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Transcript

I Didn't Plan On Getting Old With You · After the Rush Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was standing at my kitchen sink last week, drying a bowl, composing a speech.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: The speech went like this.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I love you.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot live here.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: And absolutely not the cats.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody had asked me anything.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: My sister has never once asked me.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: She had,
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: in fact,
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: just published an essay saying plainly that she cannot live that close
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: to another person.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not for a season.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Not even if everyone involved is kind.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: A shared kitchen, she said, would take her apart inside a month.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I read it the morning it went out.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I am her publisher, so I read it twice.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then I stood at my own sink and won an argument nobody was having.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Catherine McDowell, and this is After the Rush.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you about our childhood home first because everything else I'm going
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: to say depends on it.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Five children,
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: two parents,
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: three dogs,
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: chickens, a duck,
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: rabbits in a residential neighborhood on an ordinary street with neighbors
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: who could see us.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was not a farm.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was a zoo with a mortgage.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: My sister was eight.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was six,
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: and somewhere in there she started going through that house room by room,
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: looking for anywhere quiet, and she found it.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: A storage space at the back of our older brother's bedroom closet.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: She climbed in,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: and then she stacked the boxes into a wall across the opening,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: so that from outside there was nothing to see.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody in that house ever found it.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Except me.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And did I leave her alone?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I did not.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I stole food out of the kitchen and I moved in.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: She had filled that cubby space with books.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And she let me stay.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which, at six, I took as my due.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: That is where she taught me to read.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: On the floor of our brother's closet.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Behind a wall of boxes.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Eating whatever I had managed to get out of the kitchen without anybody noticing.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: That was the first arrangement the two of us ever made.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: She built a wall.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: I came in anyway.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: It worked because I brought food and because I would go quiet the second there was
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: a book in front of me.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Sixty years later,
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: she has built herself another one,
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: and I am standing at a sink wondering whether I am allowed in.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, five children in a house, that is not the same as five siblings in a life.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that is distance.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it is that we grew into people with different lives and different phone habits.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I am not going to relitigate any of it into a microphone.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: The one I am getting old with is the one who was in the closet.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody picks a sibling.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: You get handed one.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: You are not consulted.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: You do not interview them.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: There is no trial period.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: But out of all of it, out of that entire loud house, the two of us picked each other.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: We are each other's emergency contact,
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: not by default,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: by choice,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: out of a field of candidates,
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: which is the most flattering thing either of us has ever said to the other one.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to appreciate the engineering.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: My sister is listed as the person to call if I am hurt.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: My sister does not leave her house.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I am listed as the person to call if she is hurt,
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: which means the entire plan comes down to whether I can find my keys.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: There is also no third person to call when the two of us disagree about our 90-year-old mother.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: That is not a system.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: That is two women agreeing to be one.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: At four in the morning, I am not worried about the ambulance.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: I am worried about who has to be the one still here,
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: because one of us will be,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: and that one is going to be the last person alive who was ever behind that wall
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: of boxes.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody else even knew the hiding place was there.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we have been negotiating,
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: quietly, badly,
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: mostly by not saying anything out loud for years,
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: which is how this family has always conducted its business.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to walk you through the terms,
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: because I suspect a fair number of you are in the middle
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: of exactly this conversation with a brother or a sister and having it with
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: the same crippling politeness.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Term one, she is not moving in with me.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Term 2, and this is the one everybody leaves out.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: I am not moving in with her.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: That second one matters.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Every article I have read about siblings in later life is written as though one
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: of you is the burden,
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: and the other one is the saint, and the only open question is which is which.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: In our case, we are both perfectly terrible housemates, and we know it about ourselves.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: I would reorganize her kitchen inside a week.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: She would not survive me being in it.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Neither of us wants a roommate.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: We want a sister.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then there are the cats.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: I love my sister.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: I would drive through a hurricane for my sister.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: She is outnumbered by her pets,
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: and she says so in her own author bio,
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: cheerfully, like a woman reporting the score of a game she has already lost.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I have made my position clear to a bowl in my kitchen.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: The cats stay where they are.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: That is not a joke about the cats.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: That is a joke about me.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because what I was actually doing at
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: that sync was rehearsing generosity nobody had asked me for.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then rehearsing the limits of it alone in advance so I would be ready.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the woman I was rehearsing at had already written her answer down
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: and published it and sent it to my inbox.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Say the boundary out loud early while it is still funny.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: It stops being funny later.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: It does not stop being true.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, her essay.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: She follows two Facebook groups about older women buying houses together,
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: shared mortgage,
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: one house, who gets the bedroom with the good windows, what the policy is on pets.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: She has been reading them for two years,
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: and she was reading them the way you read a travel magazine about
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: a country you are never going to visit.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because she looked at the only model anybody was offering,
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: one house and one kitchen and everybody in it, and knew she could not survive it.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then she wrote a sentence I have not been able to put down.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: She wrote that she does not want housemates.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: What she wants is for one person to be close enough to notice when her lights don't come on.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Those are two completely different requests.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And for two years she had been making the wrong one and getting turned down by a Facebook group.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: She does not need a shared kitchen.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: She needs the lot next door.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: A duplex with a wall in it.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: The arrangements where nobody expects you at dinner and somebody drives you to
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: the I appointment.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: She had been looking for a house.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: She was looking for the ground to build one on.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where I have to admit what a pair we are.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: For two years she worked on that problem by herself, in Facebook groups, in her own head.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: For two years, I worked on the same problem by myself, at my sink, drafting a refusal.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Same problem.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Two rooms.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Neither of us said a word.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: We could have solved it in one conversation,
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: which is the most accurate sentence about my family I have ever produced.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, it is the same deal we made at six and eight.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: She wants a wall.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: She wants somebody on the other side of it who knows she's back there.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: She ended that essay by saying she was going to buy a Powerball ticket
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: if she could pry herself out of the house long enough to do it.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: $905 million.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: $2 for the ticket.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: She said she would settle for a hundred acres and a solid-built house.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: I would like to make my counteroffer.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I also want the hundred acres.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want a second house on it.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: I want it far enough across the field that I cannot hear the cats,
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: and she cannot hear me reorganizing anything,
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: and I want a road running between the two,
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: so that on the days she can't get in a car,
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: I can still see whether her lights came on.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: $2 each, $4 total, for a site plan.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: It is not a plan.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is the first honest sketch either of us has drawn,
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: and it took two years and a published essay to get it on paper,
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: and there are two houses on it.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'll get the tickets.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And when she stacks the boxes up, I'll bring food.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: After the Rush is written and hosted by me, Catherine McDowell.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a brother or a sister you have been quietly drafting a speech at,
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: forward this to them instead.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: It will go better.