Christina ~ May 4

 

When I didn’t see my sister for almost two years, back when we were eight and nine – I was eight and she was nine – I missed her so. Every night I would study a photograph of her, a black and white portrait someone had put in a wooden frame, the photo covered with glass, and I would kiss the image of her, so beautiful she was to me, with her soft wavy hair, her lovely oval face, not like me with my straight hair and my round face. Our mother said – always dividing her many children into categories – that Diana was the beautiful one and I was the cute one. Or she would say Diana looks like an Allen and Tina looks like a Franke, by which our ancestors-on-the-Mayflower mother meant Diana looked like her, looked English and Scottish, and I looked like our father, German and Jewish. Later, in our late 20s, we sat in an Indian restaurant in New York City and the waiter came to take our order and said, looking at the two of us, “Sisters, right?” And that happened more than once during those years, my hair now somehow curly too, both of us slender and soft and oh so pretty. But back when I was almost ten and she was almost 11 and we were living together again and she was the beautiful one and I was the cute one, we fought and fought, hitting each other on the Inverness school playground, screaming, and our teacher Mrs. Collier (our teacher since the Inverness school only had three rooms and we were both in the middle room), our teacher Mrs. Collier came over to us and said, “But Tina, you missed your sister so much, why, why are you hitting her?”