Cookie

The first 3 girls in my family had short, dark hair. Marie and I started out strawberry blond, but turned brunette with age, each displaying different degrees of unruly dishevelment along the spectrum of wavy to curly. The disobedient nature of our hair gradually compelled my mom to throw up her hands and shear it as closely to the scalp as possible.

The short cuts.

Liz’s hair was super-dark brown from the beginning and fell into a neat, shiny bowl cut, giving her a vaguely Asian look (that she later played up as a karate champion in the mock-newscasts we made with the rented camcorder my parents were using to film my baby brother's first bites of solid food).

The bowl cut.

Caroline, the fourth sister, was born with the same strawberry blond fuzz as Marie and I, but just like her eyes stayed blue (while ours turned hazel), her hair stayed as red as the day she was born. My mom rejoiced in this little miracle of genetics, a heartwarming reminder of her own mother who died not long after Caroline was born.

Longest hair in the house.

From the beginning, Caroline’s hair was widely celebrated. While Marie and I were being mistaken for little boys in dresses at church on Sunday, our youngest sister’s hair was proudly arranged into silky citrus pigtails because, quite frankly—it was gorgeous. Marie’s was, too--once she grew it out and learned how to contain the curls. And Liz’s bowl cut barely moved, with its sleek, dark manageable straightness. She just didn’t want it long. Mine, however, was a hot mess the second I grew it out—a nightmare that I re-live every time I attempt to comb the hair of my first son, with whom I share my unfortunate hair inheritance: the cowlicks, the wayward bangs, the texture that responds negatively to all weather and cannot be combed.

Me. Age 7. Two years post-boy cut.

I could be bitter that my mom kept me in a boy-cut until I was 5—but after dealing with this head of hair for the subsequent lifetime that followed Mama’s short stint of beating it back like kudzu, I can totally see where she was coming from.

Meanwhile, even when messy from somersaulting across the carpet, Caroline’s hair was still beautiful. And her personality was every bit as—uh—“spicy” as her hair color implied. Until her, there had been a natural flow to the pecking order. The oldest told me what to do and I did it. I told the sister directly under me what to do—and she didn’t necessarily do it, but there was a mutual respect; a slight head-nod of recognition to a realm of intelligent design where seniority mattered, at least a little bit.

And then there was Caroline. You could tell her what to do all day. It would not make one damn bit of difference.

Her earliest passion was “fuffies”, otherwise known to the rest of the world as “horses”. She would nearly leap from her car seat screaming “FUFFIES! FUFFIES!” through the passy she kept until she was nearly four—because taking it from her was a battle no one was interested in. She was so enamored with fuffies that my parents got her a stuffed pink pony, big enough for her to sit on. Unfortunately, while big enough to “ride”, Pink Fuffy was not structurally engineered to actually support the weight of a 2-year-old and eventually succumbed to a debilitating hip-displasia. After just a few months of abuse, its hind legs were permanently splayed out behind itself, like an equine zombie pawing out of a shallow grave. But all the while, Caroline sat happily on its sagging spine, sucking her passy with satisfaction, until it was finally worn down to nothing but a horse head and a deflated sack of styro-foam dust.

The passy—or the “plug” as my parents affectionately called it for its ability to cease the onslaught of what otherwise emanated from “the noisy hole”—was undoubtedly a tough one to phase out. I remember not a bit of that battle however, possibly having blocked out the nightmare of screaming and crying it must have been. What I do remember was the purple bathing suit.

Caroline was fiercely committed to items and habits. She watched favorite movies over and over and over again until the VHS tape practically disintegrated within its black plastic carcass and she played her preferred “game”  of the moment all day every day, as if it were the central cog in her own personal religion. For an extended stint prior to preschool, Caroline played “tea party” with just such frequency and fervor, literally carpeting her room with layer upon layer of play plastic partyware—tea cups, saucers, forks, knives, spoons, plates, bowls, pots. She would then exit the room abruptly, going onto the next thing and leaving in her wake what looked like the aftermath of a bombing or natural disaster.

A tame version of Caroline's infamous tea parties.

She also loved leotards. I’m not sure how long she stuck with the formal gymnastics classes for which they were originally purchased—but she wore those leotards like a uniform and regularly performed her routine of ragged somersaults and flailing donkey kicks for anyone who happened to be seated in the living room for any length of time.

Her favorite among the leotards was not a leotard at all, but a purple bathing suit--purple being her favorite color. One particular summer afternoon, my mom had removed the purple bathing suit to wash it—but also to ensure that it had not yet spontaneously grafted to Caroline’s skin. It hadn’t—but you might have assumed otherwise from the intensity of her ensuing meltdown. “I WANT MY BATHING SUIT!!!” she began screaming from a sobbing heap at the bottom of the stairs. After trying in vain to console her, the various family members gradually backed away slowly and went about their business, hoping she would eventually get bored or distracted or simply forget what she was crying about.

NOPE. 

For the entire length of the wash and dry cycles, I WANT MY BATHING SUIT was carved onto my family’s collective auditory cortex with the jagged fingernails of Caroline’s relentless repetition. Over and over. From the second that bathing suit was removed from her body until the moment it tumbled from the dryer into her rabid hands. It was an unprecedented display of determination the likes of which no sibling had been capable of mustering prior to or since that point—and it cemented her in annals of family history as a force to be reckoned with.

My brother Mikey and Caroline.

Caroline’s tenacity, while formidable, was not applied with a broad brush to all corners of her life’s canvas at all times. Her impetus to work hard, for instance, was often over-shadowed by the laundry list of things she did NOT care to do—many of which involved dealing with people. My sister Liz once got her—and later me—a job at this God-awful ice cream parlor and sandwich restaurant that truly was one of the most excruciatingly difficult places I ever worked. I suffered through just long enough to find another slightly less odious occupation, while Liz, whose gluttony for punishment exceeds that of most biblical martyrs, was elevated to assistant manager before graduating high school. Caroline, meanwhile, was eventually “left off the schedule” for her tendency to disappear during the lunch rush—a time of day when she was found on at least one occasion crouched in a cubby hole eating French fries under the ice cream counter, while a line of customers snaked out the door onto the sidewalk. Caroline’s limits were hard and fast—and whenever she hit them, the rest be damned.

Caroline finished high school with no firm intentions of going to college. In the years since elementary school, the ferocious attention-seeking little spitfire had become rather withdrawn in comparison to her younger self. It was a pattern I recognized, having gone through it myself not long ago—the self-consciousness and self-doubt, the total lack of confidence and over-abundance of social anxiety. I’d gone from mildly reserved but friendly, to standoffish and awkward—the embodiment of the Counting Crows line “she has trouble acting normal when she’s nervous”. What do I do with my hands? Do I swing them as I walk? What about when I’m still? Keep swinging? Or fan-out into jazz-hands? My entire outward personality had been consumed by a preoccupation with how I measured up to others and their perception of who that meant I was. By senior year in high school, the fog was beginning to lift, but the next several years would still be a very conscious process of forcing myself into uncomfortable situations and plowing through with reckless abandon--until I finally looked up and realized I felt just as normal as everyone else around me. College had been the catalyst for a wealth of personal growth beyond what my academic courses could teach me and I hated to imagine the socially shriveled little troll I might have become if I’d stayed home at 18 like Caroline was planning to do. I was entering grad school at the time and needed a roommate, so I invited Caroline to come with me and take classes at the local community college. I saw a lot of myself in her and hoped to pay forward the blessings bestowed on me by the parade of patient, inquisitive, and dedicated souls who had made it their business to pull me out of my own shell over the years. It took some convincing, but she agreed.

Caroline (~middle school?) and me (~high school?).

The day I went with her to complete her registration at the community college, she had plans to meet with an advisor who could help obtain testing accommodations for students with attention deficits. I initially led the charge, with pleasantries, introductions, and polite requests regarding our intentions to meet with this person. We were essentially put off and brushed aside to the point that I was all packed up and ready to leave in defeat. Until Caroline caught sight of the woman’s name plate on a door down the hall behind the reception desk and could see someone moving around inside. Before the lady at the desk could put a caller on hold and stop her, Caroline bolted past, burst into the advisor’s office, and launched into her list of demands. She was older now and more composed in her delivery—but this very much reminded me of that childhood episode at the bottom of the stairs. She wanted her purple bathing suit. And by God, this lady was gonna give it to her.

Over the next 3 years, she and I lived together in two different locations as our journeys through adulthood gradually branched into different states. Caroline married her high school sweetheart and I married Ray within 6 months of each other.  She was more grown up than she’d ever been—working, taking classes, joining a gym, and making friends in a far-away town. It was all her doing, of course—but I silently congratulated myself, taking way too much credit as the benevolent instigator of such staggering personal growth.

Things unraveled pretty quickly for Caroline over the next few years—in ways that aren’t my story to tell, mostly because I wasn’t there for much of it. Because I refused to be, for my own reasons. I was ignorant and selfish and too consumed with the pursuit of my own happiness to go down that road with her. I’d like to say I’d do things differently now—but sometimes the only cure for ignorance is the time it takes for hind sight to materialize, and selfishness rarely feels like itself in the moment. That era of our relationship was a sad lesson in the ways a person you’ve learned to depend on can ultimately disappoint, but it also illuminated that there’s no shortage of love for Caroline in the world. My absence, while regrettable, made room for more understanding and capable people--old friends, new relationships, and my sister Marie—to step in and do what I couldn’t.

Proof that Marie's hair situation drastically improved. Mine, not so much...

Caroline, known to our family as "Cookie" for at least the first decade of her life, has always been and always will be stubborn and difficult. But she’s also silly and loyal and loving and lovable. I haven’t been able to share all the funny Caroline stories until now because the distance I put between us cast an unfortunate shadow on those memories. When I recently called her to address it (all out-of-the-blue and crying-in-baseball-style), she was so…patient. And kind. And mature. And understanding. I’m sure there’s plenty of hurt and anger she could have piled on. But she didn’t. Instead, she made me feel like I could one day arrive at what I’d failed to provide her--and what we all need from each other: acceptance for who we are and forgiveness for whoever we’re not—and for whatever we did or didn’t do because of it.

My continued wish for Caroline on her birthday and beyond is that her own health and happiness become the purple bathing suit of her existence, and that she persist in her insistence for them with the tenacity and determination of the same girl who busted into that office at the community college. In the meantime, I’ll look forward to telling new Caroline stories—the stubborn, the silly, the loyal, the loving, and the lovable. Because that’s the kind of person she is.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, COOKIE!!!