Youth Serum

There is nothing for shaving 20 years off your age like sharing a bed with your sister. I finally had someone to put my ice cold feet on. Last night my visiting sister and I lay in my bed and whispered and giggled like we used to when we were afraid our mother would rap on the wall and tell us to quiet down. And maybe in the back of my mind, the little girl me was half afraid her half-awake mother, hair tousled into horns by sleep, was going to appear at the doorway and demand what in the world we were thinking. But we kept talking anyway until we became incoherent.



My sister and I look like two different sides of the family. If we were going to the Oscars, I would wear one of those simple, sleek column gowns like Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d wear something with a little décolleté and feminine curves like Kate Winslet. But we often think alike: while flipping through one of her fashion magazines while we were talking with my mom, who came along to visit too, I paused at an ad that showed two bronzed beauties in expensive clothes at the beach with their arms draped over each other, one looking directly at the camera, the other staring off into the horizon. “Look, it’s you and me!” I said.



She laughed. Apparently on the drive down here, my mom was looking at the same magazine and held up that ad with a disgusted, “Look at this.” And my sister said, “It looks like me and Emily.” Of course, the magazine is trying to suggest the eroticism that my mom picked up on, not sisterly love, although the two models do look alike. And if my sister and I hung around the beach like that, I’m sure we would get some stares because we don’t look alike. But we have often lamented that the sisters in Jane Austen’s day were allowed to be much more affectionate without suspicion.



Not that suspicion has deterred my sister from harassing me with irritating shoulder squeezes. She does not mind attracting attention. But then she has always been the beauty and I the brains in our sisterly partnership. (Not that she’s not brilliant, too, of course.) As teenagers, she read fashion magazines, and I read our grandfather’s scholarly magazines. Two nights ago we stayed up late detailing some of our differences: she’s afraid of getting old and ugly; I’m afraid of getting old and senile. And our mother, who is the most youthful mother of 30somethings I know, assured us we were both wonderful. But, motherly affirmations aside, we shared our struggles with coming to terms with being nearly middle-aged and having such a long way to go in our spiritual lives, although we are happy to point out each other’s root sins.



This visit is going to be a short one. We are off to New Orleans today, with two carloads of children in tow, so we are going to eat beignets and window shop in the French Quarter, peek into churches and then play at the park. Meanwhile, my sister and I are plotting our return to the fabled city on Thursday, if we can figure out the logistics of leaving our mother with the 11 cousins, so that we can sit in on the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and learn the failproof method of writing a novel in six months.  If we had planned ahead at all, she should have used one of her free vouchers to fly down here just for that.