My Sisters

#1

Blonde tennis player. Buxom. Bubbly. Beautiful. Home Health Aide. Christian. Had carrot white hair as a baby. Corn silk. Blue eyes. Youngest of 6 kids living at 2509 Le Claire Street. Davenport Iowa, 52803. Jungle abode. December 21, 1953. Solstice, my imagined DOB as well. Linkage. Simpatico. When phones were hard-corded into the wall. Black ugly with yellowed number plates on the musically twisted bell dial. Heavy receivers. Sculpted. Ergonomic matching heads. One only per house mostly. Party line. Down in the front hall beneath the knotty pine gun racks. Gray panelling cut out with one stained glass tiny window. Adjoining a plastic cushioned couch with split pleats & worn thru buttons. Cheek used to weld itself to seat cover on 3 hour dreamy calls to my girlfriend Bonnie, great granddaughter of BJ Palmer, American inventor of chiropractic “medicine”. Semi-shabby banister, later walledin with sheet rock, going to upstairs landing.

In the early years, I only knew Heidi up to age 2. Not even out of diapers. Long curlicue braids & flowery dresses a la namesake Swiss Mt. novel of shepherd girl growing up with Granpa figure by Johanna Spyri in1881. Sweet chubby kid. What foggy memories allow, given I was maybe 7 or 8. Tells a tale of her down in the basement with a paint bucket between her legs eating green paint. Daubing & swiping big gobs across

her smiling innocent face. Swalowing some. Disturbing. Emergency. Toxic. Pump her stomach? Yell for Mom. Call Dr. Crowley 2 houses down the block. Perhaps, being the oldest, I was minding 5 kids alone? Hard to believe. Mom always elsewhere. Me in charge. Her love child. Mostly clueless. Clinging to the emotional debris leftover from the last midnite drunken battle. Divorce threats. Ultimatums. Bloody wall paper. Rorschach booz staining the celing. Shattered coffeee table glass. Heidi screaming for Mommy. Intrusive inscrutable police questions. Then she was gone. Snatched by Jimmy Ryan, Stepfather #1 of 6. Only to appear 20 years later, floating behind a neighborhood bar yelling above the rattling AC …”Brother!’. “How the hell are you?”

#2

Cackling infectious laugh. Ruddy cheeks. Quick on her feet.

Copious sweating. Beaded brow. Strong arms. Legs like willowy elms. Tending bar somewhere on West Side tho she had gone to Bettendorf High to the East. Her Granny Bauer lived 6 blocks from the Twin Bridges & the Mississippi. Like snapshots out of time.

Deckle edged. Flimsy. B& W. Iowa Summer. 90% humidity. Mosquitoes like tiger pterodactyls but transparent, striped. Evil. Thick air. Baked on sweat. Dog-paddling thru a funky aquarium. Home from Johns Hopkins. Working construction. Moving furniture.

Cutting lawns. Tipped off my long lost sister might be working the 2nd shift @ Bleyart’s or Sonny’s or 5 Points or the Veteran’s Hall. Very sketchy. Coming in out of the glare to a freezing piss aroma’d grotto of pinball & devill’d eggs. Dark. Dank. Neon’d ads. Rippling Hamm’s waterfalls in Minnesota or Colorado. Clydesdale Red’s & Milwaukee browns. Green diamonds of Wrigley field writ small over the cascade of well drink bottles backlit fromwho knows where. High ceiling former warehouse. Heidi. A vision of yellowness bouncing up from a wrap around oak banquette. Her face not quite a carbon of Nadine but close. Bushy eyebrows were a giveaway. Flipping up the gate, she launched into my arms in swoons of years washed away by animosity & convenient lies.

Total surrender. No break. Immediate forgiveness & acceptance of all the things that were in or out of our control. The disinformation. The supposed move to California. The subterfuge by her bitchy stepmother who had 2 kids real quick to replace them.. My mother’s whitewashing grief & numbness. The occasional spying at tennis tournaments underneath the bleachers or thru the storm fence. Unwanted brats, her & Pat,forced to eat in the basement like dogs. Locked refrigerators. The beatings. The drop offs at the orphanage, the Annie Wittenmeyer Home, to whip them back into shape. Stonewalled.

Knowing full well this rejecting witch could not be their biological Mom. Code wods for that “other” family across town. Eavesdropping on Granny Bauer’s recollection of “Nadine”. Mystery woman. Piecing the puzzle together, Heidi snuck over to “THeAlibi”to check on her “body double” on a Wednesday & poof! The crooked mirror was broken. Screams of laughter. Tears of joy! At 43, Mom had her baby girl back in her heart!