The Phantom Sister

Dee Dee is my father’s daughter from his first marriage.  I’ve never met her.  Every year my father would go out to visit her for two weeks.   Sometimes I would wonder what my sister was like.  Would she be scientific like her (our!) father or did she take after her mother?  I didn’t know anything about her.

When I would ask about Dee Dee, my mother or father always changed the subject.  So eventually I got tired of asking.

I never understood why she couldn’t come to visit us.  I thought it would be really neat to have a sister, although my cousins told me it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.  One time I said to my grandmother, “I’ll never have any nieces or nephews!”  She told me not to be silly; I’d just have to marry someone from a large family.  Later I heard her telling Aunt Pooh that “that poor little thing” (That’s me!) had been crying about never being an aunt.  My grandmother never had a problem with embellishing a story.

Then I would worry that I would never get married.  I mentioned this to my mother, and she said, “There are worse things than never getting married.”  I couldn’t imagine what.

It turned out that my father had left Dee Dee’s mother for my mother.  She had then taken Dee Dee and moved to the other side of the country.

Karen and Nikki thought the whole thing was very romantic.  Nikki thought it was rather Dickensian and said it was too bad Dee Dee’s mother hadn’t died when she was a kid, so Dee Dee could have come and lived with us, especially since from what we heard from Aunt Pooh her mother wasn’t very nice.  Or, as Karen put it, “a bitch.”  “She probably drove him into your mother’s arms.”

When I mentioned the whole marriage/inheritance situation, neither one of them said, “But they aren’t even engaged yet”.  That’s one of the things I love about them.

But they wanted to know what he had said to me and I had to admit I hadn’t talked to him.  “As far as I know, he doesn’t even know I know.”

“Oh, he knows you know,” Nikki said.  “Allison probably called him up and yelled at him.”

I was sorry I missed that.

I’ll have to have him for dinner on Father’s Day.  I can be subtle and ask how many people are coming. 

My friend Emily says my family is like something out of Edith Wharton.  Fortunately, she meant The Age of Innocence rather than Ethan Frome.