Three Weeks With My Brother (6 page)

It wasn’t until a few years later that I noticed my father only seemed to have these powers when we were approaching a highway overpass.

In 1972, things began to change in our family. With my sister now in kindergarten, my mother started working, so after school we found ourselves alone. We had an older neighbor who was supposed to look in on us, but she seldom did. Instead, we’d head up to her apartment, tell her that we were home, then ignore her for the rest of the afternoon. This suited her perfectly. She was more of the “contact in case of only dire emergencies, lest I miss my soap operas” kind of baby-sitter, and besides, we’d been on our own in the afternoons for so long by then that we didn’t really need someone to watch over us.

Unsurprisingly, my brother and I suffered an exceedingly high number of injuries during our early years. Already, I’d had my head cut open by a rock thrown by a teenager (which not only involved the police, but a visit by my father to said teen, where the teen was threatened with grave bodily harm if it ever happened again), lost a couple of teeth while learning to ride a bicycle, sprained both wrists and both ankles, and nearly cut my finger off with a piece of broken glass. My brother had the same types of injuries, only, if anything, they were more frequent and serious.

Yet, with the exception of required vaccinations, we children were seldom taken to see doctors or dentists. By seldom, what I mean is “maybe once in our lives, and only then if there was a better than even chance that we might
die.
” I was eighteen years old before I ever set foot in a dentist’s office. I sometimes wondered how much blood I’d actually have to lose before my parents finally broke down and brought me to a clinic. They had no religious reasons for avoiding medical care, they simply believed that seeking medical attention would not only be a waste of time, but more costly than they could afford. Add in the requirement to be tough, and the only doctors my brother and I saw were on television. I remember, for instance, that after I was struck by the rock, blood literally gushed over my face. I couldn’t see well, and was barely able to stagger home.

“You’ll be fine tomorrow,” my mother said after taking a look at it. “You’ve got a thick skull.”

Luckily, I did indeed have a thick skull and was able to heal on my own.

It was around that time, however, that my sister developed epiglottitis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the epiglottis. Neither Micah nor I knew exactly what was wrong with my sister that morning; all we knew was that my sister was burning up with fever, pale, delirious, and had vomited through the night. My parents, who knew a real emergency when they saw one, rushed her to the hospital. Unfortunately, without health insurance, the hospital required a deposit of $200, and after dropping the family off, my dad sped off in search of someone to lend him the money.

My mom went into the hospital with my sister; she told my brother and me to wait near a tree at the edge of a parking lot. “Don’t go beyond here, there, and there,” she pointed, outlining an imaginary box about twelve feet square. Even at that age, we recognized the fear in her voice, and knew enough to do exactly as she said.

It was hot that day, probably close to a hundred degrees. We’d been left with neither food nor water, and to keep our minds off the heat, we spent the next few hours climbing the tree or walking just inside the lines of the imaginary box. We made a game of getting as close to the imaginary lines as we could without stepping over. At one point, I stumbled and fell over the line. I remember standing quickly, but the thought that I’d disobeyed my mom, coupled with the stress that we were under, brought me to tears. As always, in situations like these, my brother was there to comfort me, and with his arm around me, we sat for what seemed interminable hours in the shade.

“Do you think Dana will die?” I asked eventually.

“No,” he said.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know she won’t die?”

“Because she won’t. I just know it.”

I glanced at him. “Mom looked scared. Dad, too.”

He nodded.

“I don’t want her to die,” I said.

It was the first time I’d ever contemplated such a thing, and it scared me. We didn’t have much as a family, but we’d always had one another. Even though she was younger and didn’t explore like my brother and me, my sister had already taken on the best aspects of my mother’s personality. She had a perennially sunny disposition; she laughed and smiled, and—on those days when I wasn’t tagging along with my brother—was my best friend. Like me, she loved the Johnny West set, and at night we would play together for hours.

My brother and I were a curious and sad sight in the parking lot. Strangers would see us as they got out of the car on their way to visit someone inside; hours later, when they came back out, we’d still be sitting in the same spot. A few people offered to buy us a soda or something to eat, but we’d shake our heads and say that we were fine. We’d been taught never to take anything from strangers.

Later in the afternoon, while my brother was climbing in the tree, he lost his grip and fell to the pavement. Landing on his wrist, he screamed, and as he held it before me, I saw it begin to swell and slowly turn black-and-blue. We wondered aloud whether it was broken. We wondered whether we should disobey our mom and head into the hospital to tell her about it, and whether it might even need a cast.

We didn’t move, though. We couldn’t. In the end, my sister would recover, and we’d learn that Micah’s wrist was sprained, not broken, but at the time, we knew nothing. Instead, we sat together with fear in our hearts, just the two of us, not saying much to each other the rest of the afternoon.

C
HAPTER
4

A
fter listening to Micah’s admonition about cheating myself of the excitement about our trip around the world, I hung up the phone, thinking about what he’d said. What Cathy had been saying. What my agent had been saying. What everyone, in fact, had been saying about the trip whenever I’d mentioned it. Despite the logical arguments, despite the fact that it had been my idea to go, I still couldn’t summon any excitement about the trip.

It’s not that I spent my days under a cloud of doom and gloom. Yes, I was busy, but to be honest, I found tremendous satisfaction in all that I was doing. My wife was right; I was busy because I liked being busy. Perhaps, I mused, the problem was that all my energies were focused in only three areas—father, husband, and writer—with little time for anything else. As long as things fit into these neat little boxes that I’d constructed for myself, I felt in control. Not only could I function, but I could thrive. But because it was all I could do to keep up in these three areas, the idea of stepping outside the boxes to do new things—travel, adventure, or spending three weeks with my brother—not only seemed impossible, but struck me as a trade-off I would regret. And in a rare moment of clarity in an otherwise foggy year, I suddenly realized that I had begun to take this to extremes.

If I couldn’t even find excitement in the idea of taking a trip around the world, what kind of person was I? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I didn’t want to stay that way forever. Somehow, I needed to find my balance again.

Of course, there are thousands of books and talk shows offering ways to straighten out your life, and experts of every variety claim to have the answers. Intinctively, though, I wanted to figure things out with the help of the one person in my life who had lived through the same things I had: my brother.

Micah had had his own struggles over the last three years, particularly about his faith. For the most part, he’d abandoned prayer, and discussing faith had become uncomfortable to him. His wife, Christine, had talked to me about her concerns a couple of times—she was devout in her Christian beliefs, as Micah himself had once been—and I slowly began to realize that somehow there was a chance we could help each other. And in that way, I began to think of the trip less as a journey around the world than a journey to rediscover who I was and how I’d developed the way I had.

When I reflected on my childhood, I usually recalled it as light without shadow, as if the dark edges never existed. Or if they did, they were something to be reveled in, like badges of honor. Dangerous events were transformed over the years into humorous anecdotes; painful moments were modified into sweet tales of innocence. In the past, when asked about my parents, I usually responded that my mom and dad were both ordinary and typical, as was my childhood. Lately, however, I’ve come to realize that while my comments were true in some ways, they rang false in others, and it wasn’t until I had children of my own that I finally began to understand the daily pressures that must have plagued both of them. Parenthood is fraught with worry, and my parents—despite the long leash they gave us—no doubt worried about us frequently. But if raising children is difficult, I’ve learned that marriage is sometimes even more challenging, and in this, my parents’ was no exception.

By early 1972, my parents were struggling to keep their household intact. We were children and were unaware of the details; all we knew was that my dad had begun whistling all the time, and by then, it had begun to take on ominous significance. The sound of those nameless melodies, with their pitch rising and falling, was the first of the warning signs of my father’s anger that we children grew to recognize—DEFCON 1, if you will.

In DEFCON 2, mumbling would be added to the whistling and my dad would pace in circles, refusing to talk to anyone. DEFCON 3 was indicated by the actual thinning of his lips, and in DEFCON 4, his face would begin turning red. He was sometimes able to halt the eventual progression toward nuclear launch, but if he ever hit DEFCON 5—where he would curl his tongue against his bottom teeth so that his tongue
protruded
from his mouth, held in place with his top teeth, we kids knew our best option was one of two things: run or hide. We knew he’d be reaching for his belt, which had replaced the flyswatter as the instrument of punishment.

Those moments, while still rare, were growing more frequent. Looking back, I can’t say that I blame him. In 1963, he was a young, recently married, starving student; nine years later, he was still a starving student, only with the added responsibility of providing for a family of five. Working had slowed his education to a glacial pace, and trying to write a dissertation with the three of us using the apartment as our playground in the evenings was enough to drive anyone nuts.

My mom, on the other hand, continued to adore us unequivocally. When we tagged along with her to the store or she brought us to church, she was quick to display her pride to anyone who happened to be nearby. She had an uncanny ability to forget how rotten we were at times, but her ability to forgive was tempered by the same toughness she’d forever been instilling in us. As wild as we got, as far afield as we roamed, there was never a doubt in either my brother’s mind or mine exactly who was in charge. If mom said to be home by dinner, we were home. If she said to clean up our bedroom, we did so right away. And if we happened to make a mistake, she’d make sure that we corrected it. She also defended us like a mother bear when she felt it was merited. When a teacher slapped Micah at school, my mom stormed in that afternoon, dragging Micah and me behind her.

“If you ever slap my child again, I’ll call the police and have you arrested. You will NOT touch my child.”

On the way out, Micah and I strutted like roosters, thinking,
Take that, you old bat. My mom showed you who’s boss . . .

“You’re the best, Mom,” Micah preened. My mom whirled around and brought a finger to his face.

“Don’t think for a second that I don’t know why she slapped you. You probably deserved it, and if you ever talk back to her like that again, I’ll show you what a real slap feels like.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“You know I love you, right?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“You know I’ll always stand up for you, right?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“But I’m still disappointed in you. And you’ll be grounded for this.”

Micah was grounded, but the disappointment hurt worse. We hated to disappoint her.

Despite the pressures my parents were under, my dad gradually became more comfortable with us as we grew older. At times, he would let us crawl up into his lap as he watched old horror movies on television—he absolutely
loved
horror movies—and we came to treasure these moments, pining for them like the exquisite morsels they were. Naturally, we became extremely knowledgeable in the proper ways to kill vampires and werewolves in the event that our family was ever confronted by such a being. My brother and I had carved a collection of wooden stakes out of Popsicle sticks, which we kept under the bed.

In ever rarer quiet moments, my dad used to play the guitar for us as well. His sound was fluid and assured, and one evening he surprised us by telling us that he’d once been in a band.

The thought of my father in a band was fairly heady stuff. It meant that our dad not only had magic powers, but was cool, and of the two, this was of greater importance to us. We knew after all that we were cool, and we thought our parents were, too. But now we had
proof.

We liked to imagine our dad playing before screaming crowds—the kind we saw on television when the Beatles played. We even had long conversations about it, but our dad simply laughed when we asked him how he’d been able to fend all those girls off.

“My band wasn’t quite that popular,” he tried to explain, but we didn’t believe him. Why should we? The facts, after all, were clear. He was in a band. He sang and played like a professional. And he used to live in England. What could be more obvious? After a while, I think we actually convinced ourselves that he not only knew Paul McCartney and John Lennon personally, but had played no small role in their success.

And he was
our
dad.