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My sister’s arrival in Rome a few days later helped nudge my attention away from lingering
sadness over David and bring me back up to speed. My sister does everything fast, and en-
ergy twists up around her in miniature cyclones. She’s three years older than me and three
inches taller than me. She’s an athlete and a scholar and a mother and a writer. The whole
time she was in Rome, she was training for a marathon, which means she would wake up at
dawn and run eighteen miles in the time it generally takes me to read one article in the news-
paper and drink two cappuccinos. She actually looks like a deer when she runs. When she
was pregnant with her first child, she swam across an entire lake one night in the dark. I
wouldn’t join her, and I wasn’t even pregnant. I was too scared. But my sister doesn’t really
get scared. When she was pregnant with her second child, a midwife asked if Catherine had
any unspoken fears about anything that could go wrong with the baby—such as genetic de-
fects or complications during the birth. My sister said, “My only fear is that he might grow up
to become a Republican.”
That’s my sister’s name—Catherine. She’s my one and only sibling. When we were grow-
ing up in rural Connecticut, it was just the two of us, living in a farmhouse with our parents. No
other kids nearby. She was mighty and domineering, the commander of my whole life. I lived
in awe and fear of her; nobody else’s opinion mattered but hers. I cheated at card games with
her in order to lose, so she wouldn’t get mad at me. We were not always friends. She was an-
noyed by me, and I was scared of her, I believe, until I was twenty-eight years old and got
tired of it. That was the year I finally stood up to her, and her reaction was something along
the lines of, “What took you so long?”
We were just beginning to hammer out the new terms of our relationship when my mar-
riage went into a skid. It would have been so easy for Catherine to have gained victory from
my defeat. I’d always been the loved and lucky one, the favorite of both family and destiny.
The world had always been a more comfortable and welcoming place for me than it was for
my sister, who pressed so sharply against life and who was hurt by it fairly hard sometimes in
return. It would have been so easy for Catherine to have responded to my divorce and de-
pression with a: “Ha! Look at Little Mary Sunshine now!” Instead, she held me up like a cham-