I didn’t say anything, even though I felt like I might weep. I just smiled at her. I hummed a few bars of “Mack the Knife.” Still smiling, Margaret went back to the finger-pressing game, now alternating hands.
“Do you want another Coke?”
This question came from the server behind the counter, the one who was not supine in the corner. She must have been about twenty. Her long brunette hair was pulled back in a ponytail, out of her wide-set eyes and pretty face. She was tough, way too cool to be friendly. But I realized that when she asked this question, she was not asking me. She was looking at my sister. She was asking Margaret. For this, I suddenly loved her, this complete stranger.
Often as soon as people pick up on Margaret’s weirdo vibe, they start directing their questions at whoever is with her. “Does she want French fries?” they’ll ask me nervously, glancing at her. “Does she bite?” they might as well be asking. They mean well. They’re just trying to get the food on the table. It throws off a server’s game when she tries to hand out a pair of menus and a customer shouts “No!” and shoves a menu back at her.
Our waitress was smarter than most. When that had happened earlier, she just took a step back and then removed the offending menu without saying anything, letting us both order from mine. But here she was again, trying to treat my sister like a normal person.
“Do you want another Coke?” she asked again, and waited. After a second, Margaret glanced up from the counter and said, “Yes!” She took one last slurp on her straw before shoving the glass across the counter.
“Thanks,” I said as the young woman delivered the glass back across the counter. “What do you want to say, Margs?”
“Thank you!” my sister said, as she grabbed the still-fizzing glass out of the young woman’s hand, slammed it down in front of her, and took a noisy pull on the straw.
The young woman flicked her eyes at me, and the corners of her mouth jerked upward in a kind of smile. Maybe she understands that this is just how Margaret moves, I thought. Margaret shoves, yanks, slams, jerks, runs, and throws herself in and out of chairs and cars. It’s nothing personal. She’ll try to slow down if you remind her, but it just makes her nervous to try to do things at someone else’s pace.
We sat in peaceful silence until the food arrived. I looked up in anticipation. The young woman smiled back at me as she set down my plate with a clunk. Then she tried to set down Margaret’s. My sister looked horrified. “No!” she cried, and pushed the plate away with a forceful hand. “No!” The big dinner plate was heaped with food, and because it was so heavy, the young woman kept trying to set it down. But Margaret was playing defense and her voice got louder. “No-eeeeee!” She shoved the plate away again. This time the server almost dropped it. I reached over and grabbed the plate and set it down next to me.
“Got it,” I said.
The young woman stood there for a second staring at us like she was trying to figure out what she had done wrong. She looked down at the steaming plate, loaded with a hearty chicken sandwich and French fries, trying to determine the source of my sister’s horror. I was puzzled, too.
“Don’t you want your sandwich?” I asked Margaret.
“NothankyouEileen!” she said in one breath, staring at the counter. She sounded panicked.
“Maybe later,” I said to the waitress, so that she would know it wasn’t her fault. She started to smile. But then Margaret gave the plate another shove. “NO!” The smile disappeared and the server backed away from us. I moved the plate over to the left of me, out of Margaret’s reach, feeling depressed. Forget about making polite conversation. If we couldn’t even manage to have lunch together like normal people, what in the hell was I supposed to do with her? How was I supposed to be part of her life? Maybe I should just give up this experiment and stay away. Margaret glanced at the plate on the far side of me with menace.
Why? Why? I didn’t know, and worse, she couldn’t tell me. It would seem reasonable to assume that if you ordered food at a diner it would probably show up in front of you. It also seemed reasonable that, in ordering it, you implied that you wanted to eat it. But my reasoning skills often backfired when I was trying to figure out what my sister wanted or needed. I would even go so far as to say that most of the time I didn’t understand what my sister was thinking, and every time I failed, I felt my heart break a little more. Or maybe I should say I felt the heartbreak I continue to have, because it’s been this way for a very long time. This is the chasm between us, a great, yawning disconnect that neither one of us can breach. But if it felt shitty, it also felt familiar, which was some kind of cold comfort.
THIS WAS HOW I had felt on our bike ride the year before during my spring break from grad school. I’d thought it would be a sure thing, something we could do together that she would really enjoy. Half a mile from the house, Margaret had stopped her bike and stood over it, bawling. She just cried and cried without making any noise, which I somehow hated even more than her screaming. Every once in a while she would lift up her T-shirt and wipe her streaming face. I just stood there feeling helpless, her
