For Tina:
We have moments when reality hits us like an unexpected squirt in the eye from a pothole puddle--obscene mud pushed up by a too fast car, oblivious to our humanity, while we mind our business, on the side of the road.
Well, there's those soldiers who walked into Auschwitz and saw walking, naked skeletons.
There's my Vietnam Ranger sniper buddy, who found a dead Viet Cong, with his own genitalia sewed with black thread, into his mouth, laying red, in the jungle green.
And there's me, age 12, walking into the blue-tiled bathroom I shared with four siblings--seeing my naked sister, floating, in four inches of clear water,in a blue bathtub, stretched out full, staring at her belly. Or lack of belly. It looked as bony as Jacob's ladder. She didn't seem to notice I was there. Her skin, pink-white and thin, a frozen piece of fish, with blue bones. She was saying, incongruously, "I am so fat." Were those protruding blue bones invisible to her, in her mental fog? Then I noticed, with a wave of dizzying warmth, the feral hair. Covering everything, her body innately trying to keep her from killing her fatless, exposed organs-- this thick brown, soft hair, like you might see on a baby rat, a day-old kitten. She was only 10 years old, but her torso was covered with the kind of hair you would see on a chick emerging from a just hatched egg.
Her eyes were glazed in that tinny way that those of the old, with cataracts, are.
It was then that I realized I knew someone who was crazy. We once shared a room. She lived in my house. As young as I was, I felt so dismal, to suddenly see what her life would be.
There were screaming arguments at the dinner table. Almost every night. If someone forced her to eat something, beyond her usual self-allotment of lettuce, diet coke, and home-made popcorn, which for some reason she decided was close to 0 calories---she ran to the bathroom and flagrantly upchucked the whole mess. It was torture. I was pretty sure then she was going to die, but she didn't. Then.
Every morning and afternoon, she ran in this weird loop. We had one of those 70's brand new houses with no hallways. The doorway of the living room went to the dining room, which had a doorway that went to the kitchen, which went to the TV room, et c...an endless loop that my anorexic sister took for her own personal Nordic Track. she ran it for hours--her eyes drooped in that glazed way, and when you asked her what she was doing, she mumbled something about 5 pounds.
After that was the sacred re-arranging of the refrigerator. This mystified me more than anything. Our refrigerator was always spotless because of my 10, then 11, then 16 year old sister. That's how long this went on. She was endlessly sponging the shelves and rearranging whatever food was in there into particular geometric piles. If you did not replace things exactly the way she had arranged them, she let out this strange harpie's screech--in retrospect, it was a bit like those strange underwater mermaids in the lake in Harry Potter. You did NOT want this to be evoked!! The thing Harry had to listen to, in Moaning Myrtle's bathtub? yeeeaaaaah--my ears hurt!! There are things beyond logic, that you do not mess with.
I knew, instinctively, that this was something beyond repair, beyond reproach, that you could do nothing but feel pity and sorrow. You could not change it via big-sister peer pressure.
I spent my early years envying other pairs of sisters who were as close in age as my sister and I. They shared clothes and secrets and boy gossiped and listened to music together, had sleepovers. We were only 18 months apart in age. I have often thought, what if my egg had descended 2nd: would I be her? Or was her egg bad to begin with? She seemed so normal in the early days, so silly and fun.
This was probably the beginning of my becoming such a loner. Forced an early plummeting of my own deep little pool of viscosity. School was not a place to share. I'm not sure I ever let anyone in my treehouse, not really. A few got a few steps up the ladder. This is still true, even with romances. Feelings have a way of burying themselves in so many layers, no words can really form that have the same shape.
