Break It Down

Two Sisters

Though everyone wishes it would not happen, and though it would be far better if it did not happen, it does sometimes happen that a second daughter is born and there are two sisters.

Of course any daughter, crying in the hour of her birth, is only a failure, and is greeted with a heavy heart by her father, since the man wanted sons. He tries again: again it is only a daughter. This is worse, for it is a second daughter; then it is a third, and even a fourth. He is miserable among females. He lives, in despair, with his failures.

The man is lucky who has one son and one daughter, though his risk is great in trying for another son. Most fortunate is the man with sons only, for he can go on, son after son, until the daughter is made, and he will have all the sons he could wish for and a little daughter as well, to grace his table. And if the daughter should never come, then he has a woman already, in his wife the mother of his sons. In himself he has not a man. Only his wife has that man. She could wish for a daughter, having no woman, but her wishes are hardly audible. For she is herself a daughter, though she may have no living parents.

The single daughter, the many brothers’ only sister, listens to the voice of her family and is pleased with herself and happy. Her softness against her brothers’ brutality, her calm against their destruction, is admired. But when there are two sisters, one is uglier and more clumsy than the other, one is less clever, one is more promiscuous. Even when all the better qualities unite in one sister, as most often happens, she will not be happy, because the other, like a shadow, will follow her success with green eyes.

Two sisters grow up at different times and despise one another for being such children. They quarrel and turn red. And though if there is only one daughter she will remain Angela, two will lose their names, and be stouter as a result.

Two sisters often marry. One finds the husband of the other crude. The other uses her husband as a shield against her sister and her sister’s husband, whom she fears for his quick wit. Though the two sisters attempt friendship so that their children will have cousins, they are often estranged.

Their husbands disappoint them. Their sons are failures and spend their mothers’ love in cheap towns. Strong as iron, only, is now the hatred of the two sisters for one another. This endures, as their husbands wither, as their sons desert.

Caged together, two sisters contain their fury. Their features are the same.

Two sisters, in black, shop for food together, husbands dead, sons dead in some war; their hatred is so familiar that they are unaware of it. They are sometimes tender with one another, because they forget.

But the faces of the two sisters in death are bitter by long habit.