Chicken Soup for the Soul Celebrates Sisters Read Free

both of us.
    â€œWell,” she said, with the optimistic wisdom of a five-year-old, “if I ever would have had a sister I would have really loved her.”
    As I watched her drift off to sleep, I thought, I would have, too.
    Christine Pisera Naman





MY SISTER’S EYEBROWS
    I t was more than forty years ago that my big sister Marcella and I had the conversation about eyebrows. I was a little girl and she was a blossoming young woman. She was sitting at her vanity preparing to go out when she looked over at me, laughed and said, “You’re the girl with no eyebrows!”
    â€œI am not!” I retorted. But I knew she was right. My eyebrows were just stuck there above my eyes, sparse and straight, with no arch.
    I often sat next to her vanity like that with my chin cupped in my hands, watching her “going out” ritual. First came eye shadow, then eyeliner on those marvelous mossy-green eyes. Pretty containers with swirled names like Maybelline and Cover Girl opened and closed with clicks and twists. Sometimes she would reach over and dab Chanel No. 5, Seven Winds or White Shoulders perfume on my neck. This anointing was like a promise that one day I would be a young woman, too.
    The finishing touch to her face was always the same. She picked up a tiny brush and shaped her perfectly arched eyebrows. They were the most beautiful eyebrows I had ever seen.
    Sliding into the seat in front of her vanity mirror after she had gone, I looked at my plain face. There were those cursed straight eyebrows. I was missing eyelashes that were stuck on the eyelash curler. I wore an ugly hand-me-down knit shirt that belonged to my brother and my pigtails were a mess. I would never be pretty like her even though her perfume promised something more.
    On Saturdays she occasionally passed the time with me sitting on the sofa going through the pages of ladies dresses in the Sears catalog. Her long graceful finger with pearl nail-polish pointed out the dresses she liked. When I picked my favorite, it had polka dots or ruffles—or better yet, both. Her raised eyebrow and a non-committal “hmmm” started me looking beyond the flash and frills of things in life.
    In a family of short, round people it was odd she was statuesque— nearly six feet tall. She purchased clothes at exclusive stores. I remember a sharkskin skirt, a rust-colored camel hair coat, a sable stole she saved up for and glass-heeled shoes covered with black lace.
    Marcella introduced me to classical music and showed me how to twirl spaghetti on a spoon like a lady. When I turned thirteen, she took Mother’s sewing scissors and cut my long braided hair. I looked so different, and perfume didn’t seem too farfetched anymore.
    I grew up, married and moved away from my family. As the years passed, Marcella’s stunning dark hair turned into stunning silver and she never lost her sense of style. There was always a special feeling between the two of us that our distance from each other never changed.
    Marcella got cancer in her early fifties. Her treatment was so successful that the family went back into normal life soon after. Twelve years later the news came that her cancer had returned. She went shopping for new clothes saying, “I’m going to go in style when I go to the doctor’s appointments.”
    The chemo took her hair and eyebrows and she became emaciated. I thought about the vanity mirror, the makeup, the perfume and my beautiful green-eyed sister. The next day I bought pale pink tissue paper. In it I wrapped pink nailpolish the shade of seashells, lacy pink underwear, glossy pink lipstick and cosmetics in pretty containers. The last thing I wrapped was eyebrow powder and a tiny brush. Like the dab of perfume she put on my neck all those years ago, the little pink packages were my promise to carry for her the hope of things she couldn’t yet see.
    We vacationed at the ocean a few weeks later and returned the