But you don't know me

Whenever people ask about my brother, they seem worried that it's a touchy subject. I guess I can appreciate this, that people are sensitive and they don't want to seem intrusive, but my brother is a human being and a pretty fantastic one at that, and it doesn't bother me to talk about him at all. It bothers me more to talk about Maryland, or my relationship with my mom, or my dad's entire side of the family, or our finances, or... it's funny. My family on the surface is so different from what we are on a deeper level, but it's not that I think I have a particularly odd family, or that I would label myself as someone who's been put in any sort of difficult situation. I haven't, and my family is completely normal... in an entirely abnormal sort of way.

My dad is smart. Not just bright, but smart. Very intelligent. You guys are prism kids, you know the difference. My dad got a 14 something on the SAT when it was out of 1600, which is not all that impressive unless you consider the fact that he fell asleep in the middle due to a hangover. Yeah. That kind of smart. It's okay, I've never seen him drunk, a fact that is probably as impressive as his SAT score when you consider that our family owns a vineyard, but we'll get to that. My parents are from the East coast, by all those fantastic monuments that look way cooler on postcards than they do in person. I guess some people get a thrill out of the National Mall, out of walking around the nation's capital and thinking how spectacularly lucky they are to be able to go there. For me, it is a place of heat and humidity, a place where in August when I was seven (and my sister and brother were six and three, respectively), my parents took us out to telll us all they knew about Washington DC and all three of us thought we were going to die of heat stroke. It is a place of yucky water and humidity and mosquitoes. It is a place of myriad arguments within my immediate and extended family. It is uncomfortable conversations with grandparents and unwanted work on an unwanted farm.

Daddy loves the DC area and actually, I can appreciate it when I'm just with him. I can enjoy taking the subway from the Vienna station to the one right by the Mall and walking around on July 4th and talking about how he used to do this every year on July 4th and watching as everyone else runs away when a little rain hits but daddy says "We're from Seattle, we're not afraid of rain," and so we stay and the rain goes away and we get a great spot for fireworks. I can enjoy sitting on the porch at the farm, eating lunch with daddy and grandpa and Great Uncle Pete and the two mennonite boys who help out, and talking about business in Southern Maryland and whether the Sangiovese will be ripe in two weeks or three, and how to mend that hole in the netting in lot four, and who said they could put a Charles Lollar campaign poster on our property? Don't you know we don't support Republicans? I'll appreciate driving down to Virginia in grandpa's truck, hearing Sam tell grandpa he's a redneck even though she has no right because he practically raised her and she turned out alright, laughing as she complains every time he forgets to turn on his turn signal, asking if the two of us can sit in the bed of the truck instead of crammed in the back, just this once grandpa, just for ten minutes on the freeway. There aren't any police in Southern Maryland, nobody would even notice. "No, Sam, your mother would kill me," and the argument ends at that. And even though I despise the fact that dad's gonna move back out there as soon as my sister graduates and take mom with him and that he'd rather spend September and October harvesting grapes than being a good father to his daughters, not to mention his son, I have too much respect for him to let that get in the way of anything. Funny how I'm so quick to forgive him...

I won't discuss my mom or my sister. Not here, not now. Maybe because I'm not as quick to forgive them, or because I know that there's still plenty that will happen in those relationships for which I'll need to be forgiven, or because talking about them feels like gossip, or because many of you actually know my sister, or because I really am trying to avoid making too many mistakes in my relationship with my mom, but maybe I'll still be writing on this blog in a few years and we'll talk about it then.

And then I have a brother. The other day I was at church choir rehearsal and Katie, who believes that her sister and my brother are destined to fall in love and live happily ever after, asked me when Charles comes home. "Who's Charles?" Ryan asked. "Her little brotherrrrr!" Katie answered. "He's gonna marry Becky and they're going to fall in lovvvvvve and we're gonna call them Beckles because they'll be celebrities and you know how celebrity couples always have those names... we considered Checky but Beckles sounded better—" Ryan cut her off, "you have a brother?" I get that a lot. Everyone knows I have a sister. She's pretty good at making her presence known, and since I was about two years old people have been pointing out that she's the extrovert, and isn't that funny, that the younger sister would be more outgoing, that she would be the bossy one, the one to tell the older sister what to do, the one who gets all the attention—it's like their roles are switched! How odd! Yeah, I guess it is, but I don't need attention to be secure in who I am so I don't really mind anymore. In any case, everyone knows I have a sister, even people like Ryan who probably haven't met her before, but a brother? Really? Yeah, he's off at school. Most people assume this is college, but Ryan has just heard Katie talk about Beckles and Becky is Katie's little sister so he knows better. "Off at school? Where?" "The worst place in the worlddddd," Katie interjects, "because he's not here with Becky!" Needless to say, Charles and Becky have never actually spoken and probably never will. "It's a boarding school a few hours away," I explain. Here's the sensitivity that I was talking about. Ryan pauses before asking, rather awkwardly, why my brother goes to a boarding school. In my head there are a thousand reasons, most of them untrue. Because my parents would rather pay for his middle school than my college. Because he can manage to stay just disobedient enough that they think the school's doing him some good and would rather not have him at home. Because my parents used to have way too much money on their hands and now they can't bring themselves to take him out. Because they want to keep me from singing at every Thanksgiving service so that we can visit him and eat a boarding school feast instead. Because he thinks he's Harry Potter and just deserves to go to a school like this. Because Allison wanted to get rid of him... "My brother's a smart kid," I try to explain. This isn't a touchy subject or some kind of scarred past, but it's still hard for me to put into words. There's a certain kind of judgment that passes subconsciously when you hear that someone goes to a "special" school. Often there's an assumption that there's a mental or physical handicap that explains why. "There's nothing wrong with him, medically or psychologically or anything else. He just... doesn't listen. Ever." I don't know how far to go. Ryan is a good person and he asked an innocent question, but what kind of a judgment will he make if I tell him, for example, that my brother left his WASL blank? Not because he was incompetent, of course, but because he saw no reason to do it. If he'd been thirty years older they would have called it a dignified protest, but in fourth grade it was disobedience to authority and cause for him to be sent to the principal's office, where he went at least biweekly for a majority of his elementary school years. Can I tell Ryan this? That my brother has spent countless afternoons in the principal's office refusing to do simple assignments? Will he think of my brother as that kid? I don't. Charles has friends, he gets along with people well, he's a good leader, he's the fastest middle school mathematician his school has ever seen, and you could spend a week with him and still not understand why my parents would send him hours away at such a young age. Or you could spend an hour with him as a teacher or instructor and understand completely.


Look at us on the surface. Grace has been asking to see my house for months so at the informal practice today we stopped by my house on our run and she just kept saying how nice it was, how it was just the right size, how the house matches our cars, how my family is flawless, how the walls are painted just right and the kitchen is big enough to get lots of use and it just seems so homey and... Grace should know better too. That part in my story where Deanna-or-whatever-I'll-call-her makes a comment about senile mothers wanting to hear from their daughters, not realizing that Monica's mother has dementia? I don't pretend that my family deals with anything as serious as dementia, but it always interests me to see how choatic life is for even the most seemingly put together people. I think short stories (well, and long stories too) are about digging deeper, finding an aspect of a character that you wouldn't learn about them in the first week or month of your acquaintance and then seizing that deeper, more valuable part of them and figuring out how it defines a character.