About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg Page B

talk to her at all. Although everyone had more than a working knowledge of astrology in those days, Wanda was the expert. Every chart passed through her hands first. She told my mother that, although I seemed more gregarious than Maya, our charts dictated that as we grew older, Maya would become a much more social person than I. Maya would be externally motivated, she said, whereas I would spend a lot of time examining my own head. I never forgot any of this. These are the kinds of things one tends to remember. Especially when they turn out to be true.
    Harold, a South African expatriate who ended up in London, was another fascinating character who appeared on the landscape fairly frequently. Like David, he could be counted on for a colorful story, but his stories usually involved being arrested and jailed somewhere for smuggling drugs. Harold was the one who usually brought the hashish to the party. By the time I was eight, I knew that there was blond hash and black hash and that everybody usually preferred the black, although I couldn’t explain why. Wanda said that Harold had a glitch in his chart. By all indicators, he should have been a handsome man, she said, but he was small, dark, and gnomelike. He had an intercepted twelfth house, she said, and that’s why prison would always play a role in his life.
    The two others I remember clearly, George and Sondra, were among the few who never met each other and this was a good thing for me because I found them both inaccessible and daunting. Sondra was my mother’s friend. She was tall, imposing, and made up of sharp lines; a blond-haired, black-robed sepulchral image. Sondra was a self-confessed child hater. She saw absolutely no use for children whatsoever, called them “nasty things,” and made no bones about her distaste. It was hell visiting her house; a cold hell because she was too cheap to turn her heat on. Maya and I had a tiny cubic area of space we could occupy while we were there and we were not to touch anything, talk to anyone, or breathe too strongly in anyone’s direction. Sondra was the stuff of childish nightmares, something of a Roald Dahl character come to full-bodied life.
    George didn’t hate children, but he wasn’t sure what to make of them either. In a field of people who had given themselves a 1960s license to be bent, George stood out as weird. When we lived in New York, he’d ride the subway over to our apartment, often bringing his own bottle of Jack Daniels with him. He lived with his parents, which I thought was strange, and he never had any kind of girlfriend. He would speak in riddles and quote TV commercials when talking to me and then laugh at my frustration when I didn’t understand him. Nothing he said made any kind of sense at all and that made him somewhat frightening to me. All I could decipher from him was only an intellectual and intense dissatisfaction with everything. Sort of like an extremely sarcastic Eeyore. George was fonder of Maya than he was of me, which was fine with me since I found him both dark and indecipherable and therefore scary. When Maya turned seven, George gave her Candy Land as a gift and made her a giant poster-sized card on which he modified the words of an Alka-Seltzer commercial into a birthday greeting. And he didn’t just buy her the game, he played it with her, too.
    In both London and New York, it seemed as though there were always people wandering in and out of our apartments and flats, especially at night. There were constant “happenings” in those days and I didn’t want to miss any of it. If I was very quiet, my mother would let me stay up and join the party for a while. Maya was never interested in any of this, not when there was sleep to be had, so it was just me, sitting on the outer perimeter of the circle, trying to appear as small as possible so as not to be noticed. Most of the time, I brought a drawing pad and some colored pens with me