My sister has been late to everything for forty-nine years, including her own daughter’s graduation, and she is also the only person in this family who has never once missed what mattered. Both of those are the same fact.
Lali’s graduation started at six and my sister came in at six fifty-one.
I know because I was watching the doors and I was watching the clock over the doors, which is a thing I have done at approximately every event of my life. She came down the side aisle of that gymnasium in the middle of the education foundation lady’s remarks carrying a foil pan, and about nine people said Yoli out loud, and she hugged two of them without breaking stride, and she sat down next to me and put the pan on the floor between her feet.
“They already did her?”
“They’re on the S’s.”
“Okay.” She patted my leg twice. “I brought the fideo.”
“To a graduation.”
“For after.”
There were four hundred people in that gym and my sister brought a foil pan of fideo to it, and it was still hot, and by nine o’clock that night it was gone and three separate women had asked her how she did the tomato.
I have kept the count for thirty years. My mother’s seventy-fifth, an hour ten. My wedding in 1996, forty minutes, and she was in it. Lali’s baptism, an hour and a half, and the priest waited, and I want it understood that the priest waited. Mother’s Day, every Mother’s Day, between forty minutes and two hours, and my mother would not eat until she got there, so nobody ate.
And here is the sentence I have said about my sister Yoli since I was about nineteen years old, at that table, to my ex-husband, to my daughter, and once, in a car, to my mother, in a way I still think about: she has never been serious about anything.
I could show you the file. Eleven jobs since 1994 — I have counted them, I count things, it’s what the district pays me for. Married at twenty-one to a man who is a whole section of this. Divorced at thirty-three. No retirement account. No savings. She has never in her life owned a house. And from 2010 to 2021, which is eleven years, our mother came apart one system at a time in a house on Fair Park Street, and I did that, and if you want to know how much of it I did by myself, I still have the calendars.
New Year’s Eve of 2019, Yoli and Lali and I were at my table after everybody else went home, and Lali got out her phone and ran one of those personality quizzes on the three of us. A hundred and twenty-some questions. We all did it.
Yoli answered every single one of them in something under two seconds. She did not think about one of them. Lali said, “Tía, you’re supposed to consider it,” and Yoli said, “That’s my answer though.”
Lali read out four letters and then the paragraph that went with them, and there was something in it about living for the moment. I laughed at that. I laughed hard, and Yoli laughed too, and then she said the only thing she has ever said to me on the subject.
“It’s not for the moment,” she said. “It’s in it. Those are different, Odie.”
And she got up and started stacking plates, and I thought that was a very Yoli thing to say, which is what I thought about everything she said, and I did not look up one word of it for six years.
ESFP Traits: The Way She Comes Into a Room
There are resacas all through this county. They are old bends of the river that got cut off when the river moved, so there is no current in them at all — they fill up from rain and from the irrigation canals and they sit there. They look like a river. They are not going anywhere.
I have called my sister a resaca since I was twenty-two years old. I said it at my table. She has heard me say it and she thought it was funny.
Here is the arrival, since it is the thing everybody knows about her. She is fifty minutes late. She has something in her arms nobody asked for. She comes in loud and hugs people on the way, and she does not apologize, ever, not one time in forty-nine years — she does not say she is sorry she is late because it does not occur to her that a thing has been done to anybody. And within about four minutes the room has turned to face wherever she has ended up, and the conversation that was happening is over, and there is a new one.
I used to think she did that on purpose. I have decided she cannot help it and that this is worse.
She has never once had a plan for a Saturday. She has never once been unable to fill one.
Every December this family does a tamalada and it is the same argument every year. My aunt Chavela says the masa is dry, my mother said it for forty years before her, and somebody’s daughter-in-law who has never made a tamal in her life says maybe more broth, and the whole room turns on her. There are stations. You do not choose your station; you are assigned it by seniority and by whether your hands are cold. Yoli has spread masa since she was fourteen and she has never once been moved up, and spreading is the worst station because your back goes. The point of it is not the tamales. Nobody needs three hundred tamales. The point is nine women in a kitchen for six hours, and the tamales are the excuse the six hours needs in order to be allowed to happen.
ESFP Behavior: Eleven Hours in a Waiting Room
The fourteenth of August last year my sister went up on Nando Treviño’s roof with a tarp because the second band came through and his ceiling was coming down on his mother’s bed, and she was forty-eight years old and she fell off of it.
Fractured pelvis, two places. They took her to the hospital in Harlingen and I got there at 4:20 in the afternoon.
I was in that waiting room eleven hours.
By six there were nine people I did not know. By eight there were maybe twenty. At one point somebody’s cousin brought a box of pan dulce and it went around like it was a wake, except she was fine, she was on a gurney upstairs telling a resident about the tarp.
A woman about my age sat down beside me and said, “You’re Odie? You’re the sister.” And she said, “In 2011 my mom was in the hospital in McAllen eleven days and Yoli came and sat with her every night after her shift so I could go home to my kids. I never paid her. She wouldn’t take it.”
I said, “Eleven days.”
“Every night,” she said.
And then a man in a Valley Fever 5K shirt told me my sister drove his daughter to Corpus for a treatment eight times in 2017. And a lady named Erlinda told me Yoli came to her house at two in the morning back in 2004 when her husband was arrested and stayed till the sun came up and cleaned her kitchen. And a young guy, maybe thirty, told me she picked him up off the side of Business 77 in 2019 and did not ask him one question about it.
I counted. I count things. Between 4:20 in the afternoon and 3:00 in the morning, forty-one people came through that waiting room, and thirty-four of them were not family, and I would have been able to name six of them at the outside.
Nobody had called any of them. That is the part I want to put down flat. There is no phone tree. My sister does not have anybody’s number written anywhere. They found out the way people find out.
I drove home at three and I sat in the driveway with the engine off a long while, and then I went in and I did not sleep, and at about five I got up and got out the calendars from 2010 to 2021, which I still have, all eleven years, in a box in the closet where I keep them.
ESFP Under Stress: What She Says at Two in the Morning
The week after they let her out she stayed at my house because she could not do stairs, and I found out something about my sister I had gone forty-nine years without seeing.
Second night, about two in the morning, I heard her in the kitchen and she was up on the counter reaching for something with a fractured pelvis, and I got her down and she started talking, and what came out of her was the end of the world.
She was about to lose the clinic job. Then the apartment. Then Amado was going to have to come back from Austin and it was going to ruin his whole life and he would end up like her, and she said that — like me — and then she said in about four years she would be in a room somewhere and nobody would come, and she said it the way you would read a weather report.
I said, “Yoli, you’ve been off work eleven days.”
She said, “I can see it, Odie.”
And that is the thing about this type that no article is going to tell you, because everybody writes about them at the party. She has no equipment for the future at all. None. Ninety-nine percent of the time that is why she is the way she is — there is no three-years-from-now sitting on her chest, so she can give you the whole of an evening. And then something knocks her sideways and the future does not arrive as a question. It arrives as a finished scene, all at once, in detail, and it is always a catastrophe, and there is no arguing with it, because she is not reasoning toward it. She is looking at it.
That is also, I have realized since, why she does not save money. Not because she is a child about it. Because the year 2034 does not exist for her in any usable form, and you cannot put money in a year that does not exist.
One thing plainly, because I sat in a chair for two nights and did nothing but listen. A bad week talks like that. If the talking will not quit — if somebody is still narrating you the ending at two in the morning three months on and cannot get anything started in the daytime — that has stopped being a personality, and I am not qualified for it and no page is. Get a doctor into it. Get a licensed therapist into it. I will take being called heavy-handed.
ESFP vs ESTP: The Eleven Days
My sister married Beto Salinas in 1997 and this family said the same thing about the two of them for twelve years, which is that they were the same person. That is why it worked and that is why it ended, and I said it as often as anybody.
They were not the same person and I can prove it with one week.
The storm came through on a Wednesday in July of 2008 and it sat on this county and it took the roofs off the north side of San Benito. No power for nine days in some of it, longer out toward the county line.
Beto was out of the house by six the next morning and I did not see him for a week. What he did — and I have to be fair to the man, whatever else — was he looked at that whole county and saw how it worked. He knew by Thursday afternoon which road was going to open first and he was on it. He knew where the fuel was. He had a distribution point going behind his cousin’s tire shop by Friday with a generator, a pallet of water, and two boys he was paying in cash, and he moved something like nine hundred gallons of water in eleven days, and he also made about eleven thousand dollars in that same eleven days, and if you asked him about that he would look at you like you had asked him a riddle. Both of those things were true and neither one bothered him and I have never been able to decide whether that is a defect.
Yoli went to houses.
That is the entire description of what my sister did for eleven days. One house at a time, in an order that made sense to nobody, and she did not leave a house until the person in it was all right, and all right was her call and not theirs. She was at the Ybarras’ three days. Beto brought her a generator on the second morning and by that night it was in the Ybarras’ carport and she told him so at the kitchen table and she was laughing when she told him.
He said, “That was two thousand dollars, Yoli.”
She said, “They have the baby.”
Now. Both of those people were running wide open on whatever was in front of them, which is why this family got them mixed up for twelve years. But run that week the other way and you get two disasters. Put Beto in those eleven houses and he is out the door in forty minutes with a written list of what each family needs, and the list is correct, and the list is not what was needed. Put Yoli behind the tire shop and the whole pallet is gone by noon to whoever is standing there, and there is no distribution point on Friday or any other day, and the Ybarras still get a generator.
What the difference is: Beto’s read feeds a live calculation of how a situation actually works. My sister’s feeds a ranking of people that she has never said out loud, that she has never justified to one living soul, and that she has apparently been keeping since she was a child.
What Is the ESFP Personality Type: The Other Column
That September I sat down and read up on those four letters, six years after my daughter read them out at my table. The country-wide tally puts it close to one in twelve, with the women’s column ahead.
E — she is not filled by a room, which is what people think it means. She is aimed at the room. What is out there, right now, is where the whole of her attention lives.
S — and what she is aimed at is the actual physical thing. Nando’s ceiling. The baby at the Ybarras’. Not what it signifies. Not what it will mean in a year. The thing.
F — what settles a matter for her is a valuation of persons, held privately, that she has never once put up for discussion with anybody including our mother.
P — nothing is closed. Six o’clock is when a thing starts, and she is somewhere else at six o’clock, and that somewhere else has a person in it.
Behind the letters, the framework carries four working parts and puts them in order of how much of a person got issued to each. Here the present tense draws nearly the whole allotment, the long view draws almost nothing, and the ranking of people sits in the middle and does the steering. That gets you a woman who is at your worst hour inside of an hour, fifty minutes late to your graduation, and unable to tell you what she is doing in October.
So I got the calendars out. Eleven years of them, 2010 through 2021, and I went page by page, and I have a number. My sister was at our mother’s house on Fair Park forty-one times in eleven years. Forty-one. I did more than that in 2014 by myself.
That column is real. I want that on the page and I am not taking it back.
But there was never a second column, because I was the only one keeping books, and my sister does not keep any. There is no ledger anywhere in the world with 2011 in it, eleven nights in McAllen, a woman I have never met’s mother. Eight trips to Corpus in 2017. A kitchen in 2004 at two in the morning. Erlinda knows about Erlinda’s night. Nobody knows about all of it, including her, because she has never in her life sat down and totaled anything.
As to the count on these: on the order of eight or nine in a hundred, and women outnumber men in it. Now, I audit for a living, so let me say the one useful thing about every other percentage a person is going to run across. The opening question in any audit is who got counted. Those tables got built from people who went and found the questionnaire on purpose, or who sat through a workshop their company paid for, and a roster of volunteers measures volunteering and nothing else.
And what the whole thing is worth, briefly, and then back to my sister. Something real is going on down at the bottom of it — run a person’s four readings, run them again a month later, and the two administrations line up, and I process instruments for a living and plenty of them will not do that much. The soft spot is the step after, where four readings get sorted into sixteen named kinds of people. Somebody chose those sixteen drawers, and the proof for the drawers has never weighed what the confidence around them weighs. I use the thing. I would not enter it on anybody’s record. The whole document is an average taken over strangers. Whatever it says about you, there is a place where it comes off you, and that place is what I would spend the evening on, because the parts that fit are held in common with eight or nine people out of every hundred and that one is held in common with nobody.
That September I went looking for a picture of my sister for the room at the rehab place, and in thirty years of this family’s photographs I found four. Four. In one of them she is nineteen, standing in front of a white house with a chinaberry tree, and it says Refugio on the back in my mother’s handwriting, and nobody in this family has any idea whose house that is. I asked Yoli. She looked at it a long time and said she didn’t remember.
ESFP Strengths and Weaknesses: The Eleven Years
The strength is not complicated once you have sat in a waiting room and had it read out to you by strangers for eleven hours.
Nobody arrives like that. Nobody. She has no phone tree and no plan and no idea what she is going to do when she gets there, and she is in your driveway inside the hour, and she stays until the actual thing that is wrong is finished being wrong, and she has never once billed anybody for any of it in any currency, including the currency of being told she is a good person, which she will change the subject on.
The weakness comes off that same reel, and I paid that one, so I get to be the one who writes it down.
She is summonable. She is not schedulable. An emergency has an hour and a place and a person standing in it, and my sister will be there. Eleven years does not have an hour. Eleven years is Tuesdays. It is a pill organizer and a nephrologist in McAllen and forty-one calls to a supplemental insurance company and it is the same Tuesday, four hundred times, and there is no moment in it to arrive at. She came forty-one times in eleven years and every single one of those forty-one she was magnificent, and my mother lit up like a church, and then she was gone and it was Wednesday and I was still there.
Now the sixteenth of March, 2021.
Mama turned about four in the afternoon. The hospice nurse told me plainly what was happening and about how long, and I sat in that front room on Fair Park with my phone in my hand.
I had my sister’s number. I have had my sister’s number since she was fifteen. Four in the afternoon. She was in San Benito, which is nineteen minutes from that house.
I told myself she was working. I told myself I would call after I called the funeral home so I would have something to tell her. I told myself, at some point around seven, that she would want to remember Mama the way she was, which is a sentence I had heard somebody say once and which I picked up off the floor and used.
I sat there six hours. The nurse came back in at 10:15. My mother died at 10:52 at night and I called my sister at 11:04.
Yoli got there at 11:40 the next morning, because that was when they let her in, and she came into that house the way she comes into every house, and she did the four days after. She did all of it. And she has never one time, in five years, said anything to me about those six hours.
I do not know if that is because she forgave me or because a grudge needs a next week to live in and she does not have one of those. I have wanted very badly for it to be the first one. I am not going to find out, because I have not asked her, because I would have to say out loud what I did.
ESFP Cognitive Functions: Where She Keeps It
The first part is the present and it is nearly all of her. The book’s order for her is extraverted sensing, then introverted feeling, then extraverted thinking, and last introverted intuition — which is the one this section ends on.
Not attention span. The opposite of that. It is total, and whatever is standing in front of her gets all of it, which is why an evening with my sister is the best evening available in this county, and why a Tuesday in a year she is not standing in does not exist. When she says she can see it at two in the morning, she means she can see it, and the reason that is so terrible is that seeing is her one instrument and it has been pointed somewhere it was never built to point.
The second part is the ranking. Private, exact, and not open to negotiation.
That is what I could not work out for a solid year — why those eleven houses in July of 2008 and not eleven others. She has an ordering of persons that has apparently been running since she was small and she has never stated one line of it to anybody. Not to Beto. Not to our mother. When she says they have the baby, that is not a reason, that is the whole ruling, and the record of the proceeding does not exist.
The third part comes out in bursts and it is real and I underrated it for thirty years. She got nine hundred pounds of donated food out of a truck and into a church hall in Los Fresnos in about four hours with people she recruited in the parking lot. She organizes ferociously, in the middle of a thing, and then it is over and she cannot do it again on purpose on a Thursday when nothing is wrong.
The last one she got almost nothing for, and it happens to be the one my entire profession is built on: the long view. Three years out. Accrual. What this turns into. It is not laziness and it is not denial. There is no instrument in her hand there, and when something forces it into her hand it produces the thing I heard in my kitchen at two in the morning.
Beto Salinas wasted her twenties and I have said so for twenty-five years. She told me in the rehab place that she married him because she wanted to and left when she was done and that I have never once asked her about it.
I still think what I think.
ESFP Relationships and Compatibility: Summonable, Not Schedulable
What it is to be loved by one of these: you get more of a person than anybody else has ever given you, and you get it in the hour it is needed, and you cannot get one minute of it in advance or on a schedule, and you will never be told where you rank.
That last part is the one nobody writes down. There is a ranking. She has one. It is the most serious thing about her, it is entirely private, everybody in her life is somewhere on it, and the only way anyone has ever found out where they stand is by having something go wrong.
Which does a peculiar thing to a family over forty years. You cannot be reassured. There is no conversation available in which my sister tells me I matter to her, because that conversation is about a general condition and she does not deal in those. I have tried it twice. Both times she said something warm and useless and then asked me if I had eaten. And so the whole family reads her the way I read her, which is by the count of the visible column, and the visible column says fifty minutes late.
I have wondered since the waiting room how many of those thirty-four people spent years thinking they were the only one.
Her truck is a 2006 and it has three hundred and forty thousand miles on it and the passenger door has to be pulled shut twice. I could give you a partial list of who has been hauled in that truck: a man to a detox in Edinburg, my daughter to a college visit in Kingsville, at least two coffins’ worth of flowers, a goat, Erlinda’s washing machine, and me, on the twentieth of March, 2021, to the funeral home, because I could not do it.
What all of this is like inside a marriage, at the same table every night instead of from four and a half years above it, would have to come from whoever sat at that table, and it will not come from me. And the arriving does not get received the same way off a woman as off a man in a family built like ours, which I have watched happen and am not going to take up here.
ESFP Careers: Eleven Jobs
Eleven jobs in thirty-two years and I have the list. Sonic, a nursing home, a floral place, eight years at a title company which is the longest, dispatch for an ambulance service, a school cafeteria, two dental clinics with a gap between them, and three I would have to look up.
She was good at all of them. Every single one. Employee of the year twice at the title company, and she quit anyway.
The dispatch job is the one I think about. Two and a half years taking 911 calls for a private ambulance service, and by every account she was the best they had at it — she talked a man through his wife’s delivery on a caliche road in March of 2015 and they named the baby’s middle name after her, which is a thing that happened in this family and which I have never once put in the column. She left in 2016 because a supervisor humiliated a nineteen-year-old girl at the console next to hers in front of the room, and my sister said something, and then she said something else, and then she was done there. She did not look for another job first.
Here is what happens to somebody built like this in a workplace and it is not what people assume. She is not flaky on the floor. She is the best person in that building on the worst day it has. What she cannot do is the part where you stay somewhere for eleven years because in eleven years it turns into something, since eleven years from now is not a place she can stand. So she stays until a thing happens — somebody needs her for three weeks, or a supervisor is cruel to a girl at the front desk — and then the thing in front of her outranks the job, and the job is over.
What a company decides that pattern means, and what a working life of that decision adds up to on a retirement statement, is for whoever does the hiring to answer. I only run the payroll. And two people can walk in carrying the identical pattern and have a building receive it two entirely different ways.
ESFP Personal Growth: The Calendar
The advice they print for this type is all planning ahead and building routines. I have read a fair amount of it now. I would like whoever wrote it to try putting my sister on a calendar.
In October I put her on a shared calendar with alerts. Two per event. I explained it to her in her kitchen and she said okay, mija, and I was extremely pleased with myself about it for about six weeks. She has been late to nine of the eleven things on it. She was on time twice and both times it was because something at the other end of the day fell through.
The one piece of it I can actually vouch for is small, and it belongs to her, not to me.
In February she called me on a Tuesday afternoon, for nothing. No emergency. She had a break at the clinic and she called me and asked how I was, and we talked for six minutes about a supplemental dental thing at the district, which is the most boring subject on earth, and she stayed on the phone for all six minutes of it. She has done it four more times since. She is not good at it. There is a silence in the middle of every one of those calls where she does not know what to do with a conversation that has nothing wrong in it.
It is in her. It was always in her. What it needs is somebody in front of her, and a telephone is a poor substitute for a person, and she is doing it anyway, and I know exactly why she started and neither one of us is going to say it out loud.
I have had to learn what a resaca is actually for. It has no current and it is not going anywhere and that is not the criticism I spent thirty years thinking it was. When the rain comes off that Gulf the way it did in 2008, the resacas are what take it. They are the only thing standing between this whole valley and four feet of water in the living room. Nobody thinks about them in a dry year. I have been living in a dry year since 1976.
Amado’s baby was baptized the Sunday before last and the reception was at one, at the hall in San Benito.
She came in at ten of two with a foil pan and her cane in the other hand, and Amado’s wife’s people all turned around, and somebody hollered, and my sister put the pan down on the end of the table and hugged four people before she ever got to a chair.
“It’s the fideo,” she said. “It’s still hot.”
I got up and moved the salsa over to make room for it, and I never looked at the clock over the door, and to this day I do not know what time it was when she sat down.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.