12-09-06

The reason why my sister thinks she’s going blind is because she can’t see her boyfriend’s face anymore. She calls me in the middle of the night and wakes up the entire family with her call. My dad emerges from his room and I allow myself to admit this: he’s getting old. The lines around his eyes are beautiful and deep. They come out the most when he smiles. He looks like a man who could seduce a much younger, much more beautiful woman than my mother, the kind of man who girls look and think, “He’s got sad eyes,” and it would have been a compliment, a brilliant remark that was as sweet as a dream that interrupts your real, waking life.
When my father’s angry, or tired, like he is tonight, the lines begin to look drawn-in, faked—as if someone went in and penciled lines of deep irritance right onto his face. It scares me and sometimes I tell him so, only to get him angrier with me.
He comes into my room without knocking, right after I pick up the phone.
“Who is it, Celia?”
“It’s just Cindy.”
“Chuh.” That’s the sound he makes when he want to evoke a certain emotion, or pass a certain kind of judgement on me. It’s the sound of hi shaking his head at me, or the sound of him seeing the things I do as ridiculous and illogical and only possibly tolerated by someone who has not suffered for the past tweny years and continues to suffer to this very day, even up to this very second.
“Chuh,” he says, as forcefully as someone who was woken up in the middle of the night can say something. “Both of you have too much time on your hands,” he says, and if he weren’t so tired, he would suggest a way for us to not have as much free time. A common suggestion: “Why don’t you mow the lawn and repaint the house? That should take up all this free time you seem to have and otherwise spend complaining.” That was one of his favorite things to say. Or, “Try being daddy for a day. You go to work, you get yelled at, you take care of twenty computers and twenty shouting stock brokers, and then you come home and make dinner, then you clean up, then you tell mommy you have to finish paying the bills when she gets her lower lip all fat and tries to get me to watch another episode of the latest TV show she’s watching, and then you, the next day handle her when she’s going off about all the bills we should have paid yesterday. I’d be happy to switch out for your life. When should we initiate the swap?” Tonight he simply says “scchuh,” to me and retreats back into his room.
[NEED TO FIGURE OUT WHAT GOES HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH.]
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Around this time, I start to worry about dying. When I take my brother to the YMCA for his swimming lesson, I unbuckle my seatbelt during a red light and reach back to hold his hand for as long as the light stayed green.
He asks me, “Why’re you doing that?””
“I’m scared to lose you.” I close my eyes and imagine myself being shot in the face at night, being sent spiraling down the side of the highway in the morning when my dad takes the shorter windier route to Flushing, going to the doctor’s for a check-up and being told that I was fine only to have a vein in my brain explode as my mom took out a ten dollar co-pay, or worst of all, just getting old, fast, quick, each year feeling like a minute in retrospect and laying on my deathbed, already eighty, already seventy, just about to die and maybe doing something like getting up on my knees and begging, head to the sky, for whatever God there could possibly exist to let me live just a few more years.
“Um, why’re you talking like that?” I continue driving to the YMCA and drop him off at the showers and locker. I laugh when he comes out, his small seven year old body so so small, I think maybe he belongs on a toy store shelf, and I ask him over and over to please come here and let me hug him and when he finally does, I do the same thing I did in the car, hug him so long and so hard that he starts to push me away with both his hands, and when that doesn’t make me let go, he head butts me and that actually hurt me so I released my grip.
“Don’t hit me. I’m your sister and I just took you to your swimming class when I could have been at home watching TV.”
“You said one second. That was more than one second.”
I let him go and waddle around in his section of the pool. He takes a long time to learn how to swim, so even though this is his eighth week, he’s still a guppie, and Andrew Keneti, the other kid who attends Tuesday night swim lessons and is evenly matched to my brother in size is already on his way to being a shark.
I sit in the waiting room and all I can thinking about is dying, what it feels like, how it will happen to me, if I will even know that I’m about to die the moment before I die, if it’s better for me to just be obliterated without warning, or if I’d like to know so at least I can be aware of the days I have left to be happy, to feel the small cheeks of my brother against my hair and shoulders, to love the boys I see on the streets and shout out to and then run from, to ask my parents if they are scared to be the age they are now, and if they think about their parents, and then to ask my grandparents if they are scared of the days they have left, if they feel like it’s meaningful to do anything, if they think it was worth it after all, to have been born, to have been given a life that only feels so good as long as you know it will end and you will not even feel the life you led, you will not even know you were once born, and I think these songs so much, repeatedly and nonstop, that I end up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man not reading even one page of the book I had brought with me. It was, and although the night before, I had read it happily, if not a bit begrudgingly, today I could not even see the words on the page as anything at all. I think to myself, Maybe it this is what she means by I’m losing my vision Celia, you gotta believe me.