I have a sister who is very ill. Actually I have three sisters, but this story is about “Deanie,” the second of four girls, the sister who is only 18 months younger than I.
If this doesn’t sound like one of my blogs about the Middle East, hang on. In the end everything is connected. I didn’t go to the Middle East without having lived; I didn’t make it home again without everything being altered.
I can’t remember not having a sister, but I do remember the dawning of my understanding about what it meant to have a sister. I was in the second grade in school. Deanie was a first-grader with carrot-red hair and freckles. We had also one younger sister then, and I guess Betty Dean was a typical middle child—sweet, uncomplaining. Without the privilege or responsibility of the eldest. Without the right to be a baby. One morning she was not well and stayed at home instead of walking to school with me. This would not be memorable except for what happened at the end of the day.
When I arrived after school at our little wood-frame house on Levesque St., there was a large piece of paper tacked across the screen door, with a strange word printed on it. “QUARANTINE.” I had no idea what this huge word meant. The next strange thing was that I could not open the door. It was latched. Then my Daddy appeared and stood in the shadow inside the house. It was a school day; my Daddy was never at home on a school day. He did not open the door. From the shadow he told me that I could not come in, because Deanie was sick. He told me to go to Zell’s house.
Zell was one of my favorite people. She was fat and dipped snuff and let kids do whatever kids did without scolding them. She had a big feather bed at the top of the stairs, and sometimes when I was really, really lucky, I could go and sleep in Zell’s little attic. But this was not like being lucky; this was really strange to be locked out of my own house and told to go somewhere else, and I dragged my feet, though I was going to see Zell.
Somehow my clothes came to Zell’s house, too. What I remember is that she boiled them in a big pot on the stove. I had never seen anyone boil the laundry and anyway, they were not dirty. She explained that she was killing the sickness.
I don’t know how long Deanie was sick, just that it was weird to walk past my own little house on the way to school every morning and even more weird to walk past it again in the afternoon. I was not supposed to stop; I was supposed to keep walking. But one day there was a crisis, and I absolutely had to stop, because that day the teacher had told us that tomorrow we had to turn in our reader. All our books belonged to the school, and we always had to give them back. Now we had finished reading the little book about Paul and Patsy and the orange orchard, the best book I ever had. What a magical place, that wonderland with trees in neat rows and perfectly round oranges covering every tree! I had never even imagined little trees from which children could pull down oranges as simply as children could pull down apples from trees in Arkansas.
All the time that we had that little reader I had been waiting to show Deanie the pictures of the orange trees and read to her those simple sentences about children going to the orchard. And now the teacher had said we were finished and we had to give the book back to the school. I couldn’t. I couldn’t give it back when Deanie had not seen it!
But that afternoon I had dreamed up a scheme. On the way to Zell’s after school I would stop and give it to Mother or Daddy at the door. They could read it to her in the evening, and tomorrow on the way to school I could pick it up again. I was so happy to have thought of a solution.
And then my Daddy said, from behind the locked screen door, No, that would not work. He told me that nothing that went into that house could come out again. This was the most stunning, hard-to-believe thing I had ever heard! If it went into our house, it would have diphtheria on it and then it would have to be burned!!
That night I told Zell that my throat hurt, and she got very upset and called other people and they all acted scared and looked in my throat with flashlights. Apparently they didn’t know that when you need to cry and you are trying hard to keep the pain inside, the muscles in your throat begin to ache. I held the tears in until I got into the big feather bed in the dark. There were no words for what I had lost.
The rest of the story has faded, folding into the little scraps of childhood left in my head. I guess getting well was slower and less dramatic than getting sick. No doubt a lot of years went by before I ever tried to say what I learned from Deanie’s illness, and since then I have seen a lot of the world, lived 30 years in the Arab world and learned to apply broadly, to my life in the world some of the things I learned through the trials and joys of life in a family, more specifically childhood in the south during the great depression.
I have banqueted in wealthy homes, and I have received generosity from Jordanian people whose children had no shoes. I have been free and owned a house, and I have wept with the unwanted and stateless in Palestinian refugee camps. During a long artillery battle I gave the last flour in my house to another woman who made bread for everyone in the building. I have seen women risk their lives to earn food for their children. In Lebanon I was embarrassed once in church because I could read the Arabic hymnal, and the woman beside me, at home in her own country, could not. I once walked a long way in a desert heat in Syria to give a small printed story to a little child who had cried because he wanted a book. I have found among the hungry, faith that God would provide and have felt guilty about the $20 in my purse. All of these people, these Middle Easterners, are my brothers and sisters because of their faith or their love or their humanity. When I met them I already knew what it meant to have a sister.
Now in my old age I realize and must honestly admit that there are a lot of big issues, important to the world, that I care nothing about. I don’t care, for instance, about political concepts like liberal or conservative or any other dirty or proud word that offers health care to some of us but not to all of us. I care nothing for any system of economics, capitalism or socialism or communism or compromises thereof, caring only that they do or don’t provide a living for everyone who works. I don’t give a flip for the jury system or any law anywhere if it doesn’t provide justice without discrimination. I have no love or loyalty or even preference for any kind of governance, democracy or dictatorship or something else, if it doesn’t give the world peace.
I am too old now, without time to care about trivialities. Deanie is old and sick again. But I didn’t have a sister for nothing.
We— I who write and you who read this— are likely the privileged elite who will have tonight a nutritious dinner, clean water to drink, a hot bath, nighttime meds, respect and love, a comfortable bed in a safe place, a country of our own. My restlessness is for our sisters: the destitute, the abused, the kidnapped, the refugees, the illiterate. I know what I lose when I get the blessing and they don’t.