Free About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg

many years had passed since then, because most of them had blended together. I knew only that she had always been there. That experience, like so many others in our lives, had been a shared one.
    â€œI could do these shows, you know,” she said.
    â€œYou could,” I said. “Like the first runner-up. You know, if I’m unable to fulfill my duties. Something like that.”
    â€œHuh,” she said. “Funny.”
    Back in the car, driving through a relentlessly bright August morning, I asked Maya to take a detour, to the corner of Sunset and San Vicente Boulevard in West Hollywood where we’d lived for a short time twenty-seven years before. We were sunburned girls then, dressing up for Halloween costume contests and putting on plays in the living room. We went to Disneyland inmatching crocheted ponchos. For fun, my father drove us around Bel Air in our ancient pink station wagon and we pretended to be eccentric millionaires.
    Our childhood exists like this; a kaleidoscope of different places layered into the past. It struck me then that we lived only one hundred miles from this particular piece of our history yet this was the first time we’d even come close to seeing it in a quarter century.
    But Maya did not share my desire to plunge into the past.
    â€œWe don’t have time for a trip down memory lane,” she told me. “Let’s go home.”
    Maya is less sentimental than I am. She is also more practical. The subtext of her words was very clear to me. There was hardly a need to rediscover our past when we were always carrying it, and carrying each other, with us. Our past is woven seamlessly into our present, and within that present the Mariannas are often there with us.
    At night we still drink big mugs of tea, an addiction we’ve never kicked. Although we would travel miles for it, we are lucky enough to live close to an oxymoronic “British foods” store that carries imported English tea and we go through an eighty-bag box every couple of weeks. Our particular tea ritual consists of arguing over who will make it:
    â€œI made it last night.”
    â€œYes, but I made it all last week.”
    â€œIt’s your turn.”
    â€œNo, it’s your turn.”
    â€œI’ll give you five dollars if you make tea.”
    â€œNot enough.”
    â€œHow about that book you want? I’ll buy you that book you want if you make tea. How’s that? It’s a hardcover .”
    â€œOkay, done.”
    Unlike the old days, we now have television with our tea.Maya has at least a dozen shows she likes to follow. On any given prime-time evening, there is one show on the TV and two VCRs recording a couple of others. Sometimes I read while she watches and sometimes I watch with her. Sometimes I can do neither.
    Like tonight, for example. It’s after 11:00 P.M. and I’m on the couch, suddenly awake and disoriented. The living room is quiet except for the whir of the VCR rewinding a tape. Maya is holding the remote and flipping through the Living section of the newspaper.
    â€œWhat happened?” I ask her. “I missed the last ten minutes.”
    â€œYou didn’t miss the last ten minutes,” she says. “You were out for almost the whole show. I can’t tell you what happened, it’s too complicated and you missed too much.”
    â€œI saw some of it,” I say feebly. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
    â€œYou were sleeping,” Maya says.
    â€œNo, I wasn’t.”
    â€œYes, you were.”
    â€œI was?”
    â€œYes,” Maya says. “I saw you. You should go to bed. I’m off. Good night.”
    I hear her door close and drag myself off the couch, turn off the lights, and head for my bedroom.
    It took a long time, but these days Maya often goes first and sometimes I fall asleep before her.

3
Departures and Arrivals
    may
    It’s Mother’s Day, a big deal for our family, regardless