A brown parcel arrived recently in the post. My sister’s address on the back. My heart thumped as I opened my small parcel. What could she send me? We scarcely speak these days, and our only real exchange happened a few weeks ago when we were in Healesville on a family reunion.
We walked together for the family dinner as she did not want to use her car. A hire car, she was reluctant to leave in the unfamiliar streets of Healesville.
When she came out of her hotel room in readiness for our jaunt into town I saw she was carrying a large black hold all, a type of mini suitcase.
‘That’s too big to carry,’ I said and she lamented forgetting to bring a smaller bag other than her overnight travel case in which to carry her wallet, phone and necessities.
I dived back into my room and offered her the use of a bag I’d picked up from St Vinnies, the Opp shop near where I live. The type of bag you find in supermarkets everywhere, though they tend to be green at Safeway or Coles. This one was pink. Intended for multiple uses to spare the planet. A more sensible option than her black overnighter, I suggested. And she agreed.
It was slow going this twenty-minute walk. Largely because my sister struggles with ankles that swell on too much exertion. But she was determined to get there.
On our way to the restaurant we shared more words than we have spoken together over the past forty years. She told me about her ex-husband with whom she continues to be friends. About his daughter, who is currently in Israel, the daughter of a Jewish mother.
She told me this story in the context of her wish to travel abroad, to Poland, she said because she had always been interested in this country following the Second World War.
I well remember her childhood fixation on tales of female resistance fighters and women who tricked the Nazis during this time. She laughed lightly when I talked about my dislike of travel urging me to reconsider.
Later after the dinner when my family were seated in another sister’s hotel room trying to converse with one another, a year since our last shared time. We made the mistake of entering the tough territory of politics and at one point, with everyone overheated, I stood and used my hand and voice gesturing to lower the temperature.
At which stage my sister of the black overnighter and pink St Vinnies bag stood from her position at the side of the bed and thrust her hands towards my out-turned hands.
‘So, what do you want to talk about? The earth? Climate change?’
Where the conversation went after this I can’t remember. It seemed to settle. My husband left the gathering for bed, fed up with what he called the brawling, and I said nothing more to this sister.
Even in the morning when we shared breakfast as a group, apart from a peremptory hug of farewell, we did not speak.
Several days later this parcel arrives. $3.40 in postage, more than the value of the bag, but at least I have my sister’s address now and so it leaves me with the thought to write her a letter.
A response to her gesture, which puzzles me for its weirdness.
Many years ago, when she was still married to the man who now has a Jewish wife with a daughter in Israel, we were closer. And this husband one day sent a parcel to my husband which contained frayed underpants full of holes. It was intended as a joke though I never quite understood. Something to do with the hardship of joining a family like ours.
I’m as mystified by my sister sending her parcel to me now as I am by my ex in-law sending his holey underpants.
Why is it so hard to talk to family with whom we were once close, as close any soul can get? Two sisters, twenty one months apart, and now as far apart as the two sisters in the book called Twin Sisters, a book about two women who were separated at 18 months when their parents died.
The one raised by family in Germany the other in the Netherlands. These two women endure very different lives during that Second World War. Which speaks to the point, our circumstances define us almost more so than our genetic make-up.
When they reached their seventies, the two women came upon one another by chance while spending time in a health spa in Switzerland. They can scarcely recognise each other and there is tension between them until each takes it in turn to tell her story to the other.
The one raised in Germany on impoverished farms, abused repeatedly by her adoptive father and layer by her partner, the other raised in the Netherlands.
There is one point when the Dutch step-father behaves badly, too, but not in the form of abusing his child. Instead, he hoards food in his study, when people must restrict the amount anyone can eat.
One day this Dutch sister catches him tucking into pork sausage or some such while the rest of the family are starving.
It’s left to the reader to decide who has the worst experience of the two sisters. Not that it’s fair to compare.
Clearly, the woman who stayed in Germany fared the worst and her body tells us as much. She is frail and unwell and towards the end of the book she dies leaving the sister who only just then has reconnected to grieve alone.
It’s a sad and sobering story. One that stays with me whenever I think of my sister and me, even though we were raised together in the same family. She trailed behind me at school, only a year behind, despite our nearly two years difference. Perhaps this made it harder for her. She was young to begin school. I was age appropriate.
In my memory, she was more beautiful than me, taking after our mother with her dark wavy hair. While I look like our father, his long Germanic face, his sandy coloured hair, his horse like jaw.
I spent my childhood feeling ugly alongside this younger sister. I cannot say how she felt alongside me, but we both carry wounds distinct from one another. Her parcel a communication to me, at least this is how I read it, that she wants nothing from me. She will not be in debt to me, even to the tune of a $1.99 Vinnies tote bag.
