Food for Thought

"It's quite nice up here."
"It is."
"You do most of your thinking here?"
"I do."
She turned to face me and looked at me oddly, cocking her head to the side. "I don't see the point."
I didn't turn to face her as she had. I looked straight ahead. "Of sitting on a rooftop?"
"Of thinking. You think more than you should."
"How so?"
She leaned back and rested her palms on the cement, throwing her hair back and looking up at the sky. "You're so lost in your own thoughts you drown out what's going on."
"I don't."
"But you do."
I hadn't said it defensively. It wasn't much of an insult. I was never fond of what was going on anyway.
I tucked a stray lock of my hair behind my ear.
"Maybe you don't think enough."
"Pardon?"
I hadn't meant to say it as an insult, although in her reply she made it clear it had come across as such.
"Maybe you are drowned in what's going on." I said. "You need to know your thoughts."
"I know my thoughts."
"But you don't."
"But I do."
I still hadn't turned to face her. Only when I focused on them did I begin to hear the sounds of sirens and buses and people from below us. Before it had seemed silent.
"Don't doubt me, Olive." She said, reaching over and ruffling my hair. "I'm the older sister, after all. I've had experience in my time."
"Why of course you have."
"You'll learn soon enough," she paused and rolled her head around her neck, as if stretching it out and cracking out the stressed parts, "that thinking will get you no where."
"It'll get me further than you!" But I didn't say this. I said, "You're very right."
She laughed and stood up from the rooftop, her hands placed on her hips. "I am."
I dangled my feet off the ledge and looked at my bare toes.
"I'm going back inside. It's about to rain."
"Is it?"
"It obviously is." She held open the door to the stairwell and gestured for me to come too. "Wouldn't want you to get wet."
I let out a sigh and pushed myself up and off the ledge, walking back inside behind my sister.
And once inside I sat by the window and watched for raindrops but they never came. It never rained that day, and I spent it inside watching a window thinking about raindrops, where I could have been out on my favorite ledge thinking and drowning out what was going on. What a waste of a day.

-------
Wendy returned from college to stay for a summer before she went right back to it. I was fourteen that summer.
She spent the first few days with me and it seemed to me she loved me more than she had before she left in the way she always wanted me beside her. But after that first week it was as if she had never returned in the first place.
"The classes are horrid, the teachers are just so mean! My one professor just won't leave me alone. He's mean to everyone in the course, but it's as if he has a special disliking towards me! What have I ever done but turned in papers on time?"
At this point in the rant I had tuned out and was staring down at my broccoli as if studying its shape.
My mother simply nodded along with her.
I don't believe Wendy ever stopped talking at dinner, so much so that she never ate a bite of food.
"If she has such a horrible time at that college, why does she continue to go back?"
My mother jumped and dropped a pair of jeans she was folding. She put a hand over her heart and sighed when she saw me. "Olive. You gave me a start!"
"Why does she go back then?" I ignored her.
"Wendy?" She had a long pause before answering, such a long pause I thought she had forgotten what we were speaking of and wasn't going to answer at all. I started to restate the question before she said, "It's quite complicated."
"Don't they feed her at that school?" I went on to another topic. "She's considerably skinnier, isn't she!"
"You should be asleep."
"But you can see her ribs! She was changing yesterday in our room and--"
"Olive, go to sleep." My mother said sternly, enough that made me understand this wasn't the time to discuss such things.

-------
"Aren't these just the best jeans?"
"They are."
She grabbed a size 0 and tossed it over her arm without a glimpse at the price tag. I had always been envious of the size 0.
When we rang up the clothes, the cash lady looked at both of us, and remarked, "Well aren't you two just gorgeous!"
"Thank you." Wendy beamed.
She turned to Wendy and smiled brightly and fake like a cash lady does. "And you, you could be a model! You're skinny as a toothpick, Dear!"
I don't think Wendy could have smiled bigger if she tried.
We went home and showed my mother the clothes we bought when shopping.
"Aren't these just the best jeans?" She asked my mother with the same expression she had on when she had asked me in the store.
My mother nodded. "Go put them on, I'd love to see you in them."
She ran off to our room and I followed to fold and put away the new sweaters I bought at the store. I stood at my dresser and tucked each sweater nicely in the drawer where I kept the rest of my sweaters.
Wendy hummed an unfamiliar tune as she pulled her new pants on.
"Damn!" She screamed suddenly, after I had heard a few groans from her direction.
I shot around and saw her bent over the button of her pants, her hair falling in her face, using all the strength she had in her arms to pull each end toward the other.
"Fucking pants!"
"Wendy!" I was surprised at how loud I had said this. I had never raised my voice to my sister before.
She looked up at me, teeth clenched and told me to shut my mouth, I didn't know anything.
She tried more to get the zipper up and get the pants to button correctly, but it just couldn't be done. Each time she tried again it seemed as if she grew angrier and angrier, more passionate to get them to fit. But they never did.
Finally, she tore the pants off and replaced them with the skirt she had been wearing and ran out into the hallway to find my mother in the kitchen. I followed behind and stayed behind a wall to observe her.
"Why am I so goddamn fat?" She yelled at my mother, whose eyes split wide open in surprise.
This had been the furthest possibility from my mind. Wendy was skinny as a toothpick, just as the saleslady had said at the store. The exact opposite of fat.
My mother told her the same thing, she wasn't fat, and why couldn't she just calm down while she made her a cup of tea? But my sister stormed out of the room and ran out into the rain to her car, where, as she drove away, I could see tears pouring down her face.

-------
"He's handsome, isn't he?"
"I suppose."
"He is, though! You can't say he isn't."
"He's handsome." I agreed, for lack of an urge to argue about it.
Wendy hugged the pillow she was packing away in her arms and fell back on her bed- rather, her empty mattress. I glared at her from my side of the room.
"You know what he said when he asked me?" She sat up again and her eyes were wide. "You know what he said, Olive?"
"I don't."
"He said he couldn't live without me! He needed me by his side!"
"That's sweet."
"Isn't it just?" She smiled and tossed the pillow into the cardboard box. "Did you see the ring?"
"I did."
"Care to see it again?"
I shrugged. She hopped up beside me and held out her hand, displaying a band of diamonds around her fourth finger. I didn't focus on it, however, rather on the closeness we were at, a place I hadn't been in years. Her face right next to mine, sharing such personal things with me, it brought me back to being three years old.
"Isn't it beautiful? It is, isn't it? Isn't it?"
"It is."
She hopped off the bed and practically leaped to put away a few picture frames along her dresser.
"You're making a mistake by marrying him." But I didn't say that. I didn't say anything.
She packed up the rest of her things with her music blaring out everything. I didn't listen, though. I just thought. I drowned it out.

-------
"What's wrong with me?"
"I don't know. What's wrong with me?"
"I don't know. Your hair?"
"My hair?"
She reached forward and took a lock of my hair in her hand and wrapped her fingers around it. "Your hair."
"What's wrong with it? It's perfectly fine."
"It's too stringy."
She tossed her own hair back to reinforce this. "My hair is thick, see?"
"It's thick." I repeated.
"Right." She replied. "And yours is stringy. It gets knotted easily."
"Okay."
"Now what's wrong with me?"
"I don't know." I said. "Your ribs."
"My ribs."
"Your ribs stick out."