When did you realize you wanted a brother like their brothers instead of one who was interested in your crushes and jealousies and rivalries?
But both of those ring a bit a hollow. They’re excuses, neither of them completely true. Anyway, my impatient little sister would never understand concepts like erosion and accretion and evolution. She needs a moment, an instant that changed everything, a gunshot, an explosion, a confrontation, the Big Bang. She needs a wound we can lance so we can move on with the healing. Except I can’t think of any single cruel act she’s ever perpetrated that deserves such unrelenting hostility. Well, maybe one.
“You are such a faggot,” I say.
“What?” she asks, taken back, her suspicions confirmed. I have lost my mind.
“Not you. Me,” I say.
“What are you talking about?”
“You are such a faggot.”
“You aren’t making sense. Sometimes I think you’re crazy,” she says, her voice getting in pitch for the argument that’s beginning. This is the stuff she’s made for. In ten minutes, she wants us sobbing, collapsing in each other’s arms, competing in contriteness for all our past mistakes, pledging undying fealty.
I repeat the mantra again, frustrating any attempts at quick angry retorts. She needs to serve and volley. I keep hitting junk balls, soft lobs she can’t swing at.
“What’s your point? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No. I do not.”
I search for a few facts for backdrop, but my recall betrays me, coming up short. All I can retrieve is a stray moment, isolated, stripped of context. I’m standing at the open refrigerator door, poking around loosely wrapped moldy cheese, disgusted, whining, probably squealing, and sounding like a bratty little girl.
You are such a faggot, my sister, behind me, says.
I hid my face in the ketchup bottles and milk containers until she walked away. Five little words that branded me, irrevocably. How old was she? Who knows? I can’t remember anything else about that day, not the month, not the year, not if it was summer or winter, not if it was dark or light. All that survives is that one blazing minute, seared into my memory, the act of betrayal, the sharp kick in the guts, completely unexpected, by my loyal ally, the girl who had always put her thick orthopedic saddle shoes to good use, bruising the shins of our enemies.
I should have pulled my head out of that refrigerator and punched or slapped her, taking a lesson from her book. One gesture to ensure she would never forget what she did to me that day. Some violent act to teach her the consequences of turning against me, abandoning me, leaving me with nothing left to rely on but the benevolent protection of my mother. But I let her walk away with her bowl of chocolate ice cream, and today she has no recollection of this life-changing event. It’s as lost to her as a single grain of sand tossed back on the beach, indistinguishable and irretrievable.
“I don’t know what you are talking about. I really don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” I repeat, halfhearted, unwilling to concede the insignificance of the remark.
“How old was I?” she asks.
“Old enough. I can’t remember. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“So you hate me because of some stupid remark I made twenty-five years ago. Do you think I even knew what the word meant at that age? Maybe you did. Remember, you were the smart one.”
She pours the last of the wine into her glass, drains it, and opens another bottle. I anticipate a head-on assault, a blistering attack, anything but unconditional surrender.
“I give up. You win. I don’t care anymore. How many times have I tried to reach out to you? For years, I blamed that wife of yours. Oh, sorry. I forgot. We’re not supposed to mention the perfect Alice. I guess I can tell you now I never liked her, hated the way you were when you were with her, the two of you in your own little world, laughing over some private joke you thought everyone else was too stupid to get. I suppose I should feel sorry for her now for putting up with you all those years. You’re a coldhearted bastard, you know that, don’t you?”
Yes, Gina, I know that.
I’ve got a hole where my heart used to be.
“You wouldn’t understand” is my feeble response. I could ask her how she would have felt if I had called her a fatty or teased her about peeing her pants. But I know that I did-many times-and she’s either forgotten or forgiven the careless cruelties of childhood.
“You’re right,” she says, stubbing out her cigarette. “I don’t understand, you asshole.”
But you’d understand even less if I followed you back to the kitchen and tried to explain that I don’t hate you. You’re being punished for all those things you know about me that I want to forget, for having a front-row seat to all the humiliations, usually self-inflicted, I endured. Sorry, Regina, I hate that little boy you loved and you’re collateral damage. You try to talk to me about your sad little son, thinking I’ll understand, maybe offer some insight or at least some friendly support. Why would you think I have any insight into that pathetic kid? Don’t you remember your wedding day, how you confronted me about my reprehensible behavior, not understanding how or why I could be so mean to Randall Jarvis? He’d gotten shamefully drunk, reeling from my cruel remark, intended to wound.
“Come on, he’s rich. He’s famous. He’s a big boy,” I said, defending myself.
“Yeah, but he remembers what it meant to be the little boy he was back then,” she said, the one and only time she went for the kill. “Obviously, you’ve forgotten.”
Not if you won’t let me, Regina. And you’re not getting another chance, I think, retreating to the sofa and my television, remote control in hand, ready to crank up the volume in the all-too-likely event my sister has some further afterthought she feels compelled to share.
Help!
“Gina!” I scream, jumping to my feet, forgetting until it’s too late the hole in my hip.
“What? What?” she shouts, panicking, running in from the kitchen and stopping dead in her tracks to gasp at the unexpected sight of the Fab Four cutting up on the Alpine slopes in their goofy cloaks and funny hats.
“Oh my God,” she says.
We’ve seen it a dozen times. A hundred. Maybe a thousand. No, a million!
“Oh, Paul,” she says, swooning like a little girl again.
I love cable. Thank God there’s plenty of beer and wine in the house. It’s a Beatles marathon. After Help!, A Hard Day’s Night.
“It’s the better movie.”
“It’s black and white,” she argues.
“So?”
“Why couldn’t they have made it in color?”
“Black and white is better. It’s more expressive.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is. Color is too literal.”
“Oh just shut up. I love this song,” she says, still insisting, despite the visual evidence otherwise, it’s Paul, not John, singing lead vocals on “If I Fell.”
“I do too,” I say, not wanting to argue.
Suddenly it’s four in the morning and I’m up in the attic, tearing through boxes, not bothering to reseal them when I don’t find what I’m looking for. I won’t be deterred. I know they’re up here somewhere.
“Ta-dah!” I shout.
“Did you find them?”
“Yep.”
And, praise God, they aren’t warped after decades of hibernation in this sweatbox of an attic. Leave it to my mother to pack them so tightly, so expertly, that moisture and heat hasn’t destroyed them. I have a moment of drunken insight. This is what she preserved them for. Tonight.
My sister and I argue over which record to play first. Finally we compromise and drop a stack on the spindle.
“Oh, God, do you remember…”
As my mother would say, no pun intended, we sound like a broken record.
Do you remember this?
Do you remember that?
Do you remember him?
Do you remember her?
And so the night passes, nothing resolved, nothing settled. But for a few hours, we blast Rubber Soul and Revolver loud enough to wake the dead and stay pleasantly smashed and I am the ten-year-old she loved and she is eight and I can love her back and all the years of polite estrangement still lie in the future.