growing up in rural Connecticut, it was just the two of us, living in a farmhouse with our
parents. No other kids nearby. She was mighty and domineering, the commander of my
whole life. I lived in awe and fear of her; nobody else's opinion mattered but hers. I
cheated at card games with her in order to lose, so she wouldn't get mad at me. We were
not always friends. She was annoyed by me, and I was scared of her, I believe, until I was
twenty-eight years old and got tired of it. That was the year I finally stood up to her, and
her reaction was something along the lines of, "What took you so long?"
We were just beginning to hammer out the new terms of our relationship when my
marriage went into a skid. It would have been so easy for Catherine to have gained
victory from my defeat. I'd always been the loved and lucky one, the favorite of both
family and destiny. The world had always been a more comfortable and welcoming place
for me than it was for my sister, who pressed so sharply against life and who was hurt by
it fairly hard sometimes in return. It would have been so easy for Catherine to have
responded to my divorce and depression with a: "Ha! Look at Little Mary Sunshine
now!" Instead, she held me up like a champion. She answered the phone in the middle of
the night whenever I was in distress and made comforting noises. And she came along
with me when I went searching for answers as to why I was so sad. For the longest time,
my therapy was almost vicariously shared by her. I'd call her after every session with a
debriefing of everything I'd realized in my therapist's office, and she'd put down whatever
she was doing and say, "Ah . . . that explains a lot." Explains a lot about both of us, that
is.
Now we speak to each other on the phone almost every day--or at least we did, before I
moved to Rome. Before either of us gets on an airplane now, the one always calls the
other and says, "I know this is morbid, but I just wanted to tell you that I love you. You
know . . . just in case . . ." And the other one always says, "I know . . . just in case."
She arrives in Rome prepared, as ever. She brings five guidebooks, all of which she has
read already, and she has the city pre-mapped in her head. She was completely oriented
before she even left Philadelphia. And this is a classic example of the differences
between us. I am the one who spent my first weeks in Rome wandering about, 90 percent
lost and 100 percent happy, seeing everything around me as an unexplainable beautiful
mystery. But this is how the world kind of always looks to me. To my sister's eyes, there
is nothing which cannot be explained if one has access to a proper reference library. This
is a woman who keeps The Columbia Encyclopedia in her kitchen next to the
cookbooks--and reads it, for pleasure.
There's a game I like to play with my friends sometimes called "Watch This!" Whenever
anybody's wondering about some obscure fact (for instance: "Who was Saint Louis?") I
will say, "Watch this!" then pick up the nearest phone and dial my sister's number.Sometimes I'll catch her in the car, driving her kids home from school in the Volvo, and
she will muse: "Saint Louis . . . well, he was a hairshirt-wearing French king, actually,
which is interesting because . . ."
So my sister comes to visit me in Rome--in my new city--and then shows it to me. This is
Rome, Catherine-style. Full of facts and dates and architecture that I do not see because
my mind does not work in that way. The only thing I ever want to know about any place
or any person is the story, this is the only thing I watch for--never for aesthetic details.
(Sofie came to my apartment a month after I'd moved into the place and said, "Nice pink
bathroom," and this was the first time I'd noticed that it was, indeed, pink. Bright pink,
from floor to ceiling, bright pink tile everywhere--I honestly hadn't seen it before.) But
my sister's trained eye picks up the Gothic, or Romanesque, or Byzantine features of a
building, the pattern of the church floor, or the dim sketch of the unfinished fresco hidden
behind the altar. She strides across Rome on her long legs (we used to call her
"Catherine-of-the-Three-Foot-Long-Femurs") and I hasten after her, as I have since
toddlerhood, taking two eager steps to her every one.
"See, Liz?" she says, "See how they just slapped that nineteenth-century facade over that
brickwork? I bet if we turn the corner we'll find . . . yes! . . . see, they did use the original
Roman monoliths as supporting beams, probably because they didn't have the manpower
to move them . . . yes, I quite like the jumble-sale quality of this basilica. . . ."
Catherine carries the map and her Michelin Green Guide, and I carry our picnic lunch
(two of those big softball-sized rolls of bread, spicy sausage, pickled sardines wrapped
around meaty green olives, a mushroom pate that tastes like a forest, balls of smoked
mozzarella, peppered and grilled arugula, cherry tomatoes, pecorino cheese, mineral
water and a split of cold white wine), and while I wonder when we're going to eat, she
wonders aloud, "Why don't people talk more about the Council of Trent?"
She takes me into dozens of churches in Rome, and I can't keep them straight--St. This
and St. That, and St. Somebody of the Barefoot Penitents of Righteous Misery . . . but
just because I cannot remember the names or details of all these buttresses and cornices is
not to say that I do not love to be inside these places with my sister, whose cobalt eyes
miss nothing. I don't remember the name of the church that had those frescoes that looked
so much like American WPA New Deal heroic murals, but I do remember Catherine
pointing them out to me and saying, "You gotta love those Franklin Roosevelt popes up
there . . ." I also remember the morning we woke early and went to mass at St. Susanna,
and held each other's hands as we listened to the nuns there chanting their daybreak
Gregorian hymns, both of us in tears from the echoing haunt of their prayers. My sister is
not a religious person. Nobody in my family really is. (I've taken to calling myself the
"white sheep" of the family.) My spiritual investigations interest my sister mostly from a
point of intellectual curiosity. "I think that kind of faith is so beautiful," she whispers to
me in the church, "but I can't do it, I just can't . . ."
Here's another example of the difference in our worldviews. A family in my sister's
neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother
and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about
this, I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace." She replied firmly,
"That family needs casseroles," and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood
into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not
know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.We walk out of St. Susanna, and she says, "Do you know why the popes needed city
planning in the Middle Ages? Because basically you had two million Catholic pilgrims a
year coming from all over the Western World to make that walk from the Vatican to St.
John Lateran--sometimes on their knees--and you had to have amenities for those
people."
My sister's faith is in learning. Her sacred text is the Oxford English Dictionary. As she
bows her head in study, fingers speeding across the pages, she is with her God. I see my
sister in prayer again later that same day--when she drops to her knees in the middle of
the Roman Forum, clears away some litter off the face of the soil (as though erasing a
blackboard), then takes up a small stone and draws for me in the dirt a blueprint of a
classic Romanesque basilica. She points from her drawing to the ruin before her, leading
me to understand (even visually challenged me can understand!) what that building once
must have looked like eighteen centuries earlier. She sketches with her finger in the
empty air the missing arches, the nave, the windows long gone. Like Harold with his
Purple Crayon, she fills in the absent cosmos with her imagination and makes whole the
ruined.
In Italian there is a seldom-used tense called the passato remoto, the remote past. You
use this tense when you are discussing things in the far, far distant past, things that
happened so long ago they have no personal impact whatsoever on you anymore--for
example, ancient history. But my sister, if she spoke Italian, would not use this tense to
discuss ancient history. In her world, the Roman Forum is not remote, nor is it past. It is
exactly as present and close to her as I am.
She leaves the next day.
"Listen," I say, "be sure to call me when your plane lands safely, OK? Not to be morbid,
but . . ."
"I know, sweetie," she says. "I love you, too."
30303030
I am so surprised sometimes to notice that my sister is a wife and a mother, and I am not.
Somehow I always thought it would be the opposite. I thought it would be me who would
end up with a houseful of muddy boots and hollering kids, while Catherine would be
living by herself, a solo act, reading alone at night in her bed. We grew up into different
adults than anyone might have foretold when we were children. It's better this way,
though, I think. Against all predictions, we've each created lives that tally with us. Her
solitary nature means she needs a family to keep her from loneliness; my gregarious
nature means I will never have to worry about being alone, even when I am single. I'm
happy that she's going back home to her family and also happy that I have another ninemonths of traveling ahead of me, where all I have to do is eat and read and pray and
write.
I still can't say whether I will ever want children. I was so astonished to find that I did not
want them at thirty; the remembrance of that surprise cautions me against placing any
bets on how I will feel at forty. I can only say how I feel now--grateful to be on my own.
I also know that I won't go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it
later in life; I don't think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the
earth. Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason--for insurance
against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons--sometimes out
of a pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice,
sometimes in order to hold on to a partner or create an heir, sometimes without thinking
about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not
all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same,
either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.
I say this because I'm still working out that accusation, which was leveled against me
many times by my husband as our marriage was collapsing-- selfishness. Every time he
said it, I agreed completely, accepted the guilt, bought everything in the store. My God, I
hadn't even had the babies yet, and I was already neglecting them, already choosing
myself over them. I was already a bad mother. These babies--these phantom
babies--came up a lot in our arguments. Who would take care of the babies? Who would
stay home with the babies? Who would financially support the babies? Who would feed
the babies in the middle of the night? I remember saying once to my friend Susan, when
my marriage was becoming intolerable, "I don't want my children growing up in a
household like this." Susan said, "Why don't you leave those so-called children out of the
discussion? They don't even exist yet, Liz. Why can't you just admit that you don't want
to live in unhappiness anymore? That neither of you does. And it's better to realize it now,
by the way, than in the delivery room when you're at five centimeters."
I remember going to a party in New York around that time. A couple, a pair of successful
artists, had just had a baby, and the mother was celebrating a gallery opening of her new
paintings. I remember watching this woman, the new mother, my friend, the artist, as she
tried to be hostess to this party (which was in her loft) at the same time as taking care of
her infant and trying to discuss her work professionally. I never saw somebody look so
sleep-deprived in my life. I can never forget the image of her standing in her kitchen after
midnight, elbows-deep in a sink full of dishes, trying to clean up after this event. Her
husband (I am sorry to report it, and I fully realize this is not at all representational of
every husband) was in the other room, feet literally on the coffee table, watching TV. She
finally asked him if he would help clean the kitchen, and he said, "Leave it, hon--we'll
clean up in the morning." The baby started crying again. My friend was leaking breast
milk through her cocktail dress.
Almost certainly, other people who attended this party came away with different images
than I did. Any number of the other guests could have felt great envy for this beautiful
woman with her healthy new baby, for her successful artistic career, for her marriage to a
nice man, for her lovely apartment, for her cocktail dress. There were people at this party
who would probably have traded lives with her in an instant, given the chance. This
woman herself probably looks back on that evening--if she ever thinks of it at all--as one
tiring but totally worth-it night in her overall satisfying life of motherhood and marriageand career. All I can say for myself, though, is that I spent that whole party trembling in
panic, thinking, If you don't recognize that this is your future, Liz, then you are out of
your mind. Do not let it happen.
But did I have a responsibility to have a family? Oh, Lord-- responsibility. That word
worked on me until I worked on it, until I looked at it carefully and broke it down into the
