On the car ride from our house to the high school football game, I was subjected to another one of my sister’s mad ramblings about her future husband.
From age six to sixteen, Josie had a knack for turning any conversation into a verbal storyboard of her life alongside her groom-to-be. She would oscillate between minute details. She would debate whether the rose bouquets at the reception dinner should be red or purple, whether his eyes would be brown or blue, or whether their house would be painted white or pink. The one detail she never questioned was her diamond ring. Sure, she would agonize over where the proposal would happen or how she’d react when he dropped to one knee, but what sat inside that little velvet box remained the same: a simple gold band with a single, flawless diamond.
Being a good little sister, rather than getting annoyed, I always sat and listened. I would treat her monologues as puzzles to solve. At first, I tried to interject whenever questions came to mind. Josie hated that. My inquiries were met with snappy dismissals, as if I should have known the answers even when they were matters of personal taste.
Once, when she was debating whether to spend her honeymoon in Paris or Rome, I simply asked, “Why Paris or Rome?”
She snapped: “Because they are the most romantic places in the world, obviously!”
I learned to keep my questions to myself.
I didn’t like football. But Josie was the cheer captain, which meant I had to go. I didn’t care for the players, or any boys who played team sports; my reaction to them was roughly the same as my reaction to large, untrained dogs.
Instead, I watched the cheer team. Today, they looked particularly uncanny. After a few minutes of study, I realized their makeup was drawn to exaggerate sharp features their round faces didn’t possess, while their uniforms exaggerated rounded curves their sharp frames didn’t possess.
I pulled out my notebook and scribbled: Tell Josie to tailor the makeup to her own features… without upsetting her.
The routines didn’t hold my interest either. The cheers seemed simple, the movements little more than glorified jumping jacks. My gaze drifted away from the squad and settled on the vibrant green of the field below. Having never seen grass this saturated or immaculate, I immediately thought: How did someone make this grass so beautiful?
I envisioned the groundskeeper out there at dawn. I imagined them seeding, watering, and trimming the grass with meticulous care. Moments like that brought me a very particular kind of joy. I loved seeing people care deeply about something. It was precisely the reason I tolerated my sister’s ceaseless monologues about her future husband.
Yet with Josie, I could never quite decipher why she wanted those things. It seemed as though she couldn’t feel fulfilled until the exact future she had prophesied unfolded before her. I admired her passion, but I couldn’t understand it. More than anything, I wanted to care about something with that kind of singular intensity. But I didn’t. Instead, I seemed to care about everything, which left me feeling like I cared about nothing at all.
I read a different book on a new subject almost every week, and Josie constantly mocked me for it.
“It’s like you assign yourself more homework than school does,” she’d tease. “You know a good husband will support you. You don’t need to learn like your life depends on it.”
But my life does depend on it, I thought.
I noticed that the ground fringing the field was nothing but barren dirt. Curious, I stepped down from the bleachers, walked out onto the sidelines, and immediately knelt on the green; my jeans already had permanent grass stains embedded in the knees anyway.
I reached out to pluck a single blade, but I couldn’t pull it free.
It wasn’t real.
For a brief moment, I was disappointed. Then I looked closer, brushed my fingers over the synthetic fibers, and smiled as a new question took hold:
How was this grass made?