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Authors: Lidia Yuknavitch
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barely saw each other. He worked at Smith Family Bookstore, I went to school in English. Sometimes we’d run into each other, and lock eyes, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d put my hand on my belly to feel what was there between us. It was all I had to give to him.
Here it is. What I didn’t want to say before. It’s me. I’m the reason we went busto. I could not take his gentle kindness. But neither could I kill it.
Family Drama
WHEN MY SISTER WAS 16 AND I WAS EIGHT, SHE’D MAKE me “do” things.
Like this: just hold this apple in your mouth by taking a partial bite out of it. Yeah, like that. Now hold it, hold it … her socking the apple out from between my teeth, sending it across the room, while my little blond head shot to the left with the momentum and my teeth clacked shut on my lower lip.
Or this: see this ashtray? Do this. Just blow in it. One, two, three.
Ashes going all up my nose and all over my face.
Or this: aren’t the icicles hanging from the house cool? C’mere. Put your tongue on this one. It’s pretty!
I would have done anything.
Lemme say from the get-go - I adored my sister to the point of going cross-eyed and fainting as a kid. I thought she was mythic. For one thing, she had the thickest, longest, most beautiful auburn hair I’d ever even heard of, better than the idiotic dolls my mother kept buying me with hair that you could pull out from the tops of their heads - Chrissy with the red-auburn hair and the shorter platinum blond Velvet. Whereas I had a kind of … Q-tip for a head. Chlorine bleached head fuzz. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull any hair out of the top of my head.
For another thing, she could read and recite Shakespeare scenes by heart. She’d seen the R-rated “ Romeo and Juliet” - she had the album. She could paint real paintings that went on
walls. She had a black portfolio almost as big as me (that I was secretly convinced could be used as a sled). She could write poems, speak French, she could play guitar, recorder, she could sing, she could ice skate. I mean really, really well. Me? Eight years younger, if you discount swimming, about the best thing I could do was dress myself. It was a banner day if I didn’t cry, pee, or rock back and forth like a little monkey.
And she had boobs.
Boobs were the magical thing women had. White and full and inexplicably mouthwatering.
But when I say I would have done anything, it isn’t exactly these things. What it is: I took naïve pleasure in the small acts of humiliation, and I attached them to a feminine form. The things she made me do made my skin hot and prickly. Her beauty was stern and commanding.
As my sister neared adulthood, my father took a keen interest in her many talents. He’d brag. And put photos of her up in his office. Just her.
Her art teacher guided her more and more toward the world. Her watercolor paintings - giant, sexual looking flowers a little like Georgia O’ Keefe’s, her art teacher helped her to have them framed and entered into local art shows.
She played guitar and sang in her room with the door shutting out the word family, but out in the world her art teacher helped her and a friend perform together with microphones at local venues for money. When she learned how to make giant flowers from paper, her art teacher helped her sell those, too. Her art was making a path.
I’m not saying I figured all this out at eight. At eight, all I saw was how he looked at her hair. All I heard was his yelling every year of her development from girl to young woman, like a series of earthquakes pounding the life out of things, rattling the floors of daughter.
And anyway, maybe I have the ages wrong. Maybe I was 10. Maybe I was 6. Maybe I was 35 and getting my second divorce. I
don’t know how old we were as children. I only know my father’s anger built the house.
Once in the entryway when she was on her way out of the door for school, he yelled “Christ you look like a
Here it is. What I didn’t want to say before. It’s me. I’m the reason we went busto. I could not take his gentle kindness. But neither could I kill it.
Family Drama
WHEN MY SISTER WAS 16 AND I WAS EIGHT, SHE’D MAKE me “do” things.
Like this: just hold this apple in your mouth by taking a partial bite out of it. Yeah, like that. Now hold it, hold it … her socking the apple out from between my teeth, sending it across the room, while my little blond head shot to the left with the momentum and my teeth clacked shut on my lower lip.
Or this: see this ashtray? Do this. Just blow in it. One, two, three.
Ashes going all up my nose and all over my face.
Or this: aren’t the icicles hanging from the house cool? C’mere. Put your tongue on this one. It’s pretty!
I would have done anything.
Lemme say from the get-go - I adored my sister to the point of going cross-eyed and fainting as a kid. I thought she was mythic. For one thing, she had the thickest, longest, most beautiful auburn hair I’d ever even heard of, better than the idiotic dolls my mother kept buying me with hair that you could pull out from the tops of their heads - Chrissy with the red-auburn hair and the shorter platinum blond Velvet. Whereas I had a kind of … Q-tip for a head. Chlorine bleached head fuzz. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull any hair out of the top of my head.
For another thing, she could read and recite Shakespeare scenes by heart. She’d seen the R-rated “ Romeo and Juliet” - she had the album. She could paint real paintings that went on
walls. She had a black portfolio almost as big as me (that I was secretly convinced could be used as a sled). She could write poems, speak French, she could play guitar, recorder, she could sing, she could ice skate. I mean really, really well. Me? Eight years younger, if you discount swimming, about the best thing I could do was dress myself. It was a banner day if I didn’t cry, pee, or rock back and forth like a little monkey.
And she had boobs.
Boobs were the magical thing women had. White and full and inexplicably mouthwatering.
But when I say I would have done anything, it isn’t exactly these things. What it is: I took naïve pleasure in the small acts of humiliation, and I attached them to a feminine form. The things she made me do made my skin hot and prickly. Her beauty was stern and commanding.
As my sister neared adulthood, my father took a keen interest in her many talents. He’d brag. And put photos of her up in his office. Just her.
Her art teacher guided her more and more toward the world. Her watercolor paintings - giant, sexual looking flowers a little like Georgia O’ Keefe’s, her art teacher helped her to have them framed and entered into local art shows.
She played guitar and sang in her room with the door shutting out the word family, but out in the world her art teacher helped her and a friend perform together with microphones at local venues for money. When she learned how to make giant flowers from paper, her art teacher helped her sell those, too. Her art was making a path.
I’m not saying I figured all this out at eight. At eight, all I saw was how he looked at her hair. All I heard was his yelling every year of her development from girl to young woman, like a series of earthquakes pounding the life out of things, rattling the floors of daughter.
And anyway, maybe I have the ages wrong. Maybe I was 10. Maybe I was 6. Maybe I was 35 and getting my second divorce. I
don’t know how old we were as children. I only know my father’s anger built the house.
Once in the entryway when she was on her way out of the door for school, he yelled “Christ you look like a
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