Bait and Switch

I always felt uncomfortable when I was around my brothers. Actually, they were my half-brothers - they had a different dad. But I wasn’t uncomfortable around my half-sisters who had the same dad as my half-brothers. Maybe because I was around my sisters more, especially Beth who was eleven years older than me. I never knew exactly how much older Anne was because she always lied about her age, but I knew she was older than Beth and my brothers. When I got older, the jokes went from mildly funny to pathetic, “This is my big sister, Melissa,” she’d say with a snarky little grin. Har fuckin’ har. 

Anne was a terminal victim of low self-esteem. She had been heavy since early childhood and unfortunately she was also the big sister of twin boys who were captains of every sports team their small town high school had and probably some they didn’t. My older brothers were identical twins:  good looking, athletic and popular. Poor Anne. She didn’t stand a chance. So as she grew up she became bitter and mean, but she was also shrewd and highly intelligent. Bad mix. If she were mean and stupid you could see it coming and head her off at the pass, but as it stood she could have you sliced up before you even knew she had grabbed the knife from the counter.

By the time I could form memories of Anne, she was morbidly obese. It was the early 70s and even though she rarely left the house, her hair was always coiffed in a magnificent bee-hive of black and she took hours on her make-up. Her mascara took her so long she rarely removed it; just shellacked another coat on the next day. She looked after me for a while in my very early years; I don’t remember that period at all except a fuzzy memory of a small apartment with too much avocado green, mustard yellow and black. 70s, yeah.

Anne’s self-defense was making undermining comments about others and sometimes just plain cruelty. She was so jealous of what everyone else had, especially in the romance department. She automatically hated any boy that Beth or I were with; the groundwork for destruction would begin:  “Not too smart, is he?”  “Woo! Tennis shoes with a suit?  Classy!”  “You should tell him about Clearasil.” She was relentless. The only man I ever knew her to be with was a married guy named Sheldon or Conway or Fletcher or Steve, or something like that. She always denied they were anything more than friends, even after her son - my nephew Dougie, who was only a year younger than me so he was more like a brother - walked in on them in bed together. He told me about it while we were Christmas shopping with my sisters and mother at Marshall Fields. I asked him if they were naked; he said he thought they were.  He also said that later she, Anne - his mom/my oldest sister, told him that she was only showing him her new waterbed and that he, Dougie, was to knock in the future.  She didn’t yell or get mad at him which I definitely thought she would have. Side note:  by the time she was entertaining aforementioned married guy, she had stomach by-pass surgery and lost a significant amount of weight. She wasn’t a bathing suit model, but she could at least go to the movies with us.

Anne and I butted heads. A lot. We were both stubborn and intelligent and I could see right through her act.  Maybe everyone could but no one but me was willing to call her on her bullshit.  I just refused to play along. “At least I’ve got a boyfriend!” I would retort to her nasty comments about my guys. Then I wasn’t allowed to play with Dougie for a week or two, but sometimes it was just worth it. She could be so unflinchingly cruel. And the thing that pissed me off the most is when she would make comments about Beth’s intelligence. Our middle sister wasn’t a Rhodes scholar, but she was the kindest person I have ever known. People tended to adore her because of her sweet simple nature.  I loved Beth more than any other person on the planet. When Beth was around I was at peace with the world. I knew I was protected and loved and cared for and cherished. So when Anne would turn her pettiness toward Beth, she had to go through me first.

In my eyes, Beth was everything. Ever since I was a little thing she was there doting, protecting, entertaining, teaching and loving me. When all my parents could manage was to crawl out of their corners for another round of Ultimate Codependent Smack-down, Beth was there to soften the blows; to cover my eyes during the bad parts; to distract me when it was too much to bear.  She did such a great job of it that I didn’t even realize I was living in hell until she went away to college - around the time I was going into the third grade. I remember that day taking her to the airport was like consenting to an amputation; the anguish was indescribable. Just like a phantom limb I would reach out to touch her, but she wasn’t there. Inconsolable doesn’t begin to describe it. Luckily for me, college and Beth didn’t get along so well and she was back within two years, but in those two years the cracks in my life came into clear focus. I puttied them up by staying outside and riding my bike until it was time to go to bed. At least in the early years that’s what I did.

While I was out riding my bicycle - and other things - Beth met Ray. Anne hated Ray for no good reason other than he was something that she couldn’t have. I liked him; he was goofy and made Beth happy. By the time Beth met him, I was older, maybe 14 or so and had other things to fill my time so I wasn’t jealous of him like I certainly would have been had I been younger. I guess without realizing it I knew that he was her ticket out of here. I just couldn’t begrudge her for that. The night before their wedding - which was to be at the Mormon temple in Seattle, Washington - Anne was sitting on the toilet and I was in front of the mirror perfecting the art of feathering my hair. “You know Melissa, I do not like Ray. I just don’t think he’s the right guy for Beth,” sneered Anne. I knew she didn’t like him and I didn’t care. “Well I can tell he doesn’t care much for you either, so call it a draw,” I delighted in informing her. Luckily my oldest sister was on the toilet and couldn’t jump up and strangle me. I was out the door and nestled between Beth and Ray by the time she squeezed her size 13 ass into her size 8 jeans. Boy that felt good.

I never really knew the extent of Anne’s malice until after Beth died too early of MS. Oh yeah, she had MS. She was diagnosed when she was 18, but the symptoms were pretty mild until she got into her 40s. Then, poor thing, it was a white-knuckle ride to the end. There were some pit stops along the way, some times when it looked a shade brighter than pitch black, but it went pretty fast. She was dead by 50.  I had a difficult time going to see her those last five years or so and I will feel guilt and remorse for that until the day I take my last luge ride to the finish line. I took comfort from telling myself that she was so far gone she didn’t even know I was there. I’ll never know, but she had withered, both body and mind. I just couldn’t take seeing her like that. What I saw in the bed of that nursing home couldn’t possibly be my beloved sister. It couldn’t. Because if it were, my favorite person in the world was dying a slow, degenerative death. Her beautiful teeth would be rotting out of her skull; her hair would be graying when she would have certainly kept it dark brown, like mine; she would have been able to speak instead of chanting some random phrase that got stuck behind a piece of lint in the groove of the vinyl. 

I hadn’t gone to see her in a year or so. One weekend Anne was in town so we went to see her together. The last time I saw Beth she was ok, relatively. This time I walked in and saw a human who wasn’t anyone I had ever met and wasn’t prepared to acquaint myself with anytime soon. I almost passed by her room altogether because the person I saw from the hallway was not my sister. But, it was. Getting my feet to walk my body into her room was like intentionally letting yourself fall into a pit of razorblades; it was going to be excruciating, it was going to slice you up and it was definitely going to leave marks. By force of will I approached my once beautiful sister. Was she looking at me? I couldn’t tell. Was she saying something? Yes; over and over; “I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.” My feet fully cooperated in getting me out of there as fast as they could. I kept it together until I got into the hallway; I had to, my kids were with me. Once out of sight, I disintegrated. It just couldn’t be this way - but it was. Anne came out and told me that I couldn’t cry like this, that I had to pull it together. I told her to fuck off.

Luckily Beth was at the very bottom of her decline by this time. She was dead within a month. Thank God, Praise Allah and O Mighty Isis. Some of you who haven’t watched a person you cherish rot in front of your eyes may think this is harsh. But death was the best thing that happened to her at this point. The best thing that happened to all of us, really. Anne had used up all of her personal days at work, so she wasn’t able to make the trip from Texas to Oregon for the funeral. At least that’s what she said at the time.

Two weeks after we had sweet Bethany in the ground, Anne left me a voicemail that I needed to call her “pronto.” Oh god. Even though Anne hates our mother, she sounds just like her and has the same self-promoting dramatic interpretation of everything that has happened and will happen in the universe. I called her back to see what the effing emergency was. Apparently, Ray had asked Anne for money over the years, to the tune of a cumulative $20,000. Apparently he told her that he wasn’t getting any other help from the rest of the family. Apparently Ray had also received around $20,000 from Will, the oldest of my twin brothers and the stingiest. Apparently my mother had also helped out but the sum was undetermined which I have a hard time even imagining because my mother is tighter than Dick’s hat band. As a result of all things apparent, Anne was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it except she couldn’t make it to Oregon. Therefore, I had to be the one to gather my mother and hire an attorney to sue that horrible Ray into the Stone Age. Really? How dare he ask for money to care for our indigent sister for ten long years of bed pans and catheters and sponge baths and liquid meals and bed sores and wheel chairs and all that other horrible awful terrible shit? That’s what she asked of me: to sue my beloved sister’s widower two weeks after he lost his bride. I told her to never contact me again. Then I told her to fuck off.

But she did contact me again, just today, about four years after I told her not to. Actually Dougie, her son - remember my nephew who was like a brother to me?  He called to tell me that she had had a massive stroke while the surgeons operated to relieve an aneurysm in her brain, and she was calling to show off the new word she learned in speech therapy. “Baaaaa deeee,” I heard an unrecognizable voice over the speakerphone. “Baaaa deeee.” She was saying “Hello.”

I want to be clear that I was uncomfortable being around my brothers not because of anything they ever did. They weren’t creepers or anything. The oldest one, Will, was an asshole, but he never really did anything to make me uncomfortable. I just wasn’t around them enough to feel at ease with them.  They never took me to fashion shows or helped me pick out prom dresses or showed me how to put make-up on or told me where babies really came from or taught me how to blow a bubble or drive a stick shift or how to flip the bird properly. They never shielded me from the evil and malevolence in this world with their pure loving spirits. They just lived their separate lives. I suppose they still do.