The ties that bind

Maria Flook's unsettling Sister Life

by Johnette Rodriguez

MY SISTER LIFE. By Maria Flook. Pantheon, 353 pages, $25.

Maria Flook's fiction is characterized by a poet's eye for the symbolic and a hard-core realist's sensibility for descriptive detail, taking the reader into the smells, tastes and tactile impacts of a scene as much as its sights and sounds. In the biography of her and her sister's lives from the ages of 12 and 14 to 22 and 24, aptly titled My Sister Life, she wields her writer's weapons with even more dexterity, cutting to the heart of the disintegration in her family.

After presenting her family's initial shock when her 14-year-old sister Karen walks out the back door of their Wilmington suburban home in 1964 with no luggage, no clues to her plans, and no evidence of foul play, Flook backs up and sets the scene of their family. Both parents had been previously married, with two older children from her mother's first marriage already out of the house by the time Karen leaves. Her mother remains obsessed by that first husband, a model for Arrow Collars who abandoned her and their two babies.

In the sister-left-behind's analysis (Flook had a writer's native curiosity from the get-go), Maria wonders, "Perhaps Karen had watched Veronica's obsession and thought that to earn her mother's adoration she too would have to remove herself from the scene." For neither sister found it easy to get any maternal warmth from Veronica. Maria fought back with sarcasm; Karen just walked away, quite literally.

She gets into a car with a 50-year-old drifter she met at the bowling alley where she was working after school, thrilled that he's brought a Thermos of orangeade and a bag of cookies for their car trip to Virginia, oblivious to his Mann Act joke as they cross the state line. Karen is no stranger to sex when she meets James, and even his physical battering and psychological brutality do not make her think of running back to Wilmington. Instead her situation drives her to seek her own life as a prostitute -- she wants to learn quickly and earn her own money, which she saves to try and escape to a better, safer place.

These sections of Flook's book are painfully graphic -- nightmarish, really. But the cumulative effect is to show the grit and pluck of this teenager. Despite the incredible betrayals she experiences over and over again -- by James, by a church group, by her mother (who commits her to a mental hospital instead of welcoming her home) -- Karen hangs on to an almost naive sense of loyalty and trust. That's partly what keeps getting her back into bad situations. And though it's frustrating to watch her do it, it makes her very believable.

Flook does an amazing feat of re-creating her sister's life, her sister's voice. No doubt she hung on to many of the stories Karen told her and filled in the gaps through more recent phone conversations. But she doesn't just retell the events of those lost years, she skillfully draws the characters Karen knew, using first person, present tense to lend stark immediacy to those sections of the book.

Shifting back to her own story in first person, past tense, Flook shows herself to be as defiantly rebellious as her sister had been withdrawn. She all but flaunts her sexual escapades with the local head-shop owner (this is the '60s, after all), her forays into glue-sniffing and drugs with her school chums and finally a joyride to Baltimore in a stolen car that ends in a pile-up.

Flook writes much of her own story in a curiously detached tone, at times sardonic and bemused by her younger self, at other times obviously very troubled by what she is relating. It's as though the prose itself might still protect her, somehow dull the blows to her inner self from calling up her all-too-vivid and damaging past.

Of all the metaphors and symbolic images Flook has used throughout the book -- Karen's dream about Maria's white footprints after she shoe-polished the bottom of her Mary Janes and left a trail on their mother's expensive Persian carpet; her mother's strategically placed ashtray with the French proverb, "Quel rit vendredi, dimanche pleurera" ("Whoever laughs on Wednesday will cry on Sunday"); her father's ulcers; her mother's heart conditions; the spider in her shower cap; her sister's memories in a shoe box -- it is the coincidence of the Andrea Doria incident that has her in its grip. The only photograph in this book about a family is the frontispiece of the Stockholm's mangled prow, as it enters New York harbor.

The Stockholm sliced through stateroom #52 of the Andrea Doria, killing one young girl and trapping her sister in the crumpled metal of the large ship's bow, from which she was extricated two days later. Save for a last-minute change in the family's travel plans, Maria and Karen would have been sleeping in that very stateroom, as their mother's ticket stubs from the Andrea Doria often reminded them.

That steamship collision sticks in Flook's mind as a question, or perhaps many questions: Why were they saved to endure the difficult life they had with their parents? Would that disaster always be a reminder of the sisters' dangerous journey through a childhood fraught with emotional shipwrecks? And how did the small events and that one large one catapult them into a bleak and dangerous set of adventures throughout their teens?

The answers are woven throughout this unforgettable book. Though the grim parallel lives of these sisters are somehow all the more unsettling because of the insulated, even privileged upper middle class from which they came, My Sister Life is ultimately a story not just of survival, but of an acceptance of one's fate in life, including the flawed people who are our parents.

Flook would never stoop to sentimentality, but she ends the book by describing a walk that she and Karen took with their mother at her luxury retirement complex last year. In the end, her mother's indomitable spirit, as infuriating as it is, shines through, and the reader sees a familial source of the stubbornness and strength that sustained these two sisters.

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An interview with the author

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