If I had to compare my sister and myself to characters in a movie, I would have to go with Uma Thurman (my sister) and Janeane Garofalo (myself) in The Truth About Cats and Dogs.  Where my sister is tall and willowy, I am not.  Where my sister is charming and sexy, I am not.  My sister is quick to laugh, but I am quick to crack a dry joke.  We have nothing in common at all except she warmed the womb up for me.  Our existence would be much more bland with out each other in our lives.

 Just thirteen months apart, my sister and I were often mistaken for twins since our mother took great pleasure in dressing us alike.  Maybe it wasn’t great pleasure, maybe it was just the fact that if she got the same outfit for the both of us there was less decision making on her part and less jealousy and fighting on my sister’s and my part.  I always secretly felt bad for the people who thought my sister and I were twins since we look nothing alike.  Didn’t these people know that twins are supposed to be spitting images of each other?  My sister and I were spitting all right, just on each other.

 Following my sister through grade school didn’t work out so well for me either.  As soon as she was finished with a teacher, I ended up with the same one.  In Kindergarten, my report card said that I was “a loner, nothing at all like [my] bright and bubbly sister” and got a satisfactory in social skills instead of the “outstanding progress” my sister got in the same subject.  On the first days of school, the teachers would always ask me how my big sister was doing.  By the third grade I started answering that question with, “Oh, I’m fine too.”  The only teacher who didn’t ask about my sister was in fifth grade.  That was my first encounter with a male teacher and instead of asking about my sister he said, “Well, you certainly are bigger than your sister.”  To this day I still think he was talking about my boobs.

 It wasn’t until late junior high that I finally realized that I didn’t have to be like my sister.  She was part of a crowd of girls that should have been named Bunny and Mitzie since they all seemed like hoity-toity brats to me.  If they didn’t have the newest, tightest pair of Guess jeans then they were bound to just shrivel up and die of embarrassment from being dressed in rags bought from the local mall rather than the “cool mall” fifty miles away.  My sister fell into this crowd effortlessly since she was perky and was decent at tennis.  I had been forced into tennis lessons for several years and hated it.  Everyday of those lessons I’d call the courts to see if, by chance, the lessons were cancelled due to rain even if there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  I didn’t see the point of running back and forth on a hard, sun-baked court.  My sport of choice involved running around a big sun-baked circle in the back of the junior high school.

 My friends were the girls that my sister’s group made fun of.  We weren’t pariahs, just geeky.  We were the girls who discovered Sylvia Plath at an early age and wanted to be just like her, minus the suicide part.  We wore baggy clothes to hide our developing figures and wouldn’t talk to boys though we wish we did.  My sister always had a boyfriend.  When I finally had a boyfriend I was so thrilled.  When he broke up with me because I wouldn’t kiss him, I didn’t cry.  I wrote.  I wrote in my diary and then since I knew that my sister read my private little book, I made up a sexy, older boyfriend for myself.  We made out constantly.  My sister saw right through her mousy little sister.

 In high school, my sister finally noticed my body.  After years of running track, I had visible leg muscles and tone arms from lifting weights.  My sister was still much thinner than I was; I was just in better shape.  Not to be outdone, my sister started doing aerobics tapes every night before she went to bed.  She sweated to Buns of Steel and The Cindy Crawford Workout.  She even did my mom’s Jane Fonda record from time to time on my Fischer Price record player that was last used for my Mousercise record.  I just kept running.

 My sister and I ended up going to the same college and lived in the same dorm but had very separate lives.  Every few months we would try to make a point to get together and do something so as to please our parents.  I was into the local coffee shops, roller blading and mountain biking.  Since my sister didn’t have a mountain bike or roller blades we ended up chatting at a coffee shop for about an hour before we ran out of things to say.  When it was my sister’s turn to pick what we were doing, we always ended up at the free aerobics classes held in the college gym.  My sister would wear tight little shorts and a matching sports bra.  I, trying to match her, would wear my biking shorts despite the fact they had a padded butt and my basic white sports bra.  I hated those classes.  It seemed like a hundred or better people showed up for those things and crowded around a tiny stage where the instructor did her routine.  Doing the grape vine and “woot-wooing” wasn’t my thing but I put up with those classes a few times.

 After college we went our separate ways.  She’s still living in the same college town doing her aerobics every day and I live across country doing whatever interests me.  I hike, I hoop dance (it’s hula hooping for adults), I pretend like I can belly dance, and I play the Wii with my kids.  My sister is always trying to find the best diet for her where I eat what I want in moderation.  She has eliminated refined sugar from her and her family’s diet, then sugar period.  Now she wants to do a huge cleansing diet.  Her most recent goal is to go to a resort that helps you cleanse your body of all impurities.  For an eight-day stay the cost is twenty-five hundred dollars.  You poop in a bucket to see what you’re eliminating.  I once read an article on places like these.  The author of the article was very impressed with the spa since she passed the Barbie shoe she swallowed when she was seven pretending that it was a pill as she played doctor with her boy neighbor.  I’m not wasting my money on that kind of thing.

 I know that my sister is on a tight budget so I offered to help her out with her goal.  I offered that she just fly down and stay with me.  I told her that I would give her access to my whirlpool tub.  I’ve been to massage therapy school so I can work out her tight muscles.  She can lie out in the sun by the pool and I’ll bring her colonics with a side of the laxative of her choice.  Why pay so much money to go someplace when the only goal is to poop?  I promised her premium toilet paper too.  She said she’d think about it.  I sent her a bag of prunes as an incentive.