chapter eight.

i wish i had breakfast-like food. not a craving i get often - usually i can't eat within three or four hours of getting up, so that can often take me to the middle of the afternoon. but right now, i could eat over sweetened froot loops, or a big plate of bacon and eggs with those little breakfast sausages that are full of msg but the taste is worth it, and perhaps some home made hash browns. or a gross clown breakfast (at the drive through you take fewer chances of coming face to face with the clown, did you know?). seriously, with a bacon mcmuffin or something. that stuff is so gross and toxic that it wakes me up and does the breakfast job. all i have to do is get dressed, and walk to the corner. well, the second corner. i won't. i'll have whatever leftovers i have in the fridge and the cupboard. i'm not too sure why - it feels like i'm denying myself pleasure or the fulfillment of a wish that would satisfy me. but on the other hand, i really am lazy. and i can justify not spending money. *sigh*

my sister called. she's nice and all, but sometimes i wish she'd just croak. see, i have patience with things, but no patience with humans. i'm never sure of why she's calling. this time she went on and on about my nephew, her son. he's nine years old and a darling little devil. i mean that. i adore him, but he's a hell raiser if there ever was one. and i'd be like him too, or worse most likely, if i was being raised by my sister. uh - well said like that it sounds a whole lot more red-necky than i intended. the nephew is cool. he likes me and i like him, easy enough. that, and he's usually not left alone with me, so he's no responsibility - i can just have fun with him and not care about his schedule or the color his pants have turned to. i'm not the responsible adult my sister would like me to be, but at least i'm a cool companion for her son once in a while. and when she does leave him with me, it's usually one of those times she uses the expression "i have no other choice", which i really hate because it's always bullshit. mark my words: i have no choice is always bullshit, no matter who says it or when. if you throw yourself in a fire rather than plunge 2 kilometers to your death, you had a choice: you chose the fire. if you leave your kid with me when your babysitter has cancelled on you at the last minute, you have the choice of staying home and missing out on your evening of friendly bar hopping. if you make him miss his karate lesson, don't tell him you didn't have a choice: you had a choice, you just happened to choose hosting a five service dinner on the same weeknight your kid had a class (you signed him up for), and you'd rather have everything ready for your party than take the kid to his class. you had a choice.

anyway, on those nights when she doesn't have a choice, the nephew and i pig out on all sorts of food that is forbidden for either or both of us. i slacken all the health rules accidents and procedures have laid on me in the last several years, and he asks me to buy all the junk his mom won't allow in the house. we put cushions on the floor and we rent crazy movies, the kind with a lot of stupid car chases, and horror movies with zombies and pestilent monsters. we sleep late and eat more junk for breakfast. then we hide all evidence in a special drawer, and try to act normally enough so that when his mom opens the door we can be believable in our "us? nothing!" look. it's fun. but it doesn't happen too often to become unfun.

anyway, she didn't want me to babysit (he rolls his eyes every time she uses that term: he says he's not a baby anymore - which is what i would have said when i was nine, and until i turned 25 and then realized i had been a baby all my life until then, and even then...). she just wanted to complain. i guess all her friends were unavailable. she wanted to blow some steam, tell me - well, no, not me, but somebody, anybody! - that her son had ruined his brand new super expensive sneakers on a skateboard ramp, doing she doesn't know what, but it doesn't matter what because he was supposed to be in his room doing his homework, not on a stupid skateboard ramp, which she had forbidden for him that week and the next because of some math test that he had failed, and he could have gotten hurt, going there without her permission, and what was she going to do with him, he was proving more unruly by the minute and turning into his dad, and speaking of his dad, the bastard again didn't pay his child support, and he didn't show up to pick up the nephew, and that's the third time in a row and do i think maybe that's why the nephew is acting up? she doesn't really want an answer. or if she does, she simply forgets to give you time to answer. she goes on about the school, which isn't providing enough flexibility for her busy business woman schedule, about crap on tv that her son is taking in but what else is there for him really, he doesn't want to read he doesn't want to do anything, and especially not with her and what's a single gorgeous ambitious mother to do?

the lament is long and tumultuous. i know - i've heard it all before. oh she modifies it, adds a few elements, removes some others, changes the order. it's her rich good looking single mother chant, and she's been perfecting it for seven years and if you knew my sister you'd know just how perfect anything she devotes her attention to can get. any thing, mind you, because she is rather frustrated with all of us subhumans, who somehow can live our lives around her (orbiting her, she'd say and think) without being touched by her blessedness. so she goes on with her chant, the theme to her life nowadays. she'll tune it for the audience, too. i'm the sister, so i get every possible version - she tests them on me. but i've heard her modify it for the divorce judge (her son's father never stood a chance... what she doesn't say in the chant is that she got such a high child support payment from him that he has to keep two jobs to be able to live - yet clearly she lives well enough without his payments - and that he is only allowed to see his son approximately whenever she decides he should - and if she calls and he happens not to pick up before the fourth ring, well he's lost his chance and he can hope to see his son in another couple of weeks, whenever she'll think of it next). i've heard her modify it for an award acceptance speech. i've heard another version at a friend's wedding - somehow all of a sudden it became all about the maid of honor...

i lit up a joint. i wasn't really a part of the conversation anyway. i could keep her happy (and i prefer to keep my sister happy, even though it has very little to do with sisterly love and everything to do with my personal peace and quiet - she can be something when she gets angry or offended, or even worse, when she's worried and absolutely wants to make sure you're doing okay; and by that, she means living your life the way she thinks you should, and that's the way she would live it if she could...) without doing more than grunting an uh-uh once in a while, or sending a "no, really?" via the air waves. she went on and on for close to an hour. she knows i hate the telephone, she just doesn't care. no, that's probably not true. she just has a little difficulty practicing empathy. she simply cannot grasp certain things, like the fact that someone - anyone - could hate talking on the phone. she thinks the telephone is great: it allows her to spread her message to the masses, all over the world, while listening to the sound of her own voice. how delightful! hell, she pays for my phone service. i begged her not to, but she went on and on about emergencies, what would happen if there was an emergency, what if you were babysitting your nephew and the drapes caught fire (drapes? she lives in the last century. fire? that's why i have fire extinguishers, maybe?), what if you have a stroke and all you can do is reach for the phone and press 911? fine, i eventually said. because what she really wanted was to have a way to reach me whenever she wants to, and having a phone is not quite as frightening a thought as having her drop by unexpectedly every week. and i think she'd agree. she's as scared of barging in on me (and finding out "what i do" - even though i don't know what she's so afraid to find out) as i'm scared to have her invade my life.

it's funny and weird to look at us both now and to think that we had the same parents, the same upbringing, that we lived the same shit more or less. because we became very different adults. she's very driven. she went to school for quite a while, got good grades, graduated with whatever honor is the highest possible, got a good job right away. she got married (gasp!) young, to her second boyfriend, a guy who seemed decent enough (he was and is), and got pregnant six months into the marriage. i think her hubbie hoped that a kid would somewhat slow her down, and he would finally be able to catch up. he was oh so wrong. her expectations became requirements, and the poor guy faded slowly. he attempted to stay in her shadow and hide there, but she's not the type (and neither am i, i guess) to let you get away with anything. so she quickly decided that her life and that of her child would be better organized and more efficient if she erased the dad factor.

i don't mind that my sister plays king of the world. she does wield a certain power, and usually she uses it for good. i mean if it was up to her, there would be no environmental problem left unsolved, no animal left without a good caring family, no child going hungry. there would also be no drugs or alcohol, and men would be an endangered species. that's where i draw my own lines. and those are topics we mutually have agreed to avoid, except when i'm too drunk or she's too hyper. then we have fights the like of which most people would rather never see. the boyfriend is always tiptoeing around her, ever since bitch fest 1998, a grand public demonstration of our hostile feelings for one another. for new year's eve, no less. how pathetically unoriginal, to have our family feuds during the holidays. it scared the boyfriend. even after we reconciled (at the emergency room he brought us to), he has always gotten that terrified bunny look when i mention that my sister and i will be in the same room he is in. and if he thinks i can't handle her at that moment, he points it out, and then points out that he's got pressing things to do.

my sister and i, really, are always having the same fight. it started when i was six and she was ten, and it never really ended, only paused for shorter or longer treuces. she thinks she knows all, and she thinks i should rely on her and act according to her advice. that's one way to sum it up. my sister is the kind of person that you're better not to go see if you have a problem. it's not that she's mean, it's just that she's developed very analytical ways of coping, and she applies her grid of acceptable reactions and emotions to other people - that's where my problem starts.

an example would be when i was younger and some bastard i thought i loved cheated on me. we'd been dating for a few months, and although it was serious, i was young, and to be honest i had cheated on him too, and more than once. the difference, though, the major difference, is that he never found out. so i was still the saint, you see? very important. now my sister knew i had cheated, but she's my sister - she takes my side no matter what. now for a chick who had strayed, i was rather taken aback by how painful his betrayal was. to this day, i can't believe what an idiot he was to come right out and tell me - and then to expect me to accept his apology! if i didn't know until then, what was the point of telling me now? but the point is, i was terribly upset, falling to pieces, whatever, all the clichés there are out there to describe infidelity and betrayal are all accurate to some degree.

i went to my sister. she sat with me and listened for a bit. not too long - but i know her and i usually make my stories short and to the point, that way i can get to their end. so she listened, and then she screwed up her face (when she does that she looks like one of those mechanical toys that you wind, and the second you let them go they bark or move forward or whatever they're designed to do), and she let me have it. now what you're going to do - what? excuse me? and that's my problem with her. she doesn't care to listen, she wants to fix. she doesn't want me to pour my heart out - she wants to glue the pieces back together so we don't have to talk about all those emotions anymore. it's not just about appearances, it's about the way she sees life, and therefore the way life must be lived. she doesn't give advice, she gives instructions.

and, as i said before, i don't follow directions. never have. so perhaps you can see why every few years we end up pulling the hair off each other's head. hair pulling isn't even that bad - we started that when i was five. then at ten came the nails - in her face, in mine, anywhere. then when we were both teens we had fist fights. she didn't like those: they'd leave her face bruised and bloody, and that did not fit at all with her little miss perfect school aura. i, on the other hand, did not care, and simply looked my part. we haven't gotten into a real fight since becoming adults - other than that time at new year's eve.

as i'm thinking about all this, she's still going on, yakking away. what was it about now? oh, she's going through the one about how it's so much easier for a single dad to find another woman than it is for a single mom. i uh-uh empathetically. if it makes her feel better to think she's still single because men are afraid of her son... most likely, it's her they're afraid of. but it eats her up to know i've got a relationship that suits me - even though it would not suit her at all. so she brings up the topic oh just a little bit too often for me to think it's completely casual. i'd tell her to get a dog, since dogs are so much cuter than children, and are likely to attract more single men, but eh - why walk into a trap when i don't have to, put my foot in when she's perfectly happy chatting with herself.

and then, just between the cost of hiring a new gardener to take care of her lawn (golf course is more like it, and i've never understood why she clung and clings to that house, given that she doesn't especially like going outside, and that it is bigger out than in) and the new karate belt the nephew is trying out for next week (and could you be there? it's wednesday night and he'd love for you to be there, could you? uh-uh. well then can i ask you to drive him home afterwards? i've got a lot of things to do. uh-uh.), she let it fall, gently as is only her way when she knows she's dropping a bomb. i saw dad, she said. uh-uh.

i don't quite know what she said after that. i put the phone down on the table and walked away. and walked and walked and walked. hours later i called the boyfriend to come and pick me up. said he was worried sick. i thought, how nice, i have somebody who worries about me. how nice. he came. no questions asked. he held me, and helped me into his tiny electrical car that has a weird smell, not quite a new car smell but something else and when he first got it i made fun and said it smelled like new vegeleather. he had brought me a jacket and a hat and a thermos filled with hot chocolate. sometimes i worry that he's wearing me down, and that from independent that i was from him i'm turning into the princess by allowing him to be so prince charming-like. but most times i try not to ask those kinds of questions, i close my eyes and recline in the seat and enjoy the warmth all around, and i squeeze his knee as he drives and he looks at me and smiles gently.