My sister, Norma, moved out of the house and clear across the country in the fall of 1973, just after she turned eighteen. Her departure was abrupt. At least it felt abrupt to those of us she left behind. But, from more than thirty years of hindsight, it seems probable that she planned her escape—saved up her money, graduated from high school, and took off for a solo summer in Europe. What she didn't plan was, after that long summer, she would stop home just long enough to pack her belongings and head off for California. In an unprecedented gesture, which hasn’t been repeated since, despite subsequent offspring departures, all six of the remaining family members began to write letters to my sister. The phenomenon continued for a few years, gradually petering of to written silence around 1977. 

 A few years ago my sister sent me the accumulated letters from that time. She wanted me, “a writer,” to do something with them. It was an odd request, but also an irresistible opportunity to put myself on the receiving end of all that family outpouring. What I hadn’t anticipated was how that package of letters would unearth versions of my parents, my siblings, and myself that I hadn’t known existed.

I thought I knew the “us” of those years. Being a glass-is-half-empty kind of gal, I assumed I would receive confirmation of our collective family turmoil, but the written interpretations of that time, told through six different voices, presented a more nuanced bunch than I remember us being. There’s something appealing, as well as appalling about the family of those letters. As a group they assume an easy relationship, even a common understanding, with the reader, my sister. But I can't forget how far away she ran, and how long she has stayed away. So I read those letters, and find (in between lines about the weather and the food) subtle jealousies, outright fabrications of reality, and blatant warnings for the future of my sister’s soul.

                                        
My sister had not only wrenched up her Michigan roots, she had replanted herself in San Francisco with a man she met on a bridge in Amsterdam. He was ten years her senior, and, perhaps worse in my parents’ eyes, he was a Jew. My sister had grown up and made profession of faith at Calvin Church, right near Calvin College, in an area were the demographic looked like us, and where the Protestantism was distinctly Dutch Christian Reformed. Jewish people were “the Jews,” in our household, much in the same way that the Polish were “the Polacks” from the other side of town. My sister’s new boyfriend might have been one of the Chosen People of the old testament, but he was shacking up with my sister and leading her straight to Hell.

                                                                           
Reading my mother’s letters to my wayward sister, I had to laugh at Mom's awkwardness in dealing with Norma’s sexuality and spiritual downfall. Mom's letters stumble along, jumping from preachy rants to newsy non sequiturs:

“We—Dad & I, both like Mike very much. But we want you to be fair to yourself and to Mike. You know you couldn’t just all of a sudden one day say, “Well Mike it’s been nice. Good-bye.” And you see, Dad and I both are old fashioned enough to think if you want to live together, you should get married—Enough! How about Jim—he’s getting to be quite a kid.”

                                                    
Perhaps my mother was not unique in her attempts to dispel squeamish topics with something, anything, more benign; but some of her topical leaps left my head spinning as she jumped from fornication to my twelve-year-old brother, and, later in the same letter, from outright guilt-slathering prose to my middle sister’s new bike:

“Grandma both prays and cries for you every day. I told her that I didn’t. You were old enough to know what you were doing, and I have 4 more children and Dad to live for. I wouldn’t have a heart attack of a stroke over it. Remember, I said we like Mike very much, and think he has a lot on the ball—but oh! What joy you can have being together & serving the Lord. Myrna got a brand new 10 speed bike at 10:30 tonight...”

                                                
 At first glance, I took my mother’s letters to be further proof of her nuttiness. I had always viewed my mom as a bit of an embarrassment. She was forever saying the wrong thing at the wrong time; she looked nothing like the other, well-put-together mothers; and she was incapable of keeping the chaos of our house at bay. I also noticed the outright hypocrisy, or what seemed like pathetic delusions of “being together & serving the Lord.”  Was she talking about herself and my dad? My Dad, the guy who made us sit in the top balcony seat in church, just behind the choir, so he’d have a direct escape route from the building, thereby avoiding any direct contact with any of the other congregants. My dad, who drank, and swore, and worse, and rarely had a kind word for his wife. Or didn’t my mother think my sister noticed the spiritual and intimate distance between herself and her spouse? Do all parents believe they are presenting an ideal picture of themselves to their children?

What I hadn’t noticed in that first reading of my mother’s letters was the back story. There was an overwhelming disarray that my mother, in her early fifties, was attempting to gloss over, but which, nevertheless, seeped in between her lines of correspondence. Some of her letters are written on scraps of paper, or, in one case, an envelope that she thought was the stationary. Part way through the letter she noticed her mistake and switched to the actual stationary, albeit upside-down. The best, for reading value, and the most emotionally roller-coastery letters come written on “Nursing Notes” or, in one case, a “Bath & B.M. List” from the nursing home where she worked third shift. These are middle-of-the-night letters, scrawled in red pen, and interrupted, I’m sure, by the intermittent call of her elderly patients. 

    
My Mother, an LPN, had gotten her training in a mental hospital. She started her career in a nursing home owned by her mother, and moved on to another nursing home when Grandma died. She always told us kids that she worked in order to protect her sanity, but I think we assumed she was being ironic. In 1973, when my sister flew the coop, my mother was wrestling with the accumulated angst of five children between the ages of eleven and nineteen. The sixth child, my father, raged in and out of the house between railroad runs, and left us skittering in his wake.   In my mother’s written version of “us” we are all “serving the Lord” in our own special ways. In my father’s version, usually written on Chesapeake and Ohio stationary, there is little of “us” and lots of him. He longs for so many things: retirement, food, someplace else, and for something my sister seemed to have taken with her—our childhood selves.

“This house sure has an amount of undefinable loss since you left. No more fights and yelling and laughter. Even houses have to adjust to people leaving, I guess. At night sometimes I hear it sigh. But maybe it’s just because it’s old.”

                                       
Pulled out of their context, these few sentences could be read as a loving poetic expression of a father’s longing. If only my father hadn’t followed them up with a line about the “sighs” possibly being the dog farting. This his my father’s brand of the Calvinist vigilance against pride. A compliment or a sweet sentiment must always be followed by a jab. Just when my sister might have thought dad was being sentimental, he attributed the groans of a grieving house into a doggy-smelling stink-hole. A few lines down he pulls the same kind of flip-flop, sucking my sister in with sentiment, and then smacking her upside the head with an ego deflator.
                                

"I guess the hardest part about you being gone is the suddenness of it all. And then, also, I had hoped that you’d go to college or something. I realize that you had to leave because inside you were ready. All this is good. You also got guts, which I admire. If only you weren’t so funny looking!!"

                                        
When my sister left I think my father looked around for the first time and noticed that we all were big and slightly pimply, in various stages of puberty, and swiftly losing our cuteness. I think my sister’s leave-taking inspired my father to bemoan for the first time his now worn-out refrain, “Didn’t we have fun when you were kids?” The silent answer to that question is “No. No way. You’ve got to be kidding.” The spoken one is, “Um... sure Dad.” But, if Dad asked Norma at a bad moment, she’ll say, “Yeah, I really thought it was a hoot when you chased me down the alley with a baseball bat.” The nice thing about by dad’s memory was its malleability. “Oh,” he’ll laugh,” I NEVER did such a thing!”

Contrary to my father’s maudlin ramblings, our “fights, yelling and laughter” didn’t stop. They were the constant commodities that my family produced. His version of a sad house was merely a slightly more quiet house. But the real subtext of my father’s lamentations over the aging house is that both my father and the four-square we occupied were the same age—both born in the mid 1920’s. My father was the groaner and the sigher, and my sister’s departure only confirmed what he was already feeling. He was getting older, and so were we... but we were moving on.