living room, and on it we tracked words in red and orange, words that had been challenged before being located in the dictionary. We stayed up, and I kept winning, time after time, proving my first win wasn’t a fluke. I’d proven my own mastery over vocabulary, over language. I’d won. Something had changed. I don’t remember ever playing again with my sisters, after that night.

I learned early that verbalization, the ability to speak, meant running up against someone else’s narrative. I came from a family in which one person winning meant another person losing. Within my family my voice always seemed to represent a threat.

* * *

In college, I spoke with my mother over the phone, much as my sister had done a decade earlier. My mother repeated the same question, over and over again: “When are you coming home?”

“I can’t come home, I’m in college,” I told her, before hanging up and drinking shots of cheap vodka from plastic jugs, as a release from the pressure valve of guilt and angst she unleashed in me, as a form of self-punishment. My mother’s only interest in these phone calls seemed to be hounding me about this question, implying my failure via absence. By “come home,” she didn’t mean come home to visit. She meant come home to live for good, and to take care of her, as she often told me.

In these phone calls, my mother told me other things, too, things that disturbed me because they simply weren’t true. Once she told me she remembered visiting the rock wall at which I worked. “It’s pyramid-shaped,” she told me. In another call she told me about how I’d been studying and living abroad in Prague, when I’d never been to the Czech Republic. In another call she’d decided I’d become engaged to the person I was dating at the time, which I decidedly hadn’t.

In reality I’d flown to college alone, with two suitcases’ worth of clothes, and she’d never visited me. The rock wall I worked at wasn’t pyramid-shaped, but flat. I’d signed up to study abroad in Spain, but because of the paperwork involved, I hadn’t been able to.

It was the particularity of her imaginings that both confused me and provided her with certainty. She was so convinced of the validity of her ideas, of her reality, she often made me doubt myself, as we debated back and forth whether her firmly held beliefs were true. I tried to convey the troublesome quality of these calls to my friends, but they didn’t understand why I became so upset. “So your mother thinks you got engaged when you didn’t,” a friend said. “Just tell her you didn’t, what’s the big deal?”

In isolation, perhaps any one instance of confusion might have seemed innocent. It was the sheer accumulation of tiny things that disturbed me. I tried, more importantly, to communicate my concerns to my oldest sister, whom I appealed to for assistance.

Because my mother herself had for so long feared getting Alzheimer’s, this disease was the one I’d long wondered if my mother was developing. Whenever I broached the subject, though, my oldest sister said, as though the statement were final, “But she’s too young.” She often delivered this verdict in her apartment, in the presence of her boyfriend at the time, who had a PhD in biology, and who concurred with her opinion.

Trying to sway her opinion felt a task insurmountable. She didn’t want to hear about my mother’s worrying behaviors. I’d given examples, but individually, my sister dismissed each one as explainable, as minor. In the presence of her skepticism, I failed to verbalize. I hadn’t enumerated all the many behaviors I’d seen from my mother that alarmed me. They were too numerous and too exhausting to catalogue, partially because I had only vague ideas of what normal behavior from a mother might look like. Presenting such behaviors to an unwilling audience held little appeal, particularly when I was only beginning to sort out the mess of my childhood.

My mother had been diagnosed, at some point, with a mild cognitive impairment, and my oldest sister was unwilling to believe anything more serious was wrong. I witnessed more than I was capable of enunciating. Had I been able to enunciate it all, it would’ve been more than my oldest sister would’ve been capable of hearing. She simply didn’t want to hear me, or to entertain ideas that she believed impossible.

My mother was finally diagnosed as I was turning twenty-one, a few months after I had graduated college, and after I had just moved to another continent halfway around the world, with my then partner.

Though I was the youngest, somehow I was the only one able and willing to return home, to take care of my mother. Because my own independent life hadn’t yet begun, I returned to file her application for disability and to manage the first of many crises. During that time I appealed to my oldest sister for help with paperwork and tasks, but she didn’t respond with any tangible action. She didn’t help. She left me alone to deal with caretaking.

* * *

There always seemed to be a fundamental disconnect in how my oldest sister and I communicated. I experienced this particularly when it came to expressing things I wanted for myself, independent of my family.

As we sat eating dinner at an Egyptian café in Bangkok, on our trip celebrating her post-chemo recovery, I told her, “I want to be a writer.”

She responded, “I think you make a really excellent consultant.”

It was a typical response, indicative of the quality of our communications. When I told her I wanted to go to grad school, she wasn’t supportive. She told me horror stories instead, about how it was a path to nowhere, with professorship jobs impossible to get. It was never what I had wanted—to be warned of the horrors, rather than supported in what I wanted for myself.

Years later, when I decided I’d done as much for my mother as I was willing to do, I replicated my sister’s absence while in graduate school and while working, in favor of going to graduate school myself, and focusing on my studies rather than on making emergency trips home. She angered over this choice, in return.

“I need you to fly home,” she told me, to take care of something related to my mother, the weekend before I needed to take the GRE. I knew doing so would throw me off balance, and I wanted, for once, to stay focused on my future.

?

??I can’t,” I told her. I’d reached the point where I was no longer willing or able to continue returning home without forewarning, a choice for which I didn’t apologize. No one who hadn’t been there when I was growing up with my mother had any right to judge. They had no idea what I’d been through.

Her response was to get angry, to berate me for saying no.

My oldest sister and I thought of ourselves as the “healthy” ones, at the time; my middle sister had long absented herself from any family responsibilities. If either my oldest sister or I absented ourselves from caretaking responsibilities, it fell upon the other party to pick up the slack.

“I just feel so alone,” she complained bitterly to me, often, a sentiment I knew well from my own upbringing. She, too, had left me alone.