12-19-06

When Cindy first left home for college, my mom cried everyday. Dennis was only three years old. I was okay, just felt a tiny bit betrayed, a tiny bit emptied out of all the good parts. But my mother cried every day, and she did it sitting right in front of us, at the kitchen table, while the rest of us ate. Sometimes, I would take her bowl and put it on the far end of the kitchen table because I didn’t want her to cry and eat.
Sometimes, Cindy would come home and have a blank look in her eyes for days. Sometimes, she woke us up with her crying in the middle of the night. She had lost someone who she loved to another girl, or they just simply lost interest in her, and she said to me once when I came into her room after being woken up by a long hiccupped breath that came from her end of the hall, “You think it’s so dramatic when you hear about someone killing themselves just because they were dumped, but then you feel the complete pointlessness of being alive after someone you loved for a year just stops feeling that same love back to you, and then you understand a little bit.”
I wanted to tell her that my mom probably sometimes felt like there was no point to this house without Cindy’s presence. I wanted Cindy to know that it was the way that Cindy didn’t even think about mom, never cried about our mom, that made our mom feel like her life was already over. Sometimes, I want to take Dennis with me and crawl into bed with my mom and give her little hugs all night long. Sometimes, I pretend I’m mom and I make Dennis pretend to be me, and I imitate my mom when she’s wrapped up thinking about Cindy, as if Cindy might never come home again, as if she was gone from our lives forever, and not just temporarily, and I would rock back and forth and push my hair forward in front of my eyes while I pretended to cry, and then Dennis would come up to me and try to give me a hug, but he was so small that it just felt really nice, his small hands grabbing my shoulder and I would say, “Go away unless you’re Cindy,” which wasn’t something my mom ever said, but I worried sometimes that she was speaking to us in codes, and so I was always trying to crack them, and this was just what I came up with.






I like our neighbors. Some of them own cats and dogs, and one of them owns a snake. The one who owns a snake wants us to call her Ms. F and Dennis is the only one of us who actually does that. Cindy and I just call her “hey you” even though she’s older and it’s not really showing respect. Still, that’s just what we like to do. Ms. F wears a small gold jewel in the middle of her forehead and she used to live in the jungles of Cambodia where she had to beat down snakes with her bare feet to survive, but she always secretly loved them, so she ended up taking buying a snake as soon as she arrived in the United States, and she also married an Indian husband who we never saw for more than a few minutes each month, but we always marveled at his moustache. How did he get it to be so perfectly curled at the ends?