Read Online About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg - Free Book Online Page A

Mariannas couldn’t talk about.
    A few days later, before we went to sleep one night, I asked Maya to teach me the hustle. There has never been a simpler dance invented, but I couldn’t get the sequence of steps right.
    â€œIt’s so easy,” Maya said. “I don’t know why you’re not getting this.”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “Why does the mailman drive a blue truck?”
    Maya made a disgusted noise and got into bed. She turned her light off and rolled over so that her back was to me. Soon after, I clicked off my light as well and lay motionless in the darkness. As always, Maya was sleeping long before I fell into unconsciousness in the bed next to hers.
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    When I was eighteen, I moved out of the house and went away to college. When I was twenty-five with a newborn son, Mayamoved in with me. We are still living together. We have lived together, in fact, all but seven years of our lives—long enough to run out the bad luck of a broken mirror. In the last fourteen years, we’ve shared a checking account, a couple of jobs, and, quite often, my son’s care. Maya, in fact, was the very first person on earth to see my son’s face as he left the shelter of my body. Ours is truly a domestic partnership. Until he was about seven or eight, my son referred to the two of us as “my parents.”
    We’ve done things together as adults that the Mariannas couldn’t have conceived of. There were the hospitals, for example. The two of us sitting in emergency rooms at three, four, and five o’clock in the morning with my sick child. These were times when Maya never slept, but stayed awake with me, making jokes about the seizure and suicide-attempt patients next to us in order to keep my mind off the fact that my son was blue and gasping for breath.
    We’ve also done things that the Mariannas would have loved, like sharing a suite at Beverly Wilshire Hotel the night before I had a TV interview for my first book, noticing that room service popcorn cost ten dollars ( before delivery charges and tip), and wondering if we should order some just so that we could get a sense of what ten-dollar popcorn tasted like.
    Fairly often, Maya will start a sentence and I will finish it for her before she gets to the main point.
    â€œI was going to say that,” she tells me. “Why don’t you get out of my head and get your own thoughts?”
    â€œI was born first,” I answer her. “I had those thoughts before you.”
    When Maya gets stuck in conversation and can’t remember the word or phrase she’s looking for (and, as we all get older, this kind of thing tends to happen more frequently), her standard response is, “I’m sorry, I can’t get the words right now. Debra’s using them all.”
    Maya and I don’t share clothes. We don’t wear each other’s shoes or read the same books. Our views on men, relationships, and affairs of the heart are different enough to be diametrically opposed. We have different eyes, hair, and bone structure. But we have the same voice. When we sing together, it sounds like the same person on two vocal tracks. Sometimes our own mother can’t tell us apart on the phone.
    We have a house full of kitchen gadgets, books, and furnishings from Ikea. I work at home and she is out most of the time.
    There are no Harrys. At least not in the way we envisioned them.
    Maya is still my first reader, just as she was when she was Marianna. Then, Maya would listen to my stories whether they were about the Ma’s or some other world we were creating together and give me her opinion on how well they worked. Maya saw everything first whether it was a short story, a drawing, or a play the two of us would perform together. Today, it is the same. Everything I write goes through Maya first. Maya knows if it’s not working because Maya, more than anyone, knows what I mean to say.
    When I