I’ve long perceived sisterhood as a secret inlet. A relationship whose shape is uniquely undisclosed. As though the world shrinks into a nucleus formed of borrowed clothes and ordained fights, matching prepubescent limbs and terrible haircuts; one sister’s nose invariably more aquiline than the others’. One sister noticeably more dawdling than the others—picking flowers, not combing her hair. Getting sick on her birthday.
Does the discrete viability of sisterhood rise since birth, sharing a heart like you might share speech patterns? Like a tin-can telephone, but for the voice in your head. As if you have an innate fluency for sharing the blanket so that everyone’s toes are covered. In childhood, having a sister, especially if she was older, meant sharing a wall with—it’s possible—some likeness of your near-future self. Movies, books, the March sisters, all of it, devised a rubric that engrossed me because sisterhood amounted to what I envied: not having to learn how to join. You were already part of something. You could be a crowd. You could troop places. You could be recruited the way a pop song recruits you. You could link arms. Your crowd was loud. You could be the quiet one couched inside the crowd, nodding off to the sound of sisters sneaking in one last burst of energy before bed. You could develop a dramatic flair for fighting. A penchant for doing nothing except to sit in the company of a girl and her mirror; a girl and her closet; a girl and the leeching shame of a mistake she believes makes her undeserving of anything.
You could witness coming-of-age as it revealed itself between a sister and your parents. You could have someone magically absorb whatever terror was compassing your week by lending you her jacket. By saying, “Keep it.” You could have an adjunct mother who braided your hair differently from how your mother braided your hair. You could admire the manner in which your sister establishes herself outside the home; how it was possible to escape the madness that closes in on you from being a daughter with gratitude, but also a daughter who is desperate to slide the ribbon out from her hair and race toward heartbreak; pacifying that initial lacking with, it turns out, even more lacking.
While this isn’t the case with all sisters, with some, when they reunite even for a short visit, the whole world is suddenly younger. An atmosphere of holiday is established: someone suggests a snack right before dinner, and newly received wisdom substantiates an old argument. Everyone drops the possessive “my,” and grown women start talking about Mom and Dad this, Mom and Dad that. When sisters walk side by side, they move slow and talk speedy, and seem somehow capable of time travel. Or perhaps sisterhood is, plainly, a version of time travel.
No matter where I am, when the Chew sisters are together, like Easter weekend in Toronto, I am emotionally solvent. I feel a sense of alcove. I think of the painter Amrita Sher-Gil’s Three Girls, a print my mother framed and gave to Jennifer and Lois many years ago. Like the Bruegel, I know it well. Three girls in salwar kurtas—orange, mint, red—form a corner. As though painted by candlelight, it has an orblike quality. Solemn, no one is smiling. I’m fond of the Sher-Gil because I know it spoke to my mother’s earliest framework. How her context since birth has been “the youngest of three.” The last one to experience her firsts.
When your mother is the baby of her family—when that expression’s been used to lovingly characterize her rank—she shrinks before you, covering her eyes when the MGM lion roars. Socks sliding down her ankles and bunching on the brim of her loafers. She’s focused on a mosquito bite; scratching it until it welts and bleeds. Her voice is higher. It might crack when she asks questions about the fit of things. How the cherry liqueur gets inside the chocolate and if it’s possible to sit on clouds.
My mother has another Sher-Gil print hanging at hers, in the living room above the large Chinese chest we’ve owned for as long as I can remember. Carved into the dark wood is a panorama of flowers, a pavilion, a bridge, some people and pines. Too much story whittled into its wood for me to have ever endowed my own. I used to dig dust from its grooves and smell the metal tang of brass on my fingers after playing with its latch. My mother stores blankets inside the chest. Or old clothes she never wears. Or stuff belonging to my father. I once fished from its contents a pilled Cardinals baseball tee and a paper-thin, plaid shirt with snap buttons. Both were his from the seventies when he was a student at Washington University. I know this because of a picture I found that I keep in a folder of other photos. In the picture, my father’s hair is long and his glasses are tinted. He’s skinny but looks strong. Like he hasn’t yet become the father I know who dwells. Who, when arguing, espouses his point by taking a deep breath and saying, “Look, in the final analysis…”
When I put on the plaid shirt, at home in my own apartment, pulling my arm through each sleeve, I smell the Chinese storage chest that sits under the Sher-Gil in my mother’s upper duplex on Coolbrook Avenue in Montreal. Its bitter camphor odor is the first smell I understood as combative. More than merely attributive, it repelled moths. Those papery phantom pests I used to fear but now don’t mind. Ladybugs, on the other hand …
It’s possible too that the shirt smells like my father in his twenties. The notion of him. He’s on a walk with a friend, somewhere near St. Louis, posing for a picture alongside a creek; finding his balance on slippery rocks. Maybe he was tossing smooth pebbles as if making use of what’s bottled up. Anticipating the plop. Maybe my father had a great arm and could throw far. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen him throw anything, not even a ball. I’ve known him to be hunched over things: papers, his phone, toweling dry our dog, deliberating between pounds of chicken at the grocery store, sitting on the foot of his bed and staring off course between putting on socks, or sitting across from his record player with his head bowed, listening to Sonny Rollins, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dave Brubeck’s airy stalling tactics.
On vacations, my father will retreat to where the view is less crowded, as if in defiance of all tourists, everywhere. He’ll lean his body on a guardrail at a museum and look down at all the foot traffic instead of at the paintings. He’ll later describe to me the stout carriage of one security guard; how her Not having it attitude was more compelling than any of the art.