Linda Sunshine - Mom Loves Me Best: (And Other Lies You Told Your Sister)

I am writing this book for my sister, Susan, whom I love dearly, even though I told her to drop dead often enough when we were kids.

I was eighteen months old when Susan was born, and to be truthful, I dont think Ive ever quite forgiven her for upstaging my solo act.

As kids, we shared a bedroom and, afraid of the dark, invented games to ward off sleep. One game, which we played every single night, was called Im sleeping. When one of us was too tired to talk anymore, she would call out, Im sleeping. The other would reply, Im sleeping. Then, in unison, wed both sing out, Were all sleeping. Okay, so it wasnt the most intellectually stimulating game (and the rules were way easy to learn) but it does point out one of the best features of having a sister: She makes you feel less alone.

It seems as though Susan and I were always together as young children. I remember the hours we spent, side by side, with our coloring books and 144 Crayolas. While we both loved to color, we had alarmingly different techniques.

I had a particular method that involved shading a border inside the black lines in a color just slightly darker than the filler space. I considered this very artistic.

My sister, ever more patient, was a total perfectionist (she still is!) and, thus, more meticulous about her coloring technique. It was always something of a crisis when she would go out of the lines. Usually, if this happened (say, when I, by accident , knocked her arm while she colored a delicate curve), she would throw down the book and refuse to finish the picture. Its ruined, she would wail. Why bother? Sometimes she would cry.

So then we would get out the comics. Romance comics were our absolute favorites. We liked to read them out loud, and we fought over who got to be the beautiful girl and who got stuck with the boy parts. If she was still crying about the coloring book fiasco, I would agree to do the boy parts on the one condition that I could also do the sound effects. For instance, when the beautiful but stubborn heroine invariably tossed her engagement ring into the river, the lake, the ocean, the pond, or any other available body of water (a regular plot twist), someone would be obliged to read: Kerrrr Plunk! This was my all-time best sound effect, one which I can re-create today, upon request.

One Christmas, we got a portable tape recorder for a present, and Im embarrassed to admit, we liked recording our rendition of a romance comic (sound effects and all), perhaps one of the worlds first audiobooks on tape. Then we played it back and my brilliant Kerrr Plunk! would make us laugh until we fell off the bed.

Reading was always a favorite pastime for us, and eventually comics were replaced by books. Our taste in books was nothing to brag about, not that it was our fault. We were pretty much on our own in selecting books to read from the local bookmobile. Mom was a knitter, not a reader, and my dad, whod married late in life, did not understand the concept of childrens books. He tended to recommend biographies of his favorite political figures, a topic that did not spark my imagination but, as I was anxious to please him, dictated much of my reading. My book choices came as quite a surprise to my grade school teachers when I would give book reports about Harry S. Truman or Adlai Stevenson.

Left to our own devices, Susan and I went from Honey Bunch and Nancy Drew straight to Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls , and Gone with the Wind. We loved Sidney Sheldon. In place of Little Women we read Marjorie Morningstar. And always, one of us wanted to read the exact book that the other had just started. I remember one vicious fight over Sybil , a book about a tortured woman with multiple personalities that so intrigued both of us that I went out and bought a duplicate copy while Susan was still reading hers.

I read faster than she did, and I liked to tell her the ending of the books before she could finish. Snapping the book closed, I declared, Sybil dies in the end. The angrier this made her, the more I was pleased.

So Id say, Im only kidding, and leave her to wonder whether I was lying when I told her Sybil died, or whether I was lying when I told her I was kidding. This was my way of keeping my sister on her toes and getting revenge for her not relinquishing the book when I wanted it.

When I was in fourth grade and Susan was a baby third-grader, we moved from our apartment into a house in the New Jersey suburbs. Our lives changed dramatically. We got our own bedrooms and learned about territorial imperatives.

And so, the Im sleeping game was put to sleep and the real fighting began. I was older, wiser, and more mature than Susan and, almost always, instigated the fights. Susan only wanted to make nice, I only wanted my own way. I deeply resented having to always take care of my little sister when my parents went out for the evening, and to get back at Mom, I took it out on poor Susan.

My favorite torture was to drag her across the floor of our finished basementby her hair. She hated this a lot. Even more, she hated when I would hide in some dark closet of the house and not come out until she was so scared by the thought of being left alone that she would start to cry.

I thought she deserved such treatment because she was so irritatingly perfect all the time.

There was lots of stuff about her that annoyed me. To impress my dad, I got good grades in elementary school and, after making honor roll in the seventh grade, was forever labeled the Brains of the family, a role I came to sorely regret. Susan was the Pretty One and, for this, I wanted to strangle her. Can you blame me? Given the choice, what preadolescent girl wants to be smart instead of pretty? Lets see: Lindsay Lohan or the foreign exchange student who wins the National Spelling Bee?

Susan did everything the way girls were supposed to, as if she were a character from a romance comic. She joined after-school clubs, learned to twirl a baton, and went out with nice Jewish boys. I hung out with the Italian guys, smoked cigarettes, and wore heavy black eyeliner. Throughout high school, we traveled in totally different circles and tried to avoid bumping into each other as much as possible.