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when the day came to move house. But they’d been able to witness the entire show. They would get up in the middle of the night and go and sit side by side at the top of the stairs to listen to the “discussion.” One night Pop knocked over the humungous kitchen cupboard and Mom drove off in the car.
    While ten steps up from there they sat sucking their thumbs.
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    It’s stupid to go on telling that side of the story: they were close for any number of reasons that, in the long run, meant more than the tough times. But still . . .
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    For Vincent and me it was completely different. We were city brats. Less bicycling and more time in front of the box. We had no idea how to stick on a rubber repair patch but we did know how to dodge a subway fare or repair a skateboard or sneak into the movies through the emergency exit.
    And then Lola got sent to boarding school, and there was no one around anymore to fill our heads with whispered mischief or chase after us in the garden . . .
    We wrote to each other every week. She was my beloved older sister. I idealized her; I sent her drawings and wrote poems to her. When she came home she would ask me whether Vincent had behaved himself during her absence. Of course not, I’d say, of course not. And I’d describe in detail all the horrible things I’d had to undergo the previous week. At which point, to my supreme satisfaction, she’d drag him into the bathroom to acquaint him with the riding crop.
    The louder my brother screamed, the wider I grinned.
    And then one day, to make it even better, I wanted to see him suffer. To my complete, flabbergasted horror, I burst in to find my sister whipping a bolster, while Vincent bleated in time, reading his Boule et Bill comic book. A mega disappointment. On that day, Lola fell from her pedestal.
    Which turned out to be a good thing. Now we were the same height.
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    Nowadays she’s my best friend. We’re sort of like Mon­taigne and La Boétie, for example . . . Because she is who she is, and I am who I am. The fact that this young woman of thirty-two years of age is also my older sister is totally beside the point. Well, maybe not totally, it’s just fortunate we didn’t have to waste time trying to find each other.
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    She’s all into Montaigne’s Essays —she likes grand theories, the notion that one is punished for stubbornly wanting, and philosophy is just learning how to die. Give me the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude —infinite abuse and all those tyrants who are great because we are on our knees. She’ll take true knowledge, I’ll take tribunals. As the wise man himself said: “I was so grown and accustomed to be always her double in all places and in all things, that methinks I am no more than half of myself.”
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    And yet we are very different . . . She is afraid of her own shadow; I sit on mine. She copies out sonnets, I download samples. She admires painters, I prefer photographers. She never tells you what is in her heart, I speak my mind. She avoids conflict, I like things to be perfectly clear. She likes to be “a little bit tipsy,” I prefer to drink. She doesn’t like going out, I don’t like going home. She doesn’t know how to have fun, I don’t know when it’s time to get some sleep. She hates gambling, I hate losing. Her embrace is all-encompassing, my kindness has its limits. She never gets annoyed, I’m forever blowing a gasket.
    She says the world belongs to early risers, I beg her to tone it down. She’s romantic, I’m pragmatic. She got married, I flitter and flirt. She can’t sleep with a guy unless she’s in love, I can’t sleep with a guy unless there’s a condom. She needs me.
    Ditto.
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    She doesn’t judge, she takes me as I am. With my gray complexion and my black thoughts. Or my rosebud complexion and my buttercup thoughts. Lola knows how it feels to lust