evolution of my sister

 I always knew when Jenny was on the phone. I could tell from Mom’s half of the conversation, when she dropped her stranger-voice. “Hello?” She would begin, smooth and clear, in the same tone the 911 ladies used on the gunshot victims on TV. Then there’d be a pause, a breath, and a rush of those rougher, louder, jumbled-together family-words. And then I knew, because who else could they be for? There was only one not-stranger who wasn’t within earshot.

Mom devoured those phone calls. She strangled the landline with both hands, wrapped the cord around her wrists tight enough to turn her fingers blue, practically shoved the speaker into her ear canal. After all, family wasn’t family if it didn’t hurt a little. If it didn’t cramp your fingers, turn your hands all pins-and-needles-y, make your eardrums ache. Those were good pains. They reminded you someone else was there, a little too close, even. But now Jenny was gone, too far to pinch or prod or needle. The landline, with its dented handset and frayed cord, had to do.

“Your sister’s on the phone!” Mom called, breaking the rhythm of the conversation I’d been eavesdropping on. “She wants to talk to you.”

I’d been on the PlayStation when the call started, but now the screen was blank, and the controller sat by my foot, dead plastic. I guess I must’ve turned it off. I switched it on and turned up the volume. “I’m busy!” I shouted.

“Pause the game and hurry up!”

I blackened the screen again. 

On my way to the kitchen I passed Jenny’s old room. It was just the way she’d left it, down to the unmade bed and the wrinkled clothes on the floor. Mom and Dad had made noise about turning it into a study, or a home gym, something useful for a change, but they hadn’t got around to that yet. For now it was untouched, the way families in murder shows kept the rooms of their kidnapped children.

Mom gave me a phone and a five dollar bill. 

“Hello,” I said. It was unnatural, saying “Hello” to your sister.

“Hello,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

A pause. I waited patiently for her to break it. “You know, once you told me you cried for three hours and forty-five minutes when I was gone.”

Three hours and twenty-two minutes. “I don’t remember that.”

“You did. Because you missed me so much.”

The phone calls always went like this. I could do what Mom wanted me to do, but didn’t they realize I miss you was even worse than Hello?

Eventually there were no more five dollar bills, and I gave the phone back. I went back to my room, but I didn’t turn the PlayStation back on. Instead I kept listening to Mom’s questions, her answers, and imagined when Jenny answered, what she had asked. 

The call went on for another ten minutes, maybe thirty, I don’t know, but all of sudden I didn’t hear anymore talking, just the radio and the banging of pots and pans. It would be dinner soon. Jenny always called right before Mom started cooking.

Mom brought the same philosophy to her cooking that she did to her phone calls. If it wasn’t unpleasant, what was the point? She would spend an hour or two in the kitchen sweating over the stove, rubbing her hands raw as she sliced or boiled or kneaded. And from it all came plate after plate, piled high with food someone had to eat. So we did. I would start to hate Jenny, off at Stanford ,as I chewed and chewed, till my jaw ached and the mush that bloated my stomach and cheeks started to taste like nothing but my own spit. But Mom had made it,it was in front of me, and there was nowhere else for it to go.

Jenny should be having fun at college. Over there, she could eat however much she wanted, whenever she wanted. She had all the space she needed. I wondered if she appreciated it. Or, during those calls, as Mom clung to the battered landline, was Jenny on the other end, holding her own phone a little too tightly, feeling the emptiness of her stomach?