Revelry in Defeat

I saw the furor in her face as soon as she got off the bus, though I swear, for the life of me I couldn’t think of what she could possibly be so pissed about. Even after I saw her stomping toward me with the envelope in her left hand like a cartoon caricature of an angry ten year old – it didn’t click. Then I got the envelope shoved into my stomach as she shrieked “I freakin’ hate you!” and stormed past me into the building, that I put the pieces together.

“How did you get this?”

“You are not my father!”

I don’t know why the words had cut me so deeply. They were just as true as if she had shouted “You are a first born son!” at me. I looked over my shoulder at Alvin, our doorman, while she made her way to the elevator, with an apologetically bashful smile on my face, but he was looking out onto the street, pretending not to have heard the high pitched screams that came out of my fuming little sister.

I followed her to the elevator and just as I reached her, the doors opened. I stepped in after she did and she inched away from me into the corner, eyes fixated on the gold framing at the top of the doors. I pressed number five and as soon as the automated bell rang that indicates the doors are about to close, she jumped out of the elevator and stood in front of it.

“What are you doing?” I said as the doors began to hide my face.

“I’m not riding in the same elevator with you.”

She was really sticking with this staring at anything two feet above my head business. At the last second I hit the <I> button and held it, staring at her until she got on. It’s a six story building. There was only one elevator. But I hadn’t accounted for her one other opt out and just when I saw the look glazing over her face that she had realized it was right there for her, I thought fast – dishonorably, but fast nevertheless.

“She’s not there. She’s upstairs.”

“Good. I’m gonna tell her what you did too.”

She bit her bottom lip and started tapping her right foot, still waiting for me to go up without her.

“Get in the elevator!”

No reaction.

“Okay, let’s just stand here. You know I’ll wait here all day. I literally have nothing better to do.”

Sylvia huffed, sucked her teeth, stomped her foot as if she were doing some kind of instructional dance routine and trudged into the elevator. I waited to see if she would say anything but she didn’t. She knew she was in the right; hence there was no reason for her to say a word. I was well aware of this myself but I was hanging on the hopes that she wouldn’t be able to contain her anger. Which in theory was rather ironic, being that I had been trying for years to teach her (mostly by example but occasionally through pre scripted lesson plans) to do to others what she was now doing to me:

“Stand your ground and commit to silence. It’s like covering a ditch with leaves.”

I should have been proud but instead I just became annoyed. In my frustration I committed the cardinal sin, which I promised her would happen to any slow witted hump that tried to match her strengths, if she followed my instructions.

“That was a sealed envelope. It’s against the law to open mail that’s not addressed to you.”

“It didn’t have an address or stamp on it; so that’s not mail.”

When the doors opened Sylvia got off first, making the left turn down the hall and I followed closely behind, reprimanding her back.

“It’s still unethical. You don’t just open something that has someone else’s name on it.”

She reached the door before I did and rang the bell instead of just waiting for me and my set of keys. I stepped in front of her and opened it myself. The apartment was just as empty as I had left it when I came downstairs to greet Sylvia coming off of the school bus.

“Where’s Auntie?”

“I don’t know. She’s probably downstairs.”

“Oh my god! You’re such a liar!”

She threw her book bag at the sofa, not really caring where or even if it landed, and headed into the kitchen. I set up post in the living room, sitting on the arm of our grandmother’s sewing chair a few feet in front of the front door, facing the stair case at the back of the room.

“You had no right opening that envelope, let alone reading the note.”

I heard the three beeps of the microwave go off and then out of the corner of my eye, I saw her exiting the kitchen on a path to the stairs. She had a paper plate topped off with five or six chewy chocolate chip cookies in her right hand and a glass of milk in her left. I started to ask her why she would carry the item that would make the bigger mess if dropped, in her off hand but decided to pick my battles more carefully. There would be plenty of other opportunities to correct her waitressing technique.

“Hello… did you hear me?”

She stopped and looked at me briefly, then redirected herself back around to the sofa and plopped down right next to her book bag.

“Go ahead and yell at me. I’m not gonna listen.”

“Well that’s fine because I wasn’t planning on yelling at you. Remember, ‘I’m not your father’?”

I turned to catch the reaction that was going to get from her and to my surprise she was looking at me, finally. But it wasn’t a very warm look. In fact it was just the opposite; colder than I knew she was even capable of.

“You’re a hypocrite.”

Three words; simply put. I let them linger for a moment as I watched her stare at her plate and take small bites from a fairly small cookie. It was obvious to the both of us the point that she was going to make but I still wanted to hear her make it. All students must show their work.

“What?”

“You know what’s ‘unethical’? Forging mommy’s name; that’s unethical.”

Even though this, at least for my sister, wasn’t the most challenging of connections to make, I still felt compelled to bask in the accomplishment. She didn’t let the easy one slip by her. I drifted for a second and wondered to myself when she would declare her intentions to turn pro.

“Just so you know – I didn’t have to sign her name. That was more or less for my own enjoyment.”

“Oh and ‘Please don’t mention this to Sylvia.’ blah, blah, blah. Why couldn’t you just talk to me yourself about it? You’re such a…”

Here we had been placed at a difficult juncture. I knew she knew the word she was looking for and I knew why she was having trouble placing it. What I wasn’t sure of was whether or not I should feed it to her. If I made a habit out of giving her answers whenever she stumbled, she’d get lazy. But the fact of the matter was that we could’ve sat at the edge of that sentence for hours and she was never going to pull this one to the surface on her own, even if only on the premise of loyalty.

“Coward?”

“Yeah… you’re such a coward.” Said the little girl to her once glowing idol.

Now, because the word coward is such an irrefutably cruel, hurtful, and demoralizing word, and because it has been used here to describe me or rather, actions taken by me, by a ten year old girl; I think now would be a great time (in the interest of hopefully restoring some sort of credibility) to reproduce the note in question that set off this chain of events. I wish I could tell you that I have the note saved in my Box of Things I Dare Not Throw Away, but – and pardon my frankness – I don’t. So this is a fairly accurate approximation of what it (I) said (wrote):

Ms. Lacoursi,

I was helping Sylvia with her Social Studies homework last night and it became apparent to me that she had only, at best, a moderate understanding of The Things You Need to Know About the Sioux. It didn’t seem to me to be material that should be giving her much trouble, which leads me to believe that she is simply not applying a sufficient amount of attention during class. If it is at all possible, could you make a change in the seating arrangement so that she is not sitting near anyone with whom she tends to do a lot of chatting with? And also, could you please not mention this to Sylvia, it would only upset her and she already doesn’t give much information when I ask her about her day at school. I would hate for her to start keeping me completely in the dark. Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Deena Farmer

We argued briefly on the validity of her statement until she made the indisputably valid point that I would not have been so brazen as to have written and sent the note had our mother not went away for the week and left me (with secret supervision from Aunt Angie) in full custody of the home front. My reply to this revelation, I cannot recall. What I do remember is the feeling that overcame me when she said it. I was more or less in an absolute stupor, reaching and grabbing for lies and excuses that might pass for halfway conceivable like airborne life rafts while the room was quickly filling, from the ground up, with liquid poison. Eventually, in haste, I found one and used it though it was wholeheartedly rejected by the way she sighed in pure disgust, breezing past me and leaving behind her the intimation of disappointment.

Without a doubt this was the first time that out of the two of us, I was the one left looking for ways to rectify the displeasure of the other. Not that it had ever been a habit of hers to disappoint me or anyone else. If I thought as hard as I could I would probably only come up with a number that I could count on one hand the amount of times I’ve had to actually address her with disenchantment in my tone. Yes there had been many lectures, sermons and speeches but they were all implemented as either preventative measures or to make small adjustments based on observations made. And in the few times that I did actually have to give Sylvia a “stern talking to” I tried my best to rub the stern out as much as possible and make it a comfortable learning experience that she could look back on without contempt or regret. But when it became my time to sit in the corner, I assessed the ten year separation in age that wedges itself between the two of us to this very day, as the difference maker in how my screw up would be handled. To put it plainly, I expected no rubdown of any kind, on the grounds that just being the tender age of ten can cause one to behave not so tenderly in matters of the heart.

I sat still and quiet on the center cushion of the couch, staring at a television I couldn’t really hear, for maybe half an hour, replaying the event of the previous night’s Homework Help Session and trying to figure out where it all went wrong. I knew that when I walked up behind her while she was sitting at the kitchen table writing (Why do most children do their homework at the kitchen table? I’ve asked Sylvia as well as my brother Anthony but they refused to give a solid answer as they often do when I ask questions about things that they deem trivial; which is another thing most children do), I had no intentions on terrorizing her though that is certainly the way she saw it. I had become instantly interested in her assignment once I read the heading, “Things You Need To Know About the Sioux”, because I remembered doing that same unit when I was somewhere close to her age. When I pulled out the chair next to her, her head drooped and her shoulders slouched – an obvious and intentional indication that she was not in the best shape for company – but I ignored it because I had no intention of even speaking to her; I merely wanted to see what she was going to write. It wasn’t until after I’d finished reading the three lines she’d already written, followed by her scribing two more short sentences, dropping her pencil, closing her binder and getting up from the table that I felt the need to exchange a word or two.

“Are you going to the bathroom?”

She stopped and turned just before she reached the kitchen exit, looking just a little confused.

“Um, no…”

“So what are you doing?”

“I’m going upstairs to my room and then I’m going to watch Ricki.”

“But why would you do that when your homework isn’t even done?”

“Actually, it is.”

At the completion of this sentence she put the kind of contemptuous smirk on her face that she could have only learned from those goddamn smart mouthed scamps in her school. Or possibly from my mother.

“Hold on, just one second.”

I pulled her binder, which she didn’t even bother to put away, toward me, opened it up to the last page written on and started to read it out loud:

The Sioux are a tribe of Native American peoples who lived in what we know today as Minnesota and North and South Dakota. There original name was Nadouessioux but that was shortened to just Sioux by a man named Jean Nicolet in the year 1640. The most famous of the Sioux people is a man named Crazy Horse who is mostly known from ‘The Battle of Little Bighorn’. Many Sioux people died during the Dakota War of 1862 and the Wounded Knee Massacre.

“The End.”

“That’s it?!”

“Yes!”

“This is four sentences, Vy. What about the fur trade with the French? What started the war in 1862 and the Wounded Knee Massacre? What did Crazy Horse do in the battle of Little Bighorn?”

“I don’t know.” She said, with an unknowing sense of guilt creeping into her accent.

“Well who was Crazy Horse? I know he wasn’t just ‘a man”

“I – don’t – know, Matthew.”

“Fine then. Go watch Ricki Lake.”

“Thank you.”

“And then go to school tomorrow and hand in the same exact homework every other fourth grader is gonna hand in.”

“I will!” She shouted back to me cheerily, as she ran up the stairs to her bedroom.

After reviewing this altercation twice over – once straight through in real time and then a second time, slowly and carefully leaving room for contemplation and reflection – I realized two things that can be summed up in a few words and quite bluntly:

A) Sylvia was obviously just in a bad mood. Why that is, is uncertain to me but I wouldn’t readily bet against it having to do with some form of cat fight at school or even the possibility of her having liked a boy who was not returning her pleasantries.

B) I should have realized this from start, let the homework thing go and let my mother handle whatever emotional static Vy was dealing with when she got back from her trip.

It is only because these two things didn’t occur to me at the optimal time that I had found myself in the fix that I was in. So the only logical thing for me to do at that point was to put on my sorry face and run eagerly with a heavy heart up to Vy’s room to give her a sincere but woeful apology, which is exactly what I did. And when I got up to the second floor and stopped at Sylvia’s room I was face to face with the funniest, cutest, warmest most sincere and beautifully heartfelt thing that my little sister has ever done.

On her door was a letter folded and taped to her poster of Pebbles and Bam-Bam sitting and laughing with a scattered array of rocks in between the two of them. When I first saw it there I was convinced that it would read as a scornful and hate laden resignation from her involvement in our relationship, which is one that transcended (or perhaps was the epitome of) that of Brother and Sister. But to my complete and total surprise, after getting past the first sentence, a huge and glowing grin came to my face and got bigger and brighter with each passing word. This particular letter I have most certainly maintained in my Box of Things I Dare Not Throw Away and it is in fact the most important of all things in it. You will indeed hear no more from me when you reach its conclusion as it damn near brings me to tears every time and will leave me in no position to finish telling any story. It reads as follows:

Dear Matthew,

The reason I didn’t do my best job on my homework yesterday is because I was kind of upset. Maybe it was because I miss mommy. I don’t really know. But that’s why I had an attitude with you yesterday. It wasn’t because of you. I know you were only trying to help me and I understand that’s also why you wrote the note. But I am still mad that you wrote the note. I’m sorry for yelling at you and calling you a hypocrite. You’re not a hypocrite and I love you.

P.S. I really do know what started the war in 1862 and who Crazy Horse really was.

P.P.S. The door is not locked but please don’t come in. I’m too embarrassed.