All Over the Place

by Geraldine DeRuiter

  But the Mona Lisa did not speak to me. She didn’t move me to tears, reminding me of my own lonely and defiant years, like Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, or leave me elated and speechless, like Seurat’s The Models. She didn’t even give me a hint as to why she was smiling. Instead, I found myself disappointed with one of the most famous paintings in the world.

  And once again, there I was, weirdly comforted by it.

  Because if Leonardo da Vinci disappoints you, there’s a good chance that you have unreasonable expectations of everything, including yourself.

  Perhaps not everyone needs to agree that something is amazing for it to be so. Maybe it is hard to smile without eyebrows or an intact skull. We do it anyway, and maybe that is enough. Maybe I needed more time. Or maybe I was different now, and maybe everything was changed, but Rand still thought I was a masterpiece and I needed to be as accepting of that as I was of these mad fools competing to take a blurry selfie with Mona.

  Not everyone will see our greatness. We might not even see it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  By the time Rand found me back at the hotel, I was lying on our bed, eating macarons and humming what I thought was the French national anthem, but may have actually been the theme to The A-Team (to those who judge me for this blunder: guess which tune will remain stuck in your head for the rest of the day).

  “How was the Louvre?” he asked.

  “Ugh. A madhouse. I spent half an hour looking for the painting of the two naked chicks where one is pinching the other’s nipple.”

  I should explain. After I’d found the Mona Lisa, I’d circled the Louvre for a good part of the afternoon looking for the works mentioned in the museum map. One painting included therein, Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters, artist unknown, features the eponymous Gabrielle sitting naked in a bath with her sister—because apparently that’s what French aristocracy did in the 1500s. And while they look rather prim and proper for two grown women sharing a tub, the sister is reaching over and pinching Gabrielle’s nipple—supposedly a nod to her fertility, as Gabrielle was pregnant with Henry IV’s son. I bet Thanksgiving, if it had existed at the time, would have been crazy at their house.

  Rand laughed. I lay on the bed, eating macarons that I had ordered from a patisserie with such pitiful determination that the woman behind the counter gave me a free one, thereby forever cementing this valuable lesson: ineptitude pays.

  I nibbled on the spoils of my pathetic effort as I relayed the afternoon to Rand. I told him a remarkable truth about the Louvre: the galleries are numbered, but in each wing of the museum, the counting starts anew. There are several galleries numbered 14 or 15 or 16. So all the signs might be telling you that you are in the right place, but you know that they’re wrong.

  And just when you start to think you are losing your mind, you find some empty corner of the museum that you have just to yourself, and you see something beautiful—a painting you’ve loved for years, the poster of which was once hanging in your college studio—and you find yourself thinking that it’s okay. You will never find the exit, but that was all okay.

  Rand smiled, arms crossed as he leaned against a desk, listening to every word.

  “Do you want some steak frites?” he asked when I’d finished my rant.

  Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes. I’d have shouted this reply had my mouth not been full of salted caramel meringue. But I didn’t need to verbalize it—Rand knew the answer, anyway. In a world where nothing is constant and nothing lasts, it is nice to know that some things are etched in stone—time or brain surgery or jet lag cannot alter them. I would always get lost. And I would always make it back. Sometimes I’d have to lose a sweater, or a piece of luggage, or a part of my skull, but I would make it back. Maybe I had changed. And maybe it didn’t matter. He was still there to listen to my misadventures, to feed me and hold me close.

  I don’t know how many years we have left, he and I. I don’t know if we’ll bow out early like Messrs. Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh, or if we’ll be around long enough to watch the other’s hair grow gray. I just know that in a world where nothing is constant, when I can’t even be sure of myself, this one thing endures.

  The truth is, roads move only in one direction, no matter how hard you try or how desperately you scream at traffic. You take a deep breath, and you accept that you are going somewhere new. You will get used to this new place, to your new reflection, to the dent in your head. If you are very, very lucky, you will find a familiar face when you get there. He will smile at you as he always has and ask if you want to get steak frites.

  You realize that you are exactly where you are supposed to be. It just looks a little different than you’d imagined.

  15

  MUNICH—LAND OF SAUSAGES AND EPIPHANIES

  TRAVEL DIDN’T JUST HELP ME make sense of myself. It helped me make sense of those closest to me. While narrowly avoiding strip searches with my mother or trekking across London to find that damn clock that my father loved, I started, in some small way, to understand them better.

  But my older brother Edward has always been another matter. I could go to the ends of the earth and things between us would remain rocky, as they have been all my life. After years of fighting this notion, I’ve just come to accept it. You don’t need to like a person or a place to have it be integral to who you are.

  It’s like your butthole. Do you like your butthole? Probably not. Some of you might, and that’s cool. It’s good to like yourself. But odds are it’s probably not your favorite body part. Still, you’re grateful for it, because it is your butthole and you don’t know where you’d be without it.

  This is how I’ve come to regard Edward. He’s a butthole. But he’s my butthole.

  At some point, I suspect he had to accept the fact that he and I were stuck with each other. But I never had this realization; from my perspective, Edward and I never met for the first time. The concept is utterly absurd, like meeting my own limbs or my reflection in the mirror. Edward has simply always been, as long as I have existed.

  My mother, though, remembers our first encounter well and delights in retelling it.

  “He wanted to throw you in the trash,” Mom explains. “But I told him we couldn’t, because you’d cry.”

  My brother, ever the problem solver, pressed on.

  “So then he suggested we take you back to the hospital. But I told him we couldn’t do that because you’d be all alone and hungry and cold. So he said, ‘Fine. Fine, I guess we can keep her.’ Isn’t that so sweet?”

  Those were Edward’s first impressions of me. But I have no first impressions of him. He’s just always been a part of my life, as permanently a part of me as a freckle on my arm. Getting rid of either would leave a scar, an indelible reminder that a part of me was now gone.

  He is the reason why my right arm doesn’t bend properly, a result of a break sustained in the summer of 1987. We were both on our bikes. Blame for this incident remains hotly debated to this day. He was the impetus for dying my hair blue when I was thirteen. And he is why my knowledge of science fiction is as uselessly vast as it is.

  My friend Nora relayed something her mother told her, which I always found lovely and completely inapplicable to my relationship with Edward: “No one will know you like your sibling does.”

  In my life, I’ve found this variant to be more accurate: “No one will know how to make you seriously consider fratricide like your sibling does.”

  Growing up in my family was a singular experience, one with a long legacy, whether it be in therapy bills or ill-advised tattoos or that haircut I got sophomore year of college that can best be described as a buzz cut with bangs. My family, never big on taking photos when my hair looks good, has documented it very well.

  I don’t think it would be fair to describe the residual effects of growing up in my family as Stockholm syndrome, for I have been to Stockholm and it is a very lovely and sane place. Perhaps a better term would be “that weird
part of town usually situated next to the airport” syndrome. (Due to financial constraints and bad judgment, that’s where my family almost always resides.) But that’s a bit wordy.

  I always assumed he and I would be better friends. We’d be impervious to fighting, tied together by inside jokes, with the exact same shade of hair color and the sort of unbreakable bond that comes from being in a foxhole together.

  I was recently visiting him in L.A., and I misread the time of my flight back to Seattle. I was in a panic, and Edward, in order to calm me down, decided to escalate the situation.

  “You know what happens if you miss this flight?”

  “I know, I know. I can just get on the next one.”

  “Nope. This is the last flight to Seattle, ever. You miss it, and the world will end.”

  “Goddamn it, Edward.”

  “Seriously, we’re going to round this corner and there are going to be overturned cars and fires everywhere and people screaming. It’s the end of days.”

  And rather than panic, I just started laughing, which I suspected was his plan all along. Sometimes, he knows me better than I know myself.

  But it’s hard to know when he’s tormenting me for my own good and when he’s just tormenting me. When asked about him, the best I can come up with is this: We are close. But we don’t get along.

  Sometimes, after a particularly nasty fight with Edward, I will tell Rand that I’m done.

  “I’m never seeing him again,” I’ll say.

  “Okay,” Rand replies, obligingly.

  “I mean it.”

  “Alright.”

  “NEVER EVER AGAIN.”

  “Sounds good.”

  What my husband never lets on is precisely how empty he knows my proclamations are. It is the vow of every ignored little sister and overlooked younger brother. I have sworn time and again that I was done with Edward. That he’d infuriated me or made me cry or tweeted that I was the best big sister ever even though he is four years older than me for the last time.

  I don’t need him.

  I try to convince Rand of this. I try to convince Edward. I try to convince myself. It’s all lies.

  I spent the first fourteen years of my life following him around, hoping for some small sign of approval or friendship. I was the prototypical annoying little sister: always around, bursting through every private moment (the day I learned to pick the bathroom lock was a grand one), and desperately needy.

  Share all the attention and love and Halloween candy you will ever receive with me. And love me, even when I kick you in the testicles.

  Honestly, is that so much to ask?

  I remember every instance of kindness he’s ever shown me. I remember the half hug he gave me when I broke my arm that fateful summer—a quick, sideways squeeze and a peck on the top of my head that lasted only a split second. Was it an admission of guilt? I can’t say. I only know that it proved more effective than codeine. I barely remember the nausea that followed the ingestion of those painkillers. But I remember that hug and have for more than a quarter of a century.

  It was the same hug he’d give me seven years later, when he left for college. His friend Chris and I dropped him off at the airport and drove back home in silence, each of us trying not to cry, unsure of who would antagonize us now.

  I would argue that Edward and I are entirely dissimilar, but there are strange overlaps. Every now and then I will start to wax—not poetic but indignant—about some topic. A long, rambling monologue that usually results in my voice becoming louder and more high-pitched as I fight with some invisible adversary.

  Rand usually says nothing during these soliloquies (though he will sometimes nudge me and whisper, “Baby, you’re shouting”) and lets me work through whatever it is I’m frustrated about.

  And then he will look at me and say, “All done, Edward?”

  This reply would have annoyed a younger me to no end. But after all these years I realize the truth in it. Oddly, both my and Edward’s spouses can see the similarities that we once refused to acknowledge.

  Val, my brother’s wife, has said this time and again, whenever Edward and I have a similar reaction or express a similar preference about something.

  “You guys are so alike. You don’t see it, but you are.”

  She’s wrong: sometimes I do see it. Sometimes. In our penchant for pumpkin-flavored desserts and 1980s action movies. In the sad realization that neither of us inherited our mother’s metabolism. In a deep and profound disdain for the actor Zach Braff. (I suspect it even stems from the same reason: Braff and my brother look alarmingly alike. The pouty lips, the floppy hair, the Gen X ennui. Really, the only fundamental difference is that Zach Braff has an estimated net worth of $22 million, and Edward… has a vast collection of Transformers.)

  My brother has spent the past twenty years waiting for his break in Hollywood. Southern California is where he lives, where he got married, where his son was born. (Xander came on the scene just a few weeks after my brain surgery. The timing was such that I wouldn’t meet him until several months later, at Thanksgiving. I ran for the door when they arrived, and Edward held the carrier away from me. “Two dollars,” he said. “For two dollars, you can look at my son. Otherwise, nothing.”)

  He doesn’t tell me about his projects. I usually find out about them by checking his IMDB page. If I am lucky, I’ll find one of his films on TV. Most of them are low-budget horror or sci-fi films. I have seen him be murdered by a homicidal clown, be possessed by some sort of evil rock from space that made him a psychic, and get vaporized by an alien. Giant robots feature prominently in my brother’s theatrical canon.

  He writes a lot of scripts and screenplays as well (I have tried and failed to understand the difference). They are occasionally made into films, and he might get one of the dozen parts that he wrote with himself in mind.

  The finished product will undergo a large number of rewrites or edits. The antagonist will change from an oppressive postapocalyptic social structure to a two-headed shark. (“Is it a metaphor?” I will gently ask. “No,” he’ll reply. “It’s a fucking two-headed shark.”) The independent, fight-the-establishment matriarch will now be played by Carmen Electra in a bikini.

  But if I pay close attention, I can see little glimpses—a joke or a brilliant line—that are truly Edward’s.

  Our real lives follow that same pattern. I’ve concluded that this person—this cranky, critical man—is not authentic but the result of rewrites and edits. Instead, it’s the times when we laugh together—when no one gets our joke but us—that I see the real him.

  But those moments are so few and far between, I sometimes doubt it.

  Los Angeles doesn’t remind me of my brother. I know it’s his home, but there is nothing familiar about L.A. to me, though nearly everything about Edward is. I don’t understand the endless sunshine or the noisy wealth or the tendency of so many of its residents to cut off perfectly good noses. It all seems wasteful.

  The Edward that I grew up with, the chubby kid who I once saw eat an entire half of a pumpkin pie in a single sitting, holding the massive hemisphere like a slice of watermelon in his hands, does not fit in that world. It is home to a new articulation of him, one that spends hours at the gym and consumes only lean protein.

  It is not that glittering metropolis, the one where he’s lived for twenty years, that reminds me of him, but rather the Bavarian city of Munich. It’s where he was born, so long ago that his birth certificate reads “West Germany.” It is in that place, where we never lived together, that he becomes inescapable.

  Rand and I go to Munich nearly every year. He’s often invited to conferences there, and we use the trip as an excuse to see my dad, who lives about an hour away. Without fail we spend a few days in the city before going to visit him.

  Munich has become a staple in our travel itineraries, a port of call that we always return to. But even after so many visits, I can’t tell if I like it or not. It’s easy to dismiss it as to
o cold and formal. A bit too sterile, a bit too rigid. On some trips, I make an extra effort to seek out something fun. I take the subway or bus to some random museum, spend the morning looking at sculptures in the Glyptothek or a hangar full of planes in the Deutsches Museum.

  Yet the harder I work to enjoy the city, the less fun I have. It’s only when I roam around expecting nothing that I discover some magical park or museum I didn’t know about, some doughnut stand or bierhalle that had escaped my notice on earlier trips.

  I’m sure there’s a lesson there.

  I remember my grandmother telling me how, when Edward was an infant, my father would get up with him at whatever ungodly hour it was and carry him to his workshop. There, he’d balance Edward with one hand and work on a miniature remote control plane with the other, until my brother fell asleep again or Mom got up.

  I realize the improbability of the story, but I like it just the same. My father has always been a fanatic for cars and planes. His creations were always precise and meticulous—German engineering at its finest.

  In many of the photos from my brother’s early childhood, Edward is wandering around my parents’ Munich apartment, diaper-clad, wielding a red biplane Dad built for him, his name written across the wingspan in big black letters: EDWARD.

  It was labeled for no reason other than to do it. Back then there would have been no confusion as to its owner. There was no one with whom he had to share.

  A few short years later Mom would leave for America to have me, and in doing so, everything changed for Edward overnight: his home country, the languages spoken around him, his status as an only child, his relationship with our father.

  I know it’s not my fault, but when I arrived, everything was different. He wasn’t even four. Sometimes I can’t blame him for blaming me.