jolee sullivan

The Smallest is the Star of the Show

“Go tell Lexi dinner’s ready.”

“Not it!”

“I always do it.”

“No you don’t, are you kidding me?”

“LEXI!”

“You’re so annoying why can’t you—”

“Somebody go get her. Right now.”

I push my chair back from the table and walk down the hallway. Hanging from Lexi’s doorknob is the expensive pearl necklace my mother should not have gifted her for her seventh birthday. Its delicate chain is irreparably tangled, and it clicks against the wooden door constantly. I knock hard and quick on the door below her Mauarader’s Map poster and call, “Dinner!”

After a few seconds of silence, I crack the door open. Click, click, clickclickclick. The door only opens a couple of inches due to the mountain of clothes on the floor blocking its swinging path. I shove the door open and poke my head in to find Lexi seated at her unbearably cluttered vanity, carefully applying sparkly sky-blue eyeshadow, wearing chunky headphones that look comically large on her tiny face. From the door, I can clearly hear the music; it’s No Other Day from the musical Rent, and the only reason she isn’t shamelessly belting it out loud is because she’s so focused on the eyeshadow. Despite the fact that I’ve now scooped up her pile of clothes and tossed it away from the door to a spot by her foot, she still hasn’t registered that I’m in the room. When she finally sees me in the mirror behind her, irritated with my arms crossed, she jumps, lets out an airy, high-pitched yelp, and collapses into a fit of giggles. “Wow, you scared me,” she laughs. “Want me to do your makeup?”

Living with five siblings is like being on a TV show. While our life may not be as Hollywood as the Kardashians, it’s certainly as dramatic, and arguably as interesting. I’m probably biased in saying that, but as Michael Cunningham once wrote, “there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them.” If Keeping Up With the Sullivans was a TV show, I guarantee you’d be sucked into the drama of the who-ate-the-last-muffin storyline and entranced by the screaming matches between my sisters. You’d be texting your friends to say did you see how hard she threw that shoe? Savage.

Living with five siblings means having virtually no privacy, sharing everything, knowing how to fight, and cherishing every second of silence in your life. Our house is loud. As we’ve gotten older and busier and mellow-er, things have quieted a bit. I think the last of my fighting energy was depleted the year Sari moved out and Ben and I fought viciously over who’d get her room, even after I’d already moved my stuff in. He’d dumped a water bottle onto my bed in protest. Now, when I’m mad that my sisters leave their wet towels on the bathroom floor, I send them long, strongly worded text messages.

Though the drama isn’t as juicy as it was when we were all younger, I think our TV show could still make it. Every one of us is a character, and we all have our roles and respective sidekicks, supporting-actors, and foils. I play the role of level-headed mediator, Ben holds the role of smarter-than-you-and-I-know-it, Sari is mom-number-two, and Craig is stoned-older-brother-who-wants-nothing-to-do-with-your-drama. When the twins were born, Craig was thirteen, Sari was nine, I was three, and Ben was two. Our house never felt small, and suddenly, we were adding two more to the mix, which is a relatively large addition.

From the very start, they were thought of as a package deal. We didn’t refer to Kayla or Lexi individually, instead we said the babies are crying, or get the babies in the car. Around their ninth or tenth birthday, we shifted to what time do the twins have to get picked up from band practice? I always felt bad for them in this sense, because their twin-ship shrouded their own individual identities. Because, despite the fact that they looked the same and dressed the same and played on the same little-league team, Kayla and Lexi have always been two very different people. While Kayla was quiet, sensitive, serious, and shy, Lexi was whimsical and quirky, and wholly unlike anyone else in our ho-hum bunch.

Lexi was born just shy of four pounds, one minute after Kayla, which earned her her place as the youngest sibling. The earliest memory I have of Lexi was on that March day when they were born. I don’t remember much of the hospital visit, including the part where I must’ve seen Kayla swaddled in my mom’s arms. I remember seeing Lexi. She was not swaddled against my mother, she was writhing around inside of an incubator. When my dad pointed to the tiny, red, alien-like creature scream-crying inside of a clear dome with tubes and wires attached to it and said that’s your sister, I think I was a bit traumatized. I’m not ashamed to say that for the first few months of their lives, I openly declared my preference for Kayla.

Lexi didn’t come home on her birthday with Kayla; the doctors still needed to monitor her for a few days. The day she came home, Dad hung a sign on their crib as a greeting from Kayla that read, Welcome to My Crib. In pictures of them as infants, Lexi is so much smaller than Kayla that she could pass as a whole year younger, rather than a minute. They grew to be adorable toddlers. Chubby, perpetually rosy cheeks framed by white-blond curlicues and eyelashes that’d put mascara companies out of business. Kayla had the look of a sweet baby animal, complete with empathetic puppy-dog eyes and a small, pouty mouth. Lexi’s face was identical but her expression was one of wonder and mischief, complete with incessant giggling. No one knows where she got it from or why, but Lexi loved to dance. I feel like I remember her dancing before I remember her walking. Any music would suffice—my dad’s records, a TV commercial, or a cell-phone jingle. Before she could twirl or jump, her signature move was a low crouch and a slight bouncing up and down on her chunky little legs. When reminiscing on the twins’ younger years, we often bring up the many times we’d visit the mall, and Lexi would be drawn to the loud, pulsing pop music that drifted out of Abercrombie and Fitch. She’d voluntarily enter the store and, next to the shirtless men in beanies, do her squat-bounce as if the entrance was her personal dance stage. My parents must’ve played a lot of music in the house, because Lexi was a self-proclaimed singer by age two. She didn’t really know many words, but still, she sang. She’d make rhymes and hold long notes to the tune of a day, a ray, today in various sequences. My parents thought her a prodigy, the next Carole King. It was very cute.

Once Lexi began to talk, her eccentricity really made itself known. The girl can talk. So much so that we mostly zone out while she talks, even when we don’t mean to. That never stops her. Here’s a common situation: I’m picking Lexi up from her job at Friendly’s where she works as an ice-cream scooper, which she takes very seriously. Before I ask her how her workday was, I’m seriously debating whether or not really want to ask her that question, or open that door. I decide that yes, I want to be nice, I want to ask her how her shift went. Without hesitation, she beings: "Good. Jaylin and Caleb left me by myself, because it was like, so insane in there, and like, I was like, okay I guess I can handle this, and it was super busy but my manager was helping me, so it was fine, and then, we had this guy come in, and he wasn't wearing a mask, and I said, I'm sorry sir, but you have to wear a mask, and he looked at me and he said I have a medical condition, and I'm like okayyy, and I just don't know what to do because like I'm not allowed to serve him without one and like, I don't know, like he was so creepy looking, and so I just said I'm sorry sir but, but, like I can't serve you, and he flips out and is yelling in my face and I'm like—” Here, I interject, “Lexi, that is when you either tell him to fucking leave or you get your manager.” “Yeah. I know, but, I don't know, like, I didn't know what to do and so I call Kelly and I'm like this man won't wear a mask—oh my god, wait, guess who walked in tonight, it was freaking Johnny and Cassidy Reynolds and they were like oh, hey Lexi, and I was like so, like, frozen, like, I was so caught off guard, and I was like hey guys haha and so I brought them to their table and I run to the back and I'm like oh my god noooo, and I grab Caleb and I'm like you have to save me from these people, I can't—oh and Johnny is wearing this Avengers T-shirt that I know Michaela got for him, I helped her pick it out and…” I have absolutely no idea who any of these people are that she is referencing, and I am tempted to ask her why she is serving tables if she's an ice-cream scooper, but I decide to save myself the extra twenty minutes and ask her, instead, "So did the guy without the mask leave?" "Oh, yeah my manager threw him out and told him he can't come back here anymore and he totally freaked out, also, I saw that there's this new Naked pallet, it's like corals and these shimmery blues and it's sooo soso pretty, I think I'm gonna see if I can beg Mom or Dad to get it for my birthday, oh also, on my birthday, I think I want to see if I can book a trip to Disney, but do I need a passport for that?”

You know how I said all six of us were characters, and have our own roles? Lexi’s role isn’t simply twin-number-two. Lexi is the-one-who-lives-in-her-own-world. We’re not sure who’s world it is, but it isn’t ours. If I had to visualize it, I’d say that our world is the drafty, barren room with the wooden wardrobe, and Lexi’s world is Narnia. If she read this, she’d break down in tears over the fact that I referenced Narnia instead of Hogwart’s Enchanted Forest. My mom reads a lot of books, and we always took frequent library trips which is how Lexi and I became such literary nerds. I like to think that I’m pretty well-read, but Lexi’s reading history is far more extensive than mine. If she isn’t dancing and jumping on her bed, she’s underneath the covers with her face stuffed into a book. When she’s reading, she’s inaccessible to the rest of the world. It isn’t uncommon for her to read through the night, and part of her signature look includes bags under her eyes that are physically gray—in addition to a shoulder-length mess of never-brushed hair, expressive jewelry, and uncomfortably long, unpainted fingernails. Our family discovered the eighth wonder of the world when Lexi got a cell phone. You could scream for help at the top of your lungs through a mega-phone, you could yell Lexi’s name straight into her ear canal, and she wouldn’t look up from the thing. It drove my parents nuts, and she got her phone taken away more times than any of us. If, after half an hour of calling her name, she finally looked up, it’d be with a slight start, wide eyes, an open mouth, and a genuinely confused, “What?”

That’s the thing about Lexi. She’s odd, she’s out-there, she’s spacey, but she’s got the most discerning air of innocence about her. When she’d get in trouble, and someone began to scold her, her quiet, mouse-like voice would stutter, “Wh-what? What do you mean? What did I do?” It could be incredibly frustrating, especially when she actually did something blatantly disrespectful. You wanted to be mad at her, and for her to know it, but she simply didn’t realize that she was in the wrong. Here’s a good example: Once, I saw Lexi wearing one of my shirts. I knew that I’d recently washed it, and that when folding laundry, my mom sometimes mixed up whose clothes belonged to whom. Understandable with four daughters. If I received a pair of socks that weren’t mine in my clothing pile, my strategy was to approach the sisters and ask, “Who’s socks are these?” Lexi, however, never had a strategy for these situations. When I asked her, “Who’s shirt is that,” Lexi took a bite of an apple, looked down at her shirt, back up at me, and said “I don’t know.” “You don’t know?” “I don’t know, it was with my clothes.” “So, you don’t know whose it is, but you’re wearing it.” This is not how I argue with any of my other siblings. This is me truly trying to better understand the inner workings of Lexi’s mind. “Well yeah, I don’t know. I figured someone was giving it to me.”

This is not the kind of argument—if you can even call it that—that would make a good bombshell teaser for an episode of our TV show. I’ve always left fights with Lexi feeling dissatisfied, confused, and even kind of sorry. It’s like trying to stay mad at a puppy who happily deposits a dead bird at your feet. It doesn’t know that what it did was wrong by your haughty standards. And anyway, no amount of yelling at a tail-wagging puppy will bring the bird back to life and out of your house. You’re better off throwing it away, tossing the dog a bone, and silently washing your hands.

If any of our family members were to actually have a TV show, it’d be Lexi, and the show would follow her journey as a musician. My dad put me in piano and guitar lessons when I was four years old and I complained and I cried and I tantrummed until he gave up and decided to save his money. By the time I was seven and had a mind of my own and decided that I’d like to give it another go, I was too late. Kayla got my old guitar, and Lexi my seat at our electric keyboard. They loved their lessons, and proved to be quite talented. When I sit in my room and hear Lexi’s flawless vibrato float down the hallway, and the incredible music and lyrics she’s written, I feel awe, pride, and real jealousy.

Despite what Lexi does that my family perceives as odd or annoying, she has never, in her whole life, refrained from being herself. While I held myself back from things as a teenager due to fear of what others might think, and while her twin sister did the same, Lexi was always shamelessly who she wanted to be. She was in the school’s theater club and various music groups and while to many, that might not seem like much, I admire her for it. We grew up with conservative parents who had strict rules and high expectations, we watched them go through a violent divorce, and we received very little encouragement when it came to self-expression. I was an anxiety-ridden teenager who stuck with a friend group that didn’t make me feel very good about myself. I went to college as a pre-med major, because that’s what my friends did. It took me two years to decide to transfer schools and study something that I was passionate about. I never felt like I could take control of my own life until I watched my little sister grow up. When applying to colleges, Lexi knew what she wanted to be: an English teacher, or a writer, like me. It’s a blessing to be able to gush over the themes of a Jane Austen novel with her, or to help each other decipher Shakespeare. In her high-school graduation card, I wrote to her: I want to be Lexi when I grow up.

The real reason that our clan will never snag a reality TV deal isn’t because we aren’t interesting enough. It’s because someone will ask Lexi a casual question, and Lexi will start talking, and she won’t stop for so long that the camera men will be physically unable to hold their cameras for the length of her monologue, or they will have far too much footage to go over and will find that nothing of what Lexi has said makes any sense or has any relevance to anything, and they will try to cut her contract from the show, but they won’t be able to, because in the end, it’s Lexi’s world, and we all simply exist in it as the muted back-drop to her whimsical, magical life.