More About Siss

In contrast to me, my sister lives in a small, rented house in the midst of Amish farm country. The narrow road in front of her house is always a minefield of horse droppings, and if you listen carefully, you can hear the ever-present low, soothing hum of the Holstein. There is abundant greenery, both in the fields and in the numerous, informal farmers' markets that seem attached to every local farm. Young Amish girls go door-to-door with baskets of strawberries and blueberries on their arms. Farm dogs hurtle from driveways if you are ill-advised enough to try to take a stroll. Whoopie pies abound.

Her house is small and cozy and safe and secure. It is very attractive and inviting in a "country" way. Not that she has those fake geese or windmills staked out in the front yard or anything. Siss really does have taste. But....the rooms are small and square and always smell faintly of old wood and aging wallpaper; the kind that is so old that you really don't want to know what is under it. It exudes the feeling of a refuge or a retreat; a place where real life is suspended.

Why would anyone who lived like this envy an urban farm with a view of a freeway and some huge, though not unattractive skyscrapers? The paradox is that Siss chose her rural, pastoral, beautiful, secure life, but yet she constantly both envied and vilified my urban, artistic, pet-filled, kinetic way of being in the world.

The end for my sister and me came on more of a whimper than a bang. Our relationship was a downward spiral that lasted for around forty years, ending, appropriately enough, with the circumstances surrounding the return of the green dress. It had been a relationship in which she had always managed to call all the shots, but I called the final one. I suppose I just got sick of my own patience with her approach-and-run style, but at the same time, I can pinpoint the very thing that triggered my decision to cross the Rubicon and end the whole mess with a single letter. That is the marvelous thing about composing on the word processor; the "save" key. Seeing the letter in print once more will help me to decide whether I did end on a bang after all. Unfortunately, the very thing that triggered my decision was a cutesy little bread-and-butter note from Siss, which I discarded after the bang or whimper was complete. The "delete" key can be devastating to a moment of hasty decision.

I have a very long fuse. Ask Sig, or any one of my animals. This is probably because I have always been an avid student of human nature and have a good eye to see what really makes people do what they do, even myself. I owe this gift to Dr. Richard Schwartzman, the Orgonomist who saved me from becoming my mother and gave me the strength to strive for, and achieve, a career in the Arts. Ironically, but par for the course, it was my sister who first introduced me to Orgonomy when I was 25 and she was 28. More than thirty years later, she is still languishing in therapy, and I am the one writing this saga. Ironically again.

There are myriad reasons why I would not want to become like my mother Cella, although I loved her dearly and mourn her passing still. One of these reasons was her "volatile effusiveness", if this term is not a violation of one or more rules of English grammar. Can effusiveness be volatile? You had to have known Cella for confirmation of this fact.

Cella was larger than life; in fact, much larger....too much larger. She was like the character "Mrs. Raymond" in the movie "Sideways"; overly excited about every little thing, the excitement always accompanied by much hand-flapping, eye-rolling, and noisy intakes of breath. She name-dropped about all her clothes, except that the names she revered were from the old lady section of Macy's. In other words, Cella was very naive, and this should have been a very endearing quality. I am sorry to say that it was not. It was merely a misguided attempt to call attention to herself and hide the fact that her self-opinion was very much on the low side.

I suppose it was because of this self-esteem issue that Cella deliberately cultivated an image of herself as a latter-day "Auntie Mame". While she was, in fact, rather conservative in most things, she delighted in calling herself "Crazy Lady" with that fake Oriental mispronunciation that came out as "Clazy Lady". Here's a "ferinstance": Cella came to visit me in Ann Arbor, Michigan when I was about to present my thesis concert for my M.F.A. in Modern Dance from the University of Michigan. She considered everything about the dance world to be exotic, and so she dived in with gusto to help me complete preparations for the big night....nights, actually. The Art Department had volunteered to help hand-paint the costumes for my work "Under the Porch Light", and since I was one body short of having models for all the costumes, Cella gamely donned the skin-tight unitard and got herself hand-painted. She drew the line at wearing no underwear, so she kept on her granny-panties and Playtex living bra, which also got painted, right through the milliskin fabric of the unitard. Here was her proof! Here was validation that she did something wild and crazy that would set her apart and make her very cool! When she got home to Scranton, PA after the concert weekend, she did everything short of bronzing that underwear! She told the story of her "crazy" exploits for months, to anyone who would listen and some who were forced to listen several times!

Vicarious thrills? Living her life through her daughter? I don't know and I really don't care. She had a good time, and this, along with all the other "adventures" she shared with me, gave her great joy and a reason to be "Clazy Lady".

Don't get me wrong. Cella's very imperfections and annoying habits were what made her such a memorable character. Even in literature, I always hated those perfect characters that the authors shove at you as what we all wistfully strive for and never attain. Troy Allyn comes to mind. This is the painter/wife of Ngaio Marsh's character "Inspector Roderick Alleyn". She is an Ice Maiden, and everything about her is perfect, unapproachable and thoroughly nauseating. No one like this exists in nature! Ngaio Marsh invented her and had her fall (reluctantly, and over time) for Inspector Alleyn so that the reader would know intelligent and aristocratic Alleyn is, and how worthy he is as a human-being-other-than-just-a-cop.

Want another, more current, example? Here we go. Stieg Larsson's own variation on the quirky Ice Maiden, Lisbeth Salander. She is the silent, sullen, brooding girl with the dragon tattoo; the girl we are supposed to envy for her photographic memory, her hacking skills and her general disdain for the rest of mankind. In every book, this girl has to do something "quite unlike herself", like fall for or sleep with some man, or have an interesting conversation with somebody other than herself. The reason for this is that she is really an uninteresting, two-dimensional freak and her story would die on the vine if she were not prompted by the author to step outside of her carefully constructed persona. How dull!

While we are on the subject, these chicks all seem to be able to eat whatever they want and never get fat. Salander chugs beer and eats calamari (that is usually deep-fried, is it not?) and brags about being 4'11" and 90 pounds!! By the way, she doesn't exercise! And then there is Kinsey Millhone, the anti-social anti-heroine of Sue Grafton's alphabet books (A is for this and B is for that). This one lives in the 1980's, so she "jogs" a bit, but still wolfs down QPCs (Quarter Pounders with Cheese) from BK and Big Macs and fries....and "moans" and "whimpers" with pleasure. Anyone who has seen"Supersize Me" knows that this is an impossibility, yet I believe that Kinsey weighs in at 115 or so. HAH!

No, Cella was none of this. She was a real living, breathing human being with a taste for bear claw pastries, Chicken Marsala, and Manhattans; fried-egg sandwiches, french fries and red velvet cake. She ate with gusto and dieted with remorse. She was never overweight, and when she died she was 5'4" and 94 pounds. This was not from dieting, but from an unfortunate series of mini-strokes that closed her esophagus and prevented her from swallowing properly. Although Cella died from a massive stroke while waiting to be discharged from the hospital after having her esophagus repaired, her last threee days....after the surgery, were glorious. She called me every day with complete details about the day's meals. She hacked her way through forests of cherry pie, mashed potatoes, cole slaw,(all favorites) and candy brought in by friends and neighbors. She indulged shamelessly in all the things that would help her put the weight back on. She was in heaven. When "the big one" hit, Cella was sitting, fully dressed, on her bed, waiting for the doc to make his rounds and discharge her. She had an appointment to have her hair cut and styled, and was meeting several friends at "The Ground Round", their favorite haunt in Scranton PA's Steamtown Mall. Rest in Peace, Cella. You were not perfect, but you were not bland either.

The aforementioned long fuse is probably why the relationship with my sister lasted as long as it did. While Cella, was alive, she acted as a buffer between us, communicating the news about one to the other, and allowing us to feel connected although we never saw each other. Mothers often do this, I hear. That is why I am glad that I had only one child.

After Cella died, we were on our own to communicate or not, as we wished. Siss took it upon herself to orchestrate a "must do" bond between us, even suggesting that we mutually buy a crash pad in the old home town of Scranton, PA, and use it for sister-type getaways. Looking back on this time, the year 2001, I should have known that it was the beginning of the end. Siss was always either in my back pocket or running a thousand miles away as if the hounds of hell were snapping at her heels. The pendulum between near and far never stopped swinging long enough to have a normal relationship, and the suggestion of the crash pad and sister-type getaways just meant that the pendulum was at the "in my back pocket" end. Nothing more.