Side by Side

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­On the last working day of December, my younger sister sends me an e-mail that says simply, “I’m done.” At the ripe old age of fifty, she is officially retired. She is ready, she tells me, to turn over a new leaf, to send the tendrils of her life in a new direction. She is moving to Uruguay.

Now, I don’t have anything against Uruguay, but from my vantage point here on California’s west coast it strikes me as being awfully far away.

Why Uruguay? I wonder. Why not Mexico, or even Costa Rica? Isn’t it enough that she’s going to another country? Does she have to go to another hemisphere as well?

It seems that she must. Something is pulling her, compelling her to transplant herself to a foreign soil that holds, for me, absolutely no appeal.

I wonder how that could happen. How could we end up so far apart when we started out in the same place? When I was eight and she was three we shared the same house, the same room, even the same double bed. I had to draw an imaginary line down the middle of our mattress every night to emphasize the difference between her space and mine. It never worked. By morning she had always squirmed to my side of the bed, and I would wake to an elbow, a fist, or a foot thrust against my middle. It seemed to me then that I couldn’t get away from her. 

We experienced childhood side-by-side: hula hooping on the front lawn, careening one behind the other down a slide into a sun-drenched motel swimming pool, racing down the front walk on white shoeskates that were identical in every way except for size. I was the bigger one, the older one, and as bossy as any big sister could be. When we played Follow the Leader I insisted on going first and I made sure that her turn, when it came, was mercilessly short. If we play acted, I always snatched the starring roles for myself, and she had to be content with back-up—Lost Boy to my Wendy, Wicked Godmother to my Sleeping Beauty.

Thinking about those days now, I begin to wonder why she didn’t move to Uruguay sooner. But she didn’t. I was the one who left home—for summer camp, for graduate school, for ever. She was the one who stayed behind, trapped in the ruins of our parents’ marriage, tied to a career and to the care of our mother, a burden she accepted without complaint or reproach.