My Sister Insisted

I didn’t wear deodorant for over a year, during the first few waves of the pandemic.

My sister used to insist I wear deodorant, shave my legs, conform back when I was in my 20s and rebellious and tired of bullshit gender constraints and corporatism dictating how I should act and think.  My sister insisted.  She bought me a brand of super strong deodorant, “So you don’t have to apply it every day.”  My sister insisted.  She bought me fancy shmancy pink razors that bent to the shape of my lithe legs.  My sister insisted I conform and no amount of argument would change her mind.  She would shove product at me like the labels and marketing devices would fix me, or at least hide the smelliest, stinkiest part of me.

My sister conformed.  She ate what the television told her to.  She drank diet soda, ordered pizza, bought frozen foods, went to fast food places for fun, and a great night out meant a visit to a national chain restaurant.  My sister’s rebellion showed itself in chain smoking and spending splurges.  “I’m not going to play the poor game,” she’d respond whenever I challenged her about spending too much, about bankruptcy, about borrowing from family, about paying her utility bills first.  I loaned her money to pay her light bill and she didn’t pay me back for three years.

My sister conformed.  The true American consumer.

She fancied herself a “good girl.”  She was a pastor’s wife.  She followed the rules set down for her as a woman, as a wife, as a mother. 

By the time of the pandemic, her pastor husband had already passed away.  He had prostate cancer that had spread throughout his body by the time it was spotted.  He spent the last year of his life under the care of my sister who was slowly losing her grip of time and space. By the time her husband died, she was already far in to early on-set dementia.  By the time of the pandemic, her daughter had placed her in a memory care residence.  Even if my sister had had all her faculties, she wouldn’t have known that I stopped wearing deodorant again.  Had she known, she would have tried to guilt me into applying stink pretty to my pits.  But what would it have mattered if no one but me and my spouse was going to smell me? 

What is the point even during non-pandemic times? Deodorant exists simply to please the senses of other people, most often strangers.  Is it better to please the senses than care that deodorant introduces chemicals to the skin, the skin near lymph nodes, that deodorant keeps the body from shedding toxins? 

Once, while living and working on an organic farm in Ramona, California, I overheard the farmer and his son discussing deodorant and how horrible it is and how people still use it, and I held my head in shame, caught between the nagging voice of my sister “People don’t want to smell you!” and the voices of wholesome organic farmers who were closer to sharing my own world view than my sister ever would.  I was sure the farmer and his son were talking about me.  They must have seen my deodorant, the same brand my sister had insisted upon years earlier, in the bathroom medicine cabinet in the guest house where I was staying temporarily after finding a mouse in my trailer.

My sister dreamed of living on a farm, but I don’t think she would have enjoyed the organic farm; she would not have enjoyed living so close to the earth, being dirty, collecting eggs covered in bird shit, hosing down the giant compost bins every morning. The farm was far from shopping malls and big box stores.

By the time of the pandemic, my sister couldn’t manage her own affairs, couldn’t be trusted with a debit or credit card, couldn’t be alone with internet access.

One thing the pandemic has demonstrated to us all, and I mean the global “us all,” is that much of what we think we have to have and have to do is both unnecessary and destructive.  When humans shut down, the planet began to heal.  When we stayed put, we had time to hear our own thoughts.  Busy-ness couldn’t interfere, and folks began to have epiphanies.  As we slowed to a halt we could see the systemic cracks, the institutional concrete and steel, crumbling.  The bullet trains stopped in the buckling tunnels of our own making, and there we were stuck inside.

As we slowed to a halt, we could see the systemic cracks, the institutional concrete and steel crumbling.

My sister, consumer of cigarettes, fast food, and biblical myth, didn’t have an opportunity expand her awareness or, conversely, have a chance to tell me I stink, because her mind was gone by the time the pandemic arrived. 

In the state’s rush to open back up again!, my sister’s memory care home became infected with Covid-19 and found its way to my sister’s lungs, and took control of her body, and none of us could be there with her in her locked room, isolated, quarantined, afraid.  She stopped breathing while suffocating in a nightmare of aloneness and confusion.

Now that I’m vaccinated against Covid-19, I’ve gone back into the world with groups of people up close, and reluctantly I have once again applied deodorant, the same brand my sister insisted I wear way back when in the 80s, when I was young enough to believe I could successfully buck the system, a system set up to disguise and disinfect anything that doesn’t conform and consume and play nicely.  

Now, in my 50s, I do play nicely.  I play along to get along because I’ve grown tired of fighting.

My sister’s early on-set dementia, though, scared me.  Scares me.  Demonstrates to me that going along to get along can inflame the soul, the lungs, the brain, and no amount of conformity can stop you from feeling dead inside.