One of my first memories is of my sister, shortly after she was born. It was a warm spring day, and she had been placed in a baby carriage on our gravel driveway. It had large wheels with springs that creaked, and a canopy to shield her baby skin from the sun. I remember picking up handfuls of gravel and standing on my tiptoes to drop them into the black coffin-like bed where she lay, out of sight. I did it several times, thinking perhaps I could bury her.
Since my sister was born, I was always in trouble, and I blamed her. I didn’t see why I had to be nice to her, to welcome her into the family, when I had no say in her being invited. Nothing about her arrival made sense. We are only twenty-two months apart, so perhaps I hadn’t taken notice of my mother’s growing belly, or if I had, I must not have been interested.
What I did notice though, was that the meaner I was to her the more my father loved her, and the more my mother loved me. Her arrival came with the sense that there were scores being settled and battle lines being drawn. I lorded my mother’s love over her, but she just smiled sweetly at me, secure and triumphant in our father’s love. Her innocent baby smile betrayed her- she had no idea of the evil forces, the dangers lurking all around us. I was angry- I wanted her to know what I knew. I wanted her to feel what I could feel.
She was small and weak, and I was big and strong and I liked that. Being weak and crying easily wasn’t allowed in our family- it was the worst thing you could do- so when I felt weak or like I might cry, I made her cry instead. Something about being mean to her soothed my own anxiety, but then there was the rush of guilt and self-hatred, until the cycle started over again. We were the seconds to our parent’s duels- the stand-ins for their anger and disappointment in each other.
I wanted to be strong and powerful like my father, so I bullied my little sister the way he bullied our mother. I wanted him to see that he’d got it wrong- that he should love me the most. It didn’t make sense to me- I was the strong one. I had followed his rules and hardened myself against pain and weakness- so why didn’t he love me?
But even though Michelle was our father’s pet, he wasn’t around much, and we knew that our mother was the one we were dependent on. She was a single parent with a husband who came and went as he pleased. He had girlfriends- and then one special one, who also happened to be his secretary, and he liked to go our drinking with his buddies after work. He liked to ride his motorcycles, a Norton and a BSA, and there was tennis, and ski trips with friends. In other words, he was busy.
Our mother only had us, and some girlfriends who came over for coffee and gossip, so it was clear she wasn’t the important one. I wished I saw him more, but our mother had strict instructions to have us in bed before he got home at night, sometimes he would call first to check. When he was around, it was hard, seeing the smoldering distain on his face when he spoke to her, and I blamed her for not being what he wanted. When he looked at her with exasperation, I did the same, hoping he would see my face, hoping to win his approval.
My mother gave birth to our baby brother just after Christmas and my father’s secretary had his baby a few months later. He got mad that our mother wouldn’t go to the baby shower. “What will people think?” he railed at our mother. His secretary was also married. People might talk if the boss’s wife didn’t attend.
I was usually in charge of my little brother and sister, especially when our mother was sad or stressed. It was the ‘70’s after all- before seatbelts, helmets, and padded playgrounds. Children were just small adults who could be trained to do, and did, all sorts of things. A seven-year-old was considered plenty capable of looking after their younger siblings. This led to all manner of calamity, but it was just considered the natural course of things back then. Sure, kids got hit by cars and drowned in rivers, but those things were considered tragic accidents, things that couldn’t have been helped. No one tried to figure out who’s fault it was every time something went wrong. Today my mother prides herself on the fact that she would always say “If anyone dies Denise, it’s not your fault” as she stood smiling in the doorway, waving goodbye. To her way of thinking, she was ahead of the times, looking after my mental health just in case something went wrong. Equally strange is the fact that it worked- I was comforted by her reassurance.
Like the time my little brother decided to run away. We were fighting- so he went into his bedroom, got his blow-up globe, and headed out the back door- he wasn’t allowed to cross the street out front. I remember staring out the window over the kitchen sink and placidly watching him make his way down the gentle slope of our rural back yard, which eventually turned into a field, and then a creek, and then there was the Hayes’s farm, which was separated from our property by a barbed wire fence. Rex was still small enough that he had to hold onto the globe with both hands, which impeded his visibility as he ventured forward into his new life. I watched as he made his first few steps into the long grass of the field before I lost interest and walked away.
A very short time later a sobbing Rex could be heard banging on the back door. He had accidentally stepped into a nest of bunnies in the field, where the grass came up to his elbows, and was sure he had killed one. He was hysterical, just inconsolable, and I knew it was all my fault. I felt sick with remorse and ran back outside with him on my hip to look for the nest. His grief was heartbreaking. Unfortunately, it was nearly dark, and once we entered the long grass we couldn’t find the nest, even though we looked for a long time.
It wasn’t so bad when someone got hurt, but when things like that happened, I really wished my mother was around. His innocence crushed me. Just like my sister, he didn’t seem to understand that innocence wasn’t for us. Innocence was for other children, but it wasn’t a luxury we could afford. I hated that they didn’t understand that, and I hated that I was the one who had to teach them. So much of childhood happens when the adults aren’t looking.
My little brother was beautiful in that way that only little boys can be beautiful- before they realize they are boys. He was all curly blond hair and wide unblinking blue eyes. I remember sitting across from him at the kid’s table in my bedroom and giving him a manicure. While I painted his nails, I told him that he was really a girl, but that our parents didn’t want him to know. I said that the only reason I was telling him was because I was his one true friend. I remember him looking up at me, then back down at his nails, and then back up at me again, impressed by this rite of passage. He was too young to understand that what I was telling him was bad, that it was a bad thing, being a girl. When I finished his nails, he just stood up and walked over to another toy and started playing.
Rex was sort of a prodigy when it came to breaking bones and getting into physically precarious situations. We spent a lot of time in the emergency room, which is surprising, considering my mother believed that there were very few things that required medical intervention. For instance- broken fingers and toes don’t really matter. They just don’t. They are things that happen in the normal course of one’s life. You can mention it once or twice, like, “I really think I broke my finger”, or “Here, look at this”, but that was it. According to my mother, doctors can’t really do anything about it, so it’s best to just wrap it in ice for a bit and get on with things. I didn’t find out until much later that that’s not true. It’s amazing what kids will believe.
Her other rule was, no band aids unless you are bleeding on the carpet or the furniture. That’s what Band-Aids are for, she said, to keep blood off the upholstery because bloodstains are hard to wash out. Stitches though, were optional, or at least up for debate. We used those things called “Steri-Strips” that you can get from the drug store. I don’t know why more people don’t know about Steri-Strips- they really do work. Once I ran into the front door, excited to see my father, and split my head open, vertically, right through my right eyebrow. My mother surprised me when she announced we were going to the hospital to get stitches. I started crying because I didn’t like needles and ran to my father to plead my case. He said it should be up to me, and my mother said, “Fine, if you want a big gapping scar on your face then fine, it’s up to you, but you’ll be sorry when you get older.” So now I have a scar across my eyebrow where no hair grows, so I look like a rapper, or a gang member- only mine is permanent.
Rex once broke his foot sliding down a pole at the playground. He couldn’t hold on to the pole properly because his arm was broken. The doctor who was examining his foot in the emergency room asked to see his arm and discovered that my mother had cut apart his plaster cast with a hacksaw so it could be removed for swimming. Back then you couldn’t get casts wet or they would disintegrate. Most people in those circumstances used a bread bag over the cast and secured it with a rubber band- but I guess she got tired of doing that. When Rex got out of the water, she would duct taped it back together. The doctor was not impressed, nor did he think it was funny like my mother did. When she saw he was serious she explained that she was a lifeguard, so swimming was a necessity. Becoming a lifeguard was my mother’s big career move after the divorce when we were suddenly poor. During the school year she drove a bus- but I’m getting ahead of myself. We spent every day at the pool, from opening to closing, all summer long- because it was free. We were supervised by everyone and no one. We were very tan children.
Rex broke his arm when we were all down by the creek in the backyard after a big flood, and the creek was all clogged up with branches and debris that needed to be cleared away. When Rex fell of the fallen tree he’d been playing on, my mother said, “O.K. Rex, up to the house and into the bathtub, I don’t want to see a filthy arm coming out of a cast in six weeks.” Of course, she said this in a high spirited and jocular manner, but she meant it, and it was clear that this was all she had to offer in the way of consolation.
I remember seeing him standing silently next to our mother, his left arm dangling in that awful way that arms dangle when there is a compound fracture, his right hand reaching up to hold my mother’s hand as she gave me instructions. Rex was probably about five, which would have made me about ten. I watched them turn and walk away, trudging up through the field that led to our little cape-cod style house, in what was still a rural area of central New Jersey, and then I went back to playing with my little sister in the creek. I wondered how long they’d be gone. I felt sad and mad that my brother wasn’t crying, that he just stood there sweetly with his dangling arm, waiting patiently for our mother to finish with her instructions before he followed her back up to the house. I wanted to bash the innocence out of him. I wanted to make sure he could survive. But I also wanted him to cry because him not crying felt dangerous somehow.
Because I was pretty sure it wasn’t a good thing that Rex wasn’t crying, and because I was afraid it would be late at night before my mother got home, I pushed my sister to make her cry. She hit me back hard with a stick and that made me feel a little better. Then I realized that now that my mother was gone, we could wade barefoot in the creek. I wasn’t supposed to do that because the creek sometimes had broken glass in it and if you get cut by glass you could get tetanus, which was the only thing our mother ever seemed to worry about. She was terrified of things that would never happen, like airplanes falling out of the sky, or falling on a glass and having a shard pierce your heart, but she never worried about the real things that could happen. She was certain we would all get tetanus if we didn’t wash all our cuts out with hydrogen peroxide. She thought peroxide could fix anything.
For the most part, Rex seemed to live in his own private world, miraculously excused from whatever was going on between my mother and father and Michelle and me. He wasn’t really expected to do much of anything but hang out and play. I figured that was just because he was the youngest and a boy. I was jealous of other families where the brothers and sisters aligned themselves against their parents as the common enemy.
In our house it was every kid for themselves. We had moments of solidarity, but they were slippery and clouded by a strange paranoia. Our father was never around, and it seemed like there was only so much of our mother’s love to go around. Being the oldest, I could push the hardest to get her attention. Or maybe I just needed it more. I knew how to make her laugh when she was sad, and I knew how to take her mind off things she didn’t want to think about. Or maybe I just tried harder.
I was my mother’s champion, her little star. I was the myth that my mother needed to believe in. I was brave and I was strong. I could do anything better than anyone and I was not afraid of anything. I was the person who was never sad or afraid, who could do back flips when the other kids were doing cartwheels, and keep a room full of adults laughing ‘till they held their stomachs- but the biggest lie of all was that I could do it all without ever even trying. For a long time, I believed this too.
I was always “on” and I couldn’t stop performing, even for myself. I told myself stories about how happy I was- about how great my life was. I was popular, always joking around and acting like I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. But I couldn’t get enough adulation. I was driven by the fear that if I didn’t keep everyone happy and laughing, if I left a moment unfilled, that we would all realize how miserable we were, and I would be punished for that.
I was afraid of the horrible truths that might be spoken if I paused long enough to take a breath between acts. I was afraid of everything and everyone, but I could never admit to having any fear. The plan only worked if I wasn’t afraid. If my father and mother agreed on anything, it was that fear was despicable. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew it was a luxury we just didn’t have.