I mean to make this story of my life leading up to Heavenletters light-hearted,  yet I don’t think I can warm you up the way comedians warm up their audiences. I cannot even warm myself up when it concerns my sister Sylvia. I’ll try.  Let’s see if I can do it.  This is kind of funny.

My sister Sylvia, instead of buying dish cloths or using worn-out towels or face cloths to wash dishes and wipe counters, used worn-out old used child and lady underpants. Yes, I said underpants. She used them to wash dishes and wipe the counters, did you ever hear of such a thing?

She was an immaculate person. At least she thought she was, and what she thought was final. She saw nothing out of the way in using worn out underpants to wash dishes and wipe counter tops.

Now, if her using worn-out underpants to wash dishes and wipe counter tops is not funny enough, her daughter, my niece, now in her senior years, who had had enough misery from her mother to last a lifetime and reason after reason not to emulate her mother, to this day follows in her mother’s footsteps and she too uses old underpants for washing dishes and wiping counters.

I don’t remember ever being happy to see my sister Sylvia although I must have been glad to go over to her apartment and play with my niece who was three years younger than I. My niece was also named Gloria, and she became Baby Gloria.

I never remember hugging my sister Sylvia or being hugged by her. I never remember seeing her hug her children. I’m not saying she never did. I simply cannot remember one time that she did. There are other things I remember which I will come to later.

From a very young age, I worried that something might happen to my mother and father, and I worried more that, if something did, I would probably be condemned to live with my sister Sylvia.

I never felt good around my sister Sylvia. This wasn’t about her being seventeen years older than I and getting married soon after I was born and never living with her. When I was as young as four or maybe three, I judged her and found her wanting.

Then there was this: If there were sliced tomatoes on my plate, my sister Sylvia would reach across the table and, without a by your leave,  she would shake salt vigorously on my tomatoes. I did not like salt on my tomatoes. At the young age of four or maybe three, I was already aware that I objected to my sister Sylvia.

Here are some of the lesser things I saw:

My sister Sylvia smoked. She took deep puffs of her cigarettes. I would shy away from the red tips, the smoke circling, and the way her eyes would sort of sparkle and wink as she dragged on the cigarettes.  As she pulled on her cigarettes, her eyes crinkled and became crafty. Then I saw her as a dragon. I saw her eyes like a tricky pirate’s eyes, the way her eyes glowed and glimmered and winked as she huffed and puffed on her cigarettes. Cigarettes were a part of her, like fingers and toes.

My sister Sylvia took long and deep puffs of her cigarettes that glowed with red-hot embers at the tips as she gave her babies Hood’s milk from baby bottles. My eyes followed the dropping ashes. I’d let out a deep breath when they did not land on the sucking baby.

My sister Sylvia had facial hair, and I saw her heat up wax in a special little pot on the stove. She would take the smoking wax and spread it like peanut butter on her upper lip  and mercilessly rip out the hair. Startling.

Once when I was in seventh grade, my sister Sylvia took me clothes-shopping. Probably my mother had asked her to and had given her the money. Business at the store had started to be good, and my parents started to have some money. This was probably the first and last time I bought clothes for full-price. Sylvia took me to Steiger’s and to Forbes & Wallace Department Stores. I remember two sweaters of two off-colors that I would never choose for myself. One was a shade of puce and the other another shade of a darker puce. I’m much more a pure pastel, but I do not hold this against my sister Sylvia.

In no way do I mean for this story to be a psychological thriller or case study. It may be that I cannot take the story of my sister Sylvia lightly, but I do want you to. It is really all ridiculous.

There are a few simple actions of hers that I have appreciation for but hardly any for my sister herself. Here are some of the good things:

My sister Sylvia taught me to knit. And then I taught my daughter to knit.

One afternoon she took Baby Gloria and me to a class in elocution. I am guessing I was six. Elocution was like creative dramatics. Whatever it was, I loved it. I can still feel the exhilaration of coming out of myself. Just once she took me. Could I have loved her if she had taken me again?

My daughter Lauren remembers how her Aunt Sylvia gave her a bottle of fingernail polish that Sylvia didn’t want any longer. It made Lauren happy.

One time a man with one leg came to my sister Sylvia’s door. He had a folded-up trouser where his leg should have been. My little niece and I went to the door with Sylvia. Although I remember myself as shy and tongue-tied, I kept saying: “BUT WHERE IS HIS OTHER LEG?” And Sylvia kept saying to me: “Shh, be quiet.” And the man said, “It’s all right.” And I kept saying: “BUT WHERE IS HIS OTHER LEG?”

My sister Sylvia did make a most delicious chocolate and vanilla marble cake.

My sister Sylvia was a voracious reader, and she read the whole series of Great Books. She relished them. But what did she gain from them?

When I was an adult and had gotten into meditation, my sister Sylvia did not consider me ridiculous like everyone else in my family, for she too was into the spiritual. Only, however well-meaning she may have been, I was not at all comfortable with her spirituality. In fact, I cringed when she told me through the screen door with her eye-scrunching-up smile that she saw me in glowing effervescent pink light and she always prayed for me and things like that.

Both my brother Bennie and sister Sylvia were from my mother’s first husband. I do not know my mother’s first husband’s name. He was a rabbi’s son. That’s all I know. And that he wouldn’t bring my mother an apple when he came to visit her in the sanatorium on Sundays when she had begged him to. My mother thought he thought she was going to die anyway and so he didn’t want to waste the money. Who knows what he thought. I can assume the fact remains that he did not bring her an apple. My mother said it was at that very moment when the rabbi’s son came to see her without an apple that my mother decided that she would leave him, the man she had married at the age of sixteen when she had no idea what marriage meant.

My mother did later leave the rabbi’s son after she had met my father.

My brother Bennie, who was twenty-three years older than I, was an angel.  It is impossible to reconcile how two such disparate children as my brother Bennie and sister Sylvia came from the same mother and father. How did my sister Sylvia come to be the way she was.

Before I get into the wicked stepmother story, I want you to know that my sister Sylvia was a human being, struggling like the rest of us to stay alive and gain some of the fruits of life. Like the rest of us, she was trying to find her way in the forest. I may have judgment, but I am not without mercy.

Later I will tell you colossal things about my sister Sylvia that could only happen in an unbelievable Grimm Fairy Tale except they happened, and I saw much of it with my own eyes. I don’t really have sympathy for her, yet I am not entirely unsympathetic. I know that all of us are not always our best selves. At the same time, I would give a lot that my sister Sylvia could have been different from the way she was. I mean to say that I wish she could have been kind.

With all that said and done, how aware I am that my daughter is an only child. She does not have even one brother or one sister to regret, and I, even now, despite everything I am going to tell you, am glad that I can say “my sister Sylvia.” I had a sister who lived until she died. I can say I had a sister Sylvia. My sister Sylvia. Once there was my sister Sylvia, my sister Sylvia whom I did not bear love for, my sister Sylvia who saw herself quite differently from the way she was.

There was one strike against Sylvia to begin with. In my mother’s eyes, Sylvia could do no wrong. It was poor Sylvia this, and poor Sylvia that. It was poor Sylvia, “She didn’t have her own father. Poor Sylvia, she had a stepfather. And when my poor Sylvia felt unhappy, I would go out and buy her a dress to make up for it. What else could I do for my poor Sylvia?”

Surely, new dresses wouldn’t have made Sylvia so oblivious to the feelings of others, would they?

The stepfather referred to was my own sweet daddy. You can tell that no one could come near to Sylvia in my mother’s estimation — until years and years later when my mother and Sylvia had a falling out. I’ll tell you about the falling out later.

It still rings in my ears, my mother’s saying: “If Sylvia had had a chance, she would have been a writer like Shakespeare.”

Who would like a sister whose mother said that about her?

What chance did Sylvia lack anyway? And when has there ever been a writer as good as Shakespeare?

It was always poor Sylvia. If it wasn’t about her childhood, it was poor Sylvia, she’s not well. Everyone was a poor something according to my mother. It was always poor Eleanor (my sister five years older than I.) “Poor Eleanor, she’s so busy.” It was also poor Gloria as well, although, for the life of me, I can’t remember what my mother poor me’d about.

But if I could make up what my mother poor me’d about, I imagine she would probably say: “Poor Gloria, she is so foolish. Poor Gloria, she doesn’t know anything. Poor Gloria, she doesn’t know enough to know that she doesn’t know anything.”

If it wasn’t poor Sylvia, it was: “Sylvia had quite a wiggle on her in high school.”