Phillip eventually followed me to Eugene. He lived on the other side of town. We barely saw each other. He worked at Smith Family Bookstore, I went to school in English. Sometimes we’d run into each other, and lock eyes, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d put my hand on my belly to feel what was there between us. It was all I had to give to him.
Here it is. What I didn’t want to say before. It’s me. I’m the reason we went busto. I could not take his gentle kindness. But neither could I kill it.
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.
But in her room. Being in her room was like being inside a painting. Our grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts with the colors of the seasons spread out across her bed. Music and books and candles and wooden boxes with jewelry or shells or feathers in them. Incense and brushes and combs and dried flowers. Paint brushes and big squares of paper and drawing pencils. Velvet dresses and leather moccasins and jeans with legs shaped like big As. A guitar. A recorder. A record player. With speakers.
In her room you would never know the torture pit of the laundry room was three feet away.
She’d let me get in bed with her, and we’d move around under the covers, our body heat remaking a womb. “ Watercolor covers,” she’d say, and I’d nearly hippoventate with pleasure. Sometimes I held my breath or made little repetitive circles between my fingers and thumbs. Smiling like a giddy little troll. Girl skin smell making me high.
Getting back upstairs was nothing, because she’d escort me, and I’d be back in the upperworld of things.
What an imaginative leap she made to leave us and live down there that year. How much I didn’t understand where the danger lived.
When my sister was in high school we got a phone call. My sister was underneath a table in the Art Lab, telling her art teacher Baudette very calmly but with complete certainty that she was not going home.
Ever.
My parents had to go see the officials at the school, and the art teacher, Baudette, who my sister had made into her better family, explained to my ding headed mother that my sister couldn’t be around my father. That mandatory
counseling sessions would happen. I thought her teacher’s names were magical. Mr. Foubert. Mr. Saari. Baudette. I sat in the corner of the school office eating a little piece of paper trying not to cry.
I still remember the counselor’s name. Dr. Akudagawa. I remember how I had to stay with friends of my parents when the three of them abandoned me for sessions. How my father never went into the basement. How she rarely came up.
How my sister got closer and closer to the final act of leaving for college: exeunt daughter, stage left.
How my father’s rage came to live in the house for good.
How I would be what was left of her, when she gave me a piece of her hair as a keepsake.
How my father’s eyes would turn.
This is Not About my Sister
THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT MY SISTER. BUT IF IT WERE, I’d tell you again that for two years before she could leave our Oedipal household she carried razor blades in her purse.
I’d tell you how her colon was irrevocably messed up - how as a child I sat in the bathroom with her and held her hand every time she tried to poo. How she squeezed my little girl hand so tight I thought it might be crushed. Because it hurt that bad to shit.
I’d tell you how she was born with a wandering eye, and what the Dr. who later delivered me wrote about what that might mean for infants like her - how to watch for it as a sign of danger in a child. How fathers or uncles or grandfathers might have had a hand in this particular kind of eye disorder - in certain sexual abuse cases - a penis coming too close to the still developing eyes of a child.
I’d tell you how, in the end, my sister replaced my mother and father in my mind and heart, how we created a union of survival that means we are both still alive.
If this book were about my sister, I’d tell you how she lived past daughter.
And I’d show you a picture.
A Simca station wagon. Maybe white. Maybe wood paneling.
My father loved the Northwest. He loved to explore the mountains and rivers and lakes. He loved to fish and camp and hike. But his wife had a misshapen leg not good for walking and he had two daughters instead of sons, so his disappointment always came with us everywhere we went. We could never hike far enough. Never carry enough weight. Never go as deeply into the wilderness. We couldn’t fish right. We had to pee sitting down and we needed toilet paper. A crippled wife and two daughters. We couldn’t even breathe right. Ever.
The Christmas I was four and my sister was 12 we drove and drove. From I-5 to Puyallup. Past Enumclaw. East on highway 7 to Elbe. Onto Highway 706 east through Ashford to Alexander’s. Then there is the entrance to Mt. Rainier National Park. I have driven it many times as an adult. That’s how I remember the path. Or so I tell myself.
But what I remember then is how bright the sun shone on the white - like an overexposed winter everywhere. How we got out of the car and made a snowman - my sister and my father and I. How we decorated the snowman with plastic Easter eggs that were in the car. How my mother laughed and wore her sunglasses and sat on the tailgate.
But too I remember my father’s voice when we drove fur - ther, and I fell asleep, and my sister began to read a book: “ What are you two doing, playing with yourselves? I bring you through the most beautiful scenery in the world and you are playing grab-ass? LOOK OUT THE GODDAMN WINDOW.” So we did. Silently. The side of my sister’s face looked as if it was made of stone. My ears burned.
We were dressed for our front yard - for maybe snowball fights with neighbor kids or going sledding. Running inside for new socks and hot chocolate. We had no food or water or blankets or radio or anything. Except a half finished plaid thermos of coffee. And matches. Both of my parents chain-smoked. My sister and I by this point were used to riding in the car like prisoners. Our father drove us to Mt. Rainier to get a tree. A goddamn tree. In the beautiful goddamn northwest.
The place we stopped to get the tree to me looked like the middle of nowhere. The “road” filled with more and more snow. The drive became steep - switchbacks and a permanent tilt to the Simca station wagon that kept my head pinned to the back seat. The heater in the car blew full blast. On the sides of the barely there road enormous evergreens and firs rose up like giant snow covered sentries. Beautiful but vaguely ominous. To me anyway. I couldn’t crane my neck hard enough to see the tops. Where he pulled over the trees were enormous. I remember wondering how we’d drag one back to our house … with a giant rope?
Where my father pulled over and stopped the car, my mother said, “ Mike?”
My father didn’t say anything. He simply made ready to get out of the car. So the little women followed him.
My mother wore a wool lined long gray raincoat with a faux fur raccoon collar and gold metal fasteners. Pointy movie star sunglasses. Her hair in a bun wrapped and wrapped on her head. Red lipstick. My sister wore a light ski jacket and red pants and a white fake fur hat with snowball ties and cotton kid gloves and black rubber K-Mart boots. I wore red corduroy pants and a smaller brown version of my sister’s hat with the pom pom ties and red galoshes and black cotton gloves - I remember our red pants because they stood out so in the snow. Like blood and urine do. And my mother made them. My father wore jeans and a fleece lined suede jacket and blond leather gloves. He pulled a handsaw from the back of the station wagon. And a rope. And my sister’s hand.
My mother and I immediately got behind on the ascent up the snow-covered hill. Think about this - my mother’s misshapen steps hobbling up and up. Me only four years old. Within five minutes the snow was up to my hips. Within 20 minutes up to my chin. My mother, again and again, pulled me out of a snow hole until I sunk into the next. The only way I experienced how cold it was happened in my mother’s voice when she yelled up to the dots of my father and sister getting smaller and farther up the hill, “ Mike! Lidia is blue!” That and my teeth clattering.
I remember seeing him turn and look down at us. I remember his yelling something I couldn’t understand, then turning away from us. I remember him grabbing my sister’s arm, and though I couldn’t know this back then, I know now he wrenched her farther up with him.
“ Well, shit.” My mother’s drawl made me laugh. But I was shivering and I felt wet. All over.
Somehow my mother and I made it back down the hill to the car, though I remember nearly drowning a couple times in snow past my head and my mother yanking me back to air and sky. So much sun I could barely keep my little blue eyes open.
In the car, my mother said “ Belle, take all your clothes off.” But I just sat there numb like a kid Popsicle. So she took all my clothes off. They were drenched. She placed the red weighted garments over the seats. She turned the car on. She blasted the heater and made me get on the floor where your feet go. She took off that weird coat with the raccoon collar and wrapped it around me like a tent. When I looked up at her, she said something I never forgot the rest of my life. She said, “ Lidabelle. Pretend I am Becky Boone, and you are Israel Boone, and this is our adventure!”
I pretended immediately. Not only did I watch Daniel Boone all the time and love it, but I looked exactly like Israel. I laughed and smiled and forgot about how cold I was. I forgot my father was my father. Somewhere out there was Daniel Boone. A man. A big man.
My mother dug through her coat pocket and found butterscotch candies and we ate them. She made me drink coffee from the plaid thermos. It tasted like hot liquid dirt. But she said, “ Remember, you are Israel Boone! You can do anything! When we get home I’ll make you a buckskin shirt!”
It was a lie. A beautiful, stunningly creative, lifesaving lie.
When I felt better I looked out of the front car window to see if I could see my father and my sister. All I saw was the brilliant blue sky - all the sun and all the white made me have to squint. Plus the windows kept fogging up so I had to keep rubbing a see-through circle with my hand. My mother made me sing songs with her. I see the moon. You are my sunshine. The bear goes over the mountain.
I know what I f
elt at first. I felt ecstatic. To be alone with my mother. Singing. Wrapped inside her southern drawl, her raccoon coat, her story of us as Becky and Israel Boone. But even at age four my chest got tight after a while. I never lived a day without the squeeze of sister around my heart. Where. Was. She.
When my mother looked out of the car window and up the hill, her eye twitched.
Even at that age I knew how Christmas would be. My father would sit in a sofa recliner smoking and silent. Presiding. My sister would open presents looking like a girl doing chores. I would open presents with the know nothing glee of a kid and look around at them all. My mother would clap and laugh. Then something - nearly anything - would happen, and my father’s anger would crush even the faintest tenderness, and my sister and I would be left alone in the living room with piles of wrapping paper to clean up. The smell of a fresh cut fir tree and cigarettes.
By the time I saw the blurry figures of a big man and a girl coming down the mountain I was sleepy. So they looked like dream people to me. My mother said, “Oh thank god,” as they approached the car, but I could hear something else in her voice.
That’s the picture I would show you - the way my sister looked through the window of the Simca station wagon. Her cheeks like apples. Her eyes puffy. My father had a hold of her arm. She looked like her legs didn’t work right. My mother rolled the window down and I saw snot under my sister’s nose. Was she crying? She did not make any sound. But she shivered. Then my sister looked straight at me. I bit my lip. Her eyes more cold than snow. That’s the picture.
I remember the ride home. The long silence. To my knowledge, we did not bring home a tree. But we did bring home everything that was our family, laden. So laden.