We are family
She had a head of thick curly hair and a voice that could wake sleeping children in zimbabwe from her yard in Smithtown, NY. She was mostly quiet though, and self reliant, prefering quiet beadwork to the sworded follies that always left her brothers bruised and scraped. Mollie, the unlucky middle child sandwiched between two, violent and rambunctions boys certainly had enough brothers on her hands. But with the extended nuclear family that the Teitelbaums (and to some extend the Kantors) added, it is any wonder she survived.
When I was a little boy, my brothers and I would steal her barbie dolls, skewer their heads on sticks and march around the house. We'd hook up makeshift electric-chairs from power outlets and rigged them up to fry her trolls, and though they never burned, her wails nourished our sadistic little-boy hearts. Jesse and I tore apart broken remote control cars and used the little motherbords and electronic doo-hickies to "make walkie-talkies" and poor mollie, who only wanted to be like her cool big siblings, begged us to play from the corner of the unfinished room. We wouldn't let her in past the corner and gave her only the sharp and useless cracked red plastic to play with. And she took it.
Part of me still thinks of her that way. The wining/crying/defiantly-ignoring-me little sister that I terrorised throughout my prepubescent years. Part of me thinks of her in the small and brief Hiatuses when the boys were away and we acted like sisters - sharing secrets of newly developing crushes and bodies, playing some modified form of truth-or-dare in the guest room in the basement.
Its been a while now since we've been so close. I went away to college, spent summers busy and far from home. She stayed on in schecter through high school, then spent a year in israel before returning, just a few months ago, to prepare for her freshman year at Washington in St. Louis.
She grew up sometime, while I wasn't looking. Curbed the wining frustrated scream into a calming patient patter. She still likes crafts--learned to knit while in israel and was surprised to learn that I knit too. We even share some friends now. And we've started to hang out, like adult sisters. We laugh and play and learn about each other. We argue and fight more readily than other friends might, and we come armed with a knowledge of what we were like as children, stuffed to the brim with memories of courntless bits of life we've seen together. Its fun, seeing her like this. . To know that we've grown up, and that we're family, and have that mean something new and permanent and real.
Thank goodness for sisters.