I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (7 page)

There were the things a nice young lady did: Wash the dishes. Fold the laundry. Be home before midnight, and submit to a timed exam in which she correctly answered specific questions concerning the minute details of the plot, characters, and setting of the movie she supposedly saw, in order to prove she didn’t skip said movie to hang out in the park smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, shooting heroin between her toes, and/or having sex with some grungy, zitty boy, thus ending up pregnant and/or diseased, not to mention disgraced and scandalized.

While my brothers did the things boys were supposed to do—while they arm wrestled and Indian wrestled and thumb wrestled, while they pushed the coffee table out of the way so they could wrestle like puppies on the living room floor, while they hunted and fished, played high school football then college, while they mowed the lawn and shoveled the snow, while they worked their asses off at my father’s auto body shop after school and all day every day during the summer from fifth grade through graduation—I did the things a girl does. I improved my posture by gliding across the room with a dictionary balanced on top of my head. I was a Brownie, then a Girl Scout (the first meeting after cookie sales ended, the troop leader measured our waists, and we had to pay a dime for every inch we gained eating all those Thin Mints, all those Samoas). I counted calories, which meant I struggled with math. I babysat younger kids because, as everyone knows, a girl with younger siblings should be really good with kids. I set the supper table and cleared the supper table, loaded and emptied the dishwasher, scrubbed the toilet. I sprayed shirts and pants and my father’s white handkerchiefs with starch, then ironed these things wrinkle-free. My after-school job was shelving books at the public library. For recreation, I called up one of my girlfriends and said catty things about another.

It wasn’t until after I was grown, after I had a son of my own, that it seemed important to change my ideas about maleness, masculinity. I wanted to raise my son differently, outside the perimeters of such rigid and outdated gender roles.

To make this happen, I gave my son a doll, brown-eyed and brown-haired, a boy doll—“This is
your
baby!” I told him—and I suggested my son name his doll. I said he could, if he wanted, cuddle it and rock it to sleep. I encouraged him to love and nurture it.

Further, for every book I read him that featured a male protagonist, I read him one that featured a girl. I also forbade him from playing with toy guns, I created a safe space where he could feel free to talk about his feelings, and I dressed him like Little Lord Fauntleroy. On his first Christmas, I clothed him in black velvet knickers, a white blouse, black-and-white-checked suspenders, a black velvet bow tie, white knee socks, black leather shoes, and a little black velvet beret. He looked adorable, and I was proud to be doing my part in bringing up a sweeter, gentler, dandier generation of boy.

Only it didn’t work. It wouldn’t take. My son didn’t want to hug and kiss his baby. He wanted to crush its head by running over it with a dump truck. His final analysis of
Little Women
was that Jo March and her sisters were silly, boring, and stupid. He bit his toast into the shape of a pistol and pointed it at me. “Pow!” he said. “Bang! Bang! You’re dead.”

When I asked him how it made him feel to do that, to bite his toast into a weapon, to point that weapon at the woman who gave him life, and to, paradoxically, metaphorically, destroy that same woman’s life, he said it made him feel like he wanted more toast.

My son was in first grade when he and I went to a backyard birthday party where six-year-old boys were taking off their shirts, then thumping their chests like they were the feral sons of Tarzan. One boy whirled his shirt in a circle over his head as though he was about to lasso a wild mustang, while the others hooted and hollered and hissed. One boy pushed his belly out as far as he could, then scratched it; another boy burped. My son was the one grunting and flexing his biceps, baring and clenching his teeth. A bouquet of helium balloons tied to a tree floated above the shirtless boys, and some of them jumped up and down, like primitives, yipping and screeching and poking at it with sticks.

A few minutes later, they were shaking cans of pop, which they then quickly buried in the sandbox before scurrying away. One of the other mothers there said what on earth are those little dickens up to?

Because I grew up with brothers, it was obvious to me what they were up to. They were building bombs out of vigorously shaken carbonated cola. They were anticipating a really awesome sandbox explosion that would morph into the sandstorm of the century at any minute. They were running for their lives.

“Run!” they implored us. “Seek shelter! It’s gonna blow!”

As the oldest child, the only daughter, I’ve watched boys blow things up and shoot things and skin things and set things on fire. I’ve seen them scratch at their bellies, their butts, their balls. I’ve heard each boast that he’s the fastest, the strongest, the smartest, the very best. I’ve heard them say Butthead. Dickhead. Fuckwad. Douche Breath. That Christmas I dressed my son in the black velvet knickers, the black velvet bow tie, the white blouse, the black-and-white-checked suspenders, my brothers removed the outfit and wouldn’t give it back, not even the white knee socks or the black leather shoes or the black velvet beret, forcing the boy to spend his first major holiday naked but for his diaper. On more than one occasion, one of my brothers has squeezed me in a headlock, forcing me to smell his armpit, his fart, his foul breath, then asking, “How do you like my new perfume?”

More than once, I’ve wondered who I would have been if I’d had a sister. What would my life have been like? How would it have been different? Because I think there would be differences. I think I would be less entertained by belching, but I would also have made better choices about my hair. A sister would have taken me aside and said it’s not 1988, you’re over thirty, it’s time to invest in a flatiron and grow out those puffy bangs.

 

 

 

 

 

I was three years old when my brother Mitchell was born, and I don’t have an early memory that doesn’t include him. In fact, he is my first memory. I’m standing on my tiptoes, peering into his bassinet, and our father is asking me who’s that? Because I am not thrilled with the sudden existence of this baby brother I’m told I need to love and be nice to, I refuse to dignify my father’s question with a response. Who’s that? What do you mean who’s that? Who is what?

But as Mitchell got older, I learned how handy it was to have him around. I stopped thinking of my little brother as a curse and started seeing him as the greatest gift my parents ever could have given me, that special little something every girl needs: a scapegoat of her very own, someone upon whom a girl can pin her crimes. Mitchell and I were adults before I finally revealed that I, not he, was the one who flushed that apple down the toilet. My brother, who’d received a couple pretty good stripes across the butt because of this incident, said no kidding, really, and all this time I thought it was me. Bitch.

Of the three of us, my brother Mitchell was the perfect one. Mitchell was who adults had in mind when they uttered words like “good boy,” “nice kid,” “gifted and talented student,” and “Have you ever considered getting him into child modeling?” Ladies young and old approached him in parking lots, in grocery stores, at the bank, on the street. They might have tightened their lips into a pinched-up smile at me, a loud and show-offy little girl with scabby knees, bitten-down nails, and gnawed-on cuticles, but even the most ardent believers in zero population growth went goo-goo-ga-ga at the sight of my brother. They held Mitchell’s little face between their hands and gazed into his very big, very blue eyes fringed by very thick, very long lashes. They got all aflutter over his rosebud lips and sweet, sweet smile. They wanted to tousle his silky hair and squeeze his pink cheeks.

“Oh, what eyelashes!” they’d exclaim.

“Oh, it’s always the boys, isn’t it, blessed with such eyelashes!”

“Oh,” they’d cry. “He’s so cute-handsome-good-sweet-wonderful-brilliant-adorable-fantastic-fabulous. . . .”

At some point their voices would blur and their words would blur, and I’d chew on my cuticles until what I heard spewing out of their black-holes-for-mouths sounded more like fucking-bratty-monster-stupid-pig-guts-baboon-testicles-bastard-son-of-a-bitch because by this point even our mother was getting in on the act. “Oh, I know,” she’d sigh, because being the mother of the New Messiah was such a burden. “I really should think about getting him into child modeling.”

In retrospect, it wasn’t Mitchell’s fault. Though he was asthmatic and living in a house with a smoker unaware that smoking aggravates asthma, though he was allergic to smoke and dust and mold and everything else in the world—though he got sick on roller coasters like The Spider, the kind of ride that whirls you round and round and up and down, causing my brother to puke up hot dogs and blue cotton candy on the people waiting in line below—Mitchell was an extraordinarily good-looking kid.

He was also dreamy and smart in a way that adults like, learning the names of stars, of insects, of dinosaurs. He was creative and good at drawing, sketching, taxidermy, and papier-mâché. He could make a five-foot-tall
Tyrannosaurus rex
out of strips of newspaper, glue and flour, chicken wire, and poster paint, then position the beast on a platform complete with papier-mâché flora and fauna and rocks historically accurate for the late Cretaceous period. He could create museum-quality mountings of fish, birds, and small mammals using only an epoxy compound, glass eyeballs, and his own innate understanding of sculpture, anatomy, tanning, and the natural world. Mitchell was quiet, even-tempered, and obedient. If our mother asked him to take out the garbage, for example, or feed the dogs, Mitchell didn’t say just a minute. He didn’t say I will soon as there’s a commercial, or I did it last time, or why do I have to do everything around here. No, Mitchell got up off the couch, and he took out the trash, he fed the dogs, he did what he was told when he was told, and he did it without lip.

Every year at Halloween, Mitchell still had Easter candy. At Christmas, he had Halloween candy—even the good stuff, the miniature Hershey’s and Snickers and little bags of M&M’s—and when Valentine’s Day rolled around, Mitchell still had a stocking full of chocolate Santas, chocolate sleighs, a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer made of chocolate.

He didn’t even flaunt his stash like I would have. He didn’t gloat about having it. Not unless he’d been provoked. Calling him a sissy usually worked or a pansy or a pussy or an asthmatic or some combination of these. Say something like you pussified pansy-faced sissy asthma boy! and Mitchell would open his mouth to show how slowly an agonizingly teensy sliver of a chocolate bunny’s ear melts on a pink tongue. “Where’s yours?” he’d say. “I’m still enjoying mine.”

We each received an allowance of five bucks a week, and Mitchell, the smart child, the family genius, washed his money in the bathroom sink. He ironed it smooth. He clipped it to the clothesline that stretched across the room he shared with our brother Travis. Mitchell saved his money, Mitchell saved every last cent while I ate my Halloween candy, my Christmas candy, my Easter candy, and I spent my allowance the same day I got it, and I never, ever did anything my mother asked me to do when she asked me to do it and certainly not without questioning why I had to do it, why didn’t she ask Mitchell, perfect Mitchell, her favorite, God’s favorite, everyone’s favorite.

 

 

 

 

 

Mitchell is now thirty-one years old, the director of a cardiac research lab, professionally successful, as was his destiny.

His personal life, though, in my opinion, needs work. He wants to become a father. Mitchell wants to impress his future grandchildren with his three-foot-tall jar full of quarters. But first he needs to meet a woman. He worries that if he doesn’t find her, fall in love, marry, and impregnate her immediately, he’ll be too old to coach his kid’s soccer team.

Part of the problem is, Mitchell doesn’t have much to say. This makes dating difficult.

My brother and I sometimes go for months without talking. We’ve gone for as long as a year without talking, not because either of us is angry with the other—repressed, unresolved childhood pain and angst aside—but because Mitchell doesn’t talk. He’s not chatty, not verbose, his is not a bubbly, loquacious personality. He once told me he has days where the only person he speaks to is the kid at the drive-thru window. Do you want fries with that? the kid says, and my brother tells him yes.

The last time I talked to Mitchell, it was his birthday, and our conversation went like this:

“Happy birthday, you little turd!”

“Thanks.”

Silence.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

Silence.

“Do you remember that time at the carnival when you puked on people?”

“Yes.”

“That was hilarious!”

Nothing.

“Does your breath still smell like egg salad and feet?”