The Alphabet Sisters (51 page)

“That’s a lovely offer, Dan, but no, I don’t think so.” Bett stood up as Carrie and Matthew’s car turned off the main road and started up the dirt road to their cottage. She could already see Lola waving majestically from the backseat. Not far behind them she saw her parents’ car.

Daniel stood beside her, his arm across her back. He leaned down and brushed his lips against her ear. “Xanthes?”

She shook her head.

He lowered his voice even more. “Wilhelmina?”

She started to laugh. “No, Dan.”

“Violet? Ursula? Thomasina? Please, Bett, can’t we have a Thomasina? You’d grow to love her, I know you would. And Saxon. And Rhiannon. As for Quincy, and Peony …”

She turned in his arms. “All this time we’ve known each other and I never realized you knew your alphabet backward.”

“I can juggle a bit, too. I could teach the children. We could go on the road, pick up where the Alphabet Sisters left off. All of us juggling together. Little Olaf, and Nero, and Magenta. Leopold. Klaus …”

Carrie and Matthew’s car came to a halt at the end of their garden.

Bett looked up at Daniel and smiled. “Have you finished?”

“Nearly,” he said, a sparkle in his eye. “Jefferson. Indigo …”

She was laughing again as she walked down the steps to greet her family.

To the Rum Sisters:
Ruby, Ulli, and Mikaella

PHOTO: © MICHAEL BOYNY

MONICA MCINERNEY
is the Australian-born author of the international bestsellers
A Taste for It, Upside Down Inside Out,
and
Spin the Bottle.
She lives in Ireland. Visit her website at
www.monicamcinerney.com
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks and love to my family in Australia, especially my mum Mary, my sisters Lea, Marie, and Maura, and my brothers Paul, Stephen, and Rob, for their help from afar with all sorts of research. Thanks also to my two Irish families, the Drislanes and the Dolans; Max and Jean Fatchen in Adelaide, Marea Fox and Andrew Storey in Queensland, Greg Cooley in the Clare Valley, Eveleen Coyle in Dublin, Karen O’Connor and Bart Meldau in London, Clare Healy in Tasmania, Fiona Gillies in Sydney, Nid Sangeengong in Adelaide, Sabine Brasseler and Michael Boyny in Munich, and Kay Ronai in Melbourne. A special thank-you to everyone at the Clare Library in South Australia, especially Val Tilbrook and Trish Jones.

Big thanks to my agents, Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown in London and Fiona Inglis of Curtis Brown Australia, and to my three publishers—everyone at Penguin Australia, especially Clare Forster, Ali Watts, Kirsten Abbott, Cathy Larsen, and Sally Bateman; Imogen Taylor, Trisha Jackson, Caroline Turner, and all the team at Pan Macmillan in London; and Alison Walsh and all at Tivoli/Gill & Macmillan in Ireland.

And, once again, all my love and thanks to my husband, John.

T
HE
A
LPHABET
S
ISTERS

A Reader’s Guide

Monica
McInerney

SISTERS TALKING ABOUT SISTERS

MONICA MCINERNEY
, author of
The Alphabet Sisters,
has a real-time e-mail conversation with her three real-life sisters. Lea, forty-five years old and a management consultant, is in Hobart, Tasmania. In South Australia is Marie, forty-three, a journalist and mother of four (three girls and a four-week-old boy); and Maura, thirty-eight, mother of Xavier, also four weeks old. Monica, thirty-nine, is in Dublin, where she lives with her Irish husband.

There are also three brothers in the McInerney family, Paul, Stephen, and Rob. Their mother, Mary, now lives in Adelaide, after moving from the family home in the Clare Valley (the setting for
The Alphabet Sisters
) last year. Their father, Steve, was the railway stationmaster in the Clare Valley for more than thirty years. He died of cancer in March 2000.

MONICA:
Hello, my sisters. To set the scene—it’s 8 am in Dublin. It’s been lashing rain all night, but so far this morning it is dry with a watery blue sky. I’m at my desk in my office, with the lights on because it’s still dark. It’s getting very autumnal for this early in October. All the trees are changing color, everyone has colds, and we’re about to switch to winter time, so it will be dark at 5 pm soon. There are Christmas decorations in the shops, too, by the way.

LEA:
I’m here in Hobart, at 6 pm. Switching to summer time robbed us of an hour of sleep on the weekend so I’m as tired, grumpy, and disorganized as a mother with a newborn baby. Check this out and you’ll be able to see Hobart’s weather for yourself: http://www.rosebay.tased.edu.au/webcam

MARIE:
It’s a beautiful bright spring day here in Adelaide, 4:30 in the afternoon, but I just got up from a nap. The new baby’s unsettled, so are the rest of us, and I don’t think I’ll even get to the shops before Christmas.

MAURA:
Okay, maybe I’m last, but then, so I was! I’m in a place away from my home in Clare—I’m at our mother’s house in Adelaide (I’m her favorite daughter, just in case that subject comes up) and it’s a lovely sunny day. My ma is sitting on the verandah holding my beautiful four-week-old son, Xavier. Hopes are he will nap until we’re done here.

LEA:
This is going to be a bit weird, like that seven-second satellite delay thing that happens on the TV news. Any ideas for managing it? (said the eldest one)

MARIE:
Maybe we should set up a chat room (said the second eldest, creatively and innovatively, yet not knowing what a chat room was or where the door would be)

MAURA:
No, forget the chat room, this is fun. You spend the whole time trying to catch up and being all confused as to what’s going on. Kind of like my life, really.

MONICA:
What about I start by asking you three a few questions? (said the bossiest one)

LEA:
I thought Marie was the bossiest one.

MARIE:
No, smartest!

MONICA:
First question, then. How do you think your relationship with your sisters differs from your relationship with other female friends?

LEA:
I am quite happy with my friends to behave like a forty-five-year-old, whereas with my sisters I am perennially eight years old, at least for some subjects.

MAURA:
My relationship with my sisters is:

(a) Different, depending on which sister we’re talking about. There is, though, a thread of sameness—probably about shared memories (although that’s probably not true—being the youngest girl, I was raised on stories about what happened in the family while we were growing up, so I’m actually not sure whether what I recall is actually my own memory at work, or a recollection of stories I’ve been told). Friendships are usually different because they’re more grounded in the present.

(b) Tension-filled at times. Curiously, my relationships with my sisters are both more relaxed than with my friends (the go-into-their-house-and-make-your-own-toast thing) and more tense (awareness of how to hurt the other, whether intentionally or, more often, not).

MARIE:
I think I have different relationships with each of you, and each is very valued and loved. But, to generalize, I think my relationship with you all is, on some levels, more honest than what I have with many friends, although not always. I tend to let rip with my full and true colors to family—the good, the bad, the ugly and, particularly, the childish (in good and bad ways). But I might well not tell you all about every night out I’ve ever had or when I’m miffed with you. (Then I’ll tell my friends about you!)

I don’t really have different relationships with my friends, but my sisters are among my very best friends, and have set the template, really, for the level of intimacy, care, and consideration that I need from real friendship. That’s when you’re not all being mad/rude/out of control, of course.

LEA:
Sisters—biggest laughs, biggest fights, biggest tantrums, biggest hearts.

Friends are all of these but the volume and color go down a notch or two (except when I am missing my sisters and transpose years of sister stuff onto girl friendships, creating surrogate sisters). I like Maura’s idea about friends being more grounded in the present. You’re kind of on alert with sisters, especially with three of them, for shots (I use the word reservedly) coming from any direction and any era. Often your sister didn’t mean anything by that, but the past is the filter you ran her comment or action through before it hit your normally intelligent and mature brain. A simple statement from a sister can be like the most dense and layered poem ever written.

MONICA:
When I think about my sisters, I feel surrounded, and in the middle of something, hundreds of layers, going back years but also looking forward to how things will be for all of us, knowing we will be a part of one another’s lives. With my friends, thoughts come and go. I’m very focused when I’m with them, talking to them, e-mailing them, but we dip in and out of one another’s lives. With my sisters, I feel like I am immersed in you. You three are part of me, on my mind in a constant way, either when you’re worrying about something (perhaps a recent troubling conversation) or amusing me (something said in e-mail or conversation that makes me laugh out loud, which happens very often, or a childhood memory that can go either way) or making me feel grateful that I have each of you (the way I know I can call on each of you for help with work, life advice, or just to listen or laugh at a story).

Next question: Does it feel like our relationship has changed as we have gotten older, or are the battlefields/sticking points the ones formed in childhood?

MARIE:
I think our relationships with one another change all the time and generally don’t relate to how things were when we were kids except when, all of a sudden, we hit a “stab from the past” road bump and then I can erupt in all the rage of childhood. I actually don’t see us in terms of oldest, youngest, prettiest (me!), most successful, etc. It’s more about relating to the different individuals we’ve become, despite all that shared background. Just when you think we all know what the other is talking about …

I forgot to say in the other bit that for me it’s the fun and laughing that are the most important. I do laugh with my sisters probably more than with any other people on earth.

LEA:
I like the way we deal with the hard stuff—an amazing mix of hard-nosed practicality, deep love, and compassion, and then the blackest and wickedest of humor.

MAURA:
I think my relationship with each of you has changed. As we’ve gotten older, I’ve learned more secrets about Lea and Marie. I wasn’t a part of their younger lives, but that’s fine, as I’ve heard about those times quite enough. With Moni, it’s a different sort of change—not the “just getting to know you” type of thing, because we shared a room and spent so much time together, even built an altar in our bedroom together and all. I think it’s become a little more mature. Most of the time at least.

I think there’s a different depth to our overall relationship as sisters since Dad died. Not a pious thing but just an acknowledgment that yucky things happen to even our family (even though we all perform as if it’s a golden world). As a result, I think we’re all a little bit kinder to one another because we have a shared vulnerability. It’s easier to be kind if you have a sense of the pain/confusion/guilt/anger that someone else can feel and Dad’s death gave us that measure, I reckon.

LEA:
I agree with you about the Dad stuff. It did change things heaps and took us all a big leap into—oh, I don’t know—for me the things I ratted on about you guys to other people I no longer felt like doing anymore. We can sort of pick on one another now but it doesn’t feel vicious like it could/did in the past.