Sisters

Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Queen Elizabeth II, Jacqueline Onassis, Emma Thompson, and my friend Alison. What do or did these women have that I envy above gold or rubies?

Sisters.

(Photo by Meg Aghamyan)

There is to me something irresistibly sumptuous in even the word sister, a sweet rustle in the ‘s’ sound that to my brother-suffocated self speaks a world of unimaginable feminine bliss. It speaks of ruffled petticoats in childhood, whispered confidences in adolescence, wise and womanly support in adult years. It speaks of private jokes and shared body types, of a fellow traveler through life who shares your sex as well as your DNA, of another woman who has known and, please God, loved you since you were both children, and will, please God, continue to love you until you are both old.

“Try it in real life,” I can hear the unhappily sistered among you cry. “Just try having a real sister and see how you like it. Did you see Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Did you know that Cleopatra had her sister beheaded? Did I tell you what my sister did to me?” All I can say is that, given my own experiences as a sole sister of brothers, I’d take my chances.

My sisterless state crept up on me. I was born into a family of radiant normalcy – father, mother, elder brother, me – and for a few paradisical years we four inhabited an Eden of gendered equilibrium that I, in my innocence, assumed would last forever. When my next sibling arrived and was another brother, that seemed fair enough: it had to be one or the other, after all, and I, being still young enough to trust in the good intentions of Mother Nature, supposed that the genders would even themselves out the next time around. When the next Donnelly child also proved male, it did occur to me that maybe Mother Nature was going a trifle far with her little joke; but I consoled myself with thoughts of the fifth, a sister for me, I was sure – Martina, my mother had confided that we’d call her – who would be sweet-natured and cooing, and at last provide a companion for me amid all the testosterone. When word reached the family home that Martina had appeared and had turned out to be not Martina at all but Mark, my other three brothers leaped immediately onto the sofa in a jubilant threefold foreshadowing of a love-drunk Tom Cruise, to bounce in triumph at the new addition to their gang; I meanwhile retired to my bedroom to cry until I was summoned by majority vote and ordered sternly to join in the rejoicing.

To be clear, I have nothing against my brothers per se: in fact, taken individually, there are even one or two of them I quite like. It’s just that when we were all growing up there were so darned many of them and they were all such darned boys. Our house in my childhood was a giant locker room, its floor a death trap strewn perilously with toy cars, escaped marbles, and viciously pointed spare pieces from model aircraft kits; our mealtimes a Battle of Bannockburn of snatched French fries and catapulted sandwich crusts; the bedrooms so many disaster zones; the bathroom … no, on reflection, I’d as soon not remember the bathroom.

To my younger brothers in particular, I grew up as an object of mixed fascinated curiosity and delighted derision, a cross between fairground attraction and Gulliver in Lilliput; they would follow me around the house imitating my voice and mannerisms, and occasionally, for no discernible reason, would utter a joyous shriek of “Bombard!” and pile on me in a flurry of (mostly) friendly attack, fists pummeling in glee.

“They’re showing they love you,” my mother would say fondly, if more than a touch mysteriously. “Just ignore them and they’ll grow tired of it.”

Have you any idea how difficult it is to ignore three small boys who are simultaneously pounding your large intestine?

Unsurprisingly, I grew up a not especially girly sort of girl. While most of my school friends were consulting fashion magazines, I was searching for one blouse that was unadorned with jam-smeared palmprints; while they were experimenting with make-up, I was jostling with mud-encrusted football heroes for the luxury of a hot bath. While other girls were learning to smile prettily at boys, I was busy honing my survival skills against a mob of juvenile Vlad the Impalers.

“You don’t know how it would have worked out,” said my mother, who, sadly, had lost one sister early and had with the other a relationship which made Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine look like the March family in comparison. “What if you’d had a sister and you hadn’t got on with her?”

Truth to tell, given our maternal genes, this would have been a distinct possibility; but I know I’d have liked one anyway. If nothing else, the balance of family power would have shifted: I would have been one of a pair instead of the lone oddity. If we had been two against three instead of one against four, we could maybe have sometimes gone for a drive in the country on a summer Saturday instead of to a cricket match, or watched Anne of Green Gables on television instead of the bloody Lone Ranger; if there had been two girls in the family instead of one, we could maybe have teamed up on my father to soften him into sometimes smiling at us in the way he smiled at his sons.

As a woman I have always cherished my women friends, of whom I am lucky enough to have many and dear. But I am also aware that there is between us a lack, certainly not of affection, but of the physical ease that women with sisters take for granted with each other. They can hold each other’s hands or arms, stroke each other’s hair, rest on each other’s shoulders, express affection in ways that, yearn as we might, few sisterless women are able to learn to do with comfort. “I took her a cup of coffee when she woke up,” recently laughed a happily sistered girlfriend of a houseguest, “climbed into bed with her, and we ended up spending the whole morning there talking.” That sounded to me the very essence of delight. Could I imagine doing it with even my closest girlfriend? Not on your sticky-bloused, model aircraft piece-perforated, flying sandwich crust-dodging nellie.

Most of all, I miss having another woman in my family to confide in. To be able to hiss, “Did you notice the grin on her face when he walked in?” without being looked at as if I’d broken into fluent Lower Yangtze Mandarin. To ask, “Do you like my new haircut?” without encountering the ashen face of horror of one who has stepped abruptly into his most dreaded nightmare. To admit, “I’m sad today,” and have someone reply, “I’m so sorry, what’s wrong?” instead of, “How do you think Spurs will do on Saturday?”

“You know,” I once felt moved to confide to one of my brothers, “I really wish I’d had a sister in the family.”

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment.

“I think they’re overrated,” he said then.

I think my case rests.