What Made Me a Brother

My sister was always quick. She was good at sports, fast on her feet, and much more agile than I was. She was smaller than me, but there was always something remarkably sure about the way she moved. Some images of her from those years have proved indelible: the red glasses, the deeply tanned skin, the constant motion. For a while, I kept a few of those photographs on my refrigerator. I would look at them with a fondness I don’t remember feeling when they were taken. Back then, she was simply this small, restless presence - following me around, appearing in whatever I was doing, and naturally assuming that whatever was mine was partly hers. I wasn’t always sure what to make of her.

There are six years between us, though the distance never felt quite as large as it sounds. Maybe boys just mature a little more slowly. I also left home early and spent much of my adolescence and adulthood abroad. In some ways, I grew up almost like an only child. My sister stayed home, and perhaps she grew up with some of the responsibilities of an eldest daughter. This left us in a slightly strange arrangement: I was the older sibling by birth, but increasingly the absent one in practice. Yet whenever we are together, she is unmistakably the younger one. She becomes more openly affectionate, asks more of me, and occasionally invokes the privileges that come with being the younger sister. She seems to enjoy the arrangement, and I have come to think there is something tender about it. Around me, she gets to be the younger one.

When she was younger, there were times when her attention wandered from school or she simply cared less about certain things than I thought she should. I took those moments more seriously than they deserved. I lectured her and sometimes raised my voice, despite knowing very little myself. I thought this was part of being an older brother. In practice, this mostly meant becoming a nag. My sister was always bright and perspicacious, especially when it came to people. She notices things quickly - who she likes, whom she trusts, when something feels off - and rarely needs much time to decide where she stands. Looking back, I am not sure she needed much of the advice I was so eager to give. She already had parents. What she needed from me was probably not a third one.

As adults, our differences have become easier to name. I can spend days deciding whether I dislike something. My sister generally requires a few seconds. I worry about offending people, reconsider conversations after they have ended, and occasionally agree to things while already regretting them. She says no. There is a cleanliness to the way she does it that I admire. When I bring her a problem I have been turning over for days, she has a way of reducing it to something much simpler. Sometimes I can see a faint expression of concern on her face - for the problem, exactly, but for the person who has managed to make such a problem out of it. Still, she seems proud of me. I suspect that my living alone in New York, far from the family, has given me a certain stature in her imagination that close observation might not support.

When my sister was born, I was jealous. I was six, and until then I had been the only child. Suddenly there was someone else at the center of the room. I don’t remember exactly when that feeling disappeared. Somewhere along the way, she simply became part of what home meant to me. Her affection has never required much explanation. She can be unsparing in her judgment and completely loyal in the same breath. She can question my choices, point out my indecision, and tell me quite plainly when I am making life more difficult than it needs to be, while somehow remaining firmly on my side. There is something reassuring about being known so well. She knows me too well to idealize me, but somehow that has never kept her from being proud of me.

I used to think being an older brother meant that I should know more, do better, and occasionally show my sister the way. I don’t think that anymore. She doesn’t need me to be wiser than she is. Still, when she asks something of me in that particular way reserved for her older brother, I notice something in me shift as well. I become a little more patient, a little more responsible, a little less occupied with myself. She reminds me that there is someone for whom I am the older one, and that perhaps I should try to live up to that - not by knowing better, but simply by being there. I used to think I was her older brother because I happened to arrive six years earlier. Now I think being older is merely a matter of time. Having her is what made me a brother.