12-17-06

My sister is coming home for Christmas. It will be the first time in four years that we have all been together for our birthdays. I had a dream last night that we were triplets, the three of us, and mom put us in a suitcase with two dividers and rolled up through Flushing Meadow Park. When I was five, my dad used to take me to the park and our favorite thing to do was stand above other things. We walked on every bridge, ever extra step, climbed on the big rocks by the east end of the park, and we leaned over to look at the things beneath us—some grass, a bit of dirty water, a few ducks fighting over bread, other children and their fathers walking through the same world we lived in.
I could put my arms out now, as I walk downstairs to make myself a cup of instant noodles, and I would bump into every hanging picture, every ornament my mother has ever bought from a local merchant at a holiday fair, every Chinese saying that has ever been written on a wooden block and then sold to suckers to my mom and suckers like my dad who pays for it, and every thing that makes up this house would eventually touch my fingers, but I would come any closer to being part of this house. Is it possible to hang up memories like a painting, only invisible, and woven in like a sweater. Is it possible to wear a sweater that was all your favorite moments from childhood, and the way you remember your mother looked when you were in elementary school, the dresses she wore every time you celebrated a birthday or a graduation, or the first certificate anyone ever presented to you, even if it was just for not missing a single day of school, which was really because both your parents worked, and they didn’t have the money for a babysitter, so you had to go to work, even the time you felt like puking, and actually did, but at least you did on Suzie, the bitch with a twitch, and what else, what else.
I’m excited to see Cindy, but she hardly makes a blip in Dennis’ radar screen. He’s turning eight this year, and she’s been gone missing from half of his life so far. Next year, it will be more than half. When I was six I told Cindy I love the house we lived in when I was three, and that it was my favorite house. So she picked me up and pretended to try and throw me in the air, but I knew she couldn’t—she’s so weak she’d have trouble lifting Styrofoam, and she pulled me back down to her and held me against her shoulder, all of her hair was falling around me and I felt so happy putting my nose in her hair that I started to laugh and shake my head which hurt her because I have a really heavy head and she has really limp bones, but even still she was pleased with me and she asked me, “You loved that house? That ratty house? You thought it was better than this one?”
“Yes. I like that house better. This one’s boring.”
I love that memory, but I have to try and force myself to not remember it too often. The thing about memory is that it’s constantly updating itself. I have this feeling that the only reason I loved our old house—the first one I remember living in, covered in yellow printed wallpaper, that was later covered in oil from the foods my parents made, the house that was carpeted in the bedroom and covered with rugs in the living room, the house with a tiny backyard with tiny flowers, and all these small bugs that came out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere—is because back then, my sister still agreed to play with me. She dressed me up and took pictures of me. She wrapped a black scarf around my head and covered her eyes with our grandpa’s eyepatch that he wore in the morning sometimes because he had injured his left eye somehow, during the war, which war, we never knew, what sort of injury we never tried to find out, and she took pictures of me looking like that, happy to be her fool and test case. She let me sleep in her bed and she said, “Wrap your legs around me. It helps me sleep.” After we moved to the new house, she was worried all the time. Her pants were too baggy, the other girls had curly hair, no one gave her a ride after Art Club, she was always crying, things were always heavy, and I was alone for the first time, and after that, all the time.


If you want to know what my dad is like, ask someone else. He spends four hours of each working day on a train and on the weekends, sometimes, he drives into Manhattan and offers to take us along with him. When Dennis and I go, we sit in the very back and turn up the air conditioning and play go fish. I let Dennis win and when I say, “You’re really good Denny,” he says, “I know,” and then I want to unbuckle my seat belt and give him a big kiss. Sometimes, I do.
My dad’s works in the World Financial Center with all the other big suits, and women in heels. Every winter, my mom makes us pose right in front of the Christmas tree that stands tall at maybe nineteen or twenty feet and it stands up straight right in the middle of the ‘Winter Gardens,’ which is just a bunch of tropical plants under a glass ceiling. We always go in the winter to see the Winter Gardens, so the feeling of cold and iciness seems apt. The winter is the longest and saddest season in New York so everything that everthing that happens in the winter is sad. Even the good things are tinged with either an enhancing sadness or a detracting gloom. An example of a sadness that enhances a good thing is falling in love someone who doesn’t really love you but pretends to kind of love you.

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I want to try again to explain my father. When he’s awake, he sits slumped in his bed, remote in hand, clicking through as many channels as we have. Sometimes, our parents stop paying for cable and then we only have five channels and every show has a laugh track. Othertimes, my father is in a good mood and we have sixty channels, and he always picks the ones that show old movies of Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris fighting a bunch of villains, and everyone has a twangy accent.
Could my father be that sort of hero? Severe, gruff, unknowable, altruistic, and altogether, the perfectly made man. Does he hold together our house, does he