Fall 2007, Volume 31, Number 2

Her dresser top reminds me of a beautiful shopping mall. Make-up that will work magic, arranged in neat rows according to color.

“This will make the boys notice your eyes,” my older sister says.

The blusher and eye shadow with sparkles are carefully painted on my face, then washed off before Mom or Dad gets home. Make-up with names like Deep Sea Blue Coral and Hint of Spice. Nicole holds up the picture of a model, ripped out from her favorite magazine.

“This will define your cheekbones.”

Nicole gives me a makeover every Saturday in front of her dresser mirror. She calls it Nicole’s School of Beauty, and tells me I am her only customer.

“I mean, my favorite customer,” Nicole corrects herself as she combs my hair and parts it perfectly down the middle. Taking some clips, she twists them around and makes me look older. The medals on her high school letter jacket jingle as she selects my lipstick: shiny gold and silver for running and soccer. Nicole holds up a mirror when she is done.

“Do I look like I’m in high school?” Because being in high school would mean that fourth grade is finally over.

“You look perfect,” says Nicole. “Like a model.”

My sister likes to exercise in sets of fifty; push-ups, sit-ups, and squats.

“You have to do things over and over again to get any results,” Nicole says, pinching skin and looking in the mirror. “Look, Brandy. I do all that and I’m still a cow.”

I stare at her reflection, trying to see what she sees. Her body looks see through, like she wants to float away and leave me behind.

“But Nicole, you are not fat,” I tell her. She turns and pats me on the head.

“Brandy, you are too young to know fat when you see it,” she says, turning back to face the mirror.

At dinner Mom brings out pork chops in cream corn and sets it out on the table. There is a moment of silence, as we all wait for what will happen next. Dad looks at the pork chops swimming in the cream corn and says,

“What is this? First you break the washing machine, then serve this up for dinner. Come on, Kathy. I can’t eat this crap again.”

They yell back and forth. The dinner slows down to a crawl, even though I am eating as fast as I can. Mom stops in the middle of telling Dad that he can make dinner from now on to turn and look at Nicole’s plate. She is just pushing food around. Everything that was on her plate at the beginning of dinner is still there.

“Nic, eat something,” Mom says quietly, “Please?”

Dad looks over at Nicole and begins eating as she looks down at her plate. My stomach hurts.

Emma Bradley and Carmen Mezera at school say they think Nicole is pretty.

“Your sister is reeeeeally gorgeous,” Carmen announces in front of Emma during recess.

“You aren’t. How did that happen, Brandy? Did your mama do an ugly milkman?”

Emma begins laughing as I shrug.

“I don’t think so, Carmen,” I say, looking at the dirt under my fingernails. “I think he was too busy doing your mom to get to anyone else’s house.”

“Hey,” Carmen says, “Let me see your Luci Love t-shirt.”

I casually turn and pull it away from my body slightly, so she can see it. It shows Luci holding a microphone and wiggling her hips.

“Well, at least it hides your fat ,” Carmen says. Emma laughs.

I roll my eyes, then say, “Are we done? Can I go now?”

“You need to be more like that,” Carmen says as she points to my dancing t-shirt.

“Because right now, Brandy, you aren’t anything.”

Carmen hisses these words like a snake. I turn and walk away.

Saturday afternoon Mom turns to me and tries to talk as if her voice isn’t hoarse from yelling at Dad. I am watching T.V., hoping that I get to see Luci Love sing Hot Love. It’s her most famous song and I wish I could sing it.

I’m a hot love beauty queen.

Number one on the scene.

“Don’t they wear clothes anymore?” Mom asks, nodding her head toward the television. I hear her take a deep breath.

“We need to go to the laundromat,” she says.

“I don’t want to go,” I tell her without looking away from the television. Folding clothes is dumb. They end up wrinkly anyway.

“Sometimes we have to do what we don’t want to,” she says to me. Except it sounds more like she is saying it to herself.

“Honey, please,” she says, turning the T.V. off. “Go get my laundry soap, would you?”

In the garage I see the soap sitting on Dad’s shelf, next to a paper cigar box. My arm reaches up for the soap and accidentally knocks the cigar box off the shelf. It is full of cuff links and shiny rings, which spill out onto the floor. I don’t understand why they are all there.

“Hurry up, Brandy!” Mom shouts from the living room.

I quickly pick up the rings and put them back in the box. Some of them have initials carved on the inside. I see a red one that matches the sweater Mom bought Nicole. The ring slips inside my pocket: I will give it to Nicole as a present.

“Brandy! Honest to god…” Mom says. I pick up the rest of the rings and put them back in the box. My heart beat echoes in my ears. When I walk back in the house, I make it seem like I never touched anything at all.

The laundromat is full of people that looked like moles or weevils. Little beady eyes, sparkling from washer to dryer.

“Put the basket there, in front of the big washer,” Mom says to me, pointing to an empty space, a dirty green tile with footprints all over it.

I am staring at this lady’s big underwear, hanging on a rack. Her underwear looks like it was made out of that shiny, waterproof stuff that people use to make kites. She shuffles from washer to dryer, and doesn’t notice me looking at her. After awhile I have to look away, because it is too gross to watch. But no matter where I am in the laundromat, I can hear her ragged breathing, as if she is going to fall over and die right there, on the cracked tile. I hear her trying to breathe in my head even as I leave the laundromat with Mom, go home, eat dinner. I stare at my open math book for a while, think about the rings in the garage, and realize I am going to flunk the test tomorrow.

That night I tell Nicole how much I hate Carmen and Emma.

“You should just ignore them,” Nicole says, sitting up perfectly straight on her bed reading Teen Style.

“I can’t,” I say. “We are in the same class. How am I supposed to ignore them?”

Nicole begins combing her long hair fifty times on each side. Her brush rapidly becomes a clump of hair. She stops and looks at me.

“I ignore people all the time,” she says.

“Do you ignore your track coach?” I say before I can stop myself.

“What do you mean?”

I shouldn’t bring it up, but I now I have to say something. So she knows I know, and will stop treating me like such a baby.

“I know you can’t go back to track practice until you gain some weight,” I say, repeating what Mom told Dad last night. Nicole’s jaw tightens.

“Please leave my room,” she says without looking at me.

At school my mind starts to float away while the teacher is talking about division. I look out the window for what feels like a minute and then hear the bell ring.

“So, everyone, I hope that helps you understand divisions with decimals,” Mrs. Lind says. My eyes blink and I look at the clock: math class is over. As I turn the corner to my locker Carmen and Emma are waiting.

“Did you know,” Carmen says, “that you are the only person in our class who is not going to Six Flags next week?”

My heart beat speeds up when Carmen says this. My Mom told me she didn’t have the money for me to go.

“And don’t ask Dad,” Mom warned me. “He has a lot on his mind.”

So I didn’t ask. I lied and told Mrs. Lind that I didn’t like roller coasters.

“What’s the deal, Brandy?” Carmen says. There is a mean smile in her voice, like she knows what really happened.

“Are you afraid of roller coasters, or is your family too poor to pay the forty dollars?”

I can’t just ignore Carmen’s voice the way Nicole would. Not when someone is standing so close, hating you.

“I don’t really care about Six Flags,” I say, “because my dad is taking me to the Luci Love concert.”

That night I am in bed, thinking about my lie. It didn’t feel like I was making it up, when I said it. It felt like the tickets were in my hand. I stare at the wallpaper in my bedroom from the light of a street lamp through my window.

“Those bastards knew I would be the first to go,” Dad says. “They were smiling in my face while stabbing me in the back.”

Dad is talking loudly to Mom about his old job.

“That whole company is rotten,” he says as ice clinks in his glass. “Rotten to the core. I had nothing to do with their problems. I was just sick of managing pawn shops.”

Then I hear nothing.

Right before I fall asleep Dad says to Mom, “If I had them, don’t you think I would have told you by now?”

Now Nicole won’t let me hang out with her, or use her make-up. I ask through the keyhole of her bedroom door if we can act like I am in high school. I want to dress up in her clothes, and practice what I will say when a boy asks me out.

“Brandy, I don’t feel like it,” Nicole says.

I want things to be like they were before.

“I swear, I won’t mess up anything in your room,” I whisper through the locked door.

“Brandy, back off!” Nicole shouts. My arms cross and I lower my head.

This is how dinner goes now: Dad orders us take out from Firzelli’s Pizza, because Mom has been working late. I watch Nicole pick off all the onions from her piece of pizza and put them in a pile on the edge of her plate. Then she does the same with the sausage, and then the olives. By the time she is done taking apart one piece, I have eaten three without even knowing it until Dad says,

“Slow it down, Brandy! Leave some for your sister.”

And then he mumbles under his breath, “You are going to eat us out of house and home.”

“I am not. I am NOT.”

My face gets hot and my throat is tight and scratchy.

“Leave her alone,” Nicole says, so quietly that Dad almost can’t hear her.

“That’s great, girls. Gang up on me,” Dad hunches over his pizza in a way that makes him look scared. “I am trying my best.”

Nicole and I look down at our plates. I really hate my own guts right now.

On Monday my class finds out that the Six Flags trip has been cancelled.

“I can’t believe it!” I hear Carmen wail after Mrs. Lind announces it in front of the class.

“Sorry, everyone,” says Mrs. Lind. “We are trying to reschedule it for next month.”

I turn and face the wall so no one will see me smile.

The bus drops me off in front of my house before rumbling down the road, belching brown smoke out of its tailpipe. I open the door to find the neighbor lady, Mrs. Kearney, waiting for me.

“It’s your sister,” she says.

I look out the window during the entire drive to the hospital. My chest feels like Dad has thrown one of his cigarette matches down my throat. The burning is stuck above my lungs. I have to remind myself to take in air by taking the deepest breaths possible. Otherwise I might forget, and stop breathing and just drop dead right there. The burning match in my chest might spread through my lungs and melt my heart.

“Brandy,” Mom says when I turn the corner to the waiting room. Her hair looks like she has not combed it and her face is all puffy. “Nicole is awake now.”

“What was wrong with her?” I ask.

“She was dehydrated,” Mom says. “She needed water.”

“How did that happen?”

Mom’s face changes, as if a terrible truth rolls over her eyes and mouth and makes them look bleary.

“The doctor says she has an eating disorder,” Mom finally says.

“I want to see her.”

“She - she isn’t speaking to anyone, honey,” Mom says. “I don’t know why.”

I pictured Nicole, her angelic face lying on a white hospital bed. She must not like it, with all those people in her room. They probably touch all of her things without asking. You can’t do sit-ups when you are attached to tubes.

“She’s ignoring you,” I tell her, my voice matter-of-fact.

Mom and Dad take turns going to the hospital, then the treatment center. Dinner is always pizza. Now Dad lets me eat as many pieces as I want and doesn’t say anything. It makes me feel worse when Dad tells me a couple of days later that he is taking me to see Luci Love.

“This is all you’ve been asking for,” he says, “for a long time.”

Dad is blocking my view of the T.V., so I have nowhere to look. I begin checking out my toenails. I feel nothing , nothing, nothing.

“Remember,” he says, “when you wore that t-shirt for a week until Mom told you to put it in the clothes hamper?”

“Yeah,” I shrug. “But I was little then. I didn’t know any better.”

Dad leans in, inches from my face.

“What is with this new attitude of yours?” He asks.
He thinks I am stupid, or a baby. I leave the couch and go to my room.

“I am talking to you, young lady,” he calls after me.

I go into my top dresser drawer and take the red ring out of its hiding place. My hands are shaking.

“You will come back here and finish this conversation, Brandy,”

I walk into the living room and hand him the ring. Dad stands there for a moment, in shock.

“You shouldn’t take things from my shelf,” he says in a near whisper. Dad’s large hand wraps around the piece of jewelry. He leaves the room, and I know I have done something awful. Something I can’t fix. Now the thought of going to the Luci Love concert makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t even have a comeback for Carmen when she asks me about it at school.

“You’re not saying anything because you aren’t going,” she says.

I try to think of Nicole at my side, saying Ignore her.

“O.K., class,” says Mrs. Lind, “here is the test from last week.”

When I get my math test back, I hold my breath before I turn it over: 62 percent. Carmen reads my score over my shoulder.

“Nice,” she whispers. Emma begins to giggle, and that’s when I grab Carmen’s hand. Her small fingers bend back easily.

“Brandy!” Mrs. Lind rushes over to my desk. She has to pull our hands apart before she can send me to the office. I won’t let go on my own.

“Hello, Brandy,” says the lady with glasses I that I don’t know.

I have figured out that she is a counselor. Last year she came to my classroom when Keith Landon’s dad died. He had to move to another school and she helped him clean out his desk.

“My name is Mrs. Schmidt. We can talk about anything you want.”

She is kind of fat but not really. I mean, not really rolls of fat. Not that you can tell under her oversize black turtleneck.

“Your teacher told me you have been having a hard time in class lately.”

I am nervous. I don’t want to talk about anything. We sit and wait for what seems like a long time.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” Mrs. Schmidt says softly.

My face feels like I am going to cry. But I don’t.

“My sister,” I hear myself say, “is a lot skinnier than you.”

Nicole is still at the treatment center. Sometimes she is doing better, sometimes worse. I ask Mom if we will have a party for my sister when she finally comes home.

“Not here,” she says.

When I ask her why, she says, “Because we are moving out of the house at the end of next month.”

I swallow hard. Dad needs to pay people back. I know that’s why we can’t live here.

“Nicole will be mad,” I say.

When my sister comes home, we won’t be here. We will have to touch all her things, take them out of straight rows and put them into boxes.

“I am sure your new school will have field trips to Six Flags,” Mom says.

I don’t even care about Six Flags anymore. I decide that I never want to go to Six Flags again. Baby stuff. Stupid.

Dad comes in, looking down at his shoes. He acts embarrassed to see me since I gave him that ring. I wish I had never done it, that I had just slipped it back into the box without a word to anyone.

“How are things going with Mrs. Schmidt?” he asks me at dinner. I see her every Tuesday after lunch.

“She gave me a test and says I am a future psycho killer,” I say, tired of his questions.

Dad laughs nervously.

“You are such a cut-up,” he says, like he doesn’t know who I am.

When I call Nicole on the phone every Thursday, I am not allowed to bring up food unless she does first.

“Hi, Nic,” I say. I can hear her quiet breathing on the phone. “I miss you.”

Last weekend we all went up to the center to visit. Nicole was happy to see us. She hugged all of us, even me. We are moving, I almost say, but I realize it might upset her. How can you leave me all alone?

“When I get back,” Nicole promises, “I will give you the best makeover anyone has ever had. No one will recognize you.”

That night my dreams are as bright and fast as a cartoon movie. I am riding on a float in a parade, hair and make-up just like Luci Love. The parade is being held in my honor, because I am leaving this town, and they will miss me. My hands wave at everyone lining Main Street. The parade slows down near Firzelli’s Pizza, so I can smell my favorite sauce and the tubs of rising dough.

Nicole is on the float with me. She closes her eyes and smells the air. She gives me something brand new; a magic ring that makes me smarter, stronger, faster. It makes her body new and shiny, so she doesn’t hate it anymore. She is suddenly hungry again, for everything.

---

Ranee Zaporski lives in Berkeley, CA. Her young adult novel, Life Above Ground, is looking for a publisher.

Tags: Fall 2007 Siblinghood Issue

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 11:42 am and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.