Telling Stories

The edge of disaster

My sister Tracy threw fits when she was a child -- full-blown, kicking, screaming tantrums. In a family of pouters and feeling-hiders, she was the only one who threw such fits. We would stare at her as if she were an alien being.

As an adult, she was still given to dramatic gestures. When things didn't go her way, she threw herself face down on her bed and sobbed, "I wish I was dead!" like a teenager. In the middle of a fight with her boyfriend du jour, she would slam the phone down and sweep an arm across her dresser like a character from a soap opera. knocking over bottles of Lutece and Obsession and sending porcelain kittens and crystal dragons over the edge to crash on the floor.

Once, in a moment of rare candor, she admitted to me that her behavior wasn't as out of control as it appeared. "I am careful not to knock over the things I really care about," she said. "You can't see it, but I kind of sweep my arm around them."

For a long time, I held that picture of controlled chaos in my mind as a metaphor for Tracy's life. Time and again, she hurtled toward some calamity, stopping just short of total disaster. She suffered troubles and setbacks, she took careless chances with her health, job, and money that would destroy an ordinary person, and yet she would regain her balance and continue on. She messed up, but not irrevocablly so. My other sisters would watch her and say, "I don't know how she's going to get out of this one. Surely she has hit rock bottom," and I had only to say, "Remember the dresser?" to remind them that she would never push things so far that she couldn't recover.

And she continued on this zig-zag path for many years before her luck, or caution, finally ran out.

Odd man out

J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, often referred to children as "gay and innocent and heartless." And that we were. We were seldom outright cruel to Tracy -- that would have brought swift retribution from our parents -- but we did exclude her at times because she was such a handful.

Tracy had a hard time fitting in. She was too loud to play with the two older kids, Scott and me. She was too rough to play with the four younger ones, Leanne, Skye, Tara, and Patrick. If she was unhappy with the way a board game was going, she might upset the board and leave the room in a huff with the game in ruins. She didn't seem to have any volume control. Everything about her was a little over the top -- her voice, her physicality, her appearance.

My dad called her "Shirley Temper." Her tantrums were legendary. Once she threw a chair at her bedroom door and left a hole in it. Things had a tendency to break while she was around, even without her touching them. A living room window shattered when she sat down next to it. A glass lamp in her bedroom broke while she was in bed. My mother said Tracy must have been followed by a poltergeist. I can't think of a better explanation. It was almost as if her anger were powerful enough to leap across space.

Tracy possessed the unlucky combination of fearlessness and poor judgment. She put Scott and me -- admitted cowards -- to shame by taking my dad's dares to jump off the high dive or jump into the ice-cold ocean. There was nothing my dad hated more than cowardice, and she got a lot of points for her bravery. But it also made her susceptible to less innocuous dares, and if we'd asked her to jump off the roof, she probably would have done so. (This may actually have happened once. I don't recall.)

One day when she was 3 or 4, while Scott and I were at school, Tracy took off on her tricycle. She wasn't intentionally running away from home; she just wanted to see how far she could get. No one knew where she was. After a frantic hour of worry, my mom got a call from the diner a half-mile away. Tracy was there and had asked to buy an entire pie. When my parents got there, she was sitting at a table enjoying some banana cream pie.

(This incident was always told as an amusing example of Tracy's guts and determination. Much later, there was a family rumor that she had told my parents about an encounter with a strange man on this trip. Details were sketchy, but there was a suggestion that something inappropriate had happened. I know that Tracy did not remember, because she always laughed when the banana cream pie story was told. It's one of those family secrets that may or may not have had a bearing on later events.)

We had to include Tracy in our games when our parents insisted on it. Children at school were under no such expectations. They made fun of her messy appearance and awkward manners. She seemed to have a hard time reading people; she seemed to be oblivious when they were making fun of her, and thought they were staring at her when they were in fact ignoring her. She wasn't shy -- perhaps it would have been better for her if she had been, because she would have kept out of trouble -- but her responses to people were often tone-deaf.

When she was in junior high, she walked in on some girls smoking in the bathroom. She ran and told a teacher, and the girls were suspended for a few days. When they returned to school, they made it clear who ratted them out. They called Tracy a "narc" and told her they'd get her back. Their teasing and threats made Tracy a nervous wreck. My parents eventually transferred her to the other junior high school in town, though they would have to drive her there every day. But before she changed schools she began obsessively pulling her eyelashes out, a condition called trichotillomania. Eyelashes take a very long time to grow back, and she spent her early teens with no eyelashes. Her bald gaze set her apart from her peers even more.

But Tracy had a tender, caring side as well. She gravitated toward lost animals. She "adopted" a couple of flea- and worm-ridden kittens that were abandoned in the neighborhood, until my parents took them to the shelter in the interest of hygiene. She "rescued" tree frogs and snakes from the yard and carefully fed them little bits ground beef hanging from a thread.

And she always had the ability to laugh at herself. When we teased her about the hole in her bedroom door or the broken window or the pet frogs, she laughed good-naturedly right along with us. She could be dramatic, but she didn't take herself too seriously.

She could also be creative. She liked to cook, puttering around in the kitchen and making up her own (not always palatable) recipes. She sewed stuffed animals by the dozen. Her workmanship was not precise, but it always had her unique stamp on it. She was very taken with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. She decorated her bedroom with calico and wore a sunbonnet. It was easy to imagine her living on a farm someday, surrounded with children and animals, baking happily in the kitchen.

Sometimes I wonder whether it was a mistake for my parents to remove her from the junior high where she was having trouble. Perhaps if they had helped her acquire the social skills she needed to deal with the situation, things would have turned out differently. I know that if the bullying had happened to any of the rest of us, our parents would have told us to tough it out. But they always treated Tracy differently. They had the best of intentions, but the results were not always what they hoped for.

Changeling

Tracy was born when I was five and my brother Scott was three. My mother had experienced a miscarriage the year before. I vividly remember going to the hospital to pick her up and asking whether I could see the baby she lost. I just assumed that it had been kept in a jar, and I was disappointed to learn that it was gone.

I felt a sense of loyalty to that baby and thought it was odd that we just forgot about it when Tracy came along. But my parents were very happy to have a new child. Tracy was a chubby baby with a round head and funny facial expressions. She had gray eyes and a wild thatch of curly hair. She got rounder and funnier as she grew into toddlerhood. We laughed about her awkwardness and goofy mannerisms. She was the family clown.

As Tracy got older, she wasn't quite as funny. She became frustrated easily and threw frequent tantrums. She was big and strong enough to do damage to people and property around her when she raged. She flew off the handle at the least provocation, throwing herself on the ground screaming to protest, say, a diaper change. She met the usual developmental milestones, but she sometimes seemed a little slow on the uptake. When she met with something she didn't understand, her face went blank and she stared into space with pale, unfocused eyes.

To  make matters worse, Tracy drew the short straw in the birth order lottery. Scott and I were 18 months apart, and, as eldest children, we were treated almost as twins. That made Tracy the baby. But when she was 21 months old, Leanne came along. Leanne was Tracy's polar opposite -- a petite, lively, dark-eyed baby who laughed often and picked up new skills with ease. She quickly became everyone's pet, leaving Tracy in the unenviable position of the middle child -- neither family trailblazer nor adorable baby. She seemed big and ungainly next to Leanne. And her out-of-control behavior tended to repel people, who preferred smiling little Leanne and the quiet, well-behaved older children. My parents bent over backwards to be loving and patient with Tracy, but as far as Scott and I were concerned, she was the most annoying little sister ever.

When Tracy was about three years old, we took a rare vacation out of town. Tracy threw fits in the car, in the pool, in the hotel room. What was supposed to be an enjoyable family trip turned into an ordeal. Late at night, when everyone was supposed to be asleep, I heard my parents whispering. Why does she do that? She's her own worst enemy. Should we take her to a psychiatrist? They sighed and fell silent. I never heard them mention therapy again.

Sometimes I would remind my mother about the baby she lost. She would tell me not to be sad. "If we'd had that baby, we wouldn't have Tracy!" she said. This was supposed to reassure me, but it just made me wonder what life would have been like with the other baby. Perhaps we got the wrong baby after all. But I kept my thoughts to myself.

Under the gazebo

We cried, my sisters and I, the day my sister Tracy married Tim. The four of us stood under the gazebo in peach taffeta gowns, red-eyed and sniffling, trying in vain to wipe our running mascara and dripping noses with white lace gloves.

If anyone was paying any attention, they would have assumed that we were weeping with joy over our sister's good fortune. But they would have been wrong. We were grief-stricken. We weren't losing a sister, we were gaining a big jerk. The appeals had run out. There would be no last-minute pardon. If the wedding vows were to be believed, we would be stuck with Tim forever. And we knew that was going to be a very bad thing.

Just how bad, we couldn't begin to imagine.