She's about 5 years older than me. She is a beautiful blonde ex-military lawyer who competed in beauty pageants in her teens, because this is a tv show. To say she's a "Type A" could be understating things, but she's still fun, with a dark sense of humor and punishingly dry delivery.
I met her a couple of times as a kid, but I got my first taste of her personality in my mid-twenties. I hadn't seen her since 1993 and had no contact information for her, so I googled her and emailed her at work. I have got to go back and find that cold call email - "hi hello I think I'm your sister". I wanted to reach out to her in general, but I had an excuse: I had just quit a job, and at 4:59 on my last day, I sent a scathing all-staff email, attacking the owner of the business and various of his employees that I had a problem with. Yes, it was "unprofessional"; no, I didn't need the reference; no, I wouldn't do it now and yes I am still glad I did it. Every time I see people I worked with then through a Phoenix friend, they mention it. My bestie Andrea printed it out and tacked it to her cube wall. And it was justified, they were terrible, it's a very long story but I promise you, it was probably the least unprofessional thing that happened in that office.
And to tell you what kind of guy ran this place, I had the girl in HR delete my address from all of her files. Because they absolutely would have come to my house. They were bodybuilding psychopathic frat guy sales dudes who live in a full-on Mad Men world, punching each other across their desks, renting chickens to chase in the office, going out for happy hour and ending up in jail. Has a work superior ever said, "I want to fuck you," casually, at work, when you pass them? Call me when you have that job. I'll write your quit email.
So anyway, that guy threatened to sue me over the email. Libel. Stupid, but he kept a lawyer on retainer and lived to harass other people. I sent the email to my sister and asked if he had a case. She loved the aggro shittiness of the email, which was my first indication that she was, in fact, my blood. Her professional opinion? I was probably fine, but that doesn't mean he couldn't file if he wanted to.
Her true parentage had been called into question by everyone in my family for decades. They felt that she didn't look like us. Her mother had been a wild 70s biker bitch, "an alley cat," my dad said. The alley cat of your choosing, you mean. The family enabled his total neglect of her with that excuse, so obviously a relationship between us had never been fostered. By the time I was an adult, I was prepared to err on the side of caution and treat her as though she probably was family. I was so fucking furious when I realized that the two of us had grown up a handful of miles apart, never knowing each other. This created a divide between my dad and I that was actually worse than the later one that resulted over Trump. I didn't call him for nine months, and he never knew why. By the time I got over it such that I decided to continue our relationship, I didn't want to litigate it. Why bother with someone who not only shies in terror from visceral interpersonal confrontation with family, but over a situation that no one can fix now?
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| This little cabbage patch turned into a bad bitch |
Many years passed before she reached out to me to ask if I wanted to meet up while she was in Austin on work. I had no idea what to expect, and was so nervous, like I was on a date/job interview/parole board hearing, but it was instantly easy when she showed up at the restaurant. We talked for hours, and it felt like talking to myself. I was shocked and thrilled that we had so much in common, and of course it's the crappy things that are the most endearing. She shared story after relatable story about her work life, her married life, we compared our behavior during fights with partners and laughed. She is so much more savage than I am, and I love every second of it.
She's brilliant, reads voraciously, there's nothing she doesn't seem to know about, and she engages in culture high and low. I can't believe how fast she reads, it's shocking. She's intimidating yet gracious and kind, full of funny stories, endlessly critical of other people but surrounded by a wide group of close friends, with many fulfilling friendships with women. I just approve.
She and our brother and I met together for the first time last year on a trip that I facilitated, in Portland. She and he had never met or talked, ever. Didn't even know about each other for ages. I told him about her, and he was incredulous. Knowing that she does exist in a fairly heteronormative world of kids and PTA meetings and professional work environments, I tried to warn her that our brother could be a little different in his interactions. He's a wonderful, sweet person, but sometimes he deliberately alienates people to test them. He tries to shock. He succeeds, because he is fucking dark too. I was sort of worried that he'd do those things to her if she read as too establishment for him - she's got money, she vacations in Europe, she's raising children and her husband's family is the definition of midwestern normal. He was so nervous about meeting her that he kept telling me, "We'll still have fun on our trip if she doesn't like me. Maybe we can hang out without her some days." He was so concerned. So I warned her, thinking she and I were the most alike of the three.
Wrong. They instantly bonded. They connected thoroughly, mostly over similarly bad experiences had as children. While they had very different early lives, they were both trapped in situations that were sometimes comically terrible, other times just real terrible. They laughed and one-upped each other with stories of parents who were neglectful at best, often abusive, and the absurd situations that lands one is as a kid. I, by comparison, am too normcore for them. I get it, although that feeling is a new one for me. I watched their relationship evolve and deepen by the minute, and hanging back felt like the only right thing to do. I complained wryly to friends that they became the best of friends and forgot all about me, but even then it felt a little much to protest about it.
A month after our visit, she texted me to ask, "Who is Rosemary (lastname)?" I said, that's our dad's cousin. She said, oh funny, 23&Me says she's likely my second cousin.
I was right. She is our goddamn sister and I knew in 2010 after one email.
