Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  Football—the game itself, much less playing it—was beyond my mother’s comprehension. Football was dangerous, it was foreign, and it was pointless. Football was for big, dumb goyim, who were never going to college, not for her smart, short, skinny son.

  “You have to talk to him,” she said on the phone. She called me every night and sometimes during the day to repeat her pleas.

  I couldn’t understand it myself: Was Kenny trying to make friends—to rebel? Silently I cheered him on. For the first time, he was on my side of the family divide, fighting with my mother.

  “He’s not going to listen to me,” I protested.

  “He’s too little. He’ll get hurt. It takes up too much time. His grades will suffer.” My mother had so many objections she didn’t know where to begin.

  Kenny had set up weights in his room, and worked them obsessively, until lumps and bumps of muscles appeared all over his skinny body like pads under the skin. He drank raw eggs for breakfast, puréeing them in the blender with milk, and ate steak for dinner. He ran up and down the streets after school, red and wet with sweat, wearing sweatshirts and pants he bought with money he earned himself. My mother would not contribute to this misbegotten effort.

  “He won’t listen to anything I say,” my mother said, nearly yelling. “He’s being an idiot.”

  In my mother’s language, that meant he wasn’t doing what she wanted. For the first time in his life, he set himself against her, and ignored her yelling and nagging and badgering. But she was relentless. She had spent a lifetime guarding him, protecting him, pulling the food from his throat with her fingers when he choked, and a pigskin ball and a bunch of overmuscled louts weren’t going to get in her way.

  Kenny didn’t fight back, or yell. But he tried out for the football team and somehow, amazingly, he made it. The coach said he would probably sit on the bench most of the season. But even making the bench was an astounding accomplishment, especially if you were 5-foot-6 and skinny as a stick.

  “It’ll interfere with your studies,” my mother screamed. When she found out about five-times-a-week practices and two weeks of football camp, she escalated her campaign. “You won’t get into a good college. You’ll be a bum your whole life because of stupid football.”

  She came at him relentlessly, day and night, from all angles.

  “You’ll get hurt.”

  “You won’t be able to go to school if you get injured.”

  “You’ll have permanent damage.”

  “You’ll ruin your life.”

  “It’s a stupid game.”

  “You’re too smart to care about football.”

  “You don’t care about me. If you cared about me you wouldn’t put me through all of this.”

  Then she pulled out the biggest weapon of all.

  “You’re killing your father. He’s so upset about this he doesn’t sleep at night. He can’t concentrate on his work. He’s miserable with worry. I’ve seen him cry.”

  But my brother held firm. He attended practices religiously, working hard to bulk up, warming the bench with devotion, always at the ready, always, fully, there.

  And then he wasn’t. He quit the team without warning or explanation.

  I was stunned; he wouldn’t say why. My mother didn’t dare question him.

  Football was Kenny’s one and only rebellion. He let it go, and then left for college a year later—a good college, where he would major in engineering, as my mother told him to. Her husband would never be an engineer; he would always be an electrician (an “electrical contractor” she told us to write on our school forms; it sounded classier). But her son would be.

  Kenny didn’t much like engineering, but he didn’t complain. After football he went back to being his compliant self. He liked physics and philosophy, but my mother couldn’t see what good those subjects would do him.

  He seemed to like college. He wrote me strange, quirky letters in his jagged, slanting print, letters filled with offbeat observations, silly sketches, and quotes from things he read, lines from poems or songs. He often ended them with cryptic phrases I didn’t really get, like “The most important thing in life is underpants,” or “The universe is a salami.”

  The summer after his junior year, he spent a lot of time in the city, hanging out with Lenny and me. He liked Lenny, who accepted all his oddities. They skied together in the winter, went to the beach together in the summer. And his closeness to Lenny brought him closer to me. We weren’t good friends yet, but we were working on it.

  One night in late August, shortly before he was to head back to school for senior year, we went to see Devo in Central Park. The opening act was a magician whose tricks couldn’t be seen past the first few rows of seats. The audience booed him mercilessly.

  “This is stupid,” I said. “I have no idea what he’s doing. Nobody does.”

  Kenny grinned. “It’s a metaphor,” he said.

  I thought about it: “A metaphor for what?”

  He looked at me. Up close he looked tired, maybe from working construction all summer. “For everything,” he said. “He’s up there, pretending to do something that isn’t real, and we can’t even see him do it. What does it matter if we can or can’t see it? We know it isn’t real, anyway.”

  “But it’s pointless,” I said.

  “That’s the point,” he said, grinning.

  I didn’t get Devo either, the jerky movements and tiered plastic helmets. But Kenny loved them, and I was willing to like them for the sake of what was slowly becoming a friendship.

  Walking up Columbus Avenue later, Kenny said he had a headache.

  “No surprise,” I said. “That music would give anyone a headache.”

  “No, it’s not from the music,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “I’ve had it for a while.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Six weeks.”

  I turned to him in shock. ”You’ve had a headache for six weeks, and you didn’t say anything about it?”

  “I’ve had it off and on for a few months. It’s no big deal.”

  “Did you tell Mom?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Are you nuts? She’ll get all crazy.”

  It was true. My mother thought every headache was a brain tumor, every cough, pneumonia.

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  He went back to college in a week and visited the doctor at the campus health center. Perfectly fine physical specimen, Kenny wrote me in his nearly illegible scrawl. He enclosed a cutout of Clark Kent from an old Superman comic, prying his jacket apart to reveal the bright yellow “S” against the red costume. Kenny had glued a yellow plastic Devo helmet on him. “Invincible,” he wrote across tier one. “Omnipotent,” was on the next tier.

  His letters to me got stranger. He never wrote about classes or friends or activities, just odd fragments of things he’d been reading, or a quote from a song. When he came home for the holidays, the change was shocking. He was very thin, and only ate strange combinations of foods, which couldn’t be altered in any way. Breakfast was one-half of a baked potato with a peeled apple, or a raw egg with one quarter of a banana. None of it made any sense, but the rules were inflexible. If there was a scrap of peel on the apple or part of the banana was brown, he would throw it all out and start over, calmly, deliberately, like a scientist focused on a very difficult task. When he talked to me, he stared somewhere over my shoulder. When he did look at me, I felt frightened. There didn’t seem to be anyone behind his eyes.

  Another shock arrived when we received his grades. He’d taken incompletes in most of his courses that semester. Handwritten notes came from his professors. They wanted to give him good grades, they said; they could tell he was capable. But at some point during the semester he had stopped doing the work, and then stopped coming to class.

  He started seeing a chiropractor, who recommended certain nutrients, particular foods, exercises, and frequent visits. Kenny was already eating according to a rigid standard
that eliminated 90 percent of the foods in the world. Now he got rid of an additional 5 percent.

  My mother was petrified, so frightened that she became incapable of movement, or decision. In frantic phone calls the same questions went around and around. What’s wrong with him? What do you think we should do? Should we take him to see a doctor? Will he go? Can you ask him? Should we take him to a psychiatrist? Will he go? Can you ask him?

  But Kenny was adamant: no doctors, no psychiatrists—just the chiropractor, and his strange nutritional regimen.

  After he returned to college in January, we waited, worried, hoping that this was just a bump, that somehow normal life would kick in, and he would go back to the way he’d been before.

  His letters became fewer, and then stopped. Phone calls failed to reach him. He was living alone in an apartment off campus, and we didn’t know any of his friends. There was no one we could call for help.

  His midterm grades arrived: incompletes in every class. In April, terrified, my parents flew down, and brought him home.

  He was emaciated, hollow-eyed. His moods shifted suddenly from silence to fury. He went back to the chiropractor, eating almost nothing, sometimes staying in his room all day. He was obsessed with germs, with illness and cleanliness, with cleaning the kitchen counter over and over, ten times or more, before he would peel his apple or pour a glass of water. Sometimes he spent hours in the bathroom, scrubbing his flesh raw, or, even worse, giving himself enemas once, twice, sometimes three or more times a day. It was my mother’s obsession with germs, her focus on food and digestion and safety times ten, times a hundred, times infinity.

  Every few days I would catch a glimpse of my funny, smart, silly brother inside this sickly shadow.

  Walking down the block in early July, steaming in the summer heat, Kenny wearing a sweatshirt because he was cold now all the time, he said, “I’m thinking of starting a T-shirt business, personalized shirts, with funny sayings like ‘Everything is relative—especially your relatives.’ ”

  I laughed: There’s my brother!

  But most of the time we circled around him warily. Everything Kenny said and did was analyzed. My mother, who had spent years running the show, giving orders, was frozen, which scared me almost more than anything. I was twenty-six years old, and had no idea what to suggest, or do.

  In July my parents forced Kenny to see a psychiatrist, a customer of my father’s electrical contracting business. The doctor met with my parents and then with my brother, then with my parents again. He told them he needed to see Kenny several times a week. Kenny saw him once more, and then refused to return.

  “He’s an asshole,” he said. “He has no idea what the fuck he’s doing.”

  My mother begged; she ordered. But he refused.

  By the end of July, Kenny would only talk to my cousin Susie, who was close to him in age, and shared a cynical worldview and a wicked sense of humor. She told me later they talked about comic books, superheroes, Roman warriors, knights in armor, and samurai. Kenny admired the Romans and the samurai, because they were men of honor, willing to fall on their swords, to not only die in battle at the hands of another, but to die by their own hand if they were defeated.

  On August 10 he sat at the kitchen table and had a fight with my mother, a fight about going to the chiropractor or eating a raw potato for breakfast or washing his hands twelve times with Ajax until they nearly bled, or any one of the dozens of things that we argued with him about. He yelled at her, “Go fuck yourself,” and my mother got in her car and went to work. She stopped to run an errand, and half an hour later, when she heard sirens and saw a police car racing past her in the opposite direction, she turned the car around and went home. Kenny wasn’t there. She sat by the window in the empty house and waited for the police to come tell her what she already knew had happened.

  After their fight, Kenny had driven to a nearby building, one of the very few apartment buildings in our suburban town. He parked in the lot in front, and went up to the roof. Later the police told us two girls saw him sitting there, on the edge, his legs dangling, sometimes swinging, as he surveyed the scene from sixteen stories up. At some point, he wrote his name and address and phone number on a piece of paper in his spiky print and put it in his pocket. Then he wrote five words on a torn piece of paper, tucked it into another pocket, and let himself fall.

  I barely remember the next few days. My uncle Sam went to the county medical center to identify Kenny’s body. Somehow I ended up with the death certificate, which said, “massive internal injuries” as the cause of death, not suicide, or madness. I remember going with my uncle to bring my brother’s car home from the lot in front of the building where he died.

  I remember, and I wish I didn’t, going with my husband to tell my grandmother that she had lost another grandchild. When she saw us at her front door, unannounced, uninvited, she knew, and her legs gave way. When we told her, sitting in her art-filled living room, my tiny grandmother shrank a little. She trembled, then steeled herself. “Oh my,” she said softly. She didn’t cry.

  My mother wept quietly at the small hasty funeral. There were a few family members there, a few family friends, but no friends of Kenny’s. He had lost touch with them by the time he died.

  The second night we were sitting shiva—the traditional seven-day Jewish mourning period—the psychiatrist who had seen my brother came to call, and asked to speak to my parents and me alone. Sitting downstairs in the chilly den, he told us that he’d diagnosed my brother as schizophrenic, although he never told my brother of his diagnosis. In his opinion, this meant Kenny was doomed.

  “Many researchers now believe that schizophrenia is an inherited condition,” he said, his gaze traveling carefully from my mother to my father to me. “It’s a condition that cannot be corrected.”

  My mother and father nodded at him.

  “Perhaps your son’s birth father or mother was schizophrenic,” he said. “I understand you know very little about them.” My mother nodded.

  The doctor continued. “Schizophrenics often spend their entire lives heavily medicated or institutionalized. I think Kenny understood enough of what was happening to him to make a different choice.”

  The night before, I’d gone into Kenny’s room, a small room with a dresser, a desk and a bed. Amid the mess of papers and books, clothes and magazines and record albums, I found several library books on mental illness. One had a bookmark at the chapter on schizophrenia. Did Kenny diagnose his own mental illness without the doctor even telling him? Was suicide his self-prescribed treatment?

  It all worked out so neatly, I thought, gazing at this pompous doctor’s smile of comfort, watching as he patted my mother’s thin, shaky hand. I didn’t need to worry—it was a condition caused by an inheritance Kenny and I didn’t share. My parents didn’t need to feel guilty because it wasn’t their fault. It had nothing to do with bad mothering, absent fathering, or lousy sistering. How convenient.

  I should have asked the doctor why, if he had diagnosed my brother with this serious mental illness, he’d never informed my parents. At the time, I didn’t think of it; I never saw the doctor again.

  I’d imagined so many endings to the story, but this was one I did not, could not, have thought up. Maybe if I had, I could have rewritten the ending. I’ll never know. I have lived a long time without my brother, and there are days and days that go by without my thinking of him, which seems the saddest ending of all. When I summon Kenny in my mind, I see the photographs in my albums: Kenny at age three, wearing red shorts and suspenders, his head buried in my mother’s lap, refusing to be part of the formal family portrait. I see him as a floppy-haired thirteen-year-old in a chocolate brown suit, holding open the door to the country club in the last photo in his Bar Mitzvah album. I see him at fifteen, leaning on a tree branch, grinning, big crooked teeth smiling at the camera. I see him taller and skinnier, a mop of brown curls atop his head, in corduroy bell bottoms with a little brown scarf tied around h
is neck like an ascot, going out to dinner with all of us to celebrate his high school graduation.

  I don’t see him much after that. I don’t see his college graduation picture, his wedding photo, heading off to a job interview in a suit and tie. I don’t see him holding my first baby, born a year and a half after Kenny died. I don’t see him becoming an uncle, a husband, a father.

  I miss him more now as a sibling than as the person he was. I don’t want to be an only child, the only person who has my memories, my parents, and my history. I want to be able to turn to someone and say, “Remember that stupid Here Come the Brides show we used to watch on Tuesday nights? Remember you used to tease me about how much I loved Bobby Sherman? Remember when Dad used to take us slot-car racing and we’d always fight over who got the red car? Remember when we went to Lake Placid and you got scared by Santa Claus and yelled at him, ‘I’m Jewish! Leave me alone!?’ Remember? Remember? Remember?”

  At the end of our week of sitting shiva, my uncle Sam took me aside and handed me an envelope from the county medical examiner’s office. “I thought you might want to keep these,” he said. Inside were Kenny’s birth certificate and the contents of his wallet, a driver’s license, a library card. There was the piece of paper on which he had thoughtfully written his name, address, and phone number for the police he knew would come. And there was the other little torn scrap of paper, with five words in my brother’s slanty, spiky, almost illegible handwriting.

  “The universe is a salami,” it said.

  The universe is a salami.

  15. BUNNY

  BIRTH

  [The baby’s] eyes will have no tears, no functioning tear ducts,

  for several weeks. The first cries are always tearless ones.

  GERALDINE LUX FLANAGAN

  THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF LIFE