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Only my little sister could get away with dropping in on me when I was busy. I couldn’t even be mad at her. She was infuriating, but she was adorable, and just enough younger than me to have been my baby to rock when she came home from the hospital. She had gotten endless mileage out of the fact that I couldn’t help babying her.
“That’s nice of you but I’m in the middle of—”
“World War III from the sound of it. You had Greta positively quaking in her sensible shoes over the fact that I was barging in here with a burger. You were not to be interrupted. It was a matter of life and death, or so she led me to believe. Are you doing brain surgery in here now?” she teased.
“No. I’m figuring out how to sell a big company on switching their marketing to my firm and generating tens of millions of dollars in profit. How about you?” I asked.
“Oh, I made twenty-six bucks in tips today. So it’s practically the same thing.”
“You know I will be happy to send you to college. Or trade school. Or cooking school. Fashion design. The Merchant Marines. Anything,” I said half teasing.
“How about clown college?” she said with a frown, “do you draw the line at clown college?”
“Look, if it makes you happy to learn to put on floppy shoes and a frizzy wig, I’ll back you. I had to work my way up from the bottom and I wish my baby sister would let me help her out,” I said, unwrapping the foil from my burger.
“You do help me out. You replaced the blown-out transmission in my car.”
“Because you wouldn’t let me buy you a new one,” I grumbled. “The one woman in the world I want to spoil…and she won’t let me.”
“Besides Mom? Or is the Louis Vuitton purse she showed me on Facetime not something that qualifies as spoiling her?” she said.
“Fine, I had to go to France anyway. I saw it and thought she’d like it.”
“You ‘had to go to France anyway’? Who has to go to France?” she asked.
“I had to attend a client’s wedding in Provence a couple of weekends ago.”
“Oh, poor you and your work commitments. You ‘had’ to go to Provence. I ‘had’ to clean out the grease trap in the fryer,” she laughed.
“You could be in Merchant Marine school right now if you wanted to be,” I told her.
“Wouldn’t that be training? Not school? Or like, boot camp? I don’t even know what they do. But you understand, right? That I want to make something of myself on my own. And right now, that means waiting tables and saving up for a trip to Egypt and trying out some new glazes on my ceramics.”
“Art school. Do you know how many times I’ve tried to send you to art school?” I complained.
She had finally consented to let me pay for a seminar a couple of years ago, where she got to study advanced ceramics techniques at an indigenous workshop in New Mexico. As a thank you, she’d made me a huge, beautiful bowl that stood in its own lighted niche in my living room.
“I don’t need art school. Experimentation and inspiration are what make great art, along with life experience. That’s why travel is so important—I can absorb influences from all over the world. I think you’re the sweetest big brother for wanting to take care of me and set me up for a cushy job with a big income. It’s just not who I am at this point.”
“So you’re saying, ‘no but ask me again in six months’?”
“Maybe ask again in a year or so,” she said with her brightest smile. “I’m going to get you a vest in Egypt, something bright and colorful that you’ll have to wear because I picked it out for you. Your staff would faint.”
“Are you saying I wear too much black?”
“Yeah, I’m saying it,” she said cheekily.
“Should I shop where you buy your clothes?” I asked, taking another bite of my burger.
She stood up and twirled to show off her green and gold skirt, some kind of wild pattern that looked like the jungle. “I got it at a thrift shop, four bucks, can you believe it?”
I didn’t tell her that she got ripped off paying four dollars for that thing, so I just shrugged. “I don’t keep track of what women’s clothes cost, so I’m not sure,” I said tactfully. The only people I really bothered to filter with were my sister and my mom. Everybody else got to hear exactly what I was thinking. Maybe they were the only two people whose feelings I actually cared about, if I was honest. She proceeded to show me her shoes and make me guess how cheap they were.
“A dollar? Seventy-five cents?” I guessed.
“Six bucks,” she said, “seventy-five cents? Really? You do not know what shoes cost.”
“I know what mine cost, but you’d probably have a stroke if I told you,” I said, indicating my Italian leather loafers.
