People I'm Related To (or Might Be Someday)

At the beginning of this month, my family got together for a belated holiday party. Really, it was just an excuse to eat food (homemade pizzas, brownies, plates of fancy cheese) and, for some, an excuse to drink an awful lot of wine. Somewhere around his sixth glass, my cousin wobbled his glass in my direction. "Will you get me some more?" he asked. "I don't want my mom to yell at me."

And I got him some more, because I'm just that kind of girl.

My brother brought a girl to that party. I'd met this girl before, briefly, at the place that employs the both of them--a tool store that gave my brother a badge which identifies him as ADAM, ASSIS. HEAD CASHIER.

I like to put my thumb over the extra -is in ASSIS. "Ha," I will say, "ADAM, ASS HEAD CASHIER."

That seems better to me. More true to life.

This girl my brother brought to the party is another ASSIS. HEAD CASHIER. She is tall and thin and normal looking. Pretty, even. She is nice and smiley and passes all the right tests, especially the most important one: humoring my father. When he swooped into the kitchen to take party pictures of us kids, she smiled and posed.



She passed my tests, too. When I was posing for a random picture by holding a pair of tongs, she slid her way into the picture and held up the first thing she could get her hands on: a measuring cup. And there was the picture.



Huh, I thought to myself. I like this girl. She's sassy.

The other day my brother came home from work. I was at my mother's house and sitting on the couch--the couch that had yet to be implicated in my brother's pleasuring of himself--watching television. He came and stood in front of the screen.

"Well," he said, "Megan and I decided we are going to start dating on July 15th, 2010."

I blinked. "Okay," I said. "Great." Then, after realizing he wasn't going to move and was thus keeping me away from watching an old episode of the X-Files, I realized this was one of those rare moments when he wanted me to play the role of Sister. I needed to ask questions and act concerned. "What happened to that other girl?" I asked.

He'd been driving out to the country to visit another girl--a small brunette--at the greasy spoon where she waited tables. He'd called her a friend with benefits. He waggled his eyebrows when he said with benefits, then said, "YOU KNOW..." As far as I knew, the waitress was the girl he was after and Megan was just a friend.

"Don't even say it! Don't even say her name!" my brother said. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Alright. So now you're going to date Megan? In three years?"

"On the anniversary of the day we met," he said.

"You remember the exact date the two of you met?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said.

"And you're choosing not to date her now why?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "It wasn't my idea. She was the one who brought up the dating."

When my brother told me that, I realized I completely understood this girl. I had a sudden vision of me with any number of the boys I have loved over my lifetime. There I was, twisting the phone cord around my toe and talking to the first boy, telling him how wonderful of a girlfriend I would be. I saw myself with the Wily Republican saying, "Who's the best girl you know, Wily?" and waiting for him to say Besides my mother, it's you and then waiting for him to connect the dots in his head--if I was his best girl, why wasn't he dating me? But he never connected those dots. His dots remained scattered like a spray of birdshot because he didn't want to date me. But my brother seems to have some errant dots of his own--dots that aren't being connected just because he's lacking certain social skills.

For instance, the skill to understand when a girl is giving him the green light to date her. Girls would never put the idea of dating into the head of a man they are repulsed by, a boy they have no interest in seeing naked, a boy they would never, ever date.

So I told my brother that. "I think she's trying to tell you to ask her out," I said. "And I know because this is the same sort of stunt I would pull. But with me it would completely backfire."

My brother seemed cheered by this. He seemed a little more confident. Maybe over the next few days he will take Megan out to dinner, chat her up real good, charm her, then ask her to be his girlfriend, his one and only, the one he dreams about, the girl he totes to all our family parties.

I hope this is true, because she's the type of girl I wouldn't mind having as a sister-in-law, a co-conspirator, someone who will help me mock my brother. And this week when our family repeated the good times we had earlier this month by having a party--this time at our house--Megan's absence was noticeable. The aunts and uncles asked after her. So did the cousins. Adam told us she wanted to come, she did, but she had to work. And so we all sat around thinking about how nice it would be if she was there. He better bring her around again. He just better not let it backfire. We'll all be pissed.