Prime Time 7, Coursebook plus Semester Self-checks

5 The troubled mind Reading: My sister’s keeper a) Read the text below and try to find out as much as you can about the narrator’s attitude towards her sister. b) Comment on the tone of this passage. In My sister’s keeper Jodi Picoult (* 1967) tells the story of a family of five. One of the children, Kate, is dependent on bone marrow and blood donation from her younger sister Anna. In the novel, perspectives frequently change: Anna, Kate, their brother Jesse, both parents and other people involved tell the story from their points of view. 1  In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister. Sometimes the recollection is so clear I can remember the itch of the pillowcase under my hand, the sharp point of her nose pressing into the palm of my hand. She didn’t stand a chance against me, of course, but it still didn’t work. My father walked by, tucking in the house for the night, and saved her. He led me back to my own bed. “That,” he told me, “never happened.” As we got older, I didn’t seem to exist, except in relation to her. I would watch her sleep across the room from me, one long shadow linking our beds, and I would count the ways. Poison, sprinkled on her cereal. A wicked undertow off the beach. Lightning striking. In the end, though, I did not kill my sister. She did it all on her own. Or at least this is what I tell myself. When I was little, the great mystery to me wasn’t how babies were made, but why. The mechanics I understood – my older brother Jesse had filled me in – although at the time I was sure he’d heard half of it wrong. […] I paid attention to different details. Like why some mothers only had one child, while other families seemed to multiply before your eyes. Or how the new girl in school, Sedona, told anyone who’d listen that she was named for the place where her parents were vacationing when they made her (“Good thing they weren’t staying in Jersey City,” my father used to say). Now that I am thirteen, these distinctions are only more complicated: the eighth-grader who dropped out of school because she got into trouble, a neighbour who got herself pregnant in the hopes it would keep her husband from filing for divorce. I’m telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they’d conclude that most people have children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn’t one hundred per cent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren’t very flattering. On the other hand, I was born for a very specific purpose. I wasn’t the result of a cheap bottle of wine or a full moon or the heat of the moment. I was born because a scientist managed to join my mother’s eggs and my father’s sperm to create a specific combination of precious genetic material. In fact, when Jesse told me how babies get made and I, the great disbeliever, decided to ask my parents the truth, I got more than I expected. We sat down and they told me all the usual stuff, of course – but they also explained that they chose little embryonic me specifically, because I could save my sister, Kate. “We loved you even more,” my mother made sure to say, “because we knew what exactly we were getting.” It made me wonder, though, what would have happened if Kate had been healthy. Chances are, I’d still be floating up in Heaven or wherever, waiting to be attached to a body to spend some time on earth. Certainly I would not be part of this family. See, unlike the rest of the world, I didn’t get here by accident. And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it’s gone, so are you. […] My parents tried to make things normal, but that’s a relative term. The truth is, I was never really a kid. To be honest, neither were Kate and Jesse. I guess maybe my brother had his moment in the sun for the four years he was alive before Kate got diagnosed, but ever since then, we’ve been too busy looking over our shoulders to run headlong into growing up. You know how most little kids think they’re like cartoon characters – if an anvil drops on their heads they can 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 70 Extreme situations Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv