So, over the course of the summer, I am supposed to post three more times about my Capstone project, and how it’s going along, what I’ve been considering about it, what questions I have, what I have learned about my topic through research, etc. The requirements for these posts are pretty rigid (the impact on your project of your: summer reading, a conversation you have had, other discoveries and experiences). Considering that the only thing I have read on my summer reading/research list is
Less Than Zero and its sequel, and I wrote a novel length entry about them already, I will save that post for another time. I also have been a coward and not told my parents yet, so the conversation will also have to wait. Which leaves the “other discoveries and experiences” post. Well, I discovered that I need to actually start writing about my brother, and talking about him in general, in order to prepare for the Capstone, so I threw together a little piece as my first summer entry to help me do just that. I hope this counts as a discovery.
Enjoy!
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All my life, I have been told by my parents and relatives that building a good relationship with your sibling is the most important relationship to build because they are, statistically speaking, going to be in your life the longest. “Blood is thicker than water,” as they would say. My brother and I are exhibit A of all the ways that I don’t follow the rules. To be it simply: I hate my brother. To make it more complex: for the first sixteen and a half years of my life, I idolized everything about him, and fantasized that if I tried hard enough, I could become just like him one day. As you can probably guess, that dream came crashing down in flames all around me, and now I wish that he never had to be a part of my life again. You can’t choose your family, I guess.
To start at the beginning would be to try to start before my memory allows me to remember. So, instead, I’ll start with what I remember from the good ole days, and you can tell me, when I’m finished, how wrong I was. As I go along you can jot down the signs that I have gone back and looked for time and time again. Maybe you can tell me all the things that I did wrong in loving him.
II.
Growing up in St. Albans, Vermont, there wasn’t a lot to do besides torture each other. And torture each other, we did. You see, my brother Doug, is seven years older than I am, and so he should presumably be seven years wiser than I was, or am. But he learned from an early age that if he blamed the baby for everything that went wrong, we were both a lot less likely to get into trouble. So, when Doug and his best friend Brian tied me up and locked me into my grandmother’s bedroom (the locks were on the inside, by the way,) he told my parents that we were playing a game. No one asked me what had really happened.
Then there was the slave game, a popular tale among my friends. The game was simple, really. It involved my brother playing the King, my cousin Meagan as his loyal secretary, and my cousin Matt (only a year older than myself) and I as the slaves. All we had to do was everything that my brother asked us to. This ranged from simple things like getting him a snack or grabbing him another can of Pepsi (always Pepsi) to more time-consuming tasks like doing his laundry or cleaning his room. When we could have been outside playing, we were inside cleaning out the gunk from underneath his bed. And you didn’t challenge his authority because the punishment was that you had to stand beneath the stairs for an hour, and if you tried to move, you were struck with a metal bat by the other slave. If we both rebelled, my brother held the bat, and he took no mercy.
Everyone who’s heard the story always asks me why I didn’t tell my parents on him, but truth be told: the games never really bothered me. I didn’t care that when we played hide-and-go-seek he would trip me down the stairs or bang my head into the wall. I didn’t mind that when he was baby-sitting, he would pretend to call up my grandmother and tell her that I hated her. It wasn’t even that bad when he nearly stabbed me with a butcher knife. I didn’t matter to me because he was paying attention to me; he was treating me like I was one of his friends. He told me secrets. He let me in on his fears. He let me watch him play
Resident Evil. He taught me how to achieve a flawless victory on
Mortal Kombat. He introduced me to his friends, one of whom I was convinced I was going to marry from the age of four until I was fourteen.
If you don’t have an older sibling, you might not know what I’m talking about here. What I’m saying is that all I ever wanted was for him to think that I was cool, and I would have done anything (and I mean absolutely anything) to make him think that. And, to those of you who are the older one, hang out with your young brother or sister. You’ll make their life.
III.
As I got older, I started to idolize my brother for different reasons. He was a starter on a winning soccer team. At the age of five, I began playing for my own soccer league as the goalie, and my brother was very good at teaching me the rules to the game. I was the only person on that soccer team who knew what “off sides” meant, and I thought that made him king of the world for telling me. He would practice with me after school, and all through grade school and junior high. I would ask him for advice on how to block certain shots (even though he played center field) and he would drag himself outside to take practice kicks at me until it was dark and our mother dragged us in.
My brother was also the person who taught me how to read. Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and even most of third were marked with my inability to spell my own name. I would write “Pat” on the tops of my assignments in hopes that the teacher wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t spelled out the entire thing. I got away with it for a surprisingly long time until another Pat entered my class and the teacher started to ask us to write our full names on the tops of our papers so she wouldn’t get confused. Suddenly, it was phone calls home to my parents and a special reading class that gave me picture books to read out loud to a mentor who would correct every mispronunciation I made (essentially, every single word except for pat). Soon, I was sent home with a stack of books that I was supposed to read out loud to my parents every night. I would sit on the big couch and stumble over the simplest of words while my parents would look on in their teary-eyed passive way that had disappointment written all over it, and whisper to each other about how it was just their luck to get a stupid child. My brother was the only one who never got mad at me for not being able to read.
The summer before fourth grade, he sat me down on the cement floor of his basement bedroom and asked me what I was interested in. I told him the usual suspects—soccer, unicorns, dragons—and he brought me over to his old bookcase full of hardcover books and handed me a book on Norse mythology. He told me to bring it up to my bedroom and read it under the covers by flashlight after my parents forced me to go to bed, and not to read it out loud. He said it was the only way to read a book. I believed him because, at nine, I believed everything that everyone told me, especially him. That summer I read my first book. Furthermore, I read it multiple times, cover to cover, without stumbling over a single word.
IV.
When he left for college, it was devastating to me. I had lost my other half and I spent a significant amount of sixth grade sulking, even though I got to move into his blood red room in the basement, something which I had fantasized about for years. It felt bittersweet with him gone. On the one hand, I had the whole basement to myself and since my parents never had any excuse to go down there, I had all the privacy any eleven year old could dream of. But on the flip side, I was on my own. For the first time in my life, I had to formulate my own opinions on things. My brother wasn’t around to force feed me his thoughts and convince me that they were also mine. It was scary to have him leave and realize that everything I loved was because he loved it first.
V.
The first time that I thought my brother might have a drug problem, I had just gotten my wisdom teeth pulled, so I couldn’t be sure whether what I was experiencing was real or laughing gas induced. He came in during his lunch break from work at the chocolate factory (packing fudge, which in no way relates to this story, but I still find amusing) on that cold spring break day, and he was looking for something. I was in a stupor on the couch, zoning out to an episode of Hey Arnold, so I didn’t hear him when he asked for the Oxycontin, and I didn’t really see him when he took the whole bottle. I was only able to add up the pieces when, that night, my mother began a desperate search to find them and screamed at me when she could not. I remember thinking that it couldn’t be a good reason that he had taken them, or else he would have asked. He also would probably not have taken the whole bottle of medication that was prescribed to my missing teeth. When I would ask him later about it, he would simply tell me that he needed them more than I did, that he was in pain too.
VI.
After the incident with my wisdom teeth, everything began to spiral out of control in rapid succession. He asked me for $400 to pay for a speeding ticket that he had gotten and then requested that I not mention the transaction to our mother, who works at the bank my account was at; he showed up at my high school in the middle of the day to ask for more money to get out of town for awhile, and would not leave until I gave him my debit card pin number; I came home from soccer practice to a sheet of paper that had my name written in cursive over and over again, more closely resembling my signature as the paper went along, and a missing checkbook; my graduation money went missing from my grandmother’s purse, and he came up with the excuse that his girlfriend had stolen it to get an abortion he knew nothing about; he asked me for more money to take his dog to the vet because of a limp that only he saw; I came home Thanksgiving break my freshman year at Champlain to find all the change jars throughout the house were gone; I woke up almost every single summer morning to screaming and crying as my parents discovered another monetarily valuable thing missing; I came home one weekend during my sophomore year at Champlain to find all my movies and CDs and books had gone missing, probably ran away; and most recently, the call from the funeral home that buried my grandmother two days after my twentieth birthday saying that the check had bounced, and finding out that he had stolen the insurance check from the mail and spent it in increments of one thousand dollars. My parents say that it’s the final straw that broke the camel’s back, but I’ve heard it all before, and it all sounds the same as the lies that he tells.
And the lies have been plentiful. Speeding ticket, abortion, the check didn’t come in, I let a friend borrow your movies, I lost a bet to the fucking Pope, the dog needs to go to the vet, I’ll pay you back tomorrow, this time I swear I’ll pay you back, give me this one last chance to prove myself to you, tomorrow I’m getting paid and then you’ll get your money back. At this point, I don’t think there’s a lie he hasn’t told in order to get money to buy his pills. In fact, just today, he called me up and asked for $100 to pay back this loan shark he borrowed money from who is threatening to kill him if he doesn’t get his money back tonight. Kill him? Over $100? And I’m the most beautiful girl in the world.
VII.
People tell me that I don’t understand, that I can never understand, because I’m not a drug addict. And I tell them that I hate my brother, and not because he’s a drug addict. The addiction I can handle because we’re all addicted to something (for me, it’s falling in love, or lust, or whatever you want to call it). I hate that the person I grew up idolizing is gone, and I don’t know if he’ll ever come back. I hate that he stole our dead grandmother’s funeral money and no one had the balls enough to report it to the police. I hate that he can’t ask for help. I hate that after five and a half years, nothing is different. Mostly, I hate that it still bothers me so much.
