by Lauren Marks
Forgetting something? I glared at the bartender.
But he did not receive my meaning. Mike stepped in to translate.
What my sister is trying to say is that she would like you to card me. Mike popped his wallet open. But I’ve been legal for eleven minutes now. See?
Unimpressed, the bartender nodded at him, and silently poured the rest of his order.
I nursed my Coke, my elbow stuck in some kind of syrupy residue on the worn bar. Mike rambled a little about his film classes as he drank, but he mainly talked about his ongoing difficulties with his girlfriend, Amber. I didn’t know her personally—she had not been around before I moved to New York—but I had seen pictures of her on my brother’s cell phone. She was striking. Her curtain of long, dark hair emphasized her light eyes, and though she wasn’t very tall, she was slim, and could easily have been mistaken for a model. But my folks had long suspected that she might have some substance abuse problems, and the more Mike talked about her, the more it sounded like these issues may well have been inherited. My brother said that Amber’s dad was in and out of rehab and he hinted her mother would occasionally take Amber’s prescriptions recreationally. Mike and I had kept an open conversation about drug use over the years. I knew he drank, had taken mushrooms in college, and smoked pot (he and I had shared a couple of joints over the years). But he had a full-blown anxiety about synthetic drugs, which mostly kept him away from the hard stuff. I was fully aware that his moderation was mild in comparison to my own college years in New York, or my parents’ hippie days in Berlin.
Mike said things were at a low point with him and Amber. He wasn’t sure what he should do. I registered what Mike was saying, but I didn’t comment on it and didn’t really think I had to. My dad had called this birthday drink a “rite of passage,” and I thought that getting Mike tipsy was the extent of my duties. Giving relationship advice was not in my job description for the night.
My brother and I didn’t stay at the bar long, and afterward, we did the ten-minute walk home, arm in arm.
• • •
The phone in the garage apartment rang a little after 4:00 a.m., jolting me awake. It took me a moment to remember where I was. I had been sleeping in the back house because the paint was drying in my bedroom in the main house. The phone kept ringing. I didn’t pick up the call; at that hour, it had to have been a wrong number. Suddenly, there were footsteps on my stairs, the apartment door swung open, and my mother appeared in the dark.
Hide these! she said, tossing something small and metallic at me. And then she was gone.
I turned on the light and saw my brother’s car keys at the end of my bed. Perplexed but obedient, I buried them inside my underwear drawer. Then I felt the floor of my apartment shaking: the garage door was opening. I got out of bed and looked out the windows that faced the main house. The sky was dark, but all the lights were on in there. My mother had pulled the car out into the driveway. Amber was in the front passenger seat. But I couldn’t figure out why she was there, or why she looked furious.
Mike had now appeared at the back door, pleading with my mother.
Stop, he said. You are ripping my love away from me!
Not in my house, she snapped. Never in my house.
And with that, my mother pushed past him and drove off, taking Amber home, even though she lived two hours north of us.
By the time I stumbled down into the main house, my brother was gone. The only indication he had been there was the empty handle of Smirnoff left open on the kitchen table.
My father told me that he and my mom had woken up to raised voices in the bedroom next to theirs, and felt the plaster wall buzzing as things were hurled against it. Mike and Amber were fighting—and it was a huge one. They had been smoking and drinking all night and when my parents came in, they were physically clawing at each other. My parents had to pry them apart. The whole scene my dad was describing was hard for me to imagine—Mike and my dad had always had hot tempers, but that had never manifested in bodily harm in our household, not by a mile. I stood there in shock.
I then became desperate to find Mike, needing him to make sense of it all. When I was actually in the room with him a few minutes later, I was still dumbstruck. I was a transparent moth and he was the irresistible porch light. As a ghost-bug without a mouth, I silently flitted around him as he went into the downstairs closet, the laundry room, the basement. If I could have spoken, I would have asked: What is happening? What are you doing? Are you okay? But my bug-brain and bug-mouth just wouldn’t connect.
Mike weakly shambled around, winded, spent, and drunk. While Dad cleaned up the mess Mike and Amber had made around the house, I managed to get Mike to his bedroom. He climbed into his twin bed, and I lay down in the one beside him. He passed out almost immediately. As I lay across from him, I wondered how I had missed this storm brewing. I realized that my focus had been on myself since my return to Los Angeles. I’d been occupied by the sensation of being a brand-new person. But for the very first time, it hit me that this could be problematic for others in ways I had not anticipated. There was a world outside of me, populated with people I knew. And some of these people might still need things from me. The old me. I thought back to my dad’s statement about how Mike was lucky to have an older sister like me. But there was no doubt in my mind that I had looked after him much better before the rupture. Things were different now. What should—or could—a good older sister do?
If I had been following my usual script with Mike, after he had taken his turn bemoaning the woes of his relationship back at the bar, I would have shared my own experiences with him, letting him know that we had a lot in common. My twenty-first birthday had also been ruined by a relationship going sour.
The breakup with Jason had been a messy one. We had been together just shy of two years when he initiated our split, but neither of us could exactly commit to breaking up. So I left town that summer to work for a theater festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts, mainly to avoid him. After I’d left, though, he’d call me in moments of drunken regret to tell me that he had just slept with some girl or another, then apologize for being an idiot, and go on about how he knew I was the love of his life and the future mother of his children. Almost every phone call with him left me miserable. I wouldn’t have invited him to my twenty-first birthday, a date that fell while I was out of town, but I was intensely relieved when he showed up. Unsurprisingly, though, the heartache and betrayal did not disappear just because he was physically with me again, and increased exponentially with the amount of alcohol I drank. I decided I should try to attempt to drink twenty-one alcoholic beverages to kick off my twenty-first year. It was an impossible feat, of course, but I did my damnedest to reach that limit with Jason, and we became ruinously destructive later that night. We screamed, we cried, we fucked. He ended up sleeping between the sheets of my bed, while I stayed on top of the covers, shivering in the fetal position.
Hearing my story might actually have lightened Mike’s load a bit. Sometimes a moment of honest commiseration can make a burden slightly more bearable or at least less isolating.
But Mike and I weren’t following our old routine. In that moment, I couldn’t have recalled most of the details of my twenty-first birthday, not quickly enough to connect the two events when it was most relevant to him. It is possible that he and Amber might have had the fight even if he and I had connected over our matching romantic despair. But he was probably doubly injured when we didn’t because he and his girlfriend were becoming distant at the exact same time he and his sister were drifting apart too.
• • •
The household was on only partially diplomatic terms the morning after my brother’s fight with Amber. Mike’s plan had been to come for his birthday and stay over Thanksgiving, and he hadn’t given any indication that this had changed. He had not asked for his keys back. However, he seemed to be avoiding our parents, and I think they were avoiding him, too. My solution was simple:
food. The doctors had agreed that I could drive within a five-mile radius—to the grocery store, to yoga classes—as long as there were no freeways involved. I hopped in the car and drove to a local fast-food joint called Everest to pick up the house special they referred to as “game time”: french fries with chili, cheese, and pastrami on top. I had always thought it was revolting, but Mike’s eyes lit up when I brought it home. It was his favorite. Although he clearly didn’t want to talk about the night before with me, this hangover special loosened him up a bit.
He admitted he drank a lot more when Amber was around, and he told me that he had never drunk that much in his life. Since he had eventually blacked out, he wasn’t even exactly sure what he did and said.
Might have proclaimed myself Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan, for all I know, Mike said weakly. He didn’t deliver his joke with much oomph, but I could see he was trying to make me smile.
I was glad my brother had understood my peace offering. The french fries had also meant I’m on your side. I can be on everyone’s side.
9
Justine lightly tapped the eraser side of her pencil on her desk a couple of times until she got my attention again.
Is something going on? she asked.
Sorry. Family stuff, I said. It’s getting better, I think. I’m working on it.
It’s really common, you know. Stress creates more word blockages for people with aphasia. By the way, how’s the John Grisham book going?
Done, I said. Finally. But it took almost three months to finish it. You know, I realize that I am the one with the brain damage so I might be a poor judge here, but I also think that guy is a pretty lousy writer.
I gave Justine an exaggerated eye roll and she laughed.
Your gestures are very expressive, she said.
Lucky me, I said.
I’m not kidding, Lauren. You might not realize it, but you’ve got impressive tactics at your disposal when words fail you. Language influences, and is influenced by, gesture. Did you learn sign language at some point?
I was surprised by her question. I had always been animated, gesturing frequently with my hands, but no one had ever asked about it.
No, I said. I guess I move like this because of my acting-school background. And growing up in a house with a lot of drama.
Justine took her water glass over to the plants situated between the sliding doors.
I can recommend some American Sign Language classes, if you’re ever interested, she said. What are you reading these days, now that Grisham has been crossed off the list?
Middlesex.
By Jeffrey Eugenides? she asked. That’s certainly ambitious! She left her overturned water glass to drain its final drops into the fern.
Don’t get too excited. I didn’t say I understand it. My folks had it in their library so I just picked it up. All I can tell you about it is that the author used the word quay three times in a five-page span, and that seemed pretty unusual. Also, there is a character called Chapter Eleven, and in the eleventh chapter of the book I guess there is something that will be revealed about him. But maybe I’m missing something. Chapter Eleven. Is this book supposed to be self rential?
Self-referential? Justine clarified.
That’s what I meant, I said. Self Ref-er-en-shul.
Your pronunciation of polysyllabic words is sounding better, she said. I can’t help you with Middlesex, unfortunately, because I’ve never read it. But maybe I’ll give you some short story reading assignments. The length will make it easier for you to follow the action. We can both read them, so we can have the same points of reference to discuss during our sessions.
Justine began to make notes about which stories she’d assign in coming weeks: H. G. Wells, Truman Capote, Thomas Wolfe, Guy de Maupassant, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Allan Poe, and a few others.
Do you like F. Scott Fitzgerald? she asked me.
I think I used to love him, I replied. And his wife . . .
Zelda? Justine asked.
Yeah, I said. I liked her, too. I think I was in a play about her once.
A scholar and an actress all rolled into one, Justine said. When we go through the Fitzgerald story, I suspect you’ll teach me more than I’ll be teaching you.
It wasn’t true. But I got caught up in her enthusiasm. Justine’s willingness to engage with me in new ways and her intuition about how I might best respond had turned around a session that had started out somewhat raw.
10
It was two days before Thanksgiving when I got a phone call from BJ. His voice boomed through the receiver.
Did you get the good news? The register in BJ’s voice started to slide up several octaves, until he was almost squealing. Materson is coming to America!
My parents, still grateful for the generosity they’d been shown in Edinburgh by the Patersons, had made it clear that Materson—or anyone else in their family—was welcome to visit us anytime. Materson was in his gap year between high school in Scotland and university in England. He was traveling the globe, with stops in New York, New Mexico, and California.
I didn’t want to talk to BJ yet about what had just happened with my brother, but the discussion about Materson reminded me of Mike. Since the rupture and my return to the States, Materson and I had remained close. We communicated mostly through e-mail, but even as my language improved, I needed my dad to proofread all my correspondence. He would add all the words I had missed, and replace the words I had confused. With that constant mediation, it was impossible to be in close personal contact with anyone.
I told BJ I had received Materson’s e-mail. The plan was to visit BJ and Laura in New York first, then he’d come out to LA to stay with us.
BJ couldn’t wait to show him around.
It’s hard to believe that that sweet boy is actually still a teenager, BJ said. When I was eighteen, I considered it my official duty to disappoint the nation-state of Texas by dyeing my hair and making out with boys. Laura was sneaking out to KISS concerts in catsuits and peeing in holy water. But our little Materson? His version of a teenage rebellion? He makes strangers pies.
As a matter of fact, Materson had just e-mailed the recipe for the banoffee pie he had made for all of us in Scotland. My mom and I planned to make it for Thanksgiving.
We started the baking early the next day. She looked preoccupied as she stirred her batter, an inarticulate worry rippling across her face as she glanced at the clock on the oven. She had hoped that Mike might help with the preparations for the holiday by taking care of basic chores, but they were still barely speaking. It was now two in the afternoon, and he was still sleeping upstairs. She knew the sound of the radio often distracted me so we worked silently, and I listened to the way she stirred and sighed.
In Scotland, Materson had used digestive biscuits to create the crust, but since they were hard to find in America, I was kneading graham crackers into the pie tin instead. The ribbons of toffee in my mother’s saucepan were becoming a creamy brown. As soon as the candy thermometer hit 338 degrees Fahrenheit, she lifted the pan from the flame to bring the mixture over to me, but one of her red clogs got caught under the carpet runner at the counter. Her trip was slight, but in the split second before she regained her balance, the syrup started to drip toward the floor, and she reached out her hand for it.
For a moment, the caramel looked like a delicate brown bird, nesting in my mother’s outstretched palm. But then her screams began. They were multiphonic and guttural, making the glass cabinets in the room rattle. As my mother thrust her hand into the cold tap water, I watched a layer of her skin slip away under the water as if she were taking off a glove. The burnt sugar could not be washed away, though. It was as sticky as it was molten.
She needed immediate help, but my response time was paralyzingly slow. I had always been her resourceful child, the one who could take charge, the one reliable in an emergency. But now, as much as I wanted to aid my mother, I was more transfixed by her metamorphosing hand than anyth
ing else.
I NEED HELP GODDAMMIT! she shrieked.
Realizing I would be no help, she bounded up the stairs. She bellowed the word hospital, and immediately I heard the thump of my brother leaping from his bed and the clang of his belt buckling. I broke from my spell and slowly put some ice into a dishtowel. When I handed it to my mom, she flung it into a bucket, which my brother filled with cold water. Her howls hadn’t stopped. They’d gotten louder. She and my brother were out of the house in fewer than three minutes. I had to call my dad to tell him they were on their way to the hospital, but even that took a long time. I had to find the number written down somewhere. This was not the sort of thing I could remember anymore, especially under duress.
My dad and I arrived in different cars, and when we got to the hospital, my mother had been moved from the waiting area to a private room where the doctor was asking about the level of pain on a scale of one to ten. Her joints were white-locked, and her eyes were clenched shut. She bellowed: Ten! Ten!
Mike stayed next to her, rubbing her undamaged arm. He continued his reassuring touch through her second dose of morphine.
You are doing great, Mom, Mike said.
When the doctor came back in after a third dose, he again asked about her pain level.
She looked at him blearily, unable to focus her eyes this time: Ten? she asked him. Ten?
My brother adopted a soothing tone. I know it hurts, Momma, he whispered. But maybe it’s a little better now, yeah? Maybe an eight?
