Chapter Seventeen
After Amy defined for me her conception of our family unit, her adolescent behavior began to make more sense. When Dad died, she felt abandoned. She pulled away from Mom and me. When she skipped classes back then, I assumed she was hanging out with the alienated artsy types who got high in the shadows of Utica Free Academy every day. In fact, she told me more than twenty years after we graduated from high school, most of the time she’d headed either to the music room to practice her cello, or away from the school altogether to Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, a few blocks away, where she’d stare at the gigantic paint-splattered Jackson Pollock, or a mesmerizing series called The Voyage of Life, by nineteenth-century Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole.
Perhaps if I’d known how creatively Amy was spending her time I’d have been less judgmental, though I doubt it. Ultimately how she spent her time was less of a concern than how it affected me, and it was affecting me badly. Just about every day I’d go into German class and Frau Grausz, the teacher, whom we referred to as Frau Grouch, would greet me with an accusatory, “Fraulein Valtman, ver vas your schwester today?”
Until then I would have been operating under the assumption that Amy had been to class, that she was being a responsible student, much the same as she’d been when Dad was alive. Frau Grausz’s interrogation, in front of the entire class, would destroy my mood and my concentration. Instead of memorizing declensions and cases, which I had trouble comprehending under the best of circumstances, I would spend the entire period growing more and more angry with my sister.
“She did it again today,” I’d report to my mother at the end of the day. “Amy skipped class and The Grouch asked me, in front of everyone, where she was.”
“Tell her you’re not your sister’s keeper,” my mother would advise me, yet another aphorism, as if that was the solution to my problems.
Amy did her best to avoid Mom, since most of their encounters ended badly. After school, if she wasn’t with friends she was locked in her room listening to Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, and other bands that had me convinced she’d turned into a drug addict.
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