Black Lipstick

My big sister Jackie wore black. Black clothes, black shoes, jet black hair and black lipstick. One morning, I rushed to the bathroom and discovered her in front of the mirror. 

I stopped short when I saw her facing the mirror with the tube at her lips.  Aghast, I said, “Why would you wear that?” She ignored me and admired her smile and pursed her lips in the mirror. As much as I detested the dark color, the contrast of the black against her brown skin thrilled me. I wished I could emulate her style, but I adopted the more conservative approach of my mother, who refused to even let me experiment with red nail polish. At eight years old, I waited until the day I painted red across my nails and envied my sixteen-year-old sister. 

Jackie lived with us in the sense that she had a bedroom at our house and collected mail, but sometimes she walked out for school one day, and returned three days later. I presumed she spent the night with her best friends. They had grown up together, living across the street from our drab brown apartment building in Toledo, Ohio, where my little sister and I would spend afternoons after school when Jackie babysat us. When Jackie returned from these visits, she had a new appearance: a new short haircut, like T-Boz from TLC; a new piercing that she presumably did herself; or giant carnival stuffed animals.

When she returned, I imagined what it would be like to leave without alerting the family, and return with things I liked. Endless chocolate chip cookies that I did not have to share, new braids, a pile of books purchased with my own money (and not from the library), freshly painted nails. 

Jackie blasted music around our house, frequently grabbing my mother by the hips and dancing in a big bear hug, or picking up Tiffany, our younger sister, and allowing her head to rest on her shoulder as she sang and rocked. We turned on Mary J. Blige and sang in unison. She and Angel, our eldest sister, who lived with my grandmother across town, watched Babyface videos together. “He so fine!” Jackie mused. She plastered Big Daddy Kane posters in her bedroom. I wished I had thought of that, or had the cash to purchase Word Up! Magazines to rip photos out and hang them next to my stuffed pink poodle.

Jackie and I never talked much. She lived with us, but I knew her in bits and pieces, through the makeup she wore, the music she listened to. We were tangentially connected by our love of reading. I learned our common hobby when I discovered one of my books missing. I only realized that she plucked it upturned and finished it herself when I found the cover wedged between the wall and the bed in her bedroom after she moved out.

There were three bedrooms, one tiny bathroom and an exaggeratedly long and narrow kitchen. My younger sister and I shared the middle sized bedroom next to the bathroom, Jackie took the compact room in the back of the house. I slept with the door open, and Jackie couldn’t even go to the bathroom without me noticing. While home, Jackie spent hours holed up in her corner bedroom listening to the music she loved so much. When she did interact with us, she danced or teased.

 Matching the struggle for space, the inhabitants of our household were in constant battle. Jackie, with her cool, relaxed personality, did not match the irascible spirit that clouded us. Tiffany and I, being close in age, fought over everything. Time in the bathroom, who had more food. My parents fought over who drove our family to gatherings (“you drive too slow! no you drive too fast!”), why my father did not want to join us at the table (“I want dinner time conversation.”), and a classic, “Why don’t you cook for me?

With eight years between us, Jackie and I fought infrequently. When we did, she never reacted strongly. She teased me sometimes by flicking my glasses, and one time I got so mad that I yelled. She said simply, “I was just playing” and disengaged from me by hiding in her room.

None of the wars in my house was as contentious as the one between my father and Jackie. As his stepdaughter, he got irate at her teenage habits: popping gum, hogging up the phone line, the loud music.

On rare occasions she was at home, and ventured out of her room, Jackie liked to cook for us. She made cheesecakes, the refrigerator version with about two packs of Philadelphia Cream Cheese and a pack of Jello. When she pulled out the gelatinous round cake from the fridge, she sat at the dining room table and carefully plopped canned cherries on top. “Oooey gooey,” she described it. 

  One evening, Jackie fried chicken in the kitchen while I sat at the dining room table doing my homework. My father sat near me, reading, ensuring that I completed the assignment. I meticulously wrote out my answers, basking in the comfort of Jackie in the kitchen and the promise of hot crunchy wings coming soon. As Jackie laid the wings in the boiling grease, she sucked on a piece of bubble gum, making tiny bubbles inside of her mouth which she cracked with her teeth, creating a loud popping noise. She turned the sizzling chicken, cracking the bubble gum.

“Stop it. Stop cracking that gum.”

I looked up, unmoved by the cracking noises both coming from the kitchen and curious about the commotion.

“I can’t help it.”

We all resumed our activities a moment later, when the cracking resumed. 

“I told you to stop!” My father rushed to the kitchen to demand that she spit out the gum.

At sixteen, Jackie and my father were roughly the same size and height. Eye to eye, she pulled back away from him as he reached over her shoulder to grab the turners from her hand. She took a step back and he advanced into her face, creeping into a bend to get her to stop cooking, and chewing the gum. He accomplished not a retrieval of the incessant chewing gum, but a fight with a child. Jackie pushed back, hard, angering my father further.

“I’m going to put you out.”

He dragged her to the front door and attempted to push her out of the house, but she escaped his arms and ran to her room. I grabbed my father’s hand, crying.

“Please stop! Please stop hurting my sister!”

My mother had pulled into the driveway and heard the commotion, and rushed into the house. She broke up the fight, horrified that her husband was fighting her daughter. I retreated to my bedroom, shaking, replaying the events of those short five minutes.

Jackie left that evening. Her stays were shorter and shorter, only returning to pick up clean clothes. She did not stop to try to play with us anymore. Teasing ceased. She knew we were in her room going through her things but she never protested. She used her aggression to ignore us. 

Eventually at seventeen she got an apartment across town with her boyfriend. 

Unable to help my sister, powerless against my father’s anger, I shut down. I distanced myself from my father because I already had his mean streak. After that incident, he would help me with my math homework and I fought him, pretending not to understand, forcing tears, then shutting down.  After Jackie moved out, Tiffany and I finally got separate rooms, and retreated to my respective bedroom.

Jackie had her own place throughout my pre-teen years. She visited, but like a distant aunt instead of the big sister I craved to emulate. I was fourteen when she left Toledo for Phoenix to stay with our aunt with her three year old son. 

Jackie and I rarely spoke while she lived in Phoenix. I never expected her to remain in touch with a powerless, apathetic sister. She did call me once.

“Why don’t you never write me any letters?” she asked, wistfully. I did not respond. It never occurred to me to remain in touch with her through letters. I dropped all notions of keeping in touch with her when she left, already accustomed to her absence. At the time, I considered it for a fleeting moment, and never pressed a pen to paper to do it. 

Jackie returned home three years later, not with a large fair stuffed animal, but my baby niece. I was seventeen. During her stay in Toledo, she dropped in on us often, but her living arrangements were a mystery. She and my mom would argue sometimes about her dropping her two children with us and not returning in a timely manner. Jackie even said once, “I wish we were a family. You know. I wish I could leave my kids somewhere and not have to worry about them.” Clearly, she needed support. And we did not give it to her.

I was blatantly apathetic. Limited in my desire to care for children, and unwilling to find the time in my schedule, I did not even offer assistance in my mother’s stead. As a teen, I overheard conversations she and my mother had. “Please don’t have kids. If you do, I’m not taking care of them.” That solidified it for me. If she had children, she had to raise them on her own. Our failure to support her was punitive. When my niece and nephew visited, I simply continued with my routine. They sat on the couch and watched while I clasped the remote in my hands, refusing to turn to cartoons. 

Jackie disappeared again. I did not miss her, not like as a child. By that time, I developed my own taste in music. My idols were Talib Kweli and Outkast, not Big Daddy Kane and Babyface. I left upturned books around the house and there they stayed. 

Jackie returned to Toledo again in 2005. I was twenty, a sophomore in college, home for summer break. This time she stayed with us in our childhood home.

We had a full house again. My parents had already divorced and my father lived in an apartment in a different neighborhood. Tiffany, Jackie and I lived with our mother, and our niece and nephew. Over the years I’ve developed a rather cold attitude. I was easily irritated, inpatient and downright rude. But Jackie had a more placid and warm personality. 

For example, sometimes she wanted to borrow my car. But I knew her patterns, she would drive away in my car and cite a time of return, but I would not see her for hours or maybe a day later. 

“I can drop you off.”

She rolled her eyes and grabbed her purse when I reached for my keys to take her.

Living together allowed us to notice things that we would not have, like Jackie’s lethargy.

My mother saw it first. Jackie rapidly lost weight and puttered around the house, and her eyes were a little swollen. One day, Jackie sat on the couch reading and looked up to make a quip about the book. My mother was studying her.

“Your eyes, they don't look right. They’re all swollen. Why don’t you go see a doctor?”

Jackie stared at her blankly and did not say anything, simply returning to her book.

As a low-income Black woman, Jackie felt apprehensive visiting government agencies for assistance, like the state health department. One we were younger, she took Tiffany and I to get food stamps with her one time. Sitting in the tedious waiting area, Jackie sighed exasperatedly. 

“I hate coming to these places. They don’t treat you right. They talk down to you, and don’t come in here looking halfway decent. Then they think you don’t need any help.”

Recalling that comment, I immediately understood her inaction. She hesitated to stand in line at the state health department to diagnose something that seemed innocuous. It would be a waste of time, if it turned out to be nothing and my mother was over-mothering. We ignored it, except my mom.

We resumed our daily life, and had another argument about my car. She wanted to take it to visit some old friends who attended a funeral of one of the neighborhood boys. Never dramatic, she moved a little slower that day and dragged around the house. I took her to her friends’ house, and returned later to bring her home. 

While in the car, she called my mother and insisted on cleaning the entire house. Something all of us only did when we were upset beyond repair. I was guilty. My father’s treatment of her was out of my control, but the car was mine, and I could have recognized her grief, and offered her some tenderness. I made up my mind to be a little kinder to her, maybe, stop being so snappy with her.

The next day, she packed her bags and went back to Arizona. 

In July 2006, Jackie gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. She went into thyroid storm and delivered the children three months early. Anthony lived for 47 days. Ashleigh lost half of her brain matter and would grow up challenged. The doctors did not believe she would survive.

Jackie’s swollen eyes indicated Grave’s Disease, and dangerous to go into labor. When my aunt called and told us that Jackie was pregnant with twins, but they were born three months early, I cried every day for a week worrying about her. I called a friend on the phone in tears, feeling all the pain my sister experienced thousands of miles away, and worrying about her life.

Jackie returned to Toledo for the final time in early 2007, with Ashleigh. Before she arrived, my mother prepared us for Ashleigh’s appearance. 

“Her head, it's kinda cone shaped. Because of the loss of brain matter.” 

I did not care. Jackie survived and was returning.

Remembering how Jackie yearned for support and closeness with her two older children, and the abject pain of almost losing her, I was significantly gentler with my sister. 

We spent more time together. At the time I was a senior at the University of Michigan, a mere 45 minute drive from Toledo. I made the drive home frequently to spend time with her growing family. She called and asked me to come spend the night with her infant daughter while she had just one night out. Whereas before I would have made a weak excuse, like I had to study, I came when she asked. 

She woke me up at three in the morning on one occasion and brought me a McDonald’s fish sandwich. 

That fall, I moved to Durham, North Carolina to begin my first year of seminary at Duke University. We talked every day after my move, chit chatting about the new state I was entering.

I was driving down a winding mountain highway on I-77, listening to a song we cherished on one of her many visits, Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” when it reminded me of her and gave her a call to check in. I could not contain my excitement to a new state, and I remarked how sunny the mountains looked. She joked and said I should share my impending largess with her when I became successful.

She paused the conversation, calling me affectionately by my middle name, “I want us to be close, Precious. We’re sisters.” We were sisters. I spent so much time separating myself from her because I felt so useless. I could not help her make decisions, could not control the constant fighting, could not make her home life happier. But I could be her sister.

We talked every day on the phone that first week in seminary. On that last day, I came home from a long, overwhelming day, I went to sleep around 7 pm. I woke up to my phone ringing and vaguely saw “Jackie” flashing across the screen. I could barely keep my eyes open so I let it go to voicemail.

Around midnight I got around to checking the voicemail. My five year old niece, Ha’teana left the message, and my heart swelled at her little voice on the phone. I regretted missing it.

“Precious, hi! We want to talk to you, can you call us back? Ok bye!”

I made a mental note to call them back after my next day of classes. But when I returned home at three pm, I got a call from my Aunt Margo.

“You need to make arrangements to go on home. Jackie died in her sleep last night.”

Jackie suffered a heart attack from her untreated Grave’s disease, and residual complication from her childbirth the year before. Of course, I did not know all that then. I could only comprehend the absurdity that my twenty-nine year old sister died, and my paralysis returned.

It was cruel. She died before we could explore my newfound empathy for her. 

After the funeral, I returned to North Carolina eager to forget. It was easier to live so many miles away from my family than to be constantly reminded that we all were affected by her life, and death. It was easy to forget her voice, her face, her pain, her poverty. It was easy to forget my hometown, the place where she never got to live, but died alone without support.

I rarely visit home. 

But I haven’t forgotten, and my memories returned when I wore black lipstick for the first time last Halloween. I rummaged in my endless lipstick collection and reached for the dark tube. 

I recalled that plea she made before she died, “We’re sisters, I want us to be close.” We are sisters. I am imitating her life.