12-01-06

My sister says she’s going blind and I think she’s being dramatic as usual. When I was five, she told me she was dying, right there, on the spot, and she clutched her throat, ripped off a little piece of my art project that I had finished at school and brought home to show mom and dad, put it in her mouth (and it was the piece with some dried macaroni and clear Elmer’s glue,) and made a horrible sound like a completely fake dinosaur, not a real one, like the dinosaurs whose bones hang from the ceiling of the Natural Museum of History, extremely faked dinosaur, like the ones in Jurassic Park the movie, the stupid ass movie that I’ve now watched twenty times, two times for each day I’ve had to babysit my brother, which if you do the math, is ten days. So she made that sound and she dropped to the floor, her hand still holding on to her throat and she took a small break from faking her death and told me the story about the man who married a woman and every hour of every day and night she wore a small pink ribbon around her neck and told him to never try to touch or, or heaven forbid, untie it, and it drove him so mad that he gave her a bunch of sleeping pills one day and then when she was snoring like a passed out alcoholic, he untied the ribbon, and BAM, her fucking head rolled right off.
“Please don’t die,” I begged her. At the time, I was in my first month of kindergarten, and already, I was so fucking stupid. I spent all of my afternoons alone with my sister in our house. We lived ten blocks from the beach, and they were ten short blocks. In the summers, the air smelled bad. It smelled like uncooked seafood and sometimes I wanted to puke. The house would get really still during the day, when no one was there, although later I found out sometimes my sister hid in the basement until my parents had dropped me off to school and they had gone off to work, and she would emerge into the morning sun which shone straight into our living room and kitchen and illuminated all of our furniture, my mom’s green plants, the block of iced meat that my dad set out every morning to thaw for dinner, and my parents change of clothing, which consisted of long underwear and pajama sets from China with hideous designs like cheesy potted plants and garden tools with the words “J’aime le soleil,” in ugly cursive that even I could do better than, and my sister would emerge into all of that, all of the things I thought no one got to touch or see or be around during the hours of 8:30 and 3:30, but she, the sneak, the liar, the deceptacon, actually got to see it quite often, and she was also the reason why our heating bills were always higher than my parents expected because she would turn the thermostat to 85, so she could prance around in my mom’s old clothes, her skirts and water-filled bras, and when I came home, she would turn it back down to 60, which was the same as freezing butt as cold, and she would calm down, and the two of us would sit at the kitchen table, eating whatever snacks our parents had bought us the Sunday before, and twiddle our thumbs in our cold, static house.