Family Drama

      WHEN MY SISTER WAS 16 AND I WAS EIGHT, SHE’D MAKE me “do” things.

      Like this: just hold this apple in your mouth by taking a partial bite out of it. Yeah, like that. Now hold it, hold it … her socking the apple out from between my teeth, sending it across the room, while my little blond head shot to the left with the momentum and my teeth clacked shut on my lower lip.

      Or this: see this ashtray? Do this. Just blow in it. One, two, three.

      Ashes going all up my nose and all over my face.

      Or this: aren’t the icicles hanging from the house cool? C’mere. Put your tongue on this one. It’s pretty!

      I would have done anything.

      Lemme say from the get-go - I adored my sister to the point of going cross-eyed and fainting as a kid. I thought she was mythic. For one thing, she had the thickest, longest, most beautiful auburn hair I’d ever even heard of, better than the idiotic dolls my mother kept buying me with hair that you could pull out from the tops of their heads - Chrissy with the red-auburn hair and the shorter platinum blond Velvet. Whereas I had a kind of … Q-tip for a head. Chlorine bleached head fuzz. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull any hair out of the top of my head.

      For another thing, she could read and recite Shakespeare scenes by heart. She’d seen the R-rated “ Romeo and Juliet” - she had the album. She could paint real paintings that went on walls. She had a black portfolio almost as big as me (that I was secretly convinced could be used as a sled). She could write poems, speak French, she could play guitar, recorder, she could sing, she could ice skate. I mean really, really well. Me? Eight years younger, if you discount swimming, about the best thing I could do was dress myself. It was a banner day if I didn’t cry, pee, or rock back and forth like a little monkey.

      And she had boobs.

      Boobs were the magical thing women had. White and full and inexplicably mouthwatering.

      But when I say I would have done anything, it isn’t exactly these things. What it is: I took naïve pleasure in the small acts of humiliation, and I attached them to a feminine form. The things she made me do made my skin hot and prickly. Her beauty was stern and commanding.

      As my sister neared adulthood, my father took a keen interest in her many talents. He’d brag. And put photos of her up in his office. Just her.

      Her art teacher guided her more and more toward the world. Her watercolor paintings - giant, sexual looking flowers a little like Georgia O’ Keefe’s, her art teacher helped her to have them framed and entered into local art shows.

      She played guitar and sang in her room with the door shutting out the word family, but out in the world her art teacher helped her and a friend perform together with microphones at local venues for money. When she learned how to make giant flowers from paper, her art teacher helped her sell those, too. Her art was making a path.

      I’m not saying I figured all this out at eight. At eight, all I saw was how he looked at her hair. All I heard was his yelling every year of her development from girl to young woman, like a series of earthquakes pounding the life out of things, rattling the floors of daughter.

      And anyway, maybe I have the ages wrong. Maybe I was 10. Maybe I was 6. Maybe I was 35 and getting my second divorce. I don’t know how old we were as children. I only know my father’s anger built the house.

      Once in the entryway when she was on her way out of the door for school, he yelled “Christ you look like a bum with those jeans and that dumpy sack shirt - you trying to look like a man? You look like a goddamn man.” Peering out from behind the door of my bedroom I saw he had his face close to hers. I saw her looking at the ground under a curtain of auburn hair. Then I saw her lift her head and meet his eyes, her literature and art books at her chest like a shield. They looked almost exactly like each other. It made the fact that I had to pee hurt.

      When my sister was older, she started wearing this long, dusted gray-purple antique dress to school. And she went out sometimes with men named Victor and Park, both much older than her, men who would drive her away from our house for hours and hours, leaving my father to make a chain smoker’s chimney of our living room. Watching All in the Family. Pounding the arm of the overstuffed sofa chair.

      But the big event for me was that she moved down into the basement of the house, into some spooky bedroom we never used down there. There was nothing my father could do but watch, because my mother did it behind his back. My sister was smarter than my never-went-to-college mother by the time she was in high school, but my mother had survivor smartness. Like a savvy animal.

      The move, to me, was unbelievable - my sister moved down into the belly of a haunted house. She wanted to. I couldn’t even make it to the unfinished cement floors of the basement laundry room without an adult with me. Down the awful blue carpet stairs, down the treacherously dark and unfinished sideboards of the basement hallway. Through those unnamable smells. Those creepy dungeon sounds of knocking pipes and creaking wood. All the way to the other end of the house, into a room that I was sure I would pass out trying to get to. I remember asking my mother if someone could die from “hippoventating.”

      Sometimes I’d just stand at the top of the blue carpet stairs and look down into the throat of them wishing I could see her, and I’d lift my foot up to take a step and immediately feel VERTIGO, and then with a little wistful sigh and my throat knotting up I’d give up. Even if I ventured half way down the stairs solo, I’d start to get light headed and the skin on my chest would heat up. I’d hold the railing for dear life and say her name into space. Hoping she would come retrieve me.

      If I made it down the stairs alone to the beginning of the horror hallway - a hallway with NO LIGHTS - the only way I could get to her was to close my eyes as tight as my fists, hold my breath, and sprint . . . always arriving at the light of her door letting out this sad little breathy MAAAARRRR sound. How I managed not to hit a wall I don’t know.