Last year my sister asked me, “Did you always want to be a writer?” I looked up from my MacAir that morning, sitting at her dining table, stopped typing. I watched her make herself coffee at one of those pod-things she has (not Keurig, a fancier one), surprised at her question. “Always,” in our cases, covers a great deal of time.
“No,” I said. “ I don’t think I ever thought about it. I just always wrote.
This is was an exciting question to me—to answer it I simply had to account for habits that I found rather humiliating at many times, digging out at notebook at a dark campsite, for instance, purchasing tablets and tucking them away in drawers, and to present them as virtuous acts.
“Did you?” she said from the other side of the refrigerator door.
“I remember when I got the pink typewriter—9th grade—I wrote stories and made a carbon copy or two and passed them around math class to Karen or Judy. They cried. These were tragic stories—the boy and girl, in love, always got struck by lightning or something.”
She stared at me: a part of you I didn’t know.
“There weren’t that many,” I said. “Stories. . . oh! I remember I did a play for us, a play of four characters, career girls, where we each played a career girl. That was a different group – that was Judi H., and Melissa and Karen again and me. We were all talented—in my play—and there was a big issue. Someone got pregnant.”
My sister was trying to listen as she closed the refrigerator door, shuffled around.
“I still have a copy of that play,” I said. “How funny! I found it not long ago. “
“Do you want an egg? I’m making myself an egg.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Then there are the journals.”
“Journals?”
Obviously, I wanted to continue talking, liking the topic. “I have boxes of them. Hand-written, a compulsion, I admit. Some people have it, others do not. You–you exercise relentlessly, for instance.” That sounded like an accusation, and I didn’t mean it that way. But it was true: sisters in that way could not be more different.
“Well, not as much as I would like,” she said, now warming up to here own love. “The leg has slowed me down a bit. And often the weather. I can’t walk in that heat!”
She lives in Florida. It was Christmas time, though, so it wasn’t a Florida summer.
“I don’t do handwritten journals anymore,” I said, veering the topic back to me. “I just account for my days – for what they’re worth!– in typing every morning. I haven’t handwritten since Susan died and I closed that last notebook.”
She waited respectfully at the mention of my daughter, and then got out a frying pan, an English muffin that she would split with me. She never eats the whole of anything. I moved on, beyond the awkwardness of that moment. “Now I type everything, each day. It’s not a boast, it’s an affliction. There’s no reason why.”
“But the books—the stories—you belong to a group of writers? Or two?”
“I guess that’s true. Here, I’ll pour us some juice, set the table.” I closed my MacAir. “Odd that I never thought about it. That’s funny. Lately I’ve been thinking I cannot write a play, I’m thinking I’ve never written a play, and I’d like to. And I wrote one already, at age fourteen. Funny.”
“You ready?” she said. “I have some berries here, too. I always have berries.”