12-18-06

On the day my brother was born, I was exactly nine years old, and my friend Hanzhi, who later changed his name to Harry, was eight years and some months, and it was a beautiful time because no one had started to make fun of us yet for being best friends (we had about a year and half of this bliss left), even though we were basically asking for the ridicule with our role-playing games. They all went along the lines of: I was his wife, he was handsome, I had a sharp wit, he had good arms, I knew an impressive amount of words, he could bench 250, we served in the secret service and had committed to spending our entire lives trying to vanquish enemies from the outside, and traitors from within (his dad and my dad of course, and their code names were Diarrhea Daddy, and Constipation Papa), and after we completed a mission (usually took about an afternoon’s time) we would pretend to sleep like husband and wife, and since we were so hyper all the time and would exert massive amounts of energy in trying to capture Diarrhea Daddy and Constipation Papa, whenever we ‘pretended’ to sleep, we would actually fall asleep, and all the grown-ups fawned at us, stood over us and whispered annoying things like, “They’re little monsters when they’re awake, but look how beautiful they look now,” as if we were better unconscious, as if the most beautiful state we could ever achieve was akin to being in a coma!
On the day my brother was born, Cindy was a junior in high school and mom was starting to cry because Cindy’s only requirement for picking a college was that it be as far away from New York as possible, and I asked her in the middle of the grayest December day in all of 1991 why she would ever leave this place, I asked her to please tell me why she would want to spend her life away from here, and she crouched down beside me and picked my eyes wide open and said, “Wake up you idiot, this place is a shithole.”
On the day my brother was born, it was Christmas, also known as Cindy and mine joint birthday. I begged my mother the year before when she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister for Christmas to please not give birth to the male version of Cindy, and please, please, please not forget to get me a real present, two real presents, one real present for Christmas, and one real present for my birhday, if for some horrible reason my baby brother or sister was to be born on my/Cindy’s/Jesus, son of God’s birthday. But, despite all that, I woke up at seven in the morning and ran downstairs to find my friend Hanzhi’s mother cooking ground pork and green spicy peppers, which I could not digest properly because I had a poor intestinal system, or so my dad said whenever I refused to eat the crud he cooked on the weekend, and my friend Hanzhi drawing pictures of giant cylindrical presents coming out of Santa’s butt.
“Guess what? You’re brother is being born.” Hanzhi crumpled one of his pictures and threw it at my face. “He’s got to come out of your mom’s butt.” His mom didn’t understand English, and I hit him for grossing me out first thing in the morning.
“Not her butt, you idiot. Don’t you know about the other hole?” He had his violin case with him, which meant he was supposed to practice thirty minutes in the morning and another thirty in the afternoon. I played the piano. My mom made me do one full hour, and it didn’t matter if I did in the morning or afternoon. I picked afternoons because I was the kind of person who waited until the last minute, and sometimes in the afternoon, if I was cute all morning, my mom would let me finish ten minutes early.
I was mad at my mom and I decided I would not practice piano that day. She had broken her promise to me, and later she would probably say something like, “No, I never promised you that. No, I didn’t,” and she would make me cry and I would not have anything to say back because she was my mom, and she always had to have the final say. I said good-morning to Hanzhi’s mom and she hugged me tightly, her dirty apron getting on my cheek.
“You must be so happy, Cici,” she said in Chinese. “Your family is the first family to have three children.” She shook her head and looked away for a minute, “Well. Some couples don’t even have one child yet. You have to wonder why some people aren’t trying to have children when they are getting on in their age. They’ll be crying alone, with no children, no grandchildren come retirement age.” She hugged me again and I tried my best to crane my neck away from the spilt soy sauce on her apron.
I ran up the stairs to find Cindy. I wanted to pounce on her, with the stink of a night’s sleep still on my breath and yell into her face, “We have a baby brother!” but when I threw open her doors there was no one there. I had been left along in the house. They woke up Cindy and took her with them to the hospital, but they left me and called up Hanzhi’s mom. I was hopping mad.
I read a children’s book once about why bees sting human, and the story was extremely biased on the side on the bees. The tone of disdain for humans was something I only picked up on many years later when I was cleaning out my old bookcase filled with storybooks that my father would bring home from work back when he was the Language Coordinator at PS 156.
On one of the last pages of the book, there was an illustration of a bee that had been provoked by a thoughtless human and the bee had slits for eyes and was diving, stinger pointed southward, into a beefy, red-faced kid’s arm. The message was clear: the kid had it coming. For all intensive purposes, when my brother was born, I felt like a pissed off bee, and I zipped through the rooms of our house hitting all the things I could hit without getting in trouble: my parent’s mattress, my sister’s mattress, the clothes hanging in both of their closets, all of my own stuff, including a Clue board that I ripped in half and was never able to tape back together properly.
When my parents finally brought him home to me, I stared at him and dreamed of all the things I would do to make him miserable: twist his arm behind his back when my parents were away, shake his head because Cindy told me that her Biology teacher told her that children have soft brains until the age of two, and you should never ever ever ever shake a child before the age of two because you could incur brain damage, so yip yip hooray, that was going to be my new mission.
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I don’t end up strangling my brother. Every time I got near him he would start drooling and it was so pathetic that I couldn’t get my arms around his neck. I touched his nose and it was very wet and very cold. I blew hot breaths onto his nose and I remembered when Cindy told me that all boys are the same, they talk to you in the same way, and I didn’t even want to know this because I hated boys, I would always hate boys, and I hated when a boy hit me on the shoulder just so he could touch me, but Cindy was always telling me things about the boys she saw in the middle of the night when both our parents were asleep and she could have me guard the front door until she came back, so I would sit at the foot of the steps eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, catching crumbs with my nighgown, and waiting for her to come back angry, pissed off at another boy who was just like that other boy who was just like that other other boy.
“If you kiss them on the nose, they say, thank you,” she told me. “Then if you let them get at your boobs, they stop thanking you.”
“Why don’t you just hang out with girls then if you’re so sick of boys.”
“God, Cecilia. You’re such a baby.”
“I’m not. Dennis is a baby. Get it right, for once.”
“Thanks for watching the front door. Let’s go.”
The things I’d get for watching the front door for Cindy included a big fifty cent lollipop she got from the school President who was selling them so the French club could fund their annual Spring Break trip to Paris, a big stinky kiss on my cheek right as we were waking up in the morning and my mom was putting on her makeup and my dad was making us eggs, an invitation to borrow one of her clothes and wear it to school on a day that wearing good clothes didn’t matter that much to her, like when she had gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays and she didn’t want to get her good clothes all sweaty.
It was a nice time for me. I loved Cindy, and I loved Dennis, and I think they both, might have loved me too.