December 16, 2006

• For Ham

  For nearly seven years I’d been happy as an only child. I had my cousin Sheri to keep me company at my dad’s house and my overactive imagination to keep me occupied elsewhere. But then one morning, eighteen years ago, I padded down the kitchen stairs for breakfast and my grandpa told me that my mom went to the hospital in the night; I had a new baby brother. Then grandpa gave me a plate of sunny side up eggs and I cried. I was convinced that the baby in my mom’s tummy was a girl. And I liked my eggs scrambled.

  Waaaaaa!

  When Anthony came home from the hospital, his head was shaped like an egg and he cried until he was purple. Late at night, Mom would hold him to her while she swayed around to a Van Morrison CD in the living room; it calmed him.

  When Anthony was learning to hold his head on his neck unassisted, I was learning to read. I remember sitting on the nubby old couch, my googley, squirming new brother in one arm and an unwieldy hardcover (sharp-cornered!) book in the other. I was as frustrated with the awkward seating arrangement as I was with trying to sound out the words, but I remember wanting so bad to share the book with him. I wanted to make it work.

  When Anthony got a bit older, he had a yellow playpen with white mesh sides. We liked to make each other laugh by smashing our faces against the mesh; I can still feel his damp little palm running over my mesh-mashed face, laughing hysterically.

  One summer, when Anthony was a toddler, I had set up what I liked to think of as a sort of sorcery nook, on the side of our house by the chimney. I had collected Anthony’s baby food jars and filled them with grass, pine cone bits, feathers, and other items that I liked to pretend had magical properties. One afternoon, Anthony wondered back there and managed to break the glass and step on it with his bare baby feet. My parents whisked him away to the ambulatory clinic; when my step dad told me how he’d been cut I felt like a murderer. My face was hot from shame and I cried alone in my ex-sorcery nook, chucking the hateful jars into a garbage pail, cringing to think of my new brother’s little feet stumbling onto glass.

  For years, Anthony hummed and slammed his face into his pillow to get to sleep at night so we nicknamed him The Hammer. Then it became Hammer, than Ham Bone, then Hammy, and sometimes just Ham. I wonder if anyone but me calls him that anymore…

  So what’s he like? It’s a hard question for me to answer. I left home at 18, when he was 11. I’ve missed a lot. Too much. But here’s what I know:

  He’s tall. Really tall. And handsome. Sometimes he’s shy. But sometimes he’s the first to shake your hand. He likes to look nice; even when he was little, he’d always want to change into something fancy-ish before seeing our grandparents. Now he pimps any car he owns, he buys teeth whitening strips, he uses hair product. He is funny in the same dark, goofy, irreverent way that is as hereditary as height in our family, but some people will never know that: he is a pretty guarded person. Babies and toddlers flock to him, inexplicably. Any family function we go to, his little cousins (the girls especially) squeal with delight when they hear that Anthony has arrived. He shrugs and blushes and does absolutely nothing to deserve the attention. But the kids just like him. And so he doesn’t fight it and he lets them. He is smart. Really smart. He hates school more than anything in the world. He’s had an astoundingly glamorous girlfriend for a few months now; he loves her, truly. There are other, sadder things about my brother, but on his birthday they are not important. Especially not this birthday.

  My brother is eighteen today. An adult with a whole world of choice and no real past to speak of. I want him to know how sacred that is and how gently to treat it. I want him to feel new again, clean and good again. I want him to know that being a sister is one of the happiest, saddest, biggest, and best things about my life.

  Happy Birthday, Hammy. I love you.

  
  The siblings three: Julian, Anthony, and Truly

  • 10:51 am
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