My sister was the promised one. In kindergarten, she read at a sixth grade level. My mother called her brilliant and told friends she listened to John Cage in high school, that she filled a whole sketchpad with ears. I remember her driving me to middle school: every morning she would label the day, "Competing Banks," "Sunflowers against a Cloudy Sky." She had pale hair and a raspberry tan. My father called her his starlet.
Not that things change, but John Cage isn't everything. In college, her teachers said she was all concept, and she learned from classmates that others had read the modernists. "It's a big pond," she said to me her first Christmas back: "an ocean." I was sixteen and deprived of ambition. I said she was the smartest person I knew. She told me she guessed that was true, and I still wanted to be like her.
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