My sister is visiting with her daughter, Lily. A more lithesome, light and lovely girl you couldn’t conjure–unless you grew up with Liza, her mother, who very nearly floated through her first 16 years on long legs and pointe shoes. Now, before those of you who know me too well roll your eyes and take bets on how long before Liza and I cross the Rubicon of sisterhood and kill each other, let me just tell you this; I have not stopped laughing since she got here.
I love to laugh. Even more, I love to make other people laugh. It is almost my raison d’etre, occasionally at the price of propriety. It has been said–just last night, at a Vassar stealth fund raising dinner by the sea in Wellfleet, in fact–that I am one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet. There, that’s out of the way. But, here’s the thing, making Liza laugh may be the best kind of funny I could ever be. It’s not just that she has had a hard time of it in the last years, though she has climbed some mountains I can’t even find on an emotional map, and it’s not that she lacks a sense of humor, she has a wonderfully sharp grasp of both the absurd and the obvious. It’s that she’s my sister and when she laughs I hear the echo of my own, and that of my happy childhood and hers. When I make her burst out, mouth in a wide smile, eyes crinkled until there are tears standing in them, I am not sure whether to laugh with her or cry at the joy in her voice. It reminds me of when my children were babies and I tickled them until they were breathless. I would scramble my fingers over their soft, pliant limbs all the while pressing my lips together to hold in my own laugh. I needed to be utterly silent so that I could really hear their giggles as they bubbled up through their chests and spilled, warm and delicious over us both. And that’s what Liza does, she giggles, loud, long, full, musical and thoroughly girlish. It is champagne.
Yesterday we ran some errands together. Wheeling our runaway trolley through the cool supermarket, shivering slightly in our bathing suits, we laughed as our flip flops skidded rounding the “frozen novelties” aisle. What is a frozen novelty? I mean, I know what it is is but really, how novel is a Fudgsicle? Anyway, we finished our shopping and considered the self checkout. I could hear the automated voice asking if we’d scanned our frequent shopper card and imagined what she’d say if Liza and I started in on our ‘Lucy and Ethel go marketing’ attempt at scanning and packing. No, that would be a reusable bag too far for both of us. We looked at each other and shook our heads, already laughing. There wasn’t time for what would no doubt turn into a lesson in packaged food chaos, we needed to get to CVS to pick up a prescription for me.
I have a long and unattractive history with hives. They had raised their red, bumpy heads for the first time in years a week before Liza arrived. When I say hives (and again, those who know me will remember my hystamine history well), I do not mean a scattering of little mosquito-like bites. My hives are big. They are dinner plate in scale and know no borders. They are Hitler and I am Poland. I get them on my scalp turning my usually limp hair into a bouffant of Mad Men proportions. I get them on my butt creating a distinctly unflattering bustle effect. Not to put too fine a point on it (and pun, sadly, intended) I get them on my nipples. I get them everywhere but when they colonize my face, small children run screaming and horses have to be gentled before they kick over their traces. A particularly vicious specimen had bivouaced inside my mouth days before turning my left cheek and jaw into a misshapen, gibbous moon–an Elephant Man-like thing that left me murmuring “I am not an animal” as people froze and made the sign of the cross at my approach. I took a picture that morning so I could show the local doctor thereby guaranteeing a long run on steroids. Steroids of the ‘get your Tour de France medal yanked’ variety are the only thing that can stop my hives. And, sure enough, I’d had ten days on them, sufficient to pack on enough bulk to attract the attention of the East German shot put team. It wasn’t enough, though, to defeat this army. The hives were still marching through me, laying waste to every inch of skin they could. I had to get more; ‘roid rage was the only way to stop them.
There we were, waiting for the prescription, when I decided to show Liza the picture on my iPhone. “See,” I said, “they can be really bad.” She took one look and started laughing. She hooted and snorted. Unsteady on her feet, she reached for a Tower o’ Tylenol display and sent it teetering. She put her hand to her chest and bent over, drawing in a deep breath before she started laughing again and soon I was laughing, too, our cadences nearly identical, our pitch perfect. The pharmacist leaned past his counter to stare, customers drifted over, a clerk peeked around the corner and still we laughed. Finally, we stopped and I felt clean, empty of everything but this pleasure, this pure beauty under the flickering flourescents of a chain drugstore.
In that moment those hives were priceless, worth more than the gold medal I could no doubt win in the hammer throw at the next Olympics. I made Liza laugh. I made her forget herself, completely, and I remembered us.