The 'It' Girl's Sister

It is four o'clock in the morning and I don't really think about answering the phone, I just do it as if I'm swatting a giant fly from my face.  I hear my mother's weak voice calling from California and realize my mistake in picking up the receiver.  "She's at it again."

            My focus is fuzzy but I want to yell at my mother, "Of course she's at it again!  When has she ever not been at it?"  Instead I am obedient; I'm one of Pavlov's dogs that salivate when the dinner bell rings, except my actions are not rewarded by food.  I take down the information Mother gives and I'm off to the police station to collect my fu*ked-up sister. 

            My husband barely stirs as I throw on clothes.  He knows if he starts reciting logic about how my sister isn't my responsibility we will only argue and he needs his rest.  Besides, we both know our marriage is surviving on fumes and the less said from either of us the better. 

            I'm in the foyer of our building.  I hope the doorman was able to flag down a cab for me.  He has and I smile at him before leaping in, "Thank you, Jerry."  He smiles back with a nod.  I'm sure in his line of work he harbors contempt for the over-privileged, but I know from the tilt of his nod I am not one he envies. 

            By the time I arrive at the police station the lawyer Mother hired to deal with my sister has completed the necessary transactions.  All that is left is for me to do is to scoop this...this thin straggly stranger who resembles me through the eyes and assist her home.

            The girl standing in front of me makes the cliché, "Road hard and put up wet," sound appealing.  I fight the impulse to leave her where she stands.  I enjoy the fantasy of allowing her to sober up with all of the riff-raft the nightshift has collected in the holding cells.  Alas, it is my imagination at work, I can't leave her to the conclusion of her mischief; she is my baby sister and I love her - apparently unconditionally (bucking family tradition).

            "Sukie!" she shouts, while relatives and friends of harden criminals crane their necks to see what a "Sukie" looks like.  She collapses into my arms and all I feel of her are her bones jetting out.  "I'm so gladddd to see you," she slurs and I pat her on the back and whisper, "I know."

            I debated taking her back to my home, but I know Harold would not approve and I run the risk of her having a moment of clarity and laughing at his new toupee.  Instead, I find myself sitting next to her on her unmade bed (now a mattress on the floor, she must have traded the other one) humming lullabies to her as the rest of New York greets the new day. 

          Have you ever had an unpleasant déjà vu where you find yourself in the same uncomfortable space doing the same unnerving activity?  I was doing this same exact thing two weeks ago.  She should be in a hospital.  She is a drug addict for Christ sake, yet here she lies and here I sit - two peas in a pod.

            I'm thirteen years older so by the time she developed a personality I was long gone from the spider hole known as our family.  Hard to believe at this moment when I look at one of her designer dresses discarded with dry vomit, but when she moved here to attend film school I was excited.  She seemed to have a zest about her that I find sadly lacking in our other siblings. 

          Of course, depression lurks in our family tree so I think we were all spooked after our brother Edward committed suicide.  That incident more than any other, has made me want to cling to her more.  After all, she was the sister who stood up to Father and she was the one who told Mother during a memorable Easter brunch to stop fussing so; "Either leave Daddy or shut-up!  You know he isn't going to stop his affairs and you also know that these women are meaningless to him.  I'm tired of you complaining because all you do is talk in circles!"  I had never seen my mother look so shocked, she muttered something that I didn't catch and then slumped off to her room where she stayed for a week.

            "She is spirited," said Harold during happier times.

          "She is such a Sagittarius!" said my best friend Miffy during her 'everything can be sorted our through astrology phase.'

Now look at her, the only spirit in her is what she drinks.  As for being a Sagittarius...is this their lot?

I phone Mother to plea with her about putting her youngest daughter in a private hospital but I am told my mother is not to be disturbed.  "How convenient," I sneer into the phone but I'm sure my wrath is lost on the maid since she barely speaks English.  My father has been dead for just over a year, yet my mother is trying to keep his memory sacred as if she was Queen Victoria and he her Prince Albert.  She recently converted to his Catholic faith (a sticking point when the two of them were married close to forty years ago) and now she prays with a rosary for hours each morning.

          I want to call Hue.  He is the only one who could help me if he was only willing to help her.  He could get Mother to sign the necessary papers to get her into a private institution that would allow her to detox without a time limit.  Unfortunately, Hue has washed his hands of our baby sis and informs me, whenever given the chance, that I'm a fool for caring about her.  "If the shoe was on the other foot do you think she would do the same for you?"

        Hue was never enchanted by her.  Her spirit was lost on him as well as her Sagittarian traits.  Miffy said of him, "A typical Capricorn."

          True, Hue has a right to be pissed.  She should not have treated our family's dirty laundry as if it was a piñata, which once broken allowed everyone to enjoy the candied secrets inside.  She yammered too much to any publication willing to print it about how she had endured this and that in childhood.  Such a sad history we have, and to think people read it as entertainment.  She always pretended she overcame it all.  Two years ago, she was simply this flighty little media darling whose only job was to spring from festivity escorted by Warwick Anthony; the guru of the underground art scene.  One would have thought she was a Jewish child rescued from a Nazi concentration camp to hear her tell of her woes.  Sexual abuse, suicide attempts, and a history of medicated depressions are bad, but there are things much worse, some people live through these hardships without money. 

         Hue thought she was just doing it because Anthony wanted to exploit her cuteness and our family name.  I believed she did it because she had no perspective.  How could she with Warwick Anthony whispering in her ear?  Yet, dare I admit it to myself, even before meeting Anthony she always lived in the moment. 

          If anyone is a villain in her life, it isn't Mother or Father, although you can imagine, they were far from perfect.  I would give the title to Warwick Anthony (I should give it to her, but my love for her still doesn't allow it).  Before Anthony, she was all-potential.  The year she and Anthony spent practically "joined at the hip, they were the definition of HIP!"  The last bit was a line fed to me during one of my husband's dinner parties by some writer who was past his youthful wit. 

After Anthony...Jesus, is that cat spray I smell?

         As soon as she met him, it was always "Warwick thinks this," or "Warwick says that."  He took her under his wing soon after taking her to his bed.  She became his muse and was included in all of his pop art and independent films.  Viewed separately, they could light up a room; together they were an event.  "Town and Country' merges with 'Spin'" was how one newspaper editorial described them.  He gave her fame and she gave him sex appeal and her share of our family's old money, which I do not doubt ended up lining his pockets.

          She once described herself as being a surfer who had caught the most awesome wave.  This was at the beginning of her deterioration, when her repartee started to slip and her skin began revealing small flaws.  It wasn't her fall from grace that blindsided me, but how fast.  I had always thought she was psychologically stronger than me because I could never confront our mother and father about their sins.  The same ones in which they felt their children owed it to them to cheerfully ignore.  Now as I play Florence Nightingale to her, I realize that my admiration for her was more about my weaknesses than her strengths. 

          When Warwick Anthony found a new muse the graffiti was on the wall.  She acted as if it didn't bother her.  She told one gossip columnist that they were still friends, even though I knew at that time he wasn't returning her calls.  Anthony had his art while she was only famous for being famous.  Fame is not a talent per se, but some people handle it better than others.  One well-known journalist, you have seen him on television, said of fame at a party once, "It is a bit like walking on your hands." 

          My sister continued to pursue fame; which smelled like desperation to anyone who mattered.  If she had only stuck with her own art it might have been different, but instead she wanted to keep on partying the night fantastic.  That is the problem with being an 'It Girl' fifteen minutes later you are the 'Shit Girl.'

Three years ago, her arrest last night would have made the front page in Section C of the 'New York Times.'  I look at her now and I'm afraid that she will start the DTs and I will have no choice but to call a hospital and she will end up in Belleview.  She has been there already and made me swear never to send her there again, but what choice do I have if she starts shaking?  For all of my glitz, finances are tight (a few bad investments) and I don't have the funds to send her somewhere else.  I hope she knows, in some sober place in her heart, that if I did I would.

         "I can't save her," I say aloud to no one but myself.  "She has to want to save herself."  This place she calls an apartment is cold.  She has gone through her trust fund and I suspect she has sold the stocks left to her from father. 

I don't know what the future will bring for either of us.  I want to believe in happy endings.  I want her to get sober even if it means listening to her chatter ad nausea about the serenity prayer, which, as I smile to myself, is something she would do.  For myself I want to be happy and if things don't work out between Harold and me, I hope that we can be one of those couples that occasionally have dinner together to laugh about old times.

          I brush clothes and fashion magazines off a chair in order to sit and stare at her.  Now I am the one who is shaking.  They are all wrong about me; I am no fool. 

© 2005 Westerfield

I first published this story on Gather in March of 2007.  I had found it in a pile of papers which was printed off my computer before it crashed.  I know people talk about backing up your work all the time, but allow me to state for the record that the best backup of all is to publish your work.  Technology changes all the time, saving your work to some floppy ten years ago would have made you feel secure, now I dare you to look for a computer which still reads those old floppies.  Nothing will ever beat the word on the printed page.  I copied this story and a few others back on my word processing program.

            I wrote this story after reading a biography about Eddie Sedgwick.  I have often thought about how 'It' girls have a huge disadvantage in that the concept of 'It' changes so frequently that they are dated before their fifteen minutes of fame is done.  In many ways it is probably much better, in terms of career longevity to not be an 'It' girl because then you aren't so quickly thrown aside as yesterday's news.  I'm sorry, did I write news?  I meant muse.

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