My Imaginary Sister Jane

This will probably come as a giant surprise to you, but I wasn’t the coolest kid growing up. In fact, I was kind of a dork. I hope you didn’t just take a sip of anything and then spit it all over yourself when I dropped that bomb. I’ve been writing some stories about all of this, stories which are true, and I’ve decided to excerpt them. And by excerpt I mean copy-and-paste. Here’s is one. Please love it. Or don’t. I don’t really care because that’s how cool I am now. (Like Ronnie advised Sam in the Jersey Shore house, I’m just doing “me.”)

My Imaginary Sister Jane

My sister and I have an imaginary younger sister named Jane who unfortunately did not receive the same kind of devoted parenting we did. We know this because our mom keeps forgetting she exists. “Wait, who’s Jane?” our mom will ask, idly peeling a banana or doing dishes. My sister will grimace. I’ll look away, disgusted. “She’s only your daughter!” I’ll yell.  “How can you forget about your own daughter? Your own flesh and blood?”

“What?” our mom will ask with a bemused look on her face, like she’s waiting for the candid camera crew to bust into her kitchen. “She’s your imaginary daughter, you know about her!” my sister will say, pleading.

“Oh, right,” our mom will say.

We suspect she doesn’t really remember, and we’ll continue to suspect this when we have this conversation a few weeks later and then again a few weeks after that. Poor Jane. No wonder she ran off to South America with her boyfriend.

Jane hates deodorant, and when you bring it up she will say, in a high pitched voice that only my sister can do, “Ew.” It’s kind of three syllables though, like “ew-ee-yoo.” In this way she’s sort of like my sister and me, as I hate most toothpaste and my sister hates most soap. We’ve found socially acceptable ways to deal with our strange grooming product aversions though.

My basic problem is mint. It makes me gag. I figure I must have experienced some kind of trauma surrounding mint-flavored toothpaste early in life which clearly I’ve suppressed. Perhaps my parents, when teaching me how to brush my teeth, stressed too strongly the importance of spitting out the toothpaste at the end instead of swallowing it. My response was to cut out the middleman. I’ve made my peace with non-mint flavored toothpaste so long as it isn’t cinnamon, which is mint’s handmaiden. I also have no use for bubblegum-flavored anything. Bubblegum ice cream? Get the fuck out of here.

My preference is lemon-flavored toothpaste. I used a lemon-scented dishwashing soap and for a time I was worried I’d begin to associate lemon with cleanser and no longer be able to tolerate it in my food and toothpaste. Thankfully that hasn’t happened but the words “food and toothpaste” in such close proximity just caused a stirring in my vomit center. See what I’m up against?

My sister, meanwhile, finds most soap to be upsetting, especially liquid soap. Her fiancé does the dishes in their apartment, which seems like a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. She’s okay with various fruit and herb scented glycerin bars but ask her to do anything involving liquid soap and you’re staring at the business end of a potential meltdown. She’s a criminal defense attorney, by the way, so it’s not as if she’s some kind of marshmallow. She’s just a high-powered public defender who’s afraid of liquid soap.

She and I compare aversions sometimes, as it’s unfathomable to me that she’s totally okay with toothpaste just as it’s unfathomable to her that I can use soap like a grownup.

“So if you were to put a blob of toothpaste on your finger and just sit with it there it wouldn’t make you want to barf?” I’ll ask her, incredulous.

“I mean, I’d rather not, but it wouldn’t be any different than-”

“Than shampoo?” I’ll ask. Shampoo for us is the epitome of the relationship one is supposed to have with a grooming product.

“Yeah.”

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around this.

“But if you were to put liquid soap in your hand?”

She stiffens and closes her eyes, like she just received bad news. “Stop!” she begs. As a fellow sufferer, I do.

But in case you’re thinking we’re weird smelly girls, I assure you we’re especially hygienic. Just particular.

These kinds of things aren’t easily explained to others though, and so we’re bonded by our secret shared weirdness.

Perhaps it was for this reason that we needed to expand the circle to include imaginary Jane and her deodorant issues, because aside from that, she’s nothing like us. In fact, it’s hard to believe the same genetic-material that produced a couple hesitant, pear-shaped late bloomers like my sister and me could have also produced a winner like Jane.

Jane is a cool girl. She runs with the popular crowd, is good at sports (especially soccer) and recently ran off to South America with her boyfriend, Hernandez Hernandez Hernandez or “Triple H” as he’s called. We don’t know why she went—aside from the kind of mad passionate love that only high schoolers can experience, and which my sister and I never experienced in high school—but we aren’t worried about her because Jane always lands on her feet.

She also has an incredibly high pain threshold and pierced her own ears with a needle and a potato even though our parents would never go for that. Plus she wears two-piece bathing suits which she doesn’t even pay for because she slips them on under her clothes in dressing rooms and waltzes right out without getting caught! When I heard she’d helped herself to a five finger-discount I sat her down and tried to explain that it just wasn’t a very smart thing to do, that actions have consequences and she was potentially messing up her future, but I don’t know if I got through to her. Plus she was chewing mint gum. She does it just to spite me.

Jane was a cheerleader (of course!) and after some kind of win the entire team went down to Mexico with some older boys and Jane got drunk as a skunk. If our parents knew half the things she did they’d probably have a coronary.

Our father is an overprotective doctor who practices a religion of worst-case scenarios:

Never go to a gas station late at night because you might get held up.

Never go to Mexico on spring break because you could be thrown in jail by corrupt federales.

Be skeptical of dentists who say you have a cavity because once they drill, you for sure have a cavity.

Veterinarians, on the whole, are full of shit.

Pit bulls can’t be trusted, certainly not around babies. Same with any dog that is part wolf or coyote.

Never go sky diving or bungee jumping.

Never ride a motorcycle.

Decline invitations to travel anywhere by single-engine plane or helicopter.

The stock market is akin to gambling.

Any bet on a craps table other than Pass and Come is a sucker bet.

Avoid general anesthesia except when absolutely necessary and then, only in a hospital.

Avoid elective surgery.

Be careful when getting your ears pierced because you could get a whopping infection and have to get a piece of your ear removed.

For this final reason my sister and I were allowed to get our ears pierced but only by thoroughly vetted qualified professionals and to the great chagrin of our father. “Don’t come to me when you get a whopping infection and have to get a piece of your ear removed,” he’d say, shaking his head. The great irony is that my sister—the actual one, not the imaginary one—in the time between being a high schooler and going to law school went through a rebellious phase where she added a couple holes to each ear and pierced the cartilage on the top of her right ear. It began to get infected. I went with her to the doctor’s office as she and I like to go to scary appointments in teams.

“You shouldn’t have pierced your ear here,” the doctor said gruffly. “Very stupid to pierce the cartilage.” It’s as if our father had phoned ahead! He went on, examining her ear, which was tender and had a swollen reddish sack protruding from the back of the hole. It was pretty gross. “Listen, I’m writing you a prescription for Cipro, but if that doesn’t clear it up, we’re probably going to have to remove a small piece of your ear.”

No fucking way! Even though this was horrible news, it was also kind of magical, in the same way that seeing something you’d heard about but long thought to be fictional, like a gnome or leprechaun or talking dog, might be magical. She and I stared at each other in disbelief. My heart swelled with pride for our dad, whose paranoid delusions had been spot on.

Luckily the Cipro worked.

This kind of thing, this transgression against the Rosen Code which Jane was famous for–don’t even get me started on the time she went zip lining in the Andes!—and which my sister dabbled in, was something I very rarely did because my own fears dovetailed so neatly with my parents. Blood, for example, the loss of which was the inherent risk in everything my parents forbid, is something I believe should be left inside the body with a layer of skin over it. I trust that it’s in there and I don’t need to see it. Or, more to the point, I get queasy when I see it.

The school I went to had a few rites of passage that were legend. In fourth grade the girls switch from jumper uniforms to uniforms of skirts and shirts. In fifth grade you study colonial America culminating in something called Colonial Day where you dip candles and make a quilt. In sixth grade you begin changing classes instead of staying in one homeroom. In seventh grade you go on a trip to Sequoia. In eighth grade you put on a musical and everyone pricks his or her finger. Because this was the gay 80s and AIDS was on everyone’s mind, the school decided it was no longer wise, from a legal standpoint, to have the students drawing their own blood. I wholeheartedly agreed. How could I be sure my classmates weren’t needle abusers who cruised gay bathhouses and engaged in unprotected sex? I couldn’t.

Instead of doing away with the experiment entirely though, our science teacher was going to prick his own finger and we’d all watch. Before the pricking, like days before, to ratchet up the intensity, he’d made this big speech about how every year there’s always one student who can’t handle the sight of blood and who gets lightheaded and faint and needs to leave the room. It was like the announcement of an unlucky lottery, or Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. Eyes darted around the room.  One of our own would be going down. Without even auditioning for the part, I knew it was mine.

So the day of the amateur phlebotomy lesson comes and already I’m beginning to dread it. We’re all standing huddled around the teacher and he takes a little finger pricking gizmo—the kind diabetics use to test their blood glucose—and holds it against his fingertip. I avert my gaze and hear a sickening click. It’s happened. The pricking has commenced. I think about the fact that finger tips are swarming with nerve endings—much more than other areas of the body like the back—and wonder if he’s in pain. By now he’s squeezing his fingertip to produce the drop of blood he needs from his freshly wounded finger. His attempts to impede coagulation are making me uncomfortable. He should be letting his finger clot! I began to feel warm, specifically around my ears and eyes and my legs feel a little funny. He takes a glass tube and holds it against the drop of blood and the tube turns dark red as the blood is pulled up by capillary action. I look down because the room starts wobbling slowly, as if I’m on a ship.  I feel like I’m going to pitch forward so I grab onto the nearest ledge to steady myself, in this case a black shelf with all sorts of little jars filled with preserved specimens in formaldehyde, like a fetal pig which is simultaneously cute and disgusting. Because there’s so much formaldehyde used in the small airless feeling space, the teacher makes use of something called lab deodorant, which I’m pretty is made by same people who manufacture urinal cakes. Regardless, the stench of noxious cherries isn’t helping matters.

“Alison?”

“Hrmph?” I respond, looking at the teacher through sudden tunnel vision. I sound drunk.

“Are you okay?” he asks. The sound is garbled like a tape being slowed down.

“Uh-huh,” I say, though I’m clearly not.

“Why don’t you go for a walk?” he says, as everyone knows the best thing to do with a kid who’s about to pass out is cut them loose and leave them unattended.

I wobble out of class and head toward the school library where my mom, fortuitously, is volunteering that day. The light is still doing strange things to my eyes and everything seems to be going back and forth between too dark and too light. I stumble into the overlit vestibule where the moms keep their purses while volunteering. It doubles as the librarian’s office and it’s a sad little affair with a couple chairs that are too big for the space and stacks of papers balanced on top of other stacks of paper.

“Honey?” I hear my mom say.  She looks concerned. “They’re drawing blood in science class, I began to feel weird,” I explain. She touches my forehead. I sit with her for a little while, wishing I didn’t have to go back to class. The librarian brings me some orange juice. “Just tell them you have low blood sugar,” says my mom. I suspect being a wimp with fake hypoglycemia isn’t going to make me any cooler than being just a wimp, but I’m game for giving it a go. By the time I make it back to science class the blood is cleaned up, the sado-masochistic teacher is wearing a band-aid and everyone is looking at me like I’m some exciting breakable oddity. “Did you pass out?” they want to know. Did they think I’d wobbled out of the class, found my mom and then hit the floor? “No,” I say haughtily, “I did not pass out. I just almost passed out. Also, I have low blood sugar.”

The same thing nearly happened again in high school biology class when the teacher pricked his finger. Why is this a favorite of science teachers? I already knew how it was going to go though so it wasn’t really a surprise when he announced from the front of the classroom while holding the crimson tube against his bleeding finger, “Alison put your head down on the desk.”

“Aye Aye, Sir!” I thought, feeling the cool fake wood of the desk against my cheek.

I will say that I was sort of amazed that both teachers, while in the midst of their bloodletting rituals, had the keen powers of observation to sense that I was about to toss my cookies or crack my skull open. In both instances I’d thought I’d been pretty subtle about it. Perhaps the self-mutilation heightened their sense of nearby suffering.

By the time I got to college the blood aversion was in full bloom and I could barely make it through a politics seminar when the teacher had us watch Angel Heart. In the film, Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet, as private detective Harry Angel and daughter of a voodoo priestess, Epiphany Proudfoot, respectively, are getting it on. It’s raining and the rain turns to blood and the walls begin to bleed and there’s blood everywhere, which is just how it goes when a private dick takes the daughter of a voodoo priestess as his lover in sweltering New Orleans. Even without the lightheadedness and near fainting I’m not sure I would have understood the purpose of watching that movie in class.

Jane would have though. She knows it by heart.