My Sister and I Didn't Speak for Ten Years. Neither of Us Remembers Why.

My sister and I did not speak for ten years. Last spring I asked her what it had actually been about.

She said, "I thought you knew."

We sat in her car outside our mother's hospital and worked it out like two people doing a puzzle with half the pieces missing, and what we found was that we had spent a decade being angry about two different afternoons.

What I remembered

Her wedding. The seating plan. I was put at table nine with our cousins and her husband's aunt, and our parents were at table one, and I had spent four months helping her with that wedding.

I did not say anything at the time. I found my card, I sat down, I was pleasant to the aunt for three hours, and I drove home and cried in the parking lot of a rest stop off the interstate, and then I did not call her for a month, and then the month became the thing.

What she remembered

The dress fitting, eleven weeks earlier.

She had asked what I thought and I had said, "It's lovely, it's very you," and apparently I had said it in a particular way, and she had spent her wedding day believing that her only sister thought she looked ridiculous.

I have no memory of the dress fitting. None. I have tried, and there is nothing there.

Ten years is not a decision

Nobody decides on ten years. That is the part I would want somebody to know.

What happens is that a month goes by and calling becomes slightly harder than not calling. Then it is three months and there is now a thing to explain, so calling means having a conversation rather than just saying hello. Then it is a year and you have both told other people your version, and now calling means admitting something in front of an audience.

By year four we were not angry. I want to be precise about this. By year four I could not have told you what I was feeling. It was not fury. It was the enormous administrative weight of a thing left undone, and every year it got heavier and cheaper to leave alone.

Our mother invited us both to things and stopped saying the other one's name. Our children have met four times. My nephew is nine and calls me by my first name, carefully, the way you address a family friend.

The sentence

I have thought about what I would tell somebody who is in year two.

It is not clever and it is not a technique. It is this:

"I don't want to do this anymore. I don't need to know who was right."

The second half is the part that does the work. Every attempt I imagined making over ten years was a version of establishing what happened, and every one of those imagined conversations ended in a fight, which is presumably why I never made one. The conversation that actually worked began by giving that up.

She said, "Neither do I." Then she cried and I did not, and then I did, later, on the phone to my husband.

What it cost

Ten years.

I do not have a clever way to say that. Her children do not know me. I missed the part where she was a new mother and needed her sister, and she missed the part where I got divorced and needed mine. We are building something now and it is good and it is not the thing we would have had.

There is also a smaller cost that surprised me. Some people in our family had grown comfortable with the version where one of us was the difficult one, and our getting on again was not universally popular. Two people have asked me, in a concerned voice, whether I am sure.

Whether it was worth it

No.

That is the honest answer and I am not going to arrange it into a better one. There was nothing at the end of ten years that we could not have had at the end of ten days. The seating plan was a seating plan. The dress was lovely. Neither of us was being cruel, and both of us waited for the other one to prove it first.

If you are in year one of something like this, the thing I would tell you is that it does not get clearer. It only gets more expensive, and the sentence you need does not get any harder to say than it is today.