I’ve heard Alison express that she felt like my mother tossed her away, that she clearly loved Morgan and me more than her. I’ve also heard my mother say Alison chose to live with our father because she felt bad and didn’t want him to be alone. There is likely some truth in both of their perspectives. I was too young to really understand.
I don’t really know what life was like for my sister living with our father, just the two of them, broken and angry. It must’ve been dangerously claustrophobic—a constant clashing of feelings of abandonment and resentment toward my mother under their roof. They had no real space to resolve, no chance to heal. Order and obedience was how my father tried to make sense out of the chaos of society and the rubble his family structure had become.
The child now in his sole care was a bitter, broken teenage girl, and he had no tools to deal with her dysfunction and hurt. Eventually my father and Alison did form a bond, united in their disdain for my mother. I believe they also bonded over the inevitable visibility of their Blackness.
Predictably, Alison turned to boys and sex in an attempt to fill the family-sized hole of rejection in her heart. At fifteen she met a handsome Black nineteen-year-old military “man,” and Alison got pregnant. Our mother wanted her to have an abortion. Our father told her she could have the baby if she got married. The young man was stationed in the Philippines, and with our father’s permission Alison followed him, and they got married there. Before she left, I recall sitting on the bed with her in her room at our father’s house. What I remember of her room was that on her wall was a shelf of books and a shelf of fancy dolls—the ones with big, poofy lace quinceañera-type dresses. I would look up at those dolls, far out of my reach—there for show, not for playing.
I was staring at them when she pointed to her belly and said, “There’s a baby in there.” A baby where? In her stomach? I was too young and didn’t understand at all what she meant. I didn’t understand much about Alison then.
I’ll never forget her bizarre combined baby and bridal shower at my mother’s house. They put a little girl on the cake—a doll, not one that looked like a grown woman but a little baby doll with dark brown hair like my sister’s. The whole thing was so confusing to me. I was a little girl, wondering, Is this a baby-is-coming party or a girl-is-going party? I couldn’t tell if it was a festive or tragic occasion. My mother was pacing and pissed off. My teenage sister had a swollen belly, and she kept pointing at it and saying to me, “There’s a baby in here; look, there’s a baby in here.” And there was this weird cake with a little doll on it. How was a little girl supposed to understand all of this?
And so, for a long time afterward, I always thought, “Okay, so I guess at fifteen is when people have kids and get married.”
It twisted my reality. But it also focused me. I made the promise to myself that was not going to be me. My sense of self-worth, or rather, my sense of self-preservation was born at that bon voyage/bridal/baby shower. I vowed I was not going to be promiscuous ever. This promise to live a different life led me to become a very prudish person. I knew then—suddenly finding myself an auntie before I was eight years old—that Alison’s path was not going to be my life. Once the last slice of baby-bridal cake was gone, my sister was gone too, for several years.
I will never understand what happened to her in the Philippines. But I do know when she left my father’s house, the remainder of her fragile childhood was left behind.
After a few years in the Philippines, Alison returned to Long Island. I was about twelve years old, and she was twenty. Whatever had happened to her over there, or on Long Island, or in a back room somewhere, had taken its toll on her. That super-smart, beautiful girl with the dark curls who was my big sister had hardened into a strange kind of absence. Something, or many things, must have happened to her to lead her to barter her body for money and drugs, as she went on to do for years. Back then, there was so much I didn’t know, but there also was so much I should have never found out, certainly not so young. The years between us might as well have been centuries.
When Alison came back, she would drift from place to place and man to man, occasionally crashing with us at my mother’s house between the many random relationships with men she collected and discarded. There was one older man—I guessed he was about sixty. He had half a head of hair, all of which was gray. He was polite to my mother and would sometimes fill our refrigerator with food, so I guess she trusted him? One evening at the shack, Alison and my mother got into one of their innumerable epic arguments, and for some unknown reason Alison took me with her to this older gentleman’s
