My Sister's Bones

by Cathi Hanauer

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A touching coming-of-age novel featuring a protagonist who’s the kind of girl every woman wishes she’d had as a best friend growing up

Billie Weinstein sees things most people don’t see. Her sister, Cassie, has always been her touchstone, the person she turns to for advice and guidance, the person whose opinion means the most to her. But ever since Cassie left for college, she’s seemed different—withdrawn, obsessed with studying, and she barely eats. Billie can’t talk to her parents about it; they act as if nothing is wrong, refusing to see the changes in their older daughter.

Now Billie has become Cassie’s confidante, the only one Cassie trusts enough to tell the truth to, and Billie is suddenly thrust into an unfamiliar—and disturbing—role; one that drives her to make choices that will forever change the way she looks at the world.

A poignant story of self-discovery, My Sister’s Bones explores the shifting landscape of family, friendship, and love through the eyes of a young girl possessed of a wisdom far beyond her years. In Billie Weinstein we meet a character as funny, vivid, and endearing as any in recent memory, and watch her transformation as she achieves freedom from the seemingly unbreakable web of family ties.

Praise for My Sister’s Bones

“A poignant but also lively and humorous novel, with characters so believable you expect them to rise up off the page.”—New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Berg

“My Sister’s Bones works a miracle. . . . Funny and idiosyncratic, elegant and simple . . . [Cathi] Hanauer gives power and dignity to the subject of anorexia.”—The Village Voice

“A persuasive, well-rendered, and rich first novel about family.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Beautifully written . . . Hanauer paints a disturbing picture of the horrific effects of anorexia on patient and family.”—Library Journal

Release date: September 16, 2009

Publisher: Delta

Print pages: 272

Sample

A week before Thanksgiving—three months after she leaves for college—my sister calls on the phone in our room. “Billie?” she says, sounding very far away. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad it’s me, okay?” She waits. “Okay?” she says, a little louder.
 
Downstairs, at top volume, my father is watching Masterpiece Theatre on PBS—a rerun of the show he made my mother and me watch with him this past Sunday night. My mother is in the kitchen cleaning up from dinner, feeding the dogs, scraping roast beef scraps off our plates.
 
“Okay,” I tell my sister. “How are you? How’s college?” I’m surprised she’s calling up here, and glad for the distraction. I’m supposed to be studying for my PSATs. Any minute my father will walk in and ask me what page of the booklet I’m on, what words I’ve learned.
 
“I called to tell you I got rid of all my clothes,” she says. “I would have told my roommate, but she’s not here anymore.”
 
“Thanks a lot.” I reach for a bottle of nail polish—lavender, one of West Berry High’s colors. “So where is she?”
 
“She went back to Indiana, to her mother. She didn’t even tell me. The dorm director had to do it.” I hear her shift the phone around. And then I hear her crying.
 
I put down the nail polish and hold the phone tightly. I can’t remember the last time my sister cried. “Cassie, what’s wrong?” I say. “What do you mean you got rid of all your clothes?”
 
“She takes a deep breath. “I gave them to a clothing drive, at the mall.”
 
“The mall?”
 
“A guy on my hall talked me into going, he said we both needed a break. But when we got there, there was all this Christmas stuff already—underwear with Santa Clauses, red rubber reindeer, glittery stockings—and all these big plastic toys. And people all over the place, pawing through everything. They knock something down and just step on it, like it’s—like it’s ruined or something. And buying things, just buying. Wrapping paper, shiny boxes—they couldn’t buy it all fast enough.”
 
“Well, yeah,” I say slowly. “I mean, that’s sort of what Christmas shopping is, isn’t it?”
 
She’s quiet a few seconds. “I had to go,” she says. “I made Tim take me back and get all my clothes, and I gave them to this clothing drive in the parking lot.” She sniffs. “After that I felt much better.”
 
She doesn’t sound better. I picture her standing, nothing but her underwear on, in the lot of some mall, hurling her clothes into the wind: her pink sweats, her white cotton shirts, those old turquoise shorts that she’d let me borrow if she was in a good mood. They sail over cars, like small parachutes. For a second I’m happy: now I’ll have nicer clothes than she does, I’ll look better than her, for a change.
 
But then I picture her huddled in some freshman dorm room at Cornell: dull green carpet, textbooks all over the place, and my sister, naked, crying into the phone. Something tugs at my heart. “Oh my god,” I say.
 
“No, it’s okay, it’s good.” She sounds convinced now. “People don’t really need so many clothes, you know? We only really need one thing.”
 
I think about what would happen at my school if you wore the same thing every day. You’d die. If you didn’t die of humiliation, people would kill you. “What about when you’re washing it?” I say. “Or at night?”
 
“I don’t know. Tim will let me borrow something, probably.”
 
I have to say it. “So this guy’s in love with you, right?”
 
“Who. Tim?” She sighs. “Billie, no one’s in love with me.”
 
She’s either wrong or lying, I’m sure, but I don’t give her the satisfaction of saying that.
 
“I look terrible, anyway,” she says then. “It’s the food here. It’s too—I don’t know, there’s too much of it, or something. I can’t eat it. All I do is study. And take showers. I don’t even play tennis anymore. I used to go to the pizza place, just to get out of here, but now the waitress there hates me. I always leave a huge tip, even though I only have coffee, but she gets this look on her face when I come in, like—” She stops, breathing fast. “Oh god, someone’s here,” she whispers. “Billie, someone just knocked on my door. What should I do?”
 
“Answer it?”
 
She fumbles with the phone. “I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you back.” She clicks off.
 
I stare at the receiver. I want to call her back but I don’t have the number, and I can’t ask my parents or they’ll want to know why I’m calling Cassie. My father will say, “I’ll call down here,” and then he’ll stay on the line while we talk, interrupting whenever he wants —or giving advice, as if we’re one of his patients he can tell to take some Mylanta and go to bed.
 
So I hang up and wait, watching a silver half-moon shine through my bedroom window. It lights up the leaves of the big oak tree that towers over our house—the ear tree, I call it, because of the knot in the trunk shaped like a huge human ear. Cassie used to say the tree listened to everything our family did, all the time. During storms, she said, when its branches whapped our windows, it was warning us we’d better behave.
 
I watch the moon shimmer down the leaves—ten minutes, then ten minutes more. Downstairs, the TV goes off. The moon shifts slightly, so I can no longer see it. And Cassandra doesn’t call back.
 
 
My sister is someone who makes life harder than it has to be; that’s what I think. In high school, Friday nights, she’d sit home and do schoolwork, her fingers twisted like branches in her hair. She wouldn’t answer the phone if it rang, and she’d tell me not to either. Of course I would anyway; I have a life, too. But it was almost always for her, and always a guy. Then I was supposed to say Cassie wasn’t home and I didn’t know where she was. One time this kid called for her twice—once at eight, once at ten—and the second time I felt so bad for him, I said, “Yeah, she’s here, I’ll go get her.” She killed me for that. Like it would have been so fatal to talk to some guy who worshiped the very air her presence had graced.
 
I get nervous just being around my sister sometimes, the way everything has to be perfect. In her notebooks, she reserves one page for doodling, and there’s so much scribbling on that page it’s like the color of the paper is black lead, but the rest of the pages are white and perfect, every line used, both front and back. It’s unreal. I mean, when you get bored in a class, you draw on your notes, right? When you love a guy, you write his name a thousand times. You draw it in bubble letters, in script, inside hearts. My ninth-grade notes say “Greg” all over them.
 
With Cassie, if a page gets messy, she’ll copy it over. On the rare chance she ever slips. Then, before a test, she highlights furiously, a rainbow of streaks over everything. That part’s cool, I have to admit.
 
Sometimes, I’ll catch her watching me out the side of her eye, and I know she’s thinking I look like a sleaze, just because my bra strap is showing a little or I have on a lot of lip-gloss. So I’m always surprised when she compliments me or laughs at something I say. She told me once that I’d do fine in the world, that it was herself she was worried about. That made me feel great for a minute or two. Then I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or not. But I decided to take it that way, since it didn’t seem like she was trying to be harsh. Another time, in the dressing room at some store, she told me I had muscular calves, and that made me so happy, I stared at them in every store window all day. Later, I said, “Cass, do you really think my calves are muscley?” She made a face and said, “What’s muscley? What’s muscley? Just because Tiffany Zeferelli can pull off that dumb act doesn’t mean you can.” She couldn’t erase the compliment, though. I still like my legs better ever since she said that.
 
Last year, we had a party—all her friends and mine in the house at once, plus a bunch of people neither of us knew. My parents were in Europe; my grandmother was supposed to check in on us periodically. So Cassie got some guy to buy liquor, and I made drinks in the blender with amaretto and vanilla ice cream, and we all had a huge water fight, all over the house. The carpets got drenched. Later, Cassie’s friend Ardelle Johnston asked me if she could borrow a blanket, so I gave her an old one of Cassie’s from the closet, this cream-colored quilt with pink roses on it. Ardelle smiled and thanked me and took it down to the basement, with this guy Walter McCann following her. Next day I found the blanket down there with a pinkish-brown spot on it. I brought it up to show Cassie. “What happened to him?” I said, and she laughed and said, “It’s more what happened to her,” “Oh,” I said, and then I got it and I felt pretty stupid. It was bad enough still being a virgin in West Berry without actually demonstrating it.