Marion Roach Smith’s alternate sisterly reality, with Margaret Roach.
A YOUNG WOMAN is breezing through the kitchen on the way to the refrigerator. Wearing tennis shorts, a T-shirt, her long red hair in a ponytail, she’s bare-foot, 22 years old, and the phone rings. I can do this with this scene—make it third-person—the way we can at any of those moments just before life takes a tilt; that old where were you when thing. [click to continue…]
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YES, MARION, YOU ARE CORRECT: We Roach sisters share a story about a particular and powerful photograph (and not the one of us in our annual matching Easter dresses from your recent post re: all this). And as you say it was an image that changed my life forever, even though you, my only sibling, never saw it, remaining safe from awareness until adulthood when it was easier (maybe) to handle than when I found the photo, at age 9. [click to continue…]
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PHOTOGRAPHS STOP TIME and yet they stir memory. Taken at an instant in history, they preserve that moment; viewed years later, an image can unravel our connection to that time and tie us to it all over again. An agent of both capture and release, photographs are one of the great wonders of the visual world. [click to continue…]
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1. Our mother always tipped gas-station attendants.
2. There were stereo speakers in our kitchen.
3. Our close friends had an uncle who worked in the kitchen at the Waldorf. Their income always unsteady, supplies were sparse, but colorful; the kids ate caviar sandwiches on Wonder Bread.
4. Our English grandfather, who lived with us, played the short-rib bones between his fingers as percussion instruments. [click to continue…]
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MARGARET WAS EEYORE when we were young, seeing the impossible in everything. She has grown up to be Kanga, her youthful negativity evolving into a carefulness for all things, as well as an exactness for detail, reminding us not only to take our medicine, but when to do so. Me, I was born a Tigger, and show little chance of ever growing up to be anybody else. I bounce, and when people try to get me to give up my bounce, I bounce away. [click to continue…]
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IAM THE JOCK. In the next seven days I will: watch the finals of the Australian Open, the Super Bowl (eating my slow-cooked bison chili), plus as much college basketball and professional hockey as possible; attend two of my daughter’s basketball games, play indoor tennis with her, and take her to shoot hoops; go to the gym at least three times, snowshoe every day I can; and peruse mainsail covers online for a small sailboat we recently acquired. I will also read some sports pages. It all seems natural to me, since I am a sportwriter’s daughter. [click to continue…]
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IHAVE SCHEDULED A TOUR OF MY CLOSET for the next time Marion visits my tiny house. Apparently she has not seen it, though her post the other day about how different we are on this score of closets would lead you to infer otherwise. This is how it is between sisters, I think: We know them so well, and yet not at all, and that’s what makes the bond and also the friction that is the unique chemistry of siblings. I have just gone upstairs to take my closet’s measurements, to try to get this straight. [click to continue…]
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There were sunny days, too.
THE FIRST WORDS in our half-century of “She Said’s” were spoken on or about April 10, 1956, a few days after the birth of the second Roach girl, Marion, a red-haired baby of nearly 10 pounds. Her actual birth date was April 7, but her existence wasn’t remarkable until she came home from the hospital with my mother, ending my life as an only child forever. She upended my 22-month-old reign with her birth, and she has not stopped. [click to continue…]
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IF YOU KNEW US only for an instant, you might think us to be something that we’re not. That’s because I’m the loud sister. Always have been. And loud gets mistaken for tough, especially in women. But Margaret is the tough one, hand-down. Don’t believe me? See what she sent me in the recent ice storm.
As I said in my reply to her post, that characterizes her. No mere basket of cheer for Margaret; when her sister was in trouble, that sister sent power tools. She’s tough, and never tougher than on gifts, though not only in the giving. [click to continue…]
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D O YOUR SISTER and you see things differently? Of course you do. Even as little girls, my sister, Margaret, and I didn’t agree on everything. I loved church and she did not. I was a jock. She was not. When she was a quiet 10-year-old, I (then 8) gladly bounced out of bed to perform my Louis Armstrong imitation at our parents’ raucous dinner parties. Goggled-eyed and oggling me from our sunken living room, the adult din would pipe down only long enough for me to belt out, “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” from the steps above. Margaret is nowhere in these scenes.
This kind of separate experience under the same roof is common. I’ve taught memoir writing for more than 10 years, and always marvel as much at what is absent from some tales as I do at what the writer offers up as the main players in each scene, finding myself imagining how and when the other members of the family veered off or out of the story. And that’s how this blog began: thinking about how at each emotional fork in the road, sisters can choose separate paths. [click to continue…]
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MARION LOVES WATER, Margaret (left) earth.
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