After 30 years at odds, Joyce and Rona Maynard confront each other in writing — and make amends
Joyce Maynard's Tale
(For Rona's side of the story, pick up a copy of the September issue of MORE, on newsstands now.)
Here's a situation that comes up surprisingly often in my life: I make a friend. We come to know each other pretty well. Months pass -- longer, even -- before the following piece of information comes out: I have a sister, four years older than I -- the one remaining relative from my family of origin, the only one who will ever understand what it meant to have our mother and father as parents, the one person on this planet who remembers the day of my birth. And still, my sister and I speak so seldom, I don't know her telephone number by heart.
"You never mentioned her before," my no-longer-very-new-friend will say.
I haven't asked my sister if this is true for her, but I doubt she speaks of me any more often than I do of her, though the space she occupies for me -- or maybe it's the space left by her absence in my life -- has been vast. "You two had a falling out?" my friend may ask. No, I say. Not that. Or rather, that part is over.
"I love my sister," I always explain. "But we're different. She lives far away." I'm not just speaking of miles here. Even when we lived in the same house, a gulf separated Rona and me. And in an odd way, the same things that link us -- our blood and our history -- are what divide us now. We know too much. We are each, for the other, a reminder of where we came from and the family that shaped our lives.
Views of the Past
Memory plays a huge part in our story. It's not so much that we have different memories of our childhood as that my sister remembers things I do not. Even when we were quite young, Rona had an amazing ability to hold on to the smallest details of events and stories: whole conversations, paintings on walls, but most of all, feelings -- particularly the painful ones. I have a good memory too, but strangely mine began to sharpen only in adult life. For me, the years of our growing up are a hazy blur, where for her, certain moments of childhood are illuminated with the shattering intensity of a lightning bolt.
So we are two women four years apart in age, in possession of radically different pictures of what took place in our family. Maybe it's simple chance -- the accident of our different natures -- that accounts for this. Maybe it's the fact that she came first and that her role as the frequently contrary worrier left me with the obligation to be who she was not: the sunbeam to compensate for her darkness.
I was famously affectionate -- leaping on the lap of whichever parent appeared to need a little love -- while Rona was known for her distaste for human touch. "Hot face," she had said once when she was small, when one of our parents bent to hold her.
I was a joker and a flirt; my sister was serious and shy. I could be sneaky and egotistical; she was honest and pure. Accurate or not, the list that characterized us as opposites went on and on. She would make trouble with our troubled father; I would make him happy, or try to.
I can never enter the story of our family without first laying one card on the table, a card that determined how the rest of the deck would play out. Our father was an alcoholic. And there's this fact, as difficult to deal with as the first, more so in many ways: For all the years the four of us lived together in a house where our father got drunk almost every night, we never mentioned it.
When you have grown up in a home where trouble lurked, there is little motivation to revisit the old days. For me, painful memories are less of a problem, because I possess so few, but for Rona, the territory of childhood is a haunted house. I am all that remains of a life she has worked hard to leave behind. I am the scent that hung in the air while soldiers ransacked the village, the sole surviving witness.
For decades, I pursued my sister and grieved over what we didn't have with each other. I wanted her to invite me to visit, know my children, ask about my life, tell me about hers. I looked enviously at friends who took trips with their sisters and spent hours on the phone together, and felt the chill wind of my sister's reluctance to seek me out. The sister I wanted was not the sister she wanted to be.
Although insufficiency of love from our parents was never the issue, the home where we grew up was filled with uneasiness and fear. My father's depression, my mother's frustration over her stalled career, their doomed marriage, all lay like a thick fog over our household. Our parents' lives had disappointed them. They looked to us -- "the girls" -- to make everything right.
My sister rebelled. I acquiesced. When I think of my childhood, the image that first comes to mind is of a smiling face. I drew them a lot. The smile was so much a part of my identity in our family that on the rare occasions when my lips didn't turn upward, our mother would put one finger into each corner of my mouth and move them into position for me -- while, off in some corner, Rona looked on. From the scant record of our childhoods provided by family photographs, I cannot summon a single image of my sister smiling.
I had friends and school activities, but my main energy in childhood went into making our parents happy. I put on shows in our living room: acting, dancing, singing. Every day, I drew cards for our parents, reminding them of what they meant to me -- which was everything. I started every morning by jumping into our mother's bed (she slept alone) to cuddle with her -- a practice that continued for way too many years, according to my sister's memory. As for Rona, I guess she hung back, cringing.
I used to look at my sister sometimes -- see her arguing with our father or retreating wordlessly to her room to play her guitar or read -- and I'd wonder why she'd want to make life difficult when it was so easy to make things nice. What did it cost a person to climb up on her mother's lap and stroke her hair, or reach for her father's hand and suggest they take a bike ride together? (Forty years later, I might provide an answer to my own question and say, It could cost plenty. But back then, Rona's refusal to play the game only baffled me.)
I used to ask myself, why isn't she nicer to me? Now I look back, imagining the scene as she must have viewed it, and see readily all the things that must have driven her crazy. There is probably nobody less lovable to an older sibling than a younger one who is so busy being cute.
Here's the story I always tell of how the relationship between my sister and me began. Rona was four years old when I was born. Our mother -- herself the younger of two sisters, four years apart, who never enjoyed a good relationship with each other -- came up with the idea of defusing potential trauma to her elder daughter by allowing her to pick the new baby's name.
A highly precocious child and lover of Greek mythology, Rona chose her favorite name, Daphne, for her baby sister. And so that was the name given to me; it is the name on my birth certificate.
Two days after our parents brought me home from the hospital, my sister changed her mind without explanation. Forever after, I went by my middle name, Joyce, though it was three decades later that she explained to me the reason for her change of heart.
One of the many things I admire about my sister is her scrupulous, sometimes painful, honesty. "I realized once I saw you," she finally told me, "that the last name I'd want you to have would be my favorite."
