elizabethlevett

She is clothed in strength and dignity…

Up in Washington State, close to one of the countless fingerlings of Puget Sound, there’s a little town. It used to have a big lumber business with a sawmill and everything. At some point people from the bigger cities came out and put in vacation houses where they could go in the summer and fish and eat oysters and drink beer. Now it’s got a couple of big grocery stores, a couple of little coffee shops, a couple of bars, and a couple of thrift stores. The people are friendly enough but they don’t get enough vegetables in the winter and they don’t get enough sun.

Outside the little town, out in the country, there are some sweet old houses on a few acres each. The people who live there are people who don’t like the idea of living in a city. They like the mountains and the forests and the eagles. They like their freedom. They do their own thing.

One of the sweet old houses belongs to Mark, my brother-in-law. There is a beautiful garden around the house with roses and lilacs, ringed with forest where ferns, bleeding heart, and trillium spread out thick under huge pines. There is a bird feeder that sees a fair amount of action in the spring. There are funny gargoyles hung here and there, and there are terrariums with tiny plants, miniature fairy statues, and shiny marbles inside. My sister Ann planted the roses and the lilacs and assembled the fairy terrariums. My sister Ann moved up to Washington with Mark and their kids some years ago for the mountains and the forest and the eagles so they could do their own thing.

But my sister isn’t there anymore. Her roses and lilacs are still gorgeous and her fairy statues hang out in their little magical worlds. Her picture stands on the piano with her witch broom and a very nice urn that holds her ashes.

I have lots of pictures of my beautiful sister Ann. How many times have I looked at her picture, the one where her skin was still luminous and her deep eyes look so far away and so sad? How many times since she’s gone have I looked at those pictures and wished I could hear her voice? 

Ann had wavy hair, the color of honey, and big, blue-green eyes. When we were young my dad had a slide projector and sometimes he would ceremoniously pull out the contraption and a few plastic carousels of slides. We’d turn off the living room light and look at photos from what seemed then to be a long time ago. We always looked longer at pictures of Ann. There was one taken in the upstairs bedroom my two sisters shared before I was born. In the picture Ann is about 3. She and Margie look up smiling from a book they were reading together in their flowered pajamas, sitting on one of the cherry-wood twin beds. In another one Ann is about five, wearing a gingham dress and a big hat, holding a little red purse in her gloved hands. Another favorite shows six-year-old Ann with muddy elbows, proudly holding a huge frog upside down. 

But Ann’s magic turned inward for a few years after that. When she was a teenager things were very tough for Ann. My mother said she was contrary – she even said Ann was a liar. My mother once smacked Ann on the head with a wooden spoon for some imagined back talk. She would poke her in the back on the way to Communion to get her to stand up straight. Something about Ann made my mother very uncomfortable and she diligently watched and criticized her looking for ways to bring out whatever might possibly be saved of her middle child’s better self. There was ballet, girl scouts, and piano lessons. 

Ann stiffened against all the attention and my mother’s scrutiny. She thought she was the most not-cool person in the world. She was awkward, but she was amazing – if perhaps more than a little unlucky. I remember getting along so much better in school than Ann had, and so much better with my mom. Ann never held it against me. She would give me half of her chocolate bar – even though she did torture me by eating her half so slowly that it lasted long after mine was gone. And she loved to be the one to put Band-Aids on my scraped up knees calling herself Nurse Ann – an homage no doubt to our other sister, Margie, who was away at nursing school. Ann told me wise secrets, like when she said the color of lips is sky-blue pink. She taught me how to braid my hair, fastening yarn to a piece of cardboard and showing me how to thread the three strands over and under, over and under, countless times until I could do it smoothly. She helped me sew and embroider stuff on my jeans. She even told me what to do when I found the drop of blood in my swimsuit bottoms. She showed me how to use eye shadow and roll a joint. I thought Ann could do anything – except get an A in school or please my mother.

At some point it was determined that Ann had a curve in her spine. (She probably got it from slouching to piss off my mother.) She would need to have a special mattress. She would need to start swimming a lot. For my mother that meant we would all now become members of the swim team. 

I don’t actually remember getting lessons in swimming per se, somehow, we all figured it out eventually. But Ann was the one who really took to it. She might have preferred to be listening to Jethro Tull and getting stoned with boys so she fought with my mother over swimming her laps. But it was the one thing she seemed to find effortless. Once again Ann became the absolute marvel she’d been as a pretty little girl. Only now she was a gorgeous young woman. Ann had ivory skin with a creamy, almost-olive cast and she browned like a hazelnut in summer, while the rest of us went from pink to peeling. She would tie her long hair into a braid and, as she slipped through the water, you pictured a mermaid among the dolphins. She had perfect form, exquisite proportion, absolutely even rhythm. She could do any stroke. When Ann swam the crawl, every stroke was exactly the same as the one before it, and the one that would come after. I loved swimming, but I usually just exhausted myself in the first lap. When I tried to swim the crawl, I would flail around unevenly, choking, over-kicking, and inevitably favoring one side. Ann glided left, then right, then left, then right, barely cutting a wake, then made a perfect flip turn at the end of each lap to start another. When she swam breaststroke, she skimmed the surface as swiftly and gently as Hiawatha’s canoe. 

Ann’s special victory was butterfly. Nobody can swim butterfly well. For me it was an unattainable ideal, an appointment with shame. I tried and tried; I failed and failed. All of us did. My legs were too short and my ass was too heavy. Ann never tried to learn to swim the butterfly. Ann was the butterfly. Her arms were perfect, her legs were perfect, and her breathing was always under control. She seemed to barely break the surface. The water opened up to her and sailed her forward. In everything else Ann saw herself as somehow not good enough, in everything else she seemed always to have an unwelcome fight on her hands. But in the water her grace was something none of us could understand or ever hope to equal.

Finally Ann started to acknowledge and radiate her coolness. She drove my mother crazy with her bare feet and extra-long bell bottoms, always worn with a turtleneck sweater and a big belt. She listened to all the cool music – The Allman Brothers, Elton John, Santana, David Bowie, Leon Russell. She took us to our first concerts. At fourteen, Jim was taken to see Emerson, Lake & Palmer. I got to see the Eagles with Linda Ronstadt in Balboa Park. I was wearing a tragically uncool red and white polo shirt. Ann didn’t care. I was her little sister and she thought I was smart. I was, I watched our blanket while Ann smoked a lot of pot and kissed boys. I tried hard to be cool but Ann didn’t have to try. My mom would send us to evening Mass sometimes. Ann would pull into the parking lot at Our Lady of Grace and wait while I went in and grabbed a bulletin to bring home and we’d skip out and go smoke cigarettes. We’d go to the mall sometimes on Saturdays and somehow Ann was never once got caught shoplifting. It seemed she was never afraid.

We all grew up after a while. Ann settled down with Mark and had beautiful babies. We all moved to different towns and lived different lives. But we talked on the phone a lot and visited each other from time to time. She would tell me about the costumes she was making for the Ren faire or the cookies she’d baked. I would tell her I’d just seen a hermit thrush poking around my redwood tree. We were separate threads, but we could always braid ourselves together again smoothly.

One day there was a phone call that knocked me a little off my cart. Ann was having trouble forming words. “Okay,” long pause, “Youuuu,” long pause, “guyyyyys,” pause, “take…care.” It was weird, scary weird, like that time she took acid and was kissing a boy in the living room when I heard my parents pulling into the driveway. It was more scary than the time Ann wrecked the family station wagon and walked home holding onto her injured arm. It was more scary than the time she had been drinking Boones Farm at Piedmont Park and somebody from church recognized us trying to hitchhike home. Actually it was even more weird and even more scary than anything ever. I tried to talk to Mark about it. He couldn’t talk because she was always around. I asked her if she’d gone to a doctor. “You know,” I ventured, as carefully as I could, “maybe you’ve had a little stroke.” (Please God, no, please God, no.) Pause. “Mmmm-yeahhhhh. There was noooooo,” long pause, “stroooooke.” Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Over time it got worse and worse. 

My sister Ann loved to drive. She owned driving is how she saw it. She was the boss of driving is how she saw it. But finally she wasn’t allowed to drive anymore. My sister Ann loved to cook too. She was the boss of cooking. She was the boss of making gravy and fudge and Christmas cookies. But finally she wasn’t allowed in the kitchen anymore. Something weird and scary had evidently happened whenever she tried to wash dishes or make coffee. It seems there had been water, water everywhere. Things my sister had always done well were now bafflingly impossible for her to master.  For months Ann raged against the changes until a time came when she slipped into a relative equilibrium, a seeming oblivious calm. And there was a diagnosis. After all the scary, weird, wrong other things they tried to come up with to explain what was wrong with my sister, they finally settled on the scariest; vascular dementia, early onset. Progressive, irreversible, terminal.

Margie called and said we needed to go and visit Ann. She meant we needed to say goodbye. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! I couldn’t get out of it. I couldn’t just drive up and get the bulletin and skip out. I thought I knew how weird and scary it would be to see Ann. When I got there I realized it was much worse, and much better than I could have expected. Ann couldn’t talk anymore at all. And yes, Ann had always been the boss of talking. She tried though, and her strong will was still there, along with her sense of humor, and a little notepad she kept close-by to write notes on. She was thin, like a pale, thin old lady. Her deep, dark eyes were faded like our jeans used to fade, from a deep indigo to a watery sky-blue. She was really proud to be the skinny one again and she shook her little hips and clapped her hands when we told her how great she looked. And our hearts shattered right there on the porch.

My sister Ann took us on a tour of her garden, pointing out every rose, every lilac, every magical terrarium world, and every funny gargoyle. We put on matching blue shirts and posed for pictures together. We went to a diner for lunch. It was hot and it took us some minutes to get used to the noises Ann made when she swallowed, and the mess she made when she couldn’t. We walked around the little town like normal people, going in and out of the thrift stores and doing our own thing. Three sisters who would soon be two. Margie was incredibly kind and competent, with that sense of humor that kept us all afloat. She and I stayed in a quiet hotel in Lacey with big trees outside and nice people at the desk.

We had some good days. We hiked in the national forest and strolled around downtown Olympia. We visited the farmers market, sat on the docks, ate enchiladas and even saw a heron. (I’m pretty sure it was my father’s spirit just checking in.) The hardest part was the saying goodbye. How the hell do you say goodbye to your sister? We smiled and hugged and hugged and smiled and then hurried out to the car so we could get on the road and start crying. But she came out of the house to see us off. She looked in our eyes and when we said, “Don’t be afraid,” my sister Ann got very, very serious. She shook her head. No, definitely not afraid. Again, Ann was the brave one.

That winter my sister got smaller and smaller. She spent most of her time lying down, watching TV and drinking milk. In March I wrote it in my journal two times to try and convince myself. “My sister is dying. My sister Ann is dying.” On the morning of April 27 I was lying in bed waiting to wake up all the way, when Mark called to tell me my sister Ann was gone. “We lost Annie,” he said, just exactly as we all had known someday he would. I had prayed for an end of it all for Ann. Now suddenly there was that sadness I’d been dreading, one I thought I could put off for a while. It pushed its way in the door and held me upside down like a frog. I sat in the backyard and looked at the clouds and sang Led Zepplin in my head until I could feel the rain starting so softly I swore it was her touch.

I got out all my favorite pictures so I could look at them I don’t know how many times and remember telling her how beautiful she was. Back in the summer we had sat on that bench in Olympia and watched little kids playing in a fountain and I told her that her grace took my breath away. 

We had a celebration for Ann that June. It wasn’t hot up in Washington like it had been the year before. I went up with Jim and stayed overnight in that nice, quiet hotel in Lacey where I’d stayed with Margie. It’s close to the road and there are big trees outside and fresh cookies on a plate at the desk. Our visit was as satisfying and unsatisfying as somehow these things always are. We all hung around in Ann’s garden among the roses and lilacs and little terrarium fairy worlds. There were huge clouds and even thunder and lightning. These we credited to my stormy sister.

I have a favorite picture of Ann that I keep in a frame on my dresser. It’s one Mark took back in the bad-ass days. She’s in a filmy, rose-colored blouse, a purse slung over one shoulder, as always. Her hair is shiny and wild, the color of honey. She’s wearing a ton of mascara and a dangerous smile. It could be an album cover photo from back in the day – Heart or Fleetwood Mac even. Jesus. I love to look long at this picture and wish that I could hear her voice, wish that we could go driving or walking in the woods again. You should have seen her then.