Bastards: A Memoir (11 page)

Things went on like that for months. Even after a phone call with Peggy confirmed the existence of our long-lost sisters, my brother was not able to shake Mimi’s perception that he was a liar. Our parents had kept this secret for years and had drawn Jacob into their cover story; it made sense that perhaps my brother had inherited the art of deception from them. And it was Mimi and Granddad’s responsibility to exorcise it from him. With each perceived transgression Mimi and Granddad crafted sentences with cause-and-effect, with multiple clauses, definitions of things.

On the weekends Jacob was tasked with picking up fallen tree limbs in the yard before Granddad attacked the lawn with a riding mower. As a boy who’d grown up surrounded by pavement, Jacob never had honed a skill for identifying sticks tangled in fields of grass. Frequently he missed some and had to be reminded that a branch could damage the blades of the lawn mower, or could go flying through the blades and put somebody’s eye out, or could stall the mower.

None of these things actually occurred—Granddad always saw the branches himself before he mowed over them—but they could have. And because they could have, Jacob had to write,
I will always be conscientious in my chores to ensure the safety of everyone involved.

On a random Tuesday night when Mimi was certain that my brother had not, in fact, brushed his teeth—she said she checked his toothbrush and it wasn’t wet—he wrote,
I will practice good hygiene every day
, followed by a full copy of the definition of
hygiene
out of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Two hundred and fifty times each. If at any time Jacob protested these assignments, a few hundred
I will remember that I am an example to my younger sisters and will not talk back when I am being disciplined
’s were tacked on.

There was something genteel about writing sentences as a means of discipline. Though the steeliness in Mimi’s voice when she assigned them suggested that there were more terrible penalties if my brother did not comply.

So he submitted. It was easier than fighting about it all the time. He submitted to Mimi’s image of him though it wasn’t true.

The writing kept my brother in a constant state of isolation. Days passed when I only saw him at breakfast and dinner. When he wasn’t sitting quietly, eyes down, at the kitchen table for meals, Jacob was hidden away in his attic bedroom. He was a phantom, his presence known only through creaking floorboards in the ceiling.

I don’t know if Mimi outright told Rebecca and me not to go upstairs, or if the prohibition was something we assumed. But, regardless of the consequences, I couldn’t go forever without seeing my brother.

I waited for a weekend afternoon when Mimi was in her basement and I crept up the stairs. I stuck to the edges of the steps themselves so the wood wouldn’t whimper under my feet and give me away. By the time I reached Jacob’s bedroom door I was sweating like a glass of ice water at a summer picnic. I tapped quietly on the door and turned the iron knob as quietly as I could. My brother was bent over the windowsill, staring at the front yard. It was a dull view, nothing but grass and squirrels, yet he seemed to hold out hope that another kid would come into view, or a car or a bicycle—something to break the monotony. This was Oklahoma Jacob. The fun-loving New Jersey mischief-maker had surrendered and in his place was a flat, sullen boy.

“You okay?” I whispered.

I stayed close to the doorway, so I could hear if anyone was coming up the stairs.

“I hate it here,” my brother said.

His right middle finger had a divot on the side of the tip from where the pencil pressed hard against it as he wrote and wrote and wrote. The pencil sitting on the white antique desk was chewed to a nub and rested neatly, eerily, atop a sheet of loose-leaf that was only half filled with today’s sentence.

The afternoon heat mixed with the thinly insulated ceiling made this room stale, humid, and heavy. I got a strong whiff of vinegar as the air-conditioning kicked on, rustling the still air to life. I wrinkled my nose.

“What’s that smell?”

“I had to pee,” Jacob said, unfolding from the sill and opening the closet door. The smell became a stench.

“Mimi yelled at me for being downstairs. She said I was stalling. So I went in here.”

I searched my brother’s eyes for an indication that he understood how crazy that sounded. But he didn’t seem bothered.

We stared into his closet, the scent of the urine-soaked carpet fading away as my nose grew accustomed to it. On the whitewashed back wall of the closet, underneath a bookshelf, my brother had written in his now-impeccable cursive,
I HATE MIMI AND GRANDDAD
.

Then, a few weeks after Jacob’s eleventh birthday, Rebecca and I were finishing breakfast while Mimi made our lunches at the kitchen counter. We’d been in Oklahoma nearly two years. Jacob passed by Mimi to leave the kitchen and Rebecca looked up at just that moment.

“You’re taller than Mimi!” she marveled.

And he was.

By an inch, more if you counted his hair. Rebecca couldn’t have known that statement would kick a pebble down the snow-covered mountain of distrust between Mimi and Jacob.

Mimi said, “Soon he’ll be eating us out of house and home!” lightly, like it was a joke, but she stiffened her back to inhabit all five feet one inch of her petite frame and I knew that I shouldn’t laugh.

Then Mimi started carrying a wooden paint stirring stick with her whenever she was alone with us. She always kept paint stirrers around the house; she used them to mix the gallon buckets of liquid porcelain in her basement workshop, and sometimes to knock boxes off of high shelves. She also found them useful for waggling at our legs to keep us in line. “Don’t make me get the spank stick,” she’d say, drawing her eyes up to the shelf above the microwave in the kitchen where she kept her largest arsenal. That spot in the kitchen was the North Pole of discipline in the house on Forty-fourth Street. But now Mimi wasn’t the only person tall enough to reach her weaponry.

Seeing Mimi wandering the house with a stick in her hand—sometimes two—set my teeth on edge. It made me want to cuss or scream or pitch a fit just to end it, even briefly. But I never craved attention enough to incite a whipping. I buried my face in a book so I wouldn’t have to look at the things.

Mimi’s sudden fear of my brother was a code I could not crack. I understood his misgivings about her; the solid year and a half of increasingly complicated sentence assignments had calcified a streak of resentment in him.

Neither Mimi nor Granddad had ever raised a boy. Sure, Granddad had been one, but that was so long ago it could hardly be relevant. As far as I could tell, Mimi was afraid of my brother because he was eleven years old and he was bigger than she was. He had spent the past eighteen months of his life being disciplined by her, and he would only get bigger. She could see him every night at the dinner table clenching his jaw rather than talk back, but what if he didn’t maintain that self-discipline once he realized he had the upper hand? Mimi was a small lady. I knew what that was like, to go through life with a sense that people and things bigger than you could easily hurt you. I never thought my brother could be one of those things, but Mimi and Granddad had lived so long and seen so much; maybe they knew something I didn’t. Maybe because they didn’t love my brother like I did they were able to see things in him that I was blind to. It was the only way I could justify the difference between the way they treated me and the way they treated him. And I needed to justify it, because other than my brother fading away from me, I was growing comfortable in Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma from mid-September to the end of October there is a four- to six-week lull between tornado season and ice storm season when the weather takes a break from trying to blot out all human life. After the scorching dog days of August, the early autumn comes in mellow and friendly. It was a day like that when the tension finally broke.

The sunlight shining through gaps in the curtains was bright enough to read by, lending everything a Hollywood-caliber glow. I was alone. I had watched my allotment of television for the day and Granddad was due home from work any minute. I assumed Mimi was in her basement workshop. That’s where she always was when she wasn’t lying down in her bedroom with a migraine. The sunlight pouring through the dining room window was warm on my belly. Then the rumbling started.

At the top of the stairway the attic door swung open and closed, followed immediately by the squeak of the upstairs bedroom door opening. Then Mimi hollered, “Git downstairs!” her voice pinched and immediate, like air escaping a balloon. Footsteps stampeded down the stairs. I jumped up from the floor to see Jacob and Rebecca emerge from the staircase, skittish and red-cheeked. I felt my jaw flap open. They had a secret that I was not in on. The realization stung me like a slap.

Mimi was on their heels, herding them to the back of the house with the spank stick.

“You sit there until Granddad gets home,” Mimi said to Jacob, pointing the stick at a kitchen chair. She didn’t look at Rebecca at all.

Jacob’s hair was combed back the way Mimi had shown him how to do when he first moved here. He wore a red-and-brown-striped shirt with a brown collar and cuffs. Jeans. The tough dark kind. His sneakers thunked against the metal legs of the kitchen chair and made a
shoosh
when they brushed the indoor/outdoor carpeting on the kitchen floor. With the flick of her wrist, Mimi cracked the paint stirrer against his calf and he stopped.

My brother slumped in the kitchen chair looking at his empty hands in his lap. Across the vast expanse of hallway, I stood in my bedroom doorway trying madly to catch his eye. The world was crumbling around us. I was afraid. I needed my brother to show me it was going to be okay.

I waved.

Jacob cast a sidelong glance at me but didn’t turn. The place was electric with dread, the moment after the roll of thunder when you wait anxiously for the next lightning strike, hoping it will be far, far away.

I turned into the bedroom to find Rebecca hidden in our closet. She crouched on the floor with her eyes wide open, hugging her knees to her chest. She said, “It was just a magazine.”

Jacob had gotten his hands on one of Granddad’s old
Playboy
magazines. He’d found it in Mimi and Granddad’s bedroom closet one day when Mimi was working in the basement. He was looking at it that afternoon when Rebecca trekked upstairs to bring him some cookies she’d liberated from the pantry. She saw the magazine and wanted to look, too.

Maybe if she hadn’t been involved Mimi and Granddad would have understood that it was natural for an eleven-year-old boy to be curious about women’s bodies. Maybe they would have assigned some sentences about not taking other people’s things and left it at that. But now an example needed to be made out of somebody. Outside, Granddad’s car sighed into the brick driveway. In the closet where Rebecca and I hid I heard his heavy footfalls advancing down the hall.

Granddad did the same thing every day. He drove forty-five minutes to the Air Force base, worked eight hours, then drove forty-five minutes back in the afternoon. All he wanted to do when he returned was ride his stationary bicycle and watch the early news in his den. Today Mimi intercepted him. Through the closet door and the double wall that separated my bedroom from the dining room, I heard her tell him that
the
boy is a problem
before they walked into their bedroom. I couldn’t hear anything more until they walked into the kitchen where Jacob still sat.

In the closet, I synced my breath to Rebecca’s. Then I crawled over to the doorway on my stomach. The heavy carpet imprinted itself on my arms and legs. I stretched my head around the doorway just enough to see Granddad’s shoulders blocking out my brother, blocking out the light. He was in his suit pants and his undershirt. The outline of his body in the doorway was crisply drawn. He held a belt in his right hand.

I’d heard of belts. When Michael was responsible for us he’d threatened the belt often. And though he never brought one down on me, he reddened the back of my brother’s legs a few times over the years. I was lucky to be big-eyed and quiet in those times. But boys were different. They needed to be broken, like horses, with whips and spurs, it seemed.

We are too close
, I thought. Too close to the nexus of Granddad’s anger and Jacob’s badness and Mimi’s urging and the vortex those clashing forces created. I knew we were too close because I’d seen anger like this before. I’d seen the look in the eyes of grown-ups cooking up bruises and welts for one another, throwing chairs and plates and all manner of things.

I felt Rebecca’s clammy body crawl beside me. In the kitchen Mimi guarded the door to the backyard; Granddad stood between the hallway and the kitchen. Jacob was standing now, his shoulders rolled so drastically that his palms pointed to the wall behind him.

Granddad told Jacob to drop his drawers and my brother didn’t argue. He was outnumbered and blocked in. He was an inch taller than Mimi but that didn’t matter now. He turned to face the back wall and prepared to bear his punishment.

The last thing I saw was my brother bent over the kitchen chair. I searched the air for my sister’s hand and, finding it, pulled her out of our bedroom. I ran to the farthest corner of the house, Rebecca flapping behind me like a cape.

We reached Granddad’s den and my legs buckled underneath me. There was no more house; I couldn’t run anymore if I tried. I collapsed behind the taupe curtains, next to my sister, so close that I could hear her heartbeat pumping to the same rapid rhythm as mine. I pulled the curtains closed behind us. We were in the light of the setting sun. The plastic backing clacked against our ribs as we sucked in deep breaths of air. Rebecca curled in the corner in a fetal position, her forehead resting on the carpet like she was deep in prayer. I couldn’t wrap my arms around her because I needed my hands over my ears to block out my brother’s screams from the kitchen. I placed my body over hers, my stomach over my sister’s back. There was still something worth preserving in her, some part that didn’t know the explosive anger of grown-ups.