Foul Boy, Bad Liar

Last night was another going away party for me, this one hosted by my mother. She had pizza and spinach bread and a bucket of fifty wings. She had my aunt and uncle and grandfather and his girlfriend and some cousins and my friends and the BFW and, and, and, of course, my brother.

Adam left the party early. He had an agenda. He had a party. He had to get there fast.

Still, as my party was breaking up, my brother strolled back in the door. We were all standing in a group near the door, so when he walked in we asked him what he was doing home when there he could be drinking, snacking, and making out with vaguely skanky underage girls.

"Well," he said, brushing past us, "I forgot something."

"What did you forget?" I asked. It would have to be something really important to make him leave a party where there was free beer.

My mother's boyfriend mumbled something under his breath. "Condoms," he coughed out. "Condoms!"

That started a chain reaction of exclamations: Eeew! Gross! Foul! Blecch! that only stopped when my brother reappeared in the room.

"So," we asked again, "what DID you forget?"

My brother raised his left hand. In it was clutched the belt clip for his phone. "My cell phone holster," he said. He kind of just stood there. We stared at him. "Well," he said, "I guess I should go."

When the door swung shut, the guys started laughing. "Cell phone holster," they said. "Yeah, sure. Right, kid."

I had to admit--the boy hadn't planned that excuse very well. He hadn't given the lie enough thought, enough time to breathe and seem realistic. To come home from a party with thumping music and hoochies and bottles of cheap tequila just waiting to be guzzled--to come home from that for a cell phone holster seemed not only improbable but really, really stupid. But, of course, forgetting to take condoms to a situation like that was also really, really stupid. Not running to the corner gas station for a three-pack and instead opting to come home where you knew your annoying relatives would be clustered nearby, just ready to grill you about your suspicious arrival home was also really, really stupid. But that's my brother.

We walked people out to their cars then, and that's when we found out my brother hadn't yet left. His car was up a ways, obscured by a pine tree, but we could hear him talking. We thought he was on the phone. We thought maybe he was orchestrating some general sluttiness, a hookup with a girl, the getting-it-on with some little blond whippet.

We ignored Adam and said our goodbyes. Some of the family started packing up the trucks and Becky went off to her car, which was parked up somewhere near Adam's, and we thought that was it for the night.

Oh, but it wasn't. When I got back inside, I realized my phone was ringing. It was Becky.

I answered. "What's up?" I asked.

"Just so you know," she said, "your brother isn't alone in that car. He's got a girl in there."

"Oh my God," I said. "I may vomit."

Of course I got off the phone right then and there and told the rest of my family that not only had he sneaked back home to get his condoms so he would be prepared for whatever the night would bring, but he also brought the girl along with him. If I were that girl, I'd be wondering why he was driving all the way home to get his condoms and why he wasn't just popping into the closest Kwik Fill, why he was dragging me along and telling me please, for the love of God, just stay in the car so I wouldn't run into any of the people who were at the house at that moment. If I were that girl, I probably would've handed him a ten dollar bill and told him to go to the Rite Aid and stop being a big lame cheapo.

I Like to Meddle

On Monday morning my brother showed up unannounced at the house. He's been doing that a lot lately, which doesn't make me all that happy because there have been several times where he's almost caught me pantsless, shirtless, or any sort of half-naked. I can't even imagine what my brother would do if he ever saw me half-naked. Probably some variety of what I'd do if I ever saw him half-naked, and that would involve a blunt object and spooning my eyes out with it.

But on Monday my brother had made the trip out here for two very specific reasons. One involved an old van one of his friend's aunt's had used in her carpet-installation business, a van that she'd given to Adam's friend, a van that Adam and his friends were determined to dismantle and turn into a field car that would be able to transport them and large amounts of their friends back to the cabin.

The other reason involved him coming into the diner to eat so he could check out the waitress I am determined to set him up with.

I'd given her notice, and she came to work with her hair impeccably straight-ironed. She had on good jewelry. She was jittery and excited. She stood in the back and wiggled up and down with anticipation.

When my brother breezed into the diner with his friends in tow, the waitress turned and high-tailed it behind the two-way mirror so she could watch Adam and his friends seat themselves in the very last booth along the wall.

"Oh my God oh my God oh my God," she said. She was whipped into hysterics. "He is so hot, so hot, so hot!"

I made a face and went out with a stack of menus for my brother and his boys. My brother had chosen to sit on the side of the back booth that faced the wall. His entire view during dinner would be of the turquoise and hot pink wall that is decked out with pictures from the '50s.

"Hi boys," I said. I doled out the menus and then hit my brother on his fuzzy head. "Are you a moron?" I asked. "Don't you think you should be on the other side of the table, so she can see you and you can see her? Don't you want to get a look at her?"

His only look at her had occurred a few days earlier, when I'd sent a picture to his cell phone.

"Oh," my brother said, "yeah. I guess. Okay. Switch with me, Tim."

Tim switched. I took drink orders. I went back to the kitchen, where the waitress was leaning against the steel counter and looking like she'd gone into heat.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"Fine," she said, fanning herself.

I told her I had a plan, and it was brilliant. I'd take the drinks to the boys, get their order, hang it, and then she could help me bring it out. That's when we'd do the official introduction. I'd make her take his food--a beef on weck, just like I'd predicted--and then they could lock eyes and touch fingers and feel the sizzle of something good starting.

She said okay, okay, that was good, that was great, that was wonderful. She said she was really nervous, though. She didn't know if she could do it.

I told her she could, that she was a pro, that it was going to be fine.

Then I went back and told my brother the plan. "I'm making her bring your food out," I said. "Okay? So she's going to hand you yours, and then I'm going to do the introduction. How do you feel about that?"

My brother told me that was good, that was great, that was wonderful. He said he was pretty nervous, though. He thought he might act like an ass.

I told him that it was entirely possible that he might, but he should try to keep it under control.

"Don't tell her I'm nervous, okay?" he asked.

"No, I totally won't," I said. Then I went back into the kitchen and told her he was really nervous.

"That's so cute," she said. "You didn't tell him I was nervous, did you?"

"No way," I said, and it went on like that for another half an hour. I ran small messages between them, and then, finally, the food came up.

"I don't think I can do this!" the waitress said as she balanced Adam's beef on weck in her palm.

"You can," I said. "You can."

And she did. She followed me out, placed his beef in front of him without incident, and then stood there as I introduced her and they said hey, hi, how are you.

After she disappeared to tend to her own tables, I turned back to my brother and raised my eyebrows. "Huh? Huh?" I asked. "She's cute, right?"

He nodded enthusiastically. "She's really cute," he said. "I like her hair. It's amazing. And her smile is possibly the best smile I've ever seen. But don't tell her that."

And that was one thing I didn't immediately go back and tell her--mainly because I figured that's something he can hang onto, something he can use to impress her later on down the line.

So, I think it went well. More than well. Later that night, we all somehow ended up standing in my driveway and letting Adam swing open the doors to the ex-carpet-hauling van that was now outfitted with several folding chairs ("Eventually," my brother said, "we want to have a couch in here."). The cute waitress looked wary, but she climbed up and into the van, she let my brother drive us over the bumpy path that leads to the cabin. She let him show her the warm beer, the outhouse, the inside of the cabin. I was the one who pointed out the cabin's finer points: the stacks of porn (which have doubled since I was last there), the rustic antler decorations, the moldy bearskin rug.

Much later, after we'd been sitting around the fire for a good long time, my cell phone blinked. I had a text message. I opened it and found a message from the waitress, who was sitting two chairs down from me.

The message said, I want to bone your brother.

And when I looked up from my phone and at the waitress, she was staring intently into the fire's flames, trying not to laugh. And I had to get up and pour myself another peach vodka-ginger ale to keep myself from throwing up right then and there.

Cat, Cupid

(1.)

Tonight after ordering drinks, a lady at one of my tables looked up at me and smiled. "I have sort of a silly question for you," she said. "Can I ask it?"

"Sure," I said. I thought it would be a silly question about the food, and I was prepared for whatever she was about to throw at me.

"Well," she said, "we're traveling. We've got this cat, and it's in the car. A kitten, really. It's in a carrier and all, but we hate to leave it out there. Do you think we could just bring the cat in the restaurant while we eat?"

I blinked. Then I blinked again. I was thinking, Oh. My. God. And then I had to take a minute out of my life to explain to these people why they couldn't bring their cat into a restaurant. I will never get that minute or those words back.


(2.)

One of the waitresses at work--this would be the one who likes to walk around the kitchen with her white shirt hitched up so the boys can see her boobs, the one who finds any excuse to use the word bone as a verb, to use the phrase ho-bag as a term of endearment--was discussing her man problems. Everyone at this place has man problems (or, if they are a dishwasher or a cook, girl problems), but this waitress's boy problems are impressive in their problematic-ness.

"I'm becoming a lesbian," she announced last week. "Seriously. That's it. I'm through. I'm a full-on lesbian now."

But this week she seems mellowed. She seems almost ready for another boy. So I announced that my brother was single. Then I said something that I never expected to come out of my mouth.

"And he's not bad looking," I said. Admitting that was torture.

"He's pretty nice," I continued. "He's sort of a royal cranky bitch when he's hungry, but if you keep him fed, he's a pretty okay kid. Also, he's building a bar for our cabin. Not bad, huh?"

The waitress wanted to see a picture. I said okay. I texted my brother and told him to send a picture of himself immediately, which he did. The picture he chose to send was a picture where he is making a funny face, a surprised face. It was a goofy picture, but it showed him for who he is. I flipped the phone in the direction of the waitress.

"There," I said.

"OH MY GOD!" the waitress squealed.

"Oh no," I said.

"OH MY GOD!"

"Oh no."

The waitress started jumping up and down. "Oh my God," she said. "I think I just wet my pants! He's hot!"

"Okay, no. Stop. That's gross."

She ran out of the room, and we could hear her squealing in the other room.

"Listen," I said to the cooks and dishwashers, "I know he's not unfortunate looking, but that's a lot of fuss."

"He's cute," one of the cooks said.

"Blecch," I said.

The waitress launched back into the room. "Send him a picture of me!" she said. "Here, I'll send you one."

We sent it. We waited. I walked out to my tables, checked things over, came back behind the line. We looked at my inbox, and there was a message from my brother. Oh, it said, she is real cute.

There was more squealing then, but for some reason I found myself supporting it. I found myself even picking up the phone and calling my brother to see if he wanted to come out to the diner to meet this girl.

"He's nice," I said. "He's a good guy. He's a good friend." Each admission made me want to vomit a little more in my mouth, but I somehow refrained, and I somehow managed to work it so that sometime next week my brother will breeze into the diner for a milkshake and the waitress will appear from the back with her not-usually-done hair actually done (You'll have to tell me exactly which day he's coming in, she said. I'll need to actually do my hair. Unlike today. Here, I'll take it out of the ponytail. It won't move. Ready? Watch. See? Awesome, huh?) and she and her straight hair will woo my brother and bring him chicken wings or a beef on weck and they will live happily ever after.

Or until they get in each other's pants.

My Brother's Logic

At 11:03 AM this morning, I was still sleeping. Last night was another late night--I didn't go to bed until 4:00 AM--and I needed my rest. But at 11:03 I woke up to muffled voices and the sound of someone clomping around outside the house. The outside clomping turned into inside clomping. Then I heard the linen closet, which is right next to my room, creak open.

I got out of my bed and opened my door. I was expecting my brother--who else?--and there he was, his fuzzy head thrust inside the closet.

"What the hell are you doing?" I asked. I'd just spent the whole day with him on Sunday. Seeing him twice in one week seemed improbable. I figured it was possible I was still dreaming.

"Looking for a towel," he said. "Which of these are shitty towels?"

"I don't know," I said. "You better be careful about what you use, though. Dad won't be happy if you use one of his good towels."

"Yeah," he said. He dove further into the closet. Unsatisfied, he turned and headed for the laundry room. He grabbed a bucket and started filling it with hot water.

I was ready to go back to bed, but I realized I still had no idea what my brother was doing at the house. I also had no idea why he was filling a bucket with water like he was about to do some heavy cleaning. So I tried asking again. "Hey," I said. He didn't look up. I raised my voice so it could be heard over the fall of water. "HEY. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" I asked.

He spiked back the flow of the water and looked at me like I was stupid not to know. "Washing my car," he said. "Tim's here, too. We're both going to wash our cars."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Wait a minute," I said. "You drove half an hour on your day off to wash your car?"

"Yes," he said. "And you brought your friend to wash his car, too?"

"Yes."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because," he said, "there's a hose here. And a bucket. And a lawn. And stuff." The tone of his voice had duh written all over it.

This definitely wasn't the first conversation I wanted to be having on my Tuesday. I blinked at him. "But why wouldn't you just do it at a car wash? You live around the corner from about twelve," I said.

Now it was his turn to narrow his eyes at me. "I don't have the money," he said.

"Not even for the dollar self-wash places?" I asked.

He sighed but didn't answer.

"Let me get this straight," I said. "Just hang on a second, okay? I want to understand. You don't have any money to wash your car, but you decide to drive half an hour each way to Dad's house so you can use his stuff? You got behind the wheel and burned up gas that costs $3.12 a gallon to do this?"

My brother glared at me. "YES," he said.

"Alright," I said, and I turned on my heel and walked back to my room, shut the door, and climbed back into bed. It shouldn't have surprised me, really. This was the boy who, after drinking himself stupid on Saturday night back at the cabin, woke up the next morning and drove all the way back out to my mother's so he could cut the grass before driving all the way back out here to spend the day with our father. Then, once he got here, he spent considerable time sitting at the kitchen table cutting out decals of naked lady silhouettes he wanted to hang inside his new car. Then, when he ran out of those, he decided to drive to buy more. Because nothing says Happy Father's Day! like a naked lady decal run.

No, I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, my brother was the one who, a month ago, after asking if I'd go with him to visit our grandfather in his rehab facility, told me that I was driving and the only way he was going to drive was if I gave him ten bucks for gas for the fifteen minute drive. The child is protective of his gas and money and driving only when it suits him. So I'm not sure why I even spent those few minutes this morning investigating why my brother found it appropriate to waste time and money driving all the way out here so he could park his car on my father's front lawn and use the hose. I should've just shrugged and gone back to bed when he first told me why he came. It's just more of my brother's busted logic. It's just more of him being strange, being silly, being him.

This Is Why I Have Trouble Believing Boys When They Say I'm Cute

When I was in grad school, I was always telling people that I was hideous-looking as a child. I told them that's why I had trouble believing boys could ever find me attractive. And by the time the whole Wily Republican incident rolled around, I was very confused why he--with his eyes and jaw and voice and general tallness--was wasting time with me when he could be dating any of the lanky Swedish goddesses that roam Minnesota.

I talked about this a lot. I didn't get it, I told people. Why were boys all of a sudden paying attention to me? What was going on?

Finally, after hearing this conversation about eight thousand times, one of my best grad school boys said, "What is your problem? I don't understand why you don't think you're cute."

And that's when I passed him a picture of me at thirteen years old.

He looked at it, looked back up at me, and said, "Oh."

And last night when I was picking through old photos for a project I'm making for Father's Day, I found one of the legendary pictures I'd told people about. I told them it was a horrible picture, a picture that illustrated just how sucky my life was during middle school. The picture was taken at a Hooters after a NASCAR promotion my mother was doing with the restaurant. While she had been doing giveaways, my brother and I had sat in the corner mowing down on a pile of wings. After the race was over and we were ready to go, my parents suggested we do one more thing: have our picture taken with two of the Hooters waitresses. Why they thought this was a good idea is beyond me, but it happened, and here's the proof:



There are several things to note in that picture. First, let's consider my brother. This might very well be where his love for all things Hooters took its root. I mean, look at his face. He's psyched to be standing with his head right at Hooter height. But me? I'm not so psyched. I just look pudgy, sad, and a little bit greasy. I'm wearing a racing-themed jacket, a racing-themed shirt, and acid wash jeans. I am standing next to two toothpicks, two early 90's Hooters girl who have breasts that somehow manage to be larger than even my fat head. I have a giant zit on my chin. I am probably thinking something like, I love Ryan McLean or Why won't Ryan McLean love me? Although I think the answer is evident from that picture.

And while this isn't the photo I showed off in grad school when I was asked to produce evidence that supported my neuroses, I think it would've done a fine job, that it would've elicited the same response that the other picture did. I think sometimes I get confused and think that I'm still that girl in the photo: awkward, bumbling, silly, and years away from finding a boy to love her.

Evidence of Our Cuteness

After his stroke, my grandfather had an extended stay at a rehab facility whose temperature was consistently set to BOILING. He wasn't its biggest fan, especially considering he couldn't sleep for the heat, hated the hours of rehab (pinning clothespins to a clothesline, setting a table, matching cut-out shapes to their corresponding openings in a box), or his roommate, who had, what my grandfather assumed from the smell, gangrene.

When Adam and I went to visit him shortly before he was sprung from the facility, we found him in the common room, dozing in front of a television that was blaring soaps. "This is no way to live," he told us. "No way at all."

Right after my grandfather entered rehab, I was put in charge of looking after his cat. Each time I opened the door to walk into the house, that cat jingled down the hallway, but as soon as she saw it was me she skidded to a stop and--I swear--looked disappointed. My grandfather might have a cruel streak, and many of my memories of him interacting with my grandmother might include him screaming at her, but he sure is good and nice and sweet to that cat.

He got the cat after my grandmother died almost four years ago. He needed something to fill the space, the quiet. And he became obsessed with the cat. He let it have the run of the house. Simultaneously, he let the house go to shit. It is entirely possible my grandfather hasn't cleaned since my grandmother's death, and I figured that out the first day I went over to take care of the cat.

I hadn't been to the house in a long time. I'd avoided like the plague, actually. Being in there made me sad and quiet and a little sick to my stomach. After my grandmother's funeral, my grandfather took to talking to the urn of my grandmother's ashes. I sure you miss you, old girl, he would say, nodding in the direction of the curio cabinet where grandma was now stored.

I hated when he did that. I hated it so much. I wanted to tell him it must be nice to get all sappy and sentimental now, now that grandma was dead and no longer around to clean the bathroom and make him sandwiches. I wanted to tell him he should have been nicer to her when she was alive, that he should have spent less time telling her she was being ridiculous and stupid. And then, when he built an enclosed mudroom at the front of the house--something my grandmother had wanted for years, something my grandfather grumbled about and put off--and told everyone he did it for grandma, that was the last straw. I wanted to hit the old man. I wanted to ask him what good it did now. I wanted to ask him why he couldn't given her one little thing she'd wanted for years when she was actually around to use it.

It made me sick to think about it. It made me sick to be there. So I generally avoided visiting the house until I had to, which happened when I needed to take care of the cat. When I walked in that first day, I waded through years' worth of filth: a scattering of old pill bottles thrown casually on the floor, paperwork that had been read and abandoned in the middle of the carpet, piles of age-old cat puke, stacks of magazines my grandfather had clearly gotten scammed into buying: Latino!, Cat Fancy, US Weekly, Star, OK!, Wired, Blender.

It was clear that there was going to have to be some intensive intervention before he was able to come home and live on his own again. There was going to be a day where we all went over and cleaned out the house and garage. Thankfully, my uncle's wife did most of the house cleaning--she turned a miracle, actually--and my uncle and mother plodded through the garage, which was still full of a lot of my grandmother's things. After her death, my mother had gone over and sorted through closets and the attic, but she has yet to make a serious dent in grandma's things. It's overwhelming what a pack-rat that woman was, really. During the cleaning session, we found giant boxes stuffed with old pantyhose, damaged Tupperware, and headless figurines. Not to mention moldy books, recipes, and pictures.

Those pictures, though, were really something else. My grandmother kept large envelopes for each of her children and grandchildren, and she sorted each season's pictures into the envelopes accordingly. My grandfather had shoved those pictures onto a low shelf, one that was attacked and flooded for years. But we were able to pull out some really precious photos--hundreds and hundreds that are worth saving, that make me excited because I'm about to make the world's cutest collage of pictures that will hang in my room. Here are some that are likely to be featured:



Here is my mother. Tell me she is not the fattest, cutest baby girl you have ever seen in your life. Grandma should've entered her in contests because she would've won, no problem. Not convinced?



How about now? I'm not sure whose back that is--it doesn't look like my grandfather; it could be one of my grandmother's brothers--but it's possibly the best photo in the history of photos.



My grandmother loved to cut my mother's bangs really, really short, so in any picture you see of her before she was a teenager, my mother is showing an awful lot of forehead.



Here's where I admit something strange. My brother was a much cuter baby than I was. For one thing, he was chubbier, and chubby babies equal cute babies. Second, he looked sort of angelic. Which didn't last long.



Doesn't he look serious and earnest? Doesn't he look like a future pilot, and not someone who will fail out of college so badly in his first semester that he won't even be afforded a second chance on academic probation?



I blame this photograph of me on my grandfather. Who else would've made me pose with a bottle of Jack? It should also be noted that this was during what I refer to as my Vaguely Chinese Period. Between birth and the age of four, I went through a phase where there's something a bit different about my face and eyes, where I look very much like I don't belong to my mother and father.



I was groomed from an early age to be a domestic goddess. Thank you, Fisher Price.



Here I am being photographed with my favorite toy, a pink and white Fisher Price bunny (are we sensing a trend? Can you tell my father worked for FP for twenty years?). I called him Merlin, and he never left my side.



My mother was sort of a badass maker of Halloween costumes. I won an award at the town Halloween party this year because I was the best Indian princess they had ever seen. And how cute is my brother? My goodness, this collage is going to be brilliant.

Now He Thinks I'm a Lesbian, Too: Incidents with My Brother

1. At My Cousin's Graduation Party

Adam: I just can't get used to Jess's hair.
Me: He hates it.
Everyone Else: What? Why?
Adam: I don't like the bangs, and it makes her look gay.


2. At My Cousin's Graduation Party, Take Two

Me: Here, try on Kait's stethoscope.
Cousin Jeff: I got her that, you know. It's really nice. The last stethoscope she'll ever need. Well, unless she becomes a veterinarian.
Adam: Cool.
Me: Pose like a doctor, Adam.
Adam:




2. In My Car, 3:45 PM

Adam {out of nowhere}: You know what word is really funny?
Me: What?
Adam: Seminary.
Me: Really? Why?
Adam: It sounds dirty. Seminary. Seminary. Seminary. Semen-ary.
Me: Gross. Don't be foul.
Adam: Rectory's pretty good, too.


3. In My Car, 4:15 PM

Adam {out of nowhere}: You know what other word is really funny?
Me: What?
Adam: Masturbation. {He laughs--two quick and huffy ha! ha!s--then goes back to text messaging the girl he's going to a bonfire with later tonight}

My Brother's Idea of an Excellent Gift

I called my brother the other day to see what he had up his sleeve for the looming Mother's Day celebration that he and I needed to put together for this coming Sunday. I felt the need to call for several reasons: first, my brother tends to forget important dates--dates, for example, that are anyone's birthday but his own. I figured it was entirely possible that my brother didn't even know that this weekend was the weekend we were supposed to turn my mother's trailer into a big festive how-do-you-do to celebrate the fact that she spent numerous hours in labor with us.

Second, I know how my brother is about giving gifts. One year for Christmas he gave my father a Snickers bar and a pack of spearmint gum. This year for my birthday he gave me a can of off-brand corned beef hash. My brother generally believes that spending under five dollars is appropriate for any gift-giving occasion. After all, the less money he spends on the people who raised and love him, the more money he can spend on pear-flavored vodka at the Peace Bridge Duty Free.

So I called as a reminder. I called to check in. I called to needle him for information. I wanted to know what--if anything--he had in mind for Mom's gift.

"Don't worry about it," he told me, his voice confident and booming. He was at work, and it was clear that he wanted to sound Mature and In Charge. "I've got it covered."

"Oh?" I said. I kept my own voice light and vaguely uninterested because I know that more than anything, my brother hates to think people are checking up on him, to think people are messing with his business. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well," he started, "we've got these things at work..."

Red flag, red flag, red flag. My brother--when he's not texting girls named Chastity! or Emmy! or Krissy!, and when he's not slipping crumpled dollar bills that could very well belong to me into the G-string of some Canadian stripper who whispers Thanks for the money, eh! into his ear--works at a tool store. A tool store.

What, I wondered, could my mother possibly want from a tool store?

"What things do you have at work?" I asked my brother.

"Coasters," he said. "These coaster-things. They're clear. You can slide photos into them."

I thought for a moment about what picture I would ever want slid underneath a coaster so that I could set my condensating drink on top of it. I figured a picture of my brother would be appropriate enough. A picture of when he was little and chubby and bullfrog-cheeked. A picture of him before he grew up to be the type of boy who figured that what my mother would want more than anything for Mother's Day was a set of see-through coasters that could be fitted with photos that would be covered up and sweated on by a summer's worth of vodka-tonics and mojitos.

"Wow, that's great," I said, lying through my teeth. I didn't want to tell him it was a horrible idea--which it was--and that Mom already has enough coasters to get by with. She has formal coasters decorated with ivy and grapes, and she has informal coasters that she and her boyfriend have filched from local bars that serve cheap beer and good fish fries. My mother needs another set of coasters like she needs a hole in her head.

"I know," he said. "Pretty good, huh?"

And today I tried one more time--tried to nudge him in the right direction, to get him thinking about something that would be less likely to make it into my mother's next garage sale. I even spoke his own language. I sent him a text. Maybe you should think about flowers, it said. A single rose to go with the coasters. That would be affordable. And nice.

A few minutes later my phone flashed, and it was with a response from my brother.

Perhaps, it said, which, in my brother's language, means the following all at the same time: Are you crazy, Hell no, and Yeah right.

I'll Never See That Money Again

Today when I was taking a break from organizing the crushing amount of research papers I have to read in the next week, I wandered into the laundry room--which, coincidentally, is also the pantry--and I stared at the shelves of food, daydreaming about what I'd make for dinner.

That's when I heard a jiggle at the front door. I froze. Nobody was supposed to be coming to the house today. But there was definitely someone out there. They were jiggling the handle, they were clattering with something, they were turning the doorknob.

I braced myself for the worst: a wild-eyed gunman intent on breaking into the house and looking for anything of value--maybe the last piece of red velvet cake or that blue ceramic duck or that stuffed monkey my father bought for his girlfriend.

But I didn't get that. I got my brother.

"Jesus, you scared the hell out of me," I said. "I didn't know you were going to be out here today."

"Me neither," he said. "I had to go to the dentist, and now my friends and I are going out to dinner." He smiled at me, to prove the thing about the dentist. Then he brushed past me and barricaded himself in the bathroom.

"Are you okay?" I asked through the door.

"Fine," he said. "I'm just looking at my teeth."

My brother is bizarre about his teeth. Honestly. You will never meet someone more obsessed with teeth and oral hygiene than my brother. It takes him half an hour to get ready for bed at night because he engages in what he lovingly calls The Procedure.

The Procedure is a complicated process my brother goes through after brushing his teeth. There's flossing, of course, but then comes several elaborate mouth-washings. There's a flouride wash that has to stay in his mouth for two minutes, and there's another bacteria-eliminating wash that stays in for another two minutes. After those scrubs, flosses, and washes, my brother leans in very, very close to the mirror so he can scrutinize his teeth. He opens wide, peels his lips back so it looks like he's growling at his relection. He picks with his fingers, he rubs with his tongue. He snares every single particle that was living in his mouth.

It's quite the thing to see, and it's quite the time consuming process. A person could do a lot of things in the time it takes my brother to finish The Procedure--solve complex math problems, skim an entire copy of Ok! magazine for black-barred pictures of Britney Spears's lady parts, or bake a double fudge layer cake. In short, my brother is as bad as a cold-creamed old lady who spends thirty minutes in the bathroom smoothing on different Oil of Olay products that promise to eliminate crow's feet and age spots.

And today my brother spent a few contemplative minutes in the bathroom, examining the job our dentist had done on his teeth. Apparently satisfied, Adam reemerged.

"Hey," he said. He leaned against the doorframe to my room and surveyed the mess of extra credit papers and portfolios that were spread out across my floor. "So," he said, "how much money do you have on you right now?"

What I really wanted to tell my brother was it was none of his business how much money I had. But I didn't say that. I shrugged. "I don't know," I said.

"Can I have some of it?" he asked.

And then I did something very strange. I got up, found my purse, and opened my wallet. I had two fives. I handed them over.

"Thanks," he said, and tucked them into his pocket.

"Just what are you going to be doing with my money?" I asked, because I had an idea, and that idea involved Canadian girls in thongs, Canadian girls whose business it was to rub their private parts up and down an oily pole in the middle of a velvet-lined room.

"I'm going to use it for dinner tonight," he said. "We're going to watch the Sabres game at a bowling alley outside Franklinville. I'd like to order something more than just ice water."

"Okay," I said. I returned to sorting through the papers.

"Booze is expensive," my brother said, absently. He still had one hand in his pocket, and that hand was clutching my money.

"You're going to buy liquor with it?" I asked. I have no problem with my brother buying liquor, but I do have a problem with him doing it with my money. Because I could buy liquor with that money, and that's way better.

"No," he said. "DINNER." He emphasized the word like I was a moron, like I hadn't listened, like I didn't know anything about anything. "All my money is gone because booze is expensive."

My brother was taking my money because he'd spent all of his weekly allowance on booze. He was taking my money because he doesn't have access to his. My mother does. She has had my brother on a tight budget ever since he dropped out of college and frittered away his bank account on spicy wings and cheeseburgers at Hooters.

If I hadn't been so tired and so beaten-down by the myriad of wrong things I was seeing in my students' papers, I would've told him it was rude to waltz into a room and demand money from a relative just because there had been an incident--a bender of sorts--and that all the week's money had been wasted on a cheap bottle of vodka and a couple six packs of whatever beer was on special at Tops. But I said nothing. I just gave him a look. A stern look. A look I hoped said, I'm telling Mom if I don't get that money back.

But deep down in my heart I knew I wasn't getting that money back. He promised he'd give it to me on Friday when he gets paid, but I know that money's already been spent, already been promised away to some sort of thing my brother will do this weekend. It's gone forever, just like he was shortly after he got his hands on it. He was going to Walmart, he said, because he needed some things--things that he would pay for with his debit card because Mom had already okayed the purchase. When I suggested he should try paying for dinner with his debit card, he looked at me like, Are you insane?

"Mom doesn't like me to do fun things with the money that's in the bank," he said. "I can't do anything good with that money."

And so my brother does it with mine.

He Swears It's Clean

Today I called my brother. I don't often call my brother, mainly because I don't have a reason to. After all, what would we talk about? His possibly-gay-black belt-bunk mate? Hooters waitresses? The pros and cons of a boy ordering a Fuzzy Navel?

But today I bit the bullet. I did it. I called him and said, "Adam, I need to ask you questions."

And he said, "Is this about something bad?"

I assured him it wasn't. It wasn't about anything bad at all.

"Okay then," he said. "Ask away."

"Well," I said, "what I need to ask you about is strip clubs."

"Oh," he said, very seriously, more serious than I've ever heard him. The tone of his voice changed. In one breath he went from assistant head cashier at a tool store to full professor--someone tenured, learned, wise. He could've been lecturing on mitosis or race relations or the brilliance of WB Yeats. But he wasn't. "Well, Jess, what would you like to know?" he asked.

I told him I wanted to know about Canadian strip clubs. I said I needed to know my options. There's a bachelorette party coming up, after all, and I wanted to be well-versed on the whereabouts, general cleanliness, and price ranges of all the clubs close to where we will be staying in Niagara Falls. The party is taking place on the Canadian side of the falls, the same place my nineteenth birthday took place, the same place where we lost one of our college friends for several hours because she went off with some random boy from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania and neglected to tell us she was going. (We will not repeat that same type of raw panic we knew that time, however. Steph, party planner extraordinaire, is on it. "Don't worry," she told me today, "I'm going to have everyone's license plate numbers and contact information. Just in case." This is a good thing. Last time we underestimated Canada and the falls and the strange songs they sing into some girls' heads--songs that make them slip their hand into the hand of a boy wearing a straggly wife beater and a gold chain, songs that take them away from their friends who then wander up and down Clifton Hill and Lundy's Lane for hours, calling their names, screaming You better not be dead! Your dad is going to kill us!)

It's good that the party will be in Canada. After all, in Canada, strippers can be full-on naked and liquor is still served. Served by the boatload. And cheaply, too.

"Top shelf will run you about seven bucks," my brother informed me. "Well drinks, though, you can get them for $4.25... no, excuse me... $4.75."

I asked my brother where to go specifically. He listed several places that are over the border. He told me about the one that's closest to our hotel. "It's clean," he said. "Real clean. I swear. I like it there. They have good food, too, and you get a ton of it."

"What's it like?" I asked him.

He described it: two floors, one long stage, which he referred to as "runway-like," and several smaller stages that have table clusters surrounding them.

"When are you going?" he asked, sounding suspicious. Suddenly I was afraid it was a very real possibility that I would run into my brother while I was at the strip club. I didn't want to see my brother sitting next to a stage with a pile of chicken wings in front of him and a wad of dollar bills in his fist.

"Eeeew," I said. "You're not going to be there when I'm there, are you? That's just gross and wrong."

Luckily, though, my brother is going up before then. They've planned ahead. They're going soon, actually, and he said he is looking forward to it. "You'll like this place," he said. "Seriously, it's clean."

I asked him about the clientele--skanky? businessmen? a mix?--and I asked him about the club's position on girls coming in, especially groups of girls.

"Oh, it's fine," he said. "There's always girls there. They have a lot of fun." He told me this like he needs to convince me, like I need to be convinced that strip clubs are fun. I had the momentary urge to tell him to sit back because I was going to tell him my top three best strip club stories, and one of them involved me running into a stripper in the bathroom, a stripper who had her leg hoisted up on the counter as to better facilitate her checking the status of her lady parts. I squelched the urge to tell him this, though. I think he and I operate on the same basic principal, and that principal is I Don't Want to Know, Okay?

My brother continued talking about the girl patrons. "We've been noticing something lately," he said. "Lots of guys are bringing their girlfriends. They're always there."

Then there was more squelching on my part. This time because I wanted to tell him about the time I made the Wily Republican take me to a strip club in Minneapolis--all-nude, a place that served giant cups of pop or fruit juice. I wanted to tell my brother that the whole thing was sensory overload and I felt like I should have brought a notebook or a laptop so I could accurately capture all that I was seeing: guys and girls who'd left their prom early to finish the night by fanning singles up at willowy Swedish strippers, the big screen TV set off to the side of the stage that was broadcasting the Discovery Network--a show about ants or earthquakes or maybe it was ants in earthquakes, and that stripper wearing a plaid skirt-knee-high combo I'd owned in eighth grade. But, again, I said nothing.

My brother went on for a few more minutes. He had other options for me. Go here, do this, see this. Don't go here, don't do this, don't see this. He told me to stick to his favorite place. It's close, he said. It's good. It's fun. And it's clean. He couldn't stress that enough. It made me wonder what other strip clubs he's been in, if he's seen some things I never want to see, if he's come out wanting to shower and get a tetanus shot as fast as he could drive back to the states.

I thanked my brother. He'd been helpful. And, really, I had never heard him that eager to talk to me. He'd never sounded more pleased to have been consulted on something. I might have made his night.

"This is good," I said. "I'll start researching this. I'll let you know what we decide."

We said goodbye then, and I knew he would hang up the phone and crack his knuckles or stretch his arms up over his head--some gesture of self-satisfaction, something that said, "My God, I am so freaking smart. I am an expert."

And he sort of is.

Heard Around the Easter Table

My Mother's Boyfriend's Possibly Gay Black-belt Son

Me: This ham is delicious.

My Cousin: Yup, great ham.

Mother's Boyfriend's Possibly Gay Black-belt Son: So, this year I got drunk on New Year's.

Me, My Cousin, My Aunt: Whaaat?

MBPGBS: Yeah, I did. We were so crazy. We were down in the basement and the parents were upstairs. We kept running around and giggling and screaming.

My Aunt: Did you find a liquor cabinet or something?

Me: Or some beer?

MBPGBS: No.

Me: What did you have then? Where did you get it?

MBPGBS: Oh, the adults gave it to us.

Everyone: Whaaat?

MBPGBS: Yeah, they gave us sparkling grape juice. Man, we were so drunk. I had a hangover later. Hey, you wanna know what else is cool? Freezing BBs and then shooting them at people.



My Grandfather

Grandpa: You want to know what Easter reminds me of?

Us: What?

Grandpa: Killing baby chickens on the farm.

Us: Oh.



My Brother

Adam: Do you want to hear the real story of that time I got lit on fire and burned my leg?

Me: Yes.

Adam's Friends: Yes.

Adam: Well, we were back at the cabin. Just me and the cousins. We had a bonfire going, but there was this stump that was bothering us. We wanted that stump out of there. So we devised a plan. A good plan. We had it all worked out.

Me: And you were unsupervised.

Adam: Oh yeah. Totally unsupervised. We had a Snapple bottle full of gasoline, so we decided we were going to douse this stump in gasoline because we'd already tried to chop it apart and that didn't work. So we started a fire on the stump but it wasn't going as good as we wanted it to, so the cousins started tossing more gasoline on it. Well, the fire started going everywhere. It was spreading into the woods.

Me: You were starting forest fires.

Adam: Well, it wasn't our intention. We just didn't like that stump. So we all started stomping it out, but that wasn't working. And the bottle had fallen on the ground by that point, and it was setting everything on fire, so I tried to kick it out of the way. But when I kicked it, it spun around and spewed gas on me. And I didn't really know what was happening. I tried to stop, drop, and roll... what a bunch of bullshit that is. You know how they always teach that? Well, it didn't work. I was still on fire. And that's when David came running out of the cabin and launched himself at me. He smothered my leg with his body and a towel. He saved my life. And that was the end of my leg hair.

He's Glad He Inherited That Gene

Tonight after his twenty-five minute shower (during which he did God knows what with that detachable shower head he likes to rave about), my brother pranced into the living room wearing only a pair of plaid pajama pants. He was shirtless and slick from his shower. His skinny chest was puffed out. He stopped in front of us and started to massage his nipples.

"Gross," my mother said.

"Disgusting," I said.

"Look at this," he said. He plucked at some straggly hairs around his nipples. "Look!" He tugged and tugged and the nipple elongated, warped, shrunk back down to size. "I can make it dance." He started humming a little tune, and his nipple jigged to the tune.

"I'm going to vomit," I said.

"You know," my brother said, finally abandoning his nipple dance and collapsing next to me on the couch, "I got that from Dad. The hairy nipple gene. Hairy tits. I'm pretty happy I inherited that."

Right at that moment my mother's boyfriend's possibly-gay-black-belt-son, the eleven year old who shares a room and a bunk bed with my brother, arrived on the scene. He, too, skittered into the living room in his sleepwear--a shortie robe that revealed his knobby knees. He wanted to say goodnight to me. He did. Then he turned to my brother and said, "Good night, Adam. See you in bed."

Oh, I couldn't help it. I couldn't help laughing at the ridiculousness of it all--the shortie robe, the vaguely sexual goodnight, my brother scantily clad and picking at his nipple hair.

"Oooooh," I hissed as the possibly-gay-black-belt-son retreated to the bedroom. "It's going to be a special night."

"Oh come on now," my brother said, feigning innocence. "It's only our first date. What do I look like?"

"Hmmm," my mother said.

"A kiss," my brother said. "Maybe a kiss. It's a first date. That's all I'm giving up."

Later, I would find my brother in the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror and preening. He was picking at his hair, smoothing a hand over his stubble.

"Have fuuun," I sang. I backed out of the bathroom before he could retaliate in some awful way--by rubbing his naked chest and errant hairs on me, by flicking my arm fat, by calling me Square Head (this because my brother swears that my head is a scientific anomaly--a perfectly square head--and he has done numerous tests to prove this point to me, my parents, and my friends). I backed away, thinking I'd escaped.

I hadn't. My brother called my name, and I, like a fool, turned around, turned to see what he wanted.

"Look at this," he said.

That's when he stepped out into a swatch of light falling from the bathroom lamps and raised his arm in one smooth, elegant motion. And there it was: a quasi-pelt of man hair. And as if that wasn't bad enough, my brother reached over and dragged his comb--the same comb he'd been running through his shower-damp hair moments before--through his awkward tangle of underarm hair. I made a face, but it was too late. My brother was already lowering his arm, happy with his grooming, and stepping back into the bathroom and shutting the door behind him.

Wherein He Breezes in and Does Strange Things (Like Always)

It hasn't been a great day. Earlier I sat down with a fresh pile of essays from my students and the very first one I read was plagiarized. The student had gone to the internet, copied, pasted, slapped his name on the page, and handed it in. This was the very first paper I read. There are, like, seventy-nine to go.

That plagiarized paper didn't give me the greatest feeling about the day. In fact, I decided it was probably going to suck. I also decided there was no way to get through it (or, at least, get to the point in the night where I would be able to grade in front of the Sabres game and my future husband's slick moves) without a jug of wine. The wine rack was full of my father's merlots, so I put on some shoes and went to the liquor store. When I came back, toting three bottles of wine, my brother was sitting in the living room. He was watching Employee of the Month. He was guzzling DanActive yogurt.

"Hello," I said.

He looked at me.

"Hi," I tried again.

"Hey," he said, then turned back to Jessica Simpson's massive breasts as they took center screen.

"Nice car," I said. About a week ago, my brother went out with my mother's boyfriend and bought a car to replace the wheels he's had for the last three years. His last vehicle was a 1994 Nissan truck--tiny, silver, beat to hell. Adam got it from our uncle. He got it for $500.

After forking over the money for that truck, Adam spent a lot more to make it uniquely him. He painted the dashboard blue and orange. He bought special lights for the interior. He installed a flashing bulb for the end of his shifter. He hooked up an expensive CD player, which was promptly stolen.

Eventually the truck started to fall apart. The transmission went, so did the radiator, so did the heat. This entire winter, my brother cruised around Buffalo without a working heater in his vehicle. He wore extra coats and gloves on the drive to work. He kept blankets behind the seat in case he had a long drive ahead of him.

But now he has a new car--well, a new used car. And this afternoon it was sitting in our driveway.

"Want to take me for a ride?" I asked. What I really wanted to say was, Can I take it for a spin? because I feel I am owed it. I have been a very giving sister when it comes to my car--letting that child have my keys, letting him drive it while I am out of town, letting him take it God knows where (Hooters? The strip clubs over the bridge in Ontario?). But as much as I wanted to ask him if I could drive, I didn't. I kept it in check. I told him to take me up and down our street.

"Alright," he said in that grudging way that was not grudging at all. Really, he'd probably been sitting there for twenty minutes hoping I'd hurry up, get home, and ask him if he'd take me for a spin.



He took me a mile up the road and let me ask him standard questions: How many cylinders does this thing have? (Four) What's your gas mileage like? (30 mpg, highway) How many times have you washed it since you got it? (Two)

Then Adam decided he'd had enough of driving me, that it was time to turn around and go back to the house so he could resume watching Jessica Simpson's breasts. He was also in the mood for some leftover stir-fry.

Of course, right now the countryside is swampy with spring. Shoulders and driveways are muddy lakes. And since he'd just washed the new car, he wasn't in the mood to get anything on it. So my brother slowed down, checked his mirrors for traffic, and then proceeded to do a six point turn to get us turned around.

I couldn't help myself. I laughed. I laughed a lot.

That's when he turned to stare at me. "What?" he demanded. "Just what's so funny about that?"

A Real Human Girl

I've said before that it took my brother an awful long time to resemble a real human boy. Adam went through an awkward phase. His awkward phase included such joys as acne in unfortunate places and--the real kicker--puffy nipples. The doctor explained that the puffy nipples were no big deal, that they were the byproduct of some sort of strange flux of hormones, that they would go away after awhile. Still, for several months, whenever my brother took off his shirt, there they were, those puffy nipples that looked like they belonged on the body of a thirteen year old girl.

There were other things, too. Incidents. The first involved a family reunion, a bag of golf clubs, a wayward swing by one of the cousins, and Adam's jaw that got knocked clear out of its socket and hung crooked from his face while the reunion and all its barbequed hamburgers were disbanded in favor of driving Adam to the emergency room. Once my family got him to the emergency room, the doctors wired Adam's jaw shut, and it stayed that way for months. He couldn't eat anything solid. We liquefied everything for him: spaghetti and meatballs, mac and cheese, beef stroganoff. He even went back to school with his jaw wired shut. We had to pack him special lunches, and he had to eat with the nurse every day to make sure he didn't choke. I remember feeding him a McDonald's french fry--a real treat--through the space in his teeth. He gummed at that thing like it was the best thing ever. Ambrosia! Heaven! A solid fry!

The other notable incident that shaped my brother's awkward period again involved a cousin, a wayward squirt of gasoline, and a bonfire. My brother had been standing too close to the edge of the flame, and when it roared up from the shot of gas, my brother's leg flared up with it. The skin and hair puckered. My brother screamed and screamed. And off he went to the emergency room one more time, where they treated him for burns, where they did the best they could with his leg. For years, his one leg was completely hairless and smooth, like a girl's or one of those cats you see--the ones who are all skin, no fur.

Adam did not have it easy. He had it worse than I did. And I have spent years watching him bumble through his awkward phase. I watched and watched and watched. Then, after I came home from Minnesota, I looked at my brother and said, "There. Finally. Almost a real human boy."

I had forgotten, though, how long it took me to look like a real human girl. Sure I've mocked myself considerably on this blog--oh, those old pictures!--but I never really sat around and thought about how long it took me to look the way I see myself in my head.

I was thinking about that a lot this weekend. When I was over at Amy and Becky's on Saturday--to celebrate Becky's 26th birthday bonanza--we stuffed ourselves full of tacos and then spread out on the living room floor. Then Amy put in a tape of her surprise birthday party from eighth grade.

Suddenly there we all were (well, not me--I was suspiciously missing from the party) on the screen. All our old friends were bouncing around in Amy's basement. They were singing. They were dancing. They were inhaling sugar as fast as they could get it clutched in their palms. Everyone was twelve, thirteen years old and wearing the best 90's apparel: scruchies and plaid shirts and boy jeans. It was really quite a sight.

"I'm HIDEOUS!" Becky shrieked.

"No, I'm HIDEOUS!" Amy shrieked.

I tried to tell them that, no, neither of them was hideous. That's just what thirteen year old girls looked like back then. We didn't wear short skirts or belly shirts. We didn't flounce around in the fashions we saw on the backs of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. We emulated Angela Chase. We had her shirts, her pants, her baggy clothes. We were exactly what thirteen year old girls who didn't have boyfriends (and wouldn't for years) looked like at that point in time. The popular girls--the ones who were rumored to have lost their virginity in sixth grade, the ones whose boyfriends were the boys we had devastating crushes on--didn't exactly look like us, but that's because they were busy being popular, and we were busy practicing our slick dance moves or fake-singing into our fists or hairbrushes. I wouldn't trade a second of that, even if someone told me I could've had Ryan McLean for my boyfriend.

But somewhere along the way, all that "hideousness" fell away. Our voices changed, we got taller, we shopped for better clothes. We got better looking. We got a handle on ourselves. For some, though, it took longer than others.

Here, for example, is me in eleventh grade:



Of note: the mullet-ish hairdo, the bloated face, the untamed eyebrows, the hideous vest. I look like I've been asleep for fifty years. I look sad and boyfriendless. I look a little bit like I might never come out of it.

But then, then, then, there was some sort of transformation, some sort of something that took place in my body over the course of a few months, something that took me from a girl with a shaggy mullet to this:



A real human girl.

(For the most part.)

(And, for those of you who are keeping score, the girl on the right is my former best friend, the girl who cried when I told her I lost my virginity.)

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.

A Conversation with My Brother

Adam: Get out of here already. Aren't you leaving? When are you leaving?

Me: I'm going, I'm going.

Adam: Good. Also, I just want you to know that the couch you were sitting on two seconds ago is where I like to pleasure myself.

We Should Call Him Drunk-O

After I turned twenty-one and would come home occasionally for a weekend away from college, this is how my brother would welcome me home:

"Hi, drunk," he'd say. "Been on any benders lately?"

When my father or mother offered me a drink with dinner or after, my brother would spike his eyebrows toward the ceiling. "Are you an alcoholic?" he asked after I accepted.

He told his friends his sister drank a lot, that she owned a book on how to make cocktails, that she had sticky bottles of vodka and blue curaco (everything necessary to make the Blue Lagoon) on top of her fridge, that there was sometimes beer in her fridge, and that she had a favorite bar for every geographic area in which she existed. She had a favorite college bar. A favorite bar in Buffalo. A favorite Canadian bar. My brother told his friends he was worried that his sister was going to become some sort of famous souse: stumbling, bumbling, drooling, a girl who wore tight-fitting clothes and draped herself across pool tables, flinging her legs and arms in the air to heavy metal music.

But I just wasn't that kind of girl. I'd watched other girls become that type of drunk, sure. One of my college friends--a church girl, an ex-Baptist, a girl who once admitted she thought the rest of us were going to hell because we weren't saved by her church--shake a bottle of Labatt and spray it all over her chest when Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me" blasted out the speakers of our favorite college bar. She writhed. She tossed her hair around. She rubbed the sudsy liquid into her tank top. Where was I during all this? Standing behind her, calmly sipping my vodka-cranberry and thinking, Wow. I bet God just loves this.

I wasn't what my brother thought I was, but he kept on believing and he kept on asking how my liver was doing, if I thought maybe it was time to enroll in AA, if I was sure I wanted to have that glass of wine with our pasta.

Last week when he and I met our father out for dinner, my brother started in on his new favorite topic: drinking. He'd just gotten two new bar books, he told our father. He liked the Long Island Iced Teas made at a certain bar in Canada. He liked to sit at bars in restaurants so he could stare longingly at their collections of liquor. He'd just recently asked the bartender at Famous Dave's about her favorite brand of Vodka, and she named something other than Grey Goose, and my brother was scandalized. "It was something I'd never heard of before," he said. "Have either of you ever heard of it?" We hadn't. "I want to try it," he said.

He went on. He was accumulating lumber so he could build a bar--no bigger than the table we were currently sitting at, he told us--for the cabin. He said he was steadily accumulating barware: tumblers, shot glasses, one of those straw holders that splays the straws out in a prickly explosion when you lift the lid. "I'm not going to keep the straws that came in it," he assured us. "That's gross. I don't know who's put their hands all over them."

Finally, my father sighed and put down his fork. "Adam," he said, "you aren't even twenty-one. This is ridiculous. When your sister turned twenty-one you spent every waking minute asking her if she was an alcoholic if she even dared to have a drink in front of you. And now look at you."

My brother narrowed his eyes. "So?" he asked.

My father went on to explain it was sort of hypocritical, sort of bad, sort of scary that he was so obsessed with all things alcohol. He told my brother it made him uncomfortable. He didn't want to talk about it anymore.

"Jeees-sus Christ!" my brother huffed. "I can't believe this! Here we are trying to have a nice dinner and nice conversation, and you go and say something like that!"

My father reiterated: Adam wasn't yet twenty-one and he was sitting at bars and staring at liquor, he was buying book after book on how to make drinks, he was buying things to stock a bar, he was going back to the cabin to get drunk more weekends than not. My father said it just wasn't right. My father said Adam needed a new hobby.

I didn't say anything. I don't think my brother is out of control. I think he is acting like a normal twenty year old boy, and since my brother dropped out of college before he had the chance to go on those typical college-boy-benders, I think he needs to get it out of his system somehow. If he wants to ride across the border with his friends and go to Canadian strip clubs and bars, that's fine. If he wants to go back to the cabin and drink cheap beer and pee outside into the snow banks, that's fine, too. I just wish he'd stop talking about it, because it's getting pretty boring. Each time he starts in on it, I have the itching urge to ask him, "Adam? Are you an alcoholic? Is your liver okay? Do you really want that drink with dinner? Should I get you the number of the local AA?"

But I know if I did that my brother would level me with one of those looks he has--evil, biting, the perfect Little Brother Look. He would cross his arms, glare, and tell me to shut up because I don't know anything about anything. Not at all.

Studded

Friday afternoon, Becky and I went to see the new James Bond movie. When we came out and checked our cell phones to see if we had missed anything important, I saw that I'd missed three calls. One was from Ex-Keith. Two were from my brother. Two.

I was shocked. My brother would rather do many unpleasant things than be forced to talk to me. He'd rather have teeth extracted, be forced to watch girly movies, work a double shift, get his hand caught in his car door. But on Friday afternoon, he called me twice. And he left a message.

"It's your dear brother," he said. "I need to ask your opinion about something. Call me back as soon as you get this."

My opinion?

"This can't be right," I said to both Becky and Amy after we'd gotten back to their apartment. "He doesn't care what I think about anything."

I called him back. I asked him what had come over him. I asked him what the hell his problem was. I asked him if he'd had any head trauma as of late.

"You and I had a conversation once," he said, "and you said you liked eyebrow rings."

If that was true—which I highly doubted—it had to have been ages ago, like when I was an undergraduate at Fredonia, when I had a thing for a boy in my first creative writing class. It was the first semester of sophomore year and I was still shaken because Keith had cut me loose after cheating on me with a girl he would later refer to as "Psycho." I was looking for a boy to save me from my misery. I was looking for a boy who would read my writing and think I was brilliant. Keith had never read my writing—always said he would, never did, never has—and I wanted someone who was his exact opposite. I wanted a liberal boy who liked to read.

Enter Chris from Intro to Creative Writing. He sat in the back, wore backward hats, and he wrote really awful poetry. I decided I'd ignore the bad poetry. I decided I'd take it, because it was sure better than loving a boy who refused to read anything except the sports page of the newspaper. Chris, at least, was trying.

He also had a piercing in that divot between his lips and chin. More than anything, I wanted to know what that piercing would feel like when he pressed close to me, when he kissed me. I was in love with that piercing more than I was in love with Chris's whole package. It seemed rebellious and badass. I pictured running into Keith when I was holding Chris's hand. I pictured Keith turning red with rage because there I was—his good, sweet, innocent ex-girlfriend—hanging out with a boy who had an attitude and a piercing, a boy who would rub that piercing over my lips before catching them in his own.

To catch Chris and make him my own, I did what I was capable of. I leveled what I assumed to be sultry looks in his direction during class. I said witty things . I tried to distract him from the very beautiful girl who sat by the windows—the one with the best curly blond hair I'd ever seen, the one who wore low-cut jeans that exposed the tattoo of a fairy cresting above her butt. On the last day of class I dressed up in clothes I thought a punk boy would approve of. I plaited my hair in tight braids against my head. I wore chunky shoes. I put on extra mascara. After we were dismissed, I sat and waited and prayed that after he gathered his things he would come over and ask me out. I waited, waited, waited. Chris picked up his jacket, yanked his backpack up off the floor, and walked out.

I hated that I'd never said anything directly to him. I wanted to know so badly how that piercing would have felt. Amy can certainly verify that. I used to spend thirty, forty minutes sitting in her dorm room, discussing that piercing and how I had to have it, and the boy it was attached to, for my own.

After that, though, I could have cared less about piercings, so Adam must have remembered me talking about Chris from Creative Writing and the silver stud in his face.

I told him this. "That conversation must have been forever ago," I said. I almost told him that right now if I met a cute boy who was my age and had a strange piercing I'd tell him to grow up and take the thing out of his chin, his eyebrow, his nose. I almost told him that, but I had a bad feeling, so I shut up and let him reveal why he was asking.

"Well," he said, "my friend Megan told me I'd look good with an eyebrow piercing, and I remembered what you said, and some of my other friends said it would look good on me, too, so I went and got it done this afternoon."

If I hadn't been in the movie, if I hadn't been busy coming 180 degrees on my perception of the new James Bond and his sexiness that I hadn't understood until I saw the movie, then I could've answered the phone and talked my brother out of it. But that chance was gone forever, so I did the only thing I could do. I raised my voice several octaves and tried to sound excited.

"Well, that's nice," I said. "Does it look good?"

He said it did and that his friends really liked it.

After we hung up, I told Amy and Becky what had been done. They were appalled, just like I was. Then we tried to examine why we were appalled. Hadn't we all at one point had a thing for a boy who had a non-ear piercing? Yes. Hadn't we all at one point looked at boys who sat in class with us, boys who had piercings, and thought nothing of it? Yes. Then what was our problem? Were piercings over, or was it just that we weren't nineteen years old anymore? We finally agreed it was the latter, that there is a short period of time where piercings are seen as badass and hot and cool, and then girls grow up and want a boy who has left his piercing days behind, a boy who can do his own laundry, a boy who has stopped throwing up in the bushes behind the fraternity house.

Adam's friends—girls with names like Kaylyn and Emily, names I associate with pretty blond girls who want to grow up and go to cosmetology school—are still in their piercing phase. They're a couple years out from wanting the boy who can separate his own laundry into piles according to shade and fabric. And so they talked him into it.

Last night Adam came out for our bi-weekly Family Dinner Night. It was the first time my father and I got to see the piercing. Adam walked in, looked at us, and said, "What? What? You guys are looking at me funny."

"I'm doing no such thing," my father said. He stirred his beef stroganoff. "I think someone's got a guilty conscience."

"Jesus Christ," my brother said. "Everyone hates it! This has been the week from hell! I'm sick of everyone looking at me like that!"

Apparently my mother hadn't been too fond of the piercing. Apparently her boyfriend had made fun of Adam and told him it was a stupid decision.

"I think it's fine," I said. "I think you can do whatever you want. You're twenty years old. If you like it, then that's all that matters."

And the thing was, I didn't hate it. I actually thought it was pretty cute. I looked at him and thought, Yeah. He looks alright. Of course his little girl followers would like it.



So I guess I don't really care about his piercing. I won't say anything about it, and I won't make fun of him for it. It's fine. I don't care. He can do what he wants. But I do care that the other day he said to me, "I don't have thirty dollars to split that part of Dad's Christmas present with you," to which I replied, "Alright, fine. How about you just give me what you can and I'll pay the rest?"

Two days later he went out and did this. Merry Christmas to him. That kid owes me money.

Officially Festive

Today I finished putting up the tree. There was an incident the other day--an incident involving the running out of hooks--and I had to make a trip to Target before the decorating could be finished. But now the tree is up in all its glory.



It's displaying the best of the best: Baby's First Christmas ornaments, ornaments my brother and I made in Girl and Boy Scouts, ornaments made out of clothespins, Hallmark Keepsakes that we get every year from our mother, snowflake ornaments with our school pictures inside, penguin ornaments, disco ball ornaments, best friend ornaments with names carved on them(Jess & Tammy, 1994), lighthouse ornaments, pickle ornaments, ornaments made out of nuts and pinecones. We are nothing if not an eclectic tree decorating family.

Examples:



You can't beat a fat TV-watching penguin.



And who doesn't like a zebra?



And there he is--my brother--many years before Hooters ever entered his vocabulary.