Chicken Soup for the Soul Celebrates Sisters Read Online Free Page A

first sixteen months of her life my elder sister basked in the attention that is showered on an only child. Then I arrived on the scene, and she had to divide that attention with a red-faced, bawling little creature who needed quiet times for sleep and craved to be held in her mother’s arms.
    As we grew older, we often fought over rights to panda bears and other toys meant for our mutual enjoyment. Exasperated by our constant bickering, my parents finally told my sister, “If you can’t play nice and share the toys with your little sister, we’re going to give Beverly away to your cousin Jerry.”
    My sister knew a good thing when she heard it. One day as I continued to encroach on her territory, she put me in our little red wagon and began to pull it along the sidewalk. Coming to a corner she was not supposed to cross by herself, she waited. Our mother came running down to the street corner, yelling, “Stop!” After she caught her breath, she asked my sister, “Marilyn, where are you going?”
    â€œI’m taking Bee to Jerry’s house; he can have her!”
    Beverly McLaggan



MY SISTER, MYSELF
    T he first time I visit my father’s bungalow at the University of Nigeria, I perch on a vinyl settee in the parlor and drink milky tea while my father rambles on about the student riots, the military government’s Structural Adjustment Program, his college years with my mother, what he recalls her saying about her family’s farm in Washington State—never a pause for me or anyone else to speak.
    Meanwhile my stepmother, another stranger, flits about the room, dipping forward with black-market sugar and tins of Danish biscuits, slipping coasters under our cups the instant we lift to sip. From the darkened hallway come the slap of flip-flops and giggles.
    â€œYou have children?” I ask politely, as if this were a question for a daughter to ask her father, as if it were not the question I traveled halfway around the globe to ask.
    When I was not quite two, my father, a graduate student from Nigeria, returned home, leaving clothes and books scattered across the floor of his rented room. He was to attend to family business, scout out job prospects and come back. Though my parents had split, and my mother was raising me alone in Seattle, she maintained relations with my father for my sake. “I want you to know that this is not a good-bye,” he wrote to us from a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, nervous about reports of ethnic and religious tensions awaiting him. “I shall look forward to our meeting so long as we are all alive.” My mother never saw him again.
    Now, more than two decades later, my stepmother nods at my question and glances at my father. She is light-skinned and solicitous, with a wide nose and a voice like the breeze of the fans she angles at me.
    â€œYes, yes, there are children.” My father waves his hands. “You’ll meet them later.” He is short like me, his weathered skin dark as plums. A strip of wiry black hair encircles the back of his head. There’s a space in his mouth where a tooth should be. I don’t see the broad-shouldered rugby player who stared out from my wall all those years. The only feature I recognize is that round nose.
    A blur flashes tan and red in the hallway. I glance up to see a velvety-brown girl in a scarlet school uniform receding into the dimness, familiar eves stunned wide in a face I could swear is mine.
    It’s not possible, I tell myself. Even if the girl in the hall is my sister, we have different mothers of different races. How can we look so alike? For twenty-six years I have been an only child, the only black member of our family, our town.
    My father explains that during Christmas we’ll travel to our ancestral village, where I will be formally presented to the extended family and clan elders. I do not mention that for me Christmas has always been white.
    After my