by Julia Pandl
I remember all these things, but because I was number nine, there is almost no actual proof I even existed. The family camera only came out for children numbers one, two, and three; after that, it was either broken or simply forgotten. It’s a little like I fell out of the sky at age twelve. The few baby pictures that exist were all taken on the same day, as if someone said, “Let’s get a few pictures, just in case she’s kidnapped.” In them I’m sitting in front of the TV, I have dirty hair, and I’m eating a huge bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream, wearing a dirty onesie and a dirty bib that reads I’M A LITTLE BADGER.
Perhaps I was kidnapped.
THE FIGHT BETWEEN Jeremiah and me lasted twelve years, nearly driving the entire family to the brink of insanity. Why it lasted so long remains a mystery, but as self-respecting Roman Catholics, we now both blame our parents, of course. The feud touched every person who entered our house, though—friends, relatives, neighbors, dates, and future in-laws. Only the brave ones stayed. The others left, a bit emotionally scarred, wondering how such brutality would shape up down the road.
Born less than three years apart, we look the same, Jeremiah and I: same lips, same hair, same eyes, same thighs. Even today we are occasionally mistaken for twins, although he has slightly less hair than I do, and I have slightly larger thighs. By the age of nine, his bare feet produced a Limburger-like smell that could clear a room. He ingested small change, screws, and turpentine. The phone number for the poison hotline was on a green sticker attached to the phone above my mother’s desk. The ipecac was underneath the kitchen sink, right next to the silver polish and the bleach.
The problem in the relationship between Jeremiah and me was simple: I existed.
“Put her down,” he demanded, the day my mother brought me home from the hospital. “I want to play with her.” Terry had been around the block enough times to know that “play with her” was toddler talk for “wrap my hands around her neck, sit on her head, and smother her with my diaper.” My presence had knocked Jeremiah off his baby throne, and he was pissed.
With very few weapons at his disposal and determined to exact revenge, he took to spitting in my crib. He would stand at the kitchen door and eyeball me from across the room, swaying back and forth on his high white shoes, blankie in one hand and bottle in the other, pretending to be mesmerized by the sunlight bouncing off the chandelier that hung above the dining room table. He waited until the coast was clear and then toddled over to the antique white crib my mother kept in the opposite corner, his poopy diaper and sourdough thighs stuffed into a pair of short pants. He couldn’t fit his pudgy hands through the crib’s wooden slats, thick with eighty-seven years of white paint, and he was too short to reach over the top, so choking me was out of the question. But with his face and mine just a few inches apart, he hawked up what little spittle he could, pursed his plump lips together, and took a shot. I’m told his aim was dead-on.
Katie acted as my bodyguard until I was about four, taking me all over town. For the most part, we went places where she could smoke cigarettes without getting caught. When I was small, she tossed me in the rickety old baby buggy, but eventually I graduated to the babyseat on the back of the family tandem bike. There was never anyone in the middle seat, just her way up front and me way in the back, twisting in the wind, no shoes, probably no clothes, certainly no helmet, just the “I’m a little badger” bib. Other kids brought fake babies to school show-and-tell; Katie brought me.
Other kids had their mothers register them for kindergarten; Katie did that. My mother couldn’t bear the thought of bringing yet another kid to Lake Bluff School, so she had Katie do the job. But when one of the other kindergarteners asked her if she was my mom, she abandoned me, and I ended up back in Jeremiah’s hands.
That’s how the chaos was managed in our family: the next oldest kid took care of the younger one. It was a perfectly acceptable arrangement. Everything Jeremiah did, I wanted to do. It didn’t matter if it was mundane, exciting, illegal, or even life threatening—I wanted in. If he played Little League, I wanted to play Little League. If he got to go camping in the Boundary Waters, I wanted to go camping in the Boundary Waters. If his hero was Chester Marcol, my hero was Chester Marcol.
The only wrinkle was the fact that given opportunity without consequences, we wanted to tear each other’s eyes out. My mother, in one of many desperate attempts to move our fights anywhere but near her, forced us down into the basement. Basements have come a long way since the seventies. For starters, they have heat. They have dropped ceilings, wood paneling, soft carpeting, comfortable chairs, and flat-screen TVs. Our basement on Prospect Avenue was like Heart of Darkness, except I suspect the Congo was warmer and more welcoming. The stairs were mismatched two-by-fours held down with rusty nails. When the lights went on, centipedes the size of sheepdogs scurried across the gray concrete floor. Occasionally they materialized in the corner of the stairwell, where the ceiling met the wall. I’d sit on the top step in my nightgown and fire thick rubber bands off my finger in an effort to thin the herd. My sister Amy actually drew a picture of one and hung it on the refrigerator. “The horror! The horror!”
The basement’s furnace room, and the furnace itself, were straight out of Dante’s seventh circle of hell. Things that went missing in the house—retainers, diamond rings, car keys—were declared to be “downstairs behind the furnace.” Which meant they were gone forever and quickly forgotten.
My mother did laundry down there, and my father had a workshop, although he never once used it. There was a splintered worktable, with a vise purchased during the Dark Ages bolted to one end.
That vise sparked the invention of what I like to call the “here, Julie” games. One day, after Terry caught us giving each other snakebites in the family room, Jeremiah and I found ourselves tiptoeing barefoot across the laundry room and into the workshop.
“Here, Julie,” he said. “I’ll put my hands in the vise and you tighten until I tell you to stop.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll see how tight we can get it.”
“Okay.” Honestly.
He pressed his hands together like he was making his First Holy Communion and set them between the jaws. I grabbed the cold steel bar from underneath, cranked it around, and let it slip down the shaft where it landed on the end ball with a clank. I did this over and over again—crank, slip, clank; crank, slip, clank; crank, slip, clank—until his hands were waffled in nice and tight.
“Try to get out.”
He set his feet and pulled with all his weight, shifted positions, and pulled again.
“Ha, I got you.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty tight. It feels kinda weird. Now let me try you.”
“ ’Kay.” I danced with delight as I loosened the grip, anxious for my turn.
We switched places and he started to crank away, except he didn’t let the rod slip and clank; he spun it around with speed and determination. I felt the jagged teeth sink quickly into the backs of my hands.
“Ow! Ow! Ouch!” I screamed.
He cranked again and smiled.
“Ouch! Goddamn it, that hurts.”
“There, try to get out.”
I wasn’t all that tall. My stance gave me very little leverage, so I leaned back and felt metal bite my skin.
“I can’t do it. Let me out.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no? I let you out. Let me out.”
“No.” He smiled and started to back out of the room.
“Agh! No, come back. Let me out, let me out!”
I squirmed. My pulse quickened and blood pumped painfully, rhythmically, into my fingertips. They turned bright red as I heard my brother bouncing up the stairs. I stood there and cried for what seemed like days while whispers of things floated across my feet. I can’t tell you who finally came along and sprang me, but I can tell you that I marched directly up to my mother and showed her the
evidence of my imprisonment: red-striped, flattened hands and purple fingertips. I can also tell you that Jeremiah received so noisy a spanking when my father got home that I actually felt guilty. Tattling was bad form, no matter what.
Sometimes things got out of hand and accidents happened. But when blood was drawn, Jeremiah and I became allies. The sight of blood, his or mine, was immediately followed by the words Don’t tell. Nine times out of ten, the words applied to Terry, but the inference included anyone within earshot who was older than us. We both knew that blood meant big trouble. Blood meant somebody would actually have to go find a Band-Aid. A Band-Aid in our house was a little like the Holy Grail: one existed, sure, but no one knew where. And when the box was found, the bandages disappeared so fast that our parents took to rationing them as if they were strips of bacon and we were at war.
“Here, Julie,” Jeremiah said one rainy morning, after Terry caught us taking turns socking each other in the shoulder and sent us upstairs to play. “You jump up and down on the end of Mom and Dad’s bed and I’ll try to knock you down with Mom’s pillow.”
Terry slept on a standard-size down pillow, rendered formless with age, stuffed inside a king-size pillowcase decorated with faded yellow daisies. We could get a strong grip on the empty side of the case, and the pillow was soft enough to wrap around two ankles, so it served our purpose too. The bed, a twenty-fifth anniversary present from George, had no footboard, only a long oak headboard with thick carved spindles on either end and one in the middle.
“Okay.” I climbed up and jumped as high as I could, lifting my knees to avoid his swing.
Because the mattress was brand new, it had a good bounce. I was able to spring up with lightning speed. The idea was that the swinger, the one who held the pillow, had to knock the jumper off his or her feet, onto his or her butt, and then we’d switch places. Jeremiah was bigger than me, of course, so tripping him up in the loose sheets was oftentimes the best I could manage. He, on the other hand, could hook my ankles and upend me with the slightest tug.
I jumped as high as I could, maintaining balance by holding my arms out to the sides and rotating. He swung and missed, swung and missed. I couldn’t help but giggle as the motion tickled my tummy and the pillow grazed the bottoms of my feet. The air caught my T-shirt as I drifted down toward the mattress. He clipped me once on the left, and again on the right, but somehow I managed to land and bounce again. Emboldened, I took my eyes off him for a second, reached up and back, and tried to touch the ceiling. I felt a sudden jerk forward as the fabric wrapped itself around my ankles. Then he let go. In his defense, gravity and physics did the rest. The ceiling drifted slowly past like a smoggy cloud as I floated backward. I had time to notice the chipped paint on the wall, just above the wooden bust of Jesus with the Crown of Thorns that my father kept high on his dresser. I’d like to say it was the face of Jesus that took my breath away, but really it was the impact of my spine against the not-so-rounded edge of the headboard’s middle spindle. My butt landed dead center, in between two king-size pillows, in the space where my mother kept hers, and I felt a trickle of blood slide down the back of my underpants.
Both as white as ghosts, we exchanged the same terrified look.
“Don’t tell,” he said.
I choked on a few tears.
“Are you okay?” He scrambled across the bed. “Lemme see, lemme see.”
My legs still tangled among the sheets, I rolled to the side. He lifted my T-shirt and sucked in a quick stream of air between his teeth. “Jeez, I’m sorry.”
An unsolicited, unforced apology was definitely a bad sign. For a brief moment I thought I might be dying.
“It’s okay, it’s okay. You’re fine. Don’t tell, though. Just don’t tell Mom.”
“I won’t,” I said, whimpering, and crawled off the bed and into my parents’ bathroom. I climbed onto the radiator and checked the wound in the medicine cabinet mirror. The spindle had peeled a hefty chunk of skin off my back, leaving a hole about the size and color of a plum. I have no clear memory of how we solved the problem, but I believe it involved wadded-up toilet paper and masking tape. Make no mistake, my father made plenty of attempts at rationing toilet paper and masking tape, but the job was just too damn big.
Neither of us told.
Jeremiah’s blood spilled too. Usually by his own accord, though. When we lived in Cedar Grove, one night he dragged me into the kitchen. He peeled a banana and held it in his left hand over the kitchen sink. “Watch this,” he said, holding an eight-inch chef’s knife in his right hand, drawing it back behind his shoulder like he was getting ready to split wood. “I’m gonna slice this banana so fast that it’ll stick together.”
“Okay.” Honestly?
One swift swing and blood squirted everywhere—out the screen and on the window, all over the knotty pine cabinets and the wrought-iron handles—and spilled into a saucepan that had been left in the sink.
He quickly grabbed the ever-present dirty and damp dishrag off the middle of the sink, wrapped it around his finger, screamed, “Don’t tell!” and ran downstairs. I followed. When he finally peeled off the crusty rag, the blood flowed down his arm in measured pumps and his fingertip was gone.
This time, though, I had to tell. Missing appendages were a little harder to hide than holes in the back.
Occasionally, and oddly, friendship smiled on us along the way. Jeremiah taught me how to watch football: how to read a draw play, how to spot an illegal block in the back, and how to see when the offense was offside. He taught me how to hide in the bushes when the UPS truck stopped, wait for the driver to exit the sliding side door, run around the back, hop up on the knobby steel bench and hitch a ride around town.
He also taught me how to skeech. The word has several meanings these days. In our world it meant to sneak out behind a car driving down an icy street, squat down, grab the bumper, and skid along until you either let go or fell off. Skeeching happened on our winter walks home from school. It required a small stature, so as not to be spotted by the driver; boots with absolutely no traction, so you could get a good skid going; and dry mittens that were not attached to each other with a string, or to the cuffs of your jacket with clips. Wet knit mittens adhered to a frosty bumper immediately, and any kind of clip or string producing even the slightest tug could beget an unfortunate meeting of tiny teeth and hard steel or of short legs and thick tires. Jeremiah would toss my clips into snowbanks and make sure my mittens were dry.
Befriending your enemy has the true and lasting beauty of a thing hard won. When concessions are made, bonds are formed. Our friendship knitted itself tightly around the scars we inflicted upon each other. It understood precise weaknesses, fears, and anxieties; it had the ability to expose, and even flaunt, but instead it chose to downplay, cajole, and create a binding strength.
It still does. Sure, he would have told me I looked fat in it, but I knew he would give me the shirt off his back. It’s true that much of the time we found ourselves tangled, and sometimes strangled, in the rope of sibling rivalry, but time had its way of undoing the knots. Time, as is almost always the case, had its way of showing us the way.
So when Terry and George let Jeremiah move from our new home in Cedar Grove back to Milwaukee, I was truly heartbroken. It was another unwelcome change. My friend and my foe were both gone, instantly, in the name of a Catholic education. My tether, twisted as it was, had become threadbare, its only remaining connections being my aging parents and the restaurant.
AFTER JEREMIAH MOVED back to Milwaukee, I encountered him only on Sunday mornings, where we shared a mutual disdain for working the brunch, although I believe circumstances may have made his dislike for it slightly more intense than mine. I remember one day in particular because it was at that brunch that he earned a nickname that stuck with him for years. It was in December 1983. It was a Packers/Bears game day and the Christmas decorations were up. The stuffed Frosty the Snowman sat shoved next to the TV in the dark and dusty
southwest corner of the bar; his carrot nose, listless with age, hung over the right corner of the screen.
The brunch shift began at eight o’clock sharp. Like I said, death and/or dismemberment were the only real viable excuses for being late, especially for Pandls. At three minutes after, George, readying a box of beef tenderloin for trimming and sensing that someone was missing, looked around and shouted to no one in particular, “Goddamn it, where’s Jeremiah?” Twitch. No one answered. Everyone, including George, knew he lay less than five minutes away, cocooned in his flannel sheets at my brother and his wife’s house, distilling the dark room with his Saturday night breath.
“I swear, that kid,” George said, shaking his head while deftly sliding his boning knife under the silver skin of his first tenderloin. His work had a delicate rhythm that brought a strange smile to the twitch. He was able to lose himself in the simple task of perfect preparation and enjoy the immediate fruits of his labor. Tenderloin did not talk back, and it did not hide a jug of wine behind the garage. Setting the skin aside, he ran his left hand smoothly back and forth over the scarlet meat, searching for any small stray strips. He sliced off both tips, set them in an empty cottage cheese bucket, laid the trimmed meat in a stainless-steel steam-table pan, and picked up another.
A few minutes later I heard the back door slam, followed by Jeremiah’s loafers slipping one by one up the stairs. He flipped a wad of dark, greasy bed-head hair off his face, revealing a gray pall covered with random shadows of teenage stubble, and red eyes, glassy and wandering, like marbles looking to squeeze themselves out of their thick misery and bounce back down the steps. His clothes—a wrinkled white oxford shirt, a pair of Levi’s worn through at the knees, no socks, and a navy blue down ski jacket with a rip in the left shoulder—had undoubtedly been recovered from a pile next his bed. He held his chef jacket and pants in a crumpled ball under his armpit.
“You’re in deep shit,” I said when he finally pulled himself up the last step. “Dad’s already looking for you.”