A week after I returned from my oldest sister’s funeral, my eye fastened in the library upon the title of a book–Sisters by Daisy Johnson.
It had been a long time since I’d picked up a title without a recommendation from the internet or from friends. Probably as a result of Covid and what the disease has required of us to stay safe, and still requires. Maybe that’s why I found this book two years past its initial publication date.
I needed this book.
The first chapter is preceded by a poem that ends with these lines: “My sister is a forest on fire. / My sister is a sinking ship. / My sister is the last house on the street.”
We hear deep chords of warning about tennis courts and the arrival of police. Then someone, I’m not sure quite who yet, arrives at a place with “Dirty white, windows sunk into brick.” I meet September and July, two sisters, ten months apart and who move into a dilapidated beach house in England with their mum, Sheela who suffers from depression. The language is symphonic, off-kilter, and always poetic, a story about two almost, but not actually Siamese twins, sisters metaphorically connected with shared organs, “that one’s lungs breathed for both…”
Mum stays locked in her bedroom and writes. The girls acknowledge that she is always better when she writes. Occasionally, they discover take-out in on kitchen pantry or create meals from packets of off-color spaghetti. In the meantime, the beach house that surrounds the sisters has its own personality, uttering noise, adjusting, complaining.
The Settle House, (a place to get settled, settle scores, unsettling, or an ant farm?), is the same place where September, and sister’s dead father were born. Their father was drowned in a swimming pool in Devon. “We did not know him,” July tells us, and the layout of the house is, “wrong, unintuitive.” But there is also great joy and love here. The sisters hold on to each other as they move through adolescence.
The book meanders between past and present, sometimes in first or third person, stopping on occasion like a casino wheel allowing us to hear Sheela’s or July’s voice. September and July are inseparable. They bathe, sleep, and watch David Attenborough programs on tv together. September is her sister’s protector and affectionally calls her “July-bug,” but her love is also matched by cruelty. The sisters play a game called September Says. July is allowed five lives before she loses. July tells us, ”September was in charge and I was her puppet.”
September’s challenges include for July to cut off fingernails and to place them in milk, or to put a needle through her own finger. But it doesn’t matter. July tugs behind her sister like a kite. Whatever September commands, July complies, embracing the path of least resistance rather than putting up a fight. Sheela equally fears her daughter’s violence, and that her dead husband, Peter, September’s father, was “buried like a broken bottle inside her child.”
There’s some nasty business between Sheela and her husband, another love and hate relationship, which is slowly revealed.
July witnesses September having sex with a boy at a beach party. Later, she has sex with the same boy, who oddly, thinks she is September. Where one sister stops, the other keeps going. September vows to punish girls at school who have shamed July, tricking her into posting a nude picture which gets displayed on the internet, but all goes foul.
September feels like an assassin on empty tennis courts where she is electrocuted by a lightning storm in a deux ex machina (a la Stephen King) ending that reenacts certain nightmares that July has had earlier, she emerges as her own singular person. We hear echoes of the poem that began the book. July recalls the pact that she made with September in Oxford, before they had moved, a promise to “weather whatever was going to come.”
Again, I thought of my own relationship with my sister, the matriarch of the family the one who kept the family secrets and remembered all the birthdays. Her absence leaves a gap. She had all the answers. And now I find myself here, the youngest.
In reading Johnson’s Sisters, I also thought about William Faulkner’s novels and his revelations about place and the people who occupy those places. July describes September, “Her anger is like the tide drawing me toward it,” or herself, “like a thief breaking out of a building, or how the sisters together “reveal ourselves like a magic trick.”
Since I’d reached for her book before I knew its author, I wanted to learn more about Daisy Johnson. I found that she grew up in Essex, England. Before age 27, she’d already won several literary prizes, the youngest author to be shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel, Everything Under, which is my next read.
Hurrah for once again being able to browse library shelves and finding treasure.
Johnson, Daisy. Sisters. Riverhead Books, 2020, 210 pages.