The Little Brother

by Victoria Patterson

  Dad pulled the car to the curb, and we got out to look. We walked for a long time, not speaking, splitting up to check the gravesites but keeping within eyesight of each other. There were hundreds of gravestones on Sunshine Terrace—most of them simple and bare, with a few lonely pinwheels turning amid bunches of flowers—and every now and then I saw a maintenance worker raking or trimming the grass. My head hurt, my ass ached, I was cold, and I felt a bit nauseated.

  I was still thinking about our great-great-grandfather possibly owning slaves, and how Dad had mentioned the fact so breezily. It bothered me, and I experienced a shifting in my feeling about our family and its history from a sense of pride to ambiguity. I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to be buried with them.

  We’d given up and had crammed into the Porsche again, this time with the top up, and turned back toward Dad’s home, when he said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s the thought that counts, anyway. We’ll come back another time.” In the purple-gold sky, the fat moon looked like a glob of cream. I knew that we wouldn’t be back, and I didn’t care.

  4.

  ONE WEEKEND NOT long after our trip to Rose Hills, Gabe got me stoned for the first time. Dad left us on a Saturday morning to play golf with Sheriff Matt Krone and some of his buddies. He said it was for business. He’d been spending less time with us, returning to his predivorce pattern of neglect.

  “Easy, dude,” Gabe said, watching me suck on the joint. He sat in Dad’s recliner, legs widespread, taking up space like a king. “That’s right. Hold it, hold it, hooold it. Hoooold . . . Okay, release.”

  Sitting tense and hunched on the couch, I let the smoke out. Coughed, choked, gasped, laughed.

  Back and forth we passed the joint, until Gabe pinched the butt dead.

  We raided the refrigerator, eating turkey slices, pickles, cheese, apples, and greasy duck liver pâté, which Gabe had not tried before. Forking it from its case, spreading it on Ritz crackers. Then we siphoned brandy from Dad’s bar, drinking from wide-bottomed crystal glasses, swilling the dark-copper liquid, and sniffing at it like sophisticated connoisseurs. Drunk and stoned, the living room whirling, we decided to go outside for a Jacuzzi.

  Stripped naked, we sat in the bubbling lukewarm water, feeling it gradually heat up. It reminded me of when we used to take baths together as kids.

  Gabe dipped his head under and came back with dripping bangs. I followed, hearing the rush of jets, and then I came back up for air. We were both pleased with our camaraderie—whether chemically induced or not—since we hadn’t experienced it as much since I’d moved out.

  On the horizon, beyond the homes and trees and streets, a vague light blue strip of ocean shimmered.

  Gabe nodded toward it, saying, “Nice view.” He kept staring with a wistful, preoccupied look on his face.

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed dumbly. Along with giving me cotton-mouth, pot stunted my vocabulary.

  “So,” he said, shifting his attention and leaning back against a jet, “dude. The girls are prettier here than in Cucamonga, right?”

  I started laughing so hard I thought something must be wrong with me.

  “You’ve got your pick,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, trying not to laugh so much.

  He leaned across the Jacuzzi toward me, and began to tell me about a girl he was having sex with, Chrystal Lemmings. “You remember her,” he said. “Long brown hair, blue eyes, nice ass, long legs.”

  “Sure,” I said, ducking my chin into the bubbles. I didn’t remember Chrystal, and I wasn’t sure I believed Gabe was having sex with her.

  “She knows what she’s doing,” he said. He traced a finger along the water that had collected in the gap between two tiles. “Know what I mean?”

  “Uh-huh,” I lied.

  He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, saying, “She’s good.”

  I started laughing again, slapping at the water with my hands like a toddler would. I couldn’t seem to help myself.

  “What’s so funny?” he said, pushing at my chest. “You think I’m joking?”

  “Nah,” I said.

  “You like anyone?” he asked.

  “There’s this girl,” I said, making my voice confidential. “I’ve never told anyone.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Tell me.”

  “She gives me hand jobs,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  “I’m serious.” My cheeks burned with shame.

  “She hot?”

  I sat back against a jet. “Not bad,” I said.

  “She blow you?”

  “Sure.”

  “You feel her pussy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice,” he said. “Your face’s all red. Do I know her?”

  “Nah,” I said.

  “Wanna call her?”

  “Nah.”

  “What’s her name?”

  I don’t know how I came up with the name Tammy.

  “Hmm,” he said. “What’s her last name?”

  I don’t know how I came up with the last name Simon.

  “Simon,” he said. “Tammy Simon.” He closed his eyes and started talking about Chrystal Lemmings blowing him, describing the way her mouth felt on his cock, speaking in detail. He was on a roll, and it was like reading pornography online, juicy and explicit. I wasn’t laughing anymore. The only noise besides his talking came from the bubbling water.

  He paused, opened his eyes, shifted, squinted at me. His face soured, as if he’d tasted something unpleasant. But it came from whatever he saw on my face.

  “You look fucked up,” he said. “You okay? You feel sick?”

  “Nah,” I said. But I felt sick, thinking about this girl Tammy Simon that I’d made up, and Gabe and Chrystal, and the pornos and the things that I’d seen on the computer, in relation to me and to Gabe: all that slapping and thrusting and licking and coming. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex, or that sex didn’t excite me, but it also seemed like a physical ordeal. I barely had hair on my armpits and groin. Somewhere between wanting to throw up and needing to cry, I felt a horrible, panicky thumping in my chest. I burped, a slippery gurgle of food and bourbon rising and falling.

  “Drink too much?” Gabe said.

  “Maybe.”

  Gabe hoisted himself onto the partition between the Jacuzzi and pool, his half-erect penis swaying. Then he stood for a moment and slapped at his chest like Tarzan. He was small and muscular, his butt cheeks paler than the rest of him, and he turned his head to look at me from over his shoulder. “Get up here,” he said. “This’ll help.”

  I lumbered onto the partition, stood beside him. He gripped my wrist and took me with him in a dive-jump-belly-flop into the cold pool. We smacked the surface, and he released me, our bodies sinking. I opened my eyes for a second and saw his hair drifting upward.

  It did help.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I couldn’t sleep. Gabe, as far as I knew, was sleeping, and Dad had gone to bed early with a migraine.

  The alcohol and pot had faded, leaving me uneasy. I tried reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea for my advanced English class. My teacher had gushed so much about “Papa’s economy of words” that I felt disgruntled, like I’d been promised a steak but what was delivered instead was a plate with a few peas on it.

  Finally, I decided to get a drink of water. I drank a glass in the kitchen and then poured another to take with me. Walking down the hallway from the kitchen in my pajama bottoms and T-shirt, holding my glass, I heard music coming from the living room.

  The TV screen showed one of those pseudo-pornos with simulated sex but no actual copulation. An oil-slicked, hairless man slammed, with a repetitive slapping noise, against an equally oil-slicked woman, both making exaggerated facial expressions, moaning mechanically.

  At first I thought the room was empty, but then I saw the top of Gabe’s head in Dad’s tilted-back recliner, his feet stretched before him.

  I walked over and sat near
him, emboldened by our earlier bonding.

  He looked over at me and in the weak light from the lamp, I saw his glazed and bloodshot eyes. He was shirtless with his boxers and socks on; one of his hands lay idle on his stomach, the other flopped on the recliner’s arm. On the table beside him next to the remote was a bottle of Michelob. It took him a few seconds to speak. “Hey,” he said, thick-tongued. “Hey there.” He set the chair more upright and muted the TV.

  “What are you doing?” I asked stupidly.

  “It’s the only one you don’t have to pay for,” he said, slurring his words a bit. He swallowed noticeably and added, “Tongue feels weird.” With his thumb and forefinger, he pinched his tongue and pulled it from his mouth.

  “Like how?”

  “Icanthfeelith,” he said, and then he released his tongue and gave me a smile.

  I shifted closer to him. We watched the muted TV without speaking for a few minutes. He lifted the Michelob to his lips, made a point to smack its bottom to get the final drops, and then set the empty back. It wobbled on the table and before it tipped I leaned forward and steadied it with my hand.

  Another oil-slicked woman joined the couple on-screen, her legs crossed so that you couldn’t fully see her pubis. She watched the couple while rubbing her breasts, and then the man pulled her down onto the floor, and she began to fondle his chest and watch over his shoulder, kneeling behind him. I realized that they were in an office space, with filing cabinets and a desk.

  “So much for getting any work done,” I said.

  Gabe looked at me with a blank expression, his mouth slightly open.

  “It’s a joke,” I offered.

  His eyes widened; he said, “Ahh,” looking at the screen, and he laughed with comprehension.

  “Gabe?” I said.

  “What?” he said, without looking away from the screen.

  “Are you mad at me for leaving you with Mom?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you mad,” I repeated, “that I left you with Mom?”

  He didn’t answer. The TV light shone on his face, and he looked empty and emotionless. It bothered me so much that I glanced back at the screen.

  “I had to leave,” I said. “I had to.” I paused, stared back at him. “I know she blames me but I hope that you don’t.”

  He turned to me, glassy-eyed, and I thought for a second he was going to tell me to shut the fuck up, but instead he said, “Can I have that”—gesturing at my glass of water.

  “Sure,” I said, handing it to him.

  He drank it down in one pull, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he said, “Ahhh, good,” and set the glass next to his Michelob.

  He stretched, turned toward me, fetus-like in the recliner. Serious, he said, “You don’t know what it’s like, Even. She makes me rub her feet, her back. You should see the meds she’s on.” A pause, then, “She says she’s dying. I hear her crying at night, sometimes all night. I cook, clean, pick up after her. It’s like I’m her caretaker.”

  “God, sorry,” I said. “I had no idea it was that bad. Can’t you tell her no? Tell her to leave you alone.”

  He turned back to the TV. “Dad’s a shit,” he said. Petulant, irritated, his eyes shining. “I hate him.”

  “Mom’s a shit, too,” I said after a long pause. But he didn’t seem to hear me or acknowledge Mom’s fault.

  “I mean,” he said, his voice rising, “he’s a fucking shit.”

  “He’s not perfect,” I said, uncertain. “I know that.”

  “You’re naïve, Even,” he said in monotone. He kept staring at the TV. “Open your eyes. He thinks he can buy your love. Looks like he’s bought it. He’s got that sheriff. Thinks he can buy everything. One day you’re going to figure it out.”

  “You sound like Mom.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “Since you left, all Mom does is talk about you. They’re both obsessed with you. It’s like I don’t exist.”

  We were quiet, and I felt sorry for Gabe.

  “Why do you play the game, Son?” I said, adopting Dad’s voice.

  Gabe snorted. “Because,” he said, with a better gravelly sounding Dad-voice than mine, “you play to win.”

  “Son,” I said, mimicking Gabe’s Dad-voice, making mine deeper, heartier, and hoarser, “you play to win.”

  He smiled at me and we both laughed.

  Our inside joke. Dad had sponsored Gabe’s fourth grade Little League team, the Eagles. That meant that embroidered near their numbers on the backs of their uniforms was HYDE DRYWALL.

  One afternoon, Dad told us: “You don’t play to have a good time. You play to win.” Over the years, Gabe and I had repeated this refrain in various forms, keeping the essential core of his philosophy.

  “Listen,” Gabe said, serious again, “promise me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it,” he said, looking down.

  “Gabe. I hate it when you do that.”

  He shook his head. “Nah, dude,” he said. “Forget it.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I’m sleepy,” he said. He stared at me, his mouth open. “I’m fucked up. Took some pills. Demerol, I think. Not sure. I don’t know what I’m saying. I can’t even see you that good.”

  “Where’re your glasses?”

  He shrugged. After a moment or so, he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “sometimes I worry about what’s going to happen to us.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  We were quiet for a long while. He had closed his eyes.

  “Now I remember”—he said, opening them—“what I was going to say.” He looked at me. “Remember how Mom would always tell us that they had more than one kid so that we’d be there for each other, always look out for each other?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Promise me you won’t let anything fuck us up.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Like Mom and Dad.”

  “They can’t do that to us,” I said, my voice fierce. “I promise. Nothing will. Nothing can.”

  He looked at me with relief and affection.

  To this day, it pains me more than anything to think about this conversation, and the way that Gabe looked at me.

  He trusted me.

  5.

  BY MY FRESHMAN year of high school in Newport and Gabe’s sophomore year in Cucamonga, I was visiting Mom every now and then (we had called a truce). She had joined a local Presbyterian church, and her ailments had improved. She volunteered on Sundays to sell coffee for a quarter from Styrofoam cups after the services, and she started to care more about her appearance. A four-month Weight Watchers membership helped her lose thirteen pounds, and she and a group of her friends started a walking club: Each morning they walked to Starbucks and treated themselves to lattes. As long as we didn’t discuss my decision to live with my dad, we did okay.

  Gabe came to Dad’s on the weekends, sometimes bringing his friends. They liked it at Dad’s for the same reason I did: not much adult supervision. They could drink, smoke pot, have sex, it didn’t matter.

  Dad had his “lady friend” by then, Nancy, a petite blond in her late thirties: quiet, smart, polite, pretty in a well-maintained way. Nancy worked in his office. On the weekends, she sometimes spent the night with Dad, but she wanted nothing to do with Gabe and me. We didn’t see her much and talked to her very little. The biggest indicator of her presence in our lives was the sharp, lingering scent of her flowery perfume in Dad’s house.

  Once in a while Dad alluded with reverence to Nancy’s impoverished upbringing in a small Alabama town (she had a trace of a Southern accent), which included, as I recall, a mother who had a wooden leg, missing teeth, and an appetite for beating her children. Dad appreciated a rags-to-riches story, and Nancy’s was a doozy.

  Nancy didn’t want kids. All she wanted, it seemed, was to make sure she maintained her beloved li
festyle. She was a myopic, rigid, religious Republican, which complimented our dad’s more fiscally based politics. Her small-town Southern roots also gave rise to a vocal xenophobia and an irrational obsession with Armageddon.

  She had no idea what she was getting involved with when she took up with our dad. But later she stuck by him like a dog, giving comments to reporters that sounded like those of a PR representative. (“Daniel Hyde’s greatest sins are being a devoted and generous family man, a successful, self-made businessman, and a selfless contributor to his community. Those that speak ill of him are obviously just jealous of his wealth and success.”)

  Unlike Dad, I didn’t have a girlfriend. Not because I didn’t want one. I didn’t know how to get one. There were few couples at my high school. Mostly people hooked up at parties, and it was better when it was someone who you didn’t know, someone from a different high school, because then you didn’t have to see them on a daily basis. By my freshman year, I’d lost my virginity to a more experienced girl from Irvine, in a clumsy, limb-shuffling, spastic two-minutes: It was nothing to brag about.

  I had a crush on Maria, a sweet, even-keeled Latina, a senior, older than me by four years, with sharp brown eyes and curly dark hair. She lived in Costa Mesa but went to school in the Newport district because her mother worked for the city. We shared a love of foreign films, and we went to a few art galleries together, but then she got a boyfriend who was in college, and she stopped hanging out with me. She graduated with honors and went on to Stanford, and then to Yale Law School. I keep track of her. I sometimes entertain the notion that she keeps track of me, too, and that my future accomplishments will impress her. But I try not to fantasize too much.

  Those days, when I felt down, I sometimes wished that I still lived in Cucamonga. I missed my mom and brother. I couldn’t really tell them this, since it had been my choice to live in Newport. But when I went back and visited, it was strange. I felt tangled up, like I didn’t belong in Newport with my dad, and I certainly didn’t belong back in Cucamonga with them anymore, either.

  If all this seems confusing, it was, so much so that I tried counseling through my high school. I had four mortifying sessions with a well-intentioned counselor named Steve, who wore socks with sandals and believed strongly in the advantages of money to gold conversion. It didn’t help that on our first session, I tried to be honest, describing the TV-shattering fight between Dad and Gabe. Steve put a hand to his cheek, gasped, and said, “No way! Really?”