How to Be a Sister by Eileen Garvin

Author:Eileen Garvin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2010-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

7.

friends and neighbors

The Golden Rule is the guiding one when it comes to thoughtful, cooperative living.

—On Neighborliness, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

MY NEW HOUSE in Oregon was just a block from an elementary school that was across the street from a preschool. A few blocks beyond that stood the middle school. From my desk every day I watched a parade of children and teenagers and parents streaming past my house in the morning and again in the afternoon. At lunchtime I could hear the buzz of the playground and the shrieking of little girls testing their power with their voices. If I walked by at recess I could see them having screaming contests with no apparent goal other than to try to be the loudest one. They leaned forward, squinched their eyes shut, and let fly so hard I expected their braids to fall off.

I found it unnerving, this screaming. It made me anxious. I felt the same way whenever I heard a baby cry, because of my own experience with Margaret’s screaming, which often went on all day. The baby might cry itself blue, and the little girls might shriek until night-fall, and I would feel compelled to act. Luckily, I realized that doing anything would have been inappropriate, so I just kept my eyes on the pavement and avoided the playground during lunchtime. The first summer in the new house came as a relief to me, because the children were out of school and it was quiet again. I know this might not seem rational, but for me, at least, it was historical.

Once when I was ten my sister had screamed bloody murder for an entire day about a blue plastic hairbrush. I do mean all day. Hours. So loud and long that someone had called the police. There was a lot of screaming at our house back then, but we lived in the kind of neighborhood where people stayed out of one another’s business. Because of that culture of “don’t get involved,” I know my sister’s screaming must have topped the charts for someone to actually pick up the phone and complain.

It was a warm Saturday afternoon when the police car pulled up in front of our green suburban house with its tidy lawn, white lamppost, and curving walkway. The large picture windows on the first floor looked out on the whole neighborhood peering in at our wild household. The screened-in windows on the second floor were wide open, so it was easy to imagine why someone had called the cops in the first place. You could often hear Margaret screaming for about four square blocks. I knew this because once when she was having a fit, I had walked away from the house to see how far I had to go before I couldn’t hear her anymore. It was a long walk.

One of the cops climbed out of the car and marched up the walkway to the front door, the one nobody used. He rang the bell and, convinced that someone was being flayed alive on the second floor, insisted on coming in.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.