My sister, like all firstborns, is unable to question received ideas. For example, even though I’ve explained to her that the fluoride in America’s water is a radioactive waste product of aluminum manufacturing that causes cancer, thyroid problems, wrinkles, and obesity, and that rather than protect teeth, it makes them break, she says, “But, Sonya, I still think it’s good for me.” She is unable to conceive that the world might be “upside down,” so to speak, and this is because, despite the fact that she’s not some grain-eating, crowd-following A, she’s an oldest child, a firstborn, and got the shit beaten out of her at a very young age.
Oldest siblings, I learned on firstborns.com, disappoint their parents when they pop out from the vagina looking not-as-expected; soon, if they’re not retarded, they sense their parents’ disappointment, and in reaction they achieve. All the first American astronauts to fly into outer space were firstborns. Oldest children are disproportionately represented in law, medicine, banking, and engineering.
Two-thirds of all entrepreneurs are firstborns. Oldest kids average two points higher on IQ tests. Oldest children are more self-righteous, insecure, and self-deluded than any other kind of offspring. That wasn’t on firstborns.com.
I jotted down the stats from the website. But after I did it, I realized that it was not good toast material. Also, I realized, my sister’s boyfriend would have no interest in it, because he’s a firstborn.
So I gave up. I had no interest in my sister’s boyfriend or in his marrying — a stupid move — my sister. I recalled how when I was angry at her as a kid, I used to hit our dog, because I lost in our physical fights, because she was bigger, but if I hit our dog, a docile English sheepdog, she would let me have whatever I wanted, as long as I didn’t hit the dog, and it became a tool of mine, when my sister was being obtuse I’d hit the dog’s gray rear, and my sister would say, “Don’t hit the dog,” and her gray-green eyes would glisten and she’d grab my arm, but I kept pounding the dog’s flat hind, the dog had hip dysplasia and a keen would emit from her black lips and I’d pound her rump until my sister said, “Okay, you win,” and I remembered how when my parents killed the dog, my sister was ten, I was seven, and the dog was three, and my sister tried to construct a human blockade, she wanted me to stand in the front door of our house and hold hands with her so that our parents would be unable to drag the dog — to whom my mother had become allergic — through the door to the car to drive it to the pound. “Come on, Sonya,” my sister said. “It will work, a human chain, we can stop them!” and I said, “They’ll just use the other door, idiot,” and went to read a book in my room. Fortunately, the death of Almond — oh, Almond, who licked my father’s hand every time he stuck it forth even though once he threw a wrench at her head and knocked her flat — reminded me of a usable anecdote.
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One time when I was three years old and my sister was six, our mother wanted to comb our hair, so first she combed my sister’s hair, and then she chased me all around the house, saying, “Come here right now or you’ll get a punishment,” and, “As soon as your father comes home he’s going to give you a punishment.” Her best and only friend in the world, Haven, was coming over, and our mother wanted her friend, whom she hadn’t seen in ten years, to think that her life was a good one, and she thought that Haven would not think this unless her girls had combed-out tresses.
We lived in Massachusetts then, of course, in the Colonial my parents built in the seventies, in a hay field midway up a pine-covered mountain in the Berkshires.
Now you, my future brother-in-law, are low-key, relaxed, and reasonable. But perhaps you know how it is to be anxious about a problem-scenario-upcoming, and to get fixated on the perfection of one detail, and to begin to believe that if it’s tilted just so, at the right angle — which is infinitesimally different from all others and is correct — that its rightness will right the whole. My mother wanted to convey to her best and only friend that she, Jordan, the girl Haven had loved in junior high, was happy, safe, and living in a well-kept house.
My mother has trouble making friends. In all her life — during the thirty-three years I knew her, when she spoke to me — in all that time, when she spoke of friends, she spoke only of Haven. In my early years, there was no occasion to refer to friends, because her world was ours: she, my sister, and I lived together in the house on the hill through winter and summer. Sometimes our father was home and sometimes he was “on a trip”; speech was about him—“when your father gets home”— or else us: “You need a bath”; “I want you to play quietly”; “What do you want for lunch?” “My friend Haven” was reserved for the highest order of discussion when she was talking to us (Leala and me), although perhaps she was also talking to herself. Our mother did, from time to time, in an effort to relate to us, reveal facts from her childhood.
She told us — the most memorable story she told — about mean girls who made fun of her hair at recess, the leader one day approaching her, walking with the others to where she stood alone, and saying to the others, “Look at Jordan’s hair.”
She told us about the leader walking up to her hair. Touching it.
“Stay still, Jordan,” the leader said. Our mother did. Our mother was short, dark, and had moles on her neck. Her hair was black, curly, thick, and dry.
“Jordan,” the leader said, “where did you get your hair? Is it African?”
“Look at her hair,” the leader said to the others — her hands were in it—“Jordan has Negro hair.”
Then the leader yanked our mother’s hair.
“Ow!” our mother said.
“I had to test,” the leader said quietly to our mother, “to see if it’s real.”
“Watch out, girls!” the leader yelled. “Jordan’s hair’s got bugs in it!”
Then the girls walked away saying, “Bugs, bugs!” and after that no girl went near my mother if she could avoid it, and if by seating arrangement a girl was forced to she’d say, “Oh no, bugs!”
“After that day,” our mother told us, “I went home and begged my mother to comb my hair. But she didn’t always have time. So, many days I went around with my hair wild.”
These stories were lessons. But occasionally, if she was in the best mood, our mother would say, “My friend Haven…,” and it was only ever a snippet, and I couldn’t even tell you the stories, because they weren’t memorable. Haven and she used to go to dances together in high school. They didn’t like any of the other girls, so they would get ready together at Haven’s house and go together as “dates” and even dance together too, if they felt like it. For a while, in high school, she and Haven double-dated. And Haven ended up marrying her high school sweetheart, although my mother did not marry hers. They went to a Catholic high school in Montpelier, Vermont, and there were nuns — not memorable ones — and Haven came from a lower-middle-class family, and her parents were divorced, and she lived with her mother. Haven had two older sisters and an older brother and my mother liked to spend time at her house.
You, my brother-to-be, will have heard the story of how our mother’s mother died of cancer when our mother was ten and her father was put in a mental hospital. A boring story: when our mother was ten, her mother died, her dad went in the bin, and our mother and her sister were sent to the neighbors’. By the time my mother met Haven, she would have been living for two years with “Auntie Frances”—Frances who had four of her own girls and worked as a nurse and whom my mother has hardly spoken of since, not to me, not to Leala. She said, for example, of her childhood, “I spent most of my time at my friend Haven’s house,” not, “When I lived with Auntie Frances, I often spent the afternoon at my friend Haven’s.” There was no Frances.