Sour Heart Page 16

  —

  One winter, when I was home from college, I went outside in the dark, crossed the playground behind my house, and followed a narrow road up a hill. I forgot my glasses and for a while, I sat on a patch of grass, looking down at the town where I spent my adolescence, the town my family had moved to not long after my brother was born. The streetlights appeared as big as tangerines, blurry and orange. What I wanted was for someone to come looking for me, for someone to worry about me, for two adults to argue about me. I wanted everyone I knew and everyone I could know one day to wonder about me, to think of me as if I were the last Popsicle on earth, and oh no, before anyone got to eat me, I had already gone ahead and melted entirely! What I wanted was for someone to kneel down on the ground and lick the red sugary water of mememememememe curving and rolling down streets half-paved in asphalt. I worried about a world where my existence barely mattered. A world where I did not exist at all. Maybe that was the world I was headed to. Maybe that was the world I deserved.

  —

  After a month of kindergarten, my brother still couldn’t write his name on a sheet of paper, and the teacher, Ms. Notice, was concerned and sent him home with a note.

  “A notice from Ms. Notice,” I said, skipping around our living room, the happiest I’d been all day. He smiled when I ripped it up into four pieces, but pulled at my sleeve when I put one of them in my mouth. “You’ll die.”

  “I won’t.” We worked on spelling his name for a good hour.

  “The letters go next to each other, retard,” I said.

  “Ass.”

  “What?” I looked at him in shock. “What did you say?”

  “Penis.”

  I was tired. I felt on the brink of a deep, stirring sleep. “Let’s go outside and throw the ball around.” I took the pen from him and flung it across the room.

  We went out in the lingering September heat. I threw the ball up and neither of us caught it. Then my brother picked up the ball and threw it into the tree. It was stuck up there. “You’re good at throwing. I’ve never seen a ball go so high.”

  “I know,” he said.

  I wanted to hug him, to kiss his cheek until it was sore, but I knew he was getting older. He would protest, he would one day no longer hug his arms around my legs because he was short, or make a fist around my pinky when I picked him up from school, or crawl into my bed with his wet hair and face, no longer say it hurts me to leave you before going to his friend’s house, or I missed you all day after coming back, because he would get old, and I would get even older. Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, we would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about “family” we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from. From that point on, I would refer to him as “your uncle” and he would mostly refer to me as “your aunt” and it would take a long time for our children to even understand that we were siblings first, but more than that, our children, just as we hadn’t, would likely not think much about a time before they were born, a time when he was my brother and I was his sister, and together, we were our parents’ children.

  II.

  The year I moved out to California for college, we talked on the phone every week. It was hard to hear him through all the tears in the beginning. Then it was every other week, and by the time I was a senior, our mother had to order him to stay on the phone for at least five minutes a month.

  “Do you miss me?” I asked him during one of our recent five minutes.

  “Yeah, kinda, but sometimes I forget about you.”

  “I would never forget about you.”

  “Do you want to talk to Mom?”

  Now I had to learn about him from my mother. Last week, she reported over the phone, he ate a penny. “Total freak thing,” she said.

  “Let me talk to him,” I said.

  “Hold on, I just have to check if I have any money in my wallet.”

  “Why?”

  “Your dad and I have started giving him a few bucks to talk to you.”

  “Fucking fantastic.”

  When he was five, he told me he had put his finger down his throat and accidentally threw up a bit. “But, I swallowed most of it back down,” he had said at the time.

  “You only did it the one time, right?”

  “I did it other times too.”

  “How many other times? Two? Three?”

  “Fifty to sixty.”

  “Holy shit. I don’t get it. Do you not like the way your body looks or something?”

  “I just wanted to see what would happen if I put my finger down there.”

  “You know what happens—you throw up, develop an eating disorder, and then you die.”

  “You can die from that?”

  “From making yourself vomit every day? Oh, for sure.”

  “No, from putting your finger down your throat? What if you die right after doing it?”

  “What is with you? Stop putting your finger down your throat, dude.”

  “Get this,” I told my friends at school the next day. “My five-year-old brother has an eating disorder. How is that even possible?”

  When my brother was starting third grade and I was starting senior year of high school, our grandparents came and lived with us in New York for six months and brought an electric bug racket from China with a tag attached that had a skull and crossbones above big bold letters: WATCH OUT! ELECTROCUTES PROBABLE.

  “What the heck are electrocutes?” my brother asked me.

  “Oh, it’s a typo. It means you could get electrocuted if you touch the racket when it’s on. So, don’t touch it, okay?”

  “Never,” our mother said, popping her head into my brother’s room. “Never never never never never never never ever touch.”

  “Okay, okay,” my brother and I said. “We get it. Can you please get out?”

  But my brother was haunted by the racket. He rolled up pieces of paper and pressed the tips against the racket.

  “I saw sparks,” he told me later.

  “Seriously, stop obsessing. Leave it alone, okay?”

  But he couldn’t. He wanted to put his finger on the racket. He said his friend Harrison touched his lips to the racket and had to wear a bandage over his mouth for a month. All the parents we knew were calling up their parents in China to tell them to stop bringing over the electric rackets. “Do you want your grandchildren to have lips or not?” I heard my mother asking my grandmother in the kitchen one evening.

  “I touched it,” my brother told me the same week his friend Harrison burned off his lips.

  “Oh my God. Why?”

  “I just did it for a second, to see what would happen. For some reason my brain is telling me to touch it again. What happens if I put my mouth on it?”

  I took the batteries out of the racket and tossed them into a pile of logs in our backyard. The year after that, I went away to college, and in my extended absence, my brother found the electric racket hidden behind a suitcase in the basement. He told our parents to get rid of it permanently, and they laughed and called me on the phone and said, “Your brother is still our little sweet baby. He’s just trying to get attention, you know?” To that I said, “Please. Please pay attention to him, then,” and to that my mother said, “Of course I’m paying attention. You think I just ignore him?” and to that I said, “Why do you always call me when I’m trying to study? Every minute I talk to you is one point less on my midterm next week.”

  Several years after my brother tried to burn his lips on an electric bug racket, and many years after I accidentally burned my brother’s hair with a candle, I found out he would sometimes light a candle and wave his index finger back and forth through the flame. Sometimes, he would hold a knife up to his own throat and inch it along the growing hairs on his neck, daring himself to get close enough to draw blood. He would swing his keychain near his mouth, letting the key graze his lips. He would dip the ke
y into the back of his throat until he gagged before yanking it back up. “I just wanted to see what would happen,” he said to me on the phone, again and again and again. “I kept thinking, What if I swallowed the key? What if the knife pierced my skin?”

  “What if,” I said. “What if you start wondering what would happen if you jumped off a bridge? What if you start wondering what would happen if you held a loaded gun to your head? What if you die trying to figure out what if? Then what? Then you’re dead.”

  After my brother ate the penny, he called our mother at work and told her that he had eaten something he wasn’t supposed to and that his stomach felt weird and he wanted to go to the hospital. She rushed home, weaved through traffic on the LIE, and drove my brother to the emergency room, where, behind partially closed curtains, a doctor with a glass eye put his finger up my brother’s butt and said, “You have some hard stools lodged up there. Other than that, everything’s fine. But tell me something. You’re thirteen years old. Most of the kids who do this kind of thing, eating pennies and quarters and tree bark and tacks and Happy Meal toys—you name it and I’ve seen it—most of the kids doing things like this are four and five years old. You’re thirteen. Don’t you know better?”

  “Did it make you feel bad?” I asked my brother on the phone after our mother bribed him with a twenty to talk to me.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t care that the doctor put his finger up my butt.”

  “No, not that. I mean when the doctor said the thing about you being too old to eat pennies.”

  “I wasn’t eating pennies.”

  “Swallowing, whatever. Did it make you feel weird when the doctor said the thing about you being too old to do this kind of thing?”

  “I guess. Dunno.”

  “Why did you eat the penny in the first place?”

  “Not eat, swallow.”

  “Whatever. Stop being so specific about everything. Stop correcting. Why did you try to swallow the penny in the first place?”

  “Uh-un-uh,” he responded, his shortcut for I dunno. “The thought just came into my mind. I kept thinking, What if I swallowed a penny? What if it got stuck in my throat? Would I die from a stuck penny? I was thinking it so much I couldn’t sleep. I figured, instead of wondering what if, I should just do it. I’m not stupid. I just wanted to know.”

  “But you can’t know. And if you die from these experiments, you still won’t know. You’ll be dead. Dead people don’t know because they’re dead. Are you depressed or something? You can tell me. It’s okay to be depressed. I can help you.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not that. I just can’t stop wondering, What if?”

  “It’s perfectly normal to be depressed at your age. I mean, look at how I was. A complete fucking nightmare of a human being. Do you remember how I would just shut myself up in my room and sob over nothing?”

  “True. You were an extremely difficult teenager,” my mother said. “So listen, your brother went to play videogames. He said his five minutes were up.”

  “Can’t you give him more money?”

  “No. Not right now. He has too much to do.”

  “You just said he went up to play videogames.”

  “What are you having for dinner tonight? Anything yummy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, petulant. “Pennies stir-fried with garlic.”

  —

  He was three and I was twelve when our parents bought our house in Glen Cove. We had successfully done something people studied in academic textbooks—we became upwardly mobile. We moved from our mostly working-class Puerto Rican and Korean neighborhood in Queens to a named community (its namesake was J. P. Morgan, the very tycoon my father worked twelve hours a day for, the reason why we never ever saw him) in a mostly upper-middle-class white neighborhood on Long Island. Everywhere we went and looked there was unused space, there was room for two people to never have to touch each other or breathe in the same approximate air. There was silence to fill, grass that had never been trampled on, trees with undisturbed spiderwebs. Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, I was the first person to come back to the house on weekday afternoons. I had about forty-five minutes to myself before my brother came home, five hours until I had to cover up everything that went on in our house before our mother returned from work, and eight or nine or ten hours before our father came home and checked in on us. We would wait up for him in our pajamas, having done everything we needed to do that day besides see him. Sometimes if I was in a selfish mood, I’d pretend to be asleep in my bed to avoid the five or so minutes I had with my father at the end of the day—it wasn’t like I was ever going to know him this way. But still, adding another day to the stack of days I missed out on knowing my father was immense and weighed on me like a millstone in a fairy tale. In a way, we were in a fairy tale—all those hours my brother and I spent alone in an empty house together, and all the times I tried to get my brother to believe that our parents had died, that I had just gotten off the phone with a police officer who found them mangled and lifeless, covered in the bloody shrapnel of a massive car wreck.

  “It’s just you and me now,” I would say to him. “Who do you think is going to take care of us?”

  “Our aunt and uncle will,” my brother would sob. “We’ll go to China and live with Grandma and Grandpa.”

  “No can do. They already said they won’t take us. It’s in the will. If Mom and Dad die, we’re on our own.”

  We were already on our own. We lived in a split-level house with windows on every level, sliding French doors in the kitchen that led out to a small deck, two skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room, four sets of windows in the family room, two windows in each bedroom. We were told to keep all the blinds tightly shut and all the curtains closed. “So that no one knows you’re home alone,” our mother explained. Sometimes though, I would pull up the blinds anyway. I would draw the curtains and let in the light from outside. So what if we were seen? So what if our secret was revealed? What did I care if someone saw me at home, eating cake and drinking coffee, heating up frozen pizza in the microwave and cutting it into bite-sized pieces for my brother? Why shouldn’t someone have seen me holding up a fireplace poker high in the air, aimed at my brother’s forehead for no other reason except that he annoyed me, when all he had to defend himself against me was a useless plastic bat—why shouldn’t someone have seen and intervened? I had never been a worse adult than when I was still a kid.

  “Will they take us away,” my brother asked our parents, “if they see us?”

  “Yes, they will,” our mother said.

  “Jenny,” my brother said, pleading with me one of the afternoons when I told him that our parents had died in a car accident. He was pulling on my arm to stop me from drawing up the blinds. “We can’t let anyone see us.”

  “You stupid idiot,” I said. “Everyone already knows.”

  III.

  I am home this week, visiting my family before I go back to my life in California. As soon as I enter the front door, I remember my old self—restless, moody, lonely, rageful. When I go through my closet, I find my old laptop from high school that my brother would use from time to time, afternoons when he wanted to be near me but I didn’t feel like interacting with him so I would give him my laptop. There weren’t any computer games installed. He mostly drew pictures on Microsoft Paint that he tried to show me but I always said, “Later, when I have time.” After I went away to college, he used my laptop a few more times to write poems for school. One of them was about me and he read it out loud over the phone:

  “I have a sister

  Once she chased me with a big metal thing.

  I found a yellow plastic bat

  And I fought back with courage!”

  “So did you win the poetry contest?”

  “No, the kid who wrote about his grandmother who survived the Holocaust did.”

  “Seems rigged,” I said.

  “It’s not.”

&
nbsp; I look at the poem again and then go through some other files, including one called “Fight on Dirt,” a painting of magenta, lime-green, and teal-blue stick figures on brown mud. I see another file named “Power Rain,” which I remember seeing a long time ago but never opened. I wondered briefly back then what “power rain” was—massive droplets of rain, each one fat enough to contain an armed soldier ready for combat, hitting the ground, causing tremors in the earth?

  I open up the file and realize the full name is actually “Power Rain Jurs.” Sour tears well up in my eyes and fall into my mouth. I feel self-conscious and stupid crying for myself—for my shame, for my regrets, for how quickly a childhood happens. I wish I had acted better. I wish I had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for “Power Rangers.”

  Whenever I’m home for a few days, I start to feel this despair at being back in the place where I had spent so many afternoons dreaming of getting away, so many late nights fantasizing about who I would be once I was allowed to be someone apart from my family, once I was free to commit mistakes on my own. How strange it is to return to a place where my childish notions of freedom are everywhere to be found—in my journals and my doodles and the corners of the room where I sat fuming for hours, counting down the days until I could leave this place and start my real life. But now that trying to become someone on my own is no longer something to dream about but just my ever-present reality, now that my former conviction that I had been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of this household has been revealed to be untrue, that all along, my responsibilities had been negligible, illusory even, that all along, our parents had been the ones watching over us—me and my brother—and now that I am on my own, the days of resenting my parents for loving me too much and my brother for needing me too intensely have been replaced with the days of feeling bewildered by the prospect of finding some other identity besides “daughter” or “sister.” It turns out that this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying. Being someone is terrifying. I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Me again. Mememememememe.