The only word my little brother could say until the age of five was the word “no.” And even then, he used that word “no” to answer to almost everything because he didn’t know what it meant, and he couldn’t say anything else. His speech therapists called him “late bloomer,” his first preschool teacher called him “retard,” my parents called him “special” and I called him “Phillip.” I was the only one who could understand his babble, and at five years old, what I couldn’t understand was why no one else could.
“No! Ababa mama fahso! No!” he screamed and cried again and again. After offering the wailing three-year-old Cheerios, candy, and toys and having them thrown at her, our grandmother pressed two clenched fists into her forehead and turned to me in her desperation.
“What does he want?” she begged of me. I had learned to tune out the screaming and didn’t think anything of the tantrum, and besides, Animaniacs was on.
“Phillip! Stop! What do you want?”
“ABABA MAMA FAHSO! NOOO! NO! NO!” he howled as he rolled around on the ground. His three-year-old world was crashing down around him.
“Phillip! Stop crying now!” I said with the authority I thought I had as his older sister. “He just wants an avocado, Grandma,” I said to her. My brother got what he wanted, and the Avocado Incident came to an end.
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We did things most siblings do. We watched Disney video cassettes together, we played with giant Lego blocks and ended up in fights over how the only three Lego men got divvied up, and after Phillip learned to speak more comprehensibly, I manipulated him. If I wanted to go to McDonald’s, which I knew my brother loved, but was too afraid to ask my grandparents myself, I’d coax my brother to do my dirty work.
“Phil. Do you want to go to McDonald’s?”
“No,” he said. A perfectly articulate “no.”
“Yeah, you do! You love McDonald’s!” He nodded in agreement but kept to his puzzle. It was one of those wooden puzzles with fifty pieces shaped as the States, all painted a sorely bright blue, red or yellow. The manufacturers must’ve thought children were blind. Hawaii and Alaska were my favorites because they obviously fit into the only two spots in the Pacific Ocean. I let Phil take the rest of the country. He loved that puzzle, but he always let me do Hawaii and Alaska.
I realized this puzzle was going to force me to work a little harder.
“Come on! You love McDonald’s! And we can get Happy Meals and chicken nuggets and toys. You love going to McDonald’s!” He looked up from his puzzle and nodded. “So, don’t you want to go to McDonald’s?”
He thought about it for a moment and nodded again, forgetting all about his earlier resistance. “Great. Go ask Grandpa if we can go.” And he’d take off with the enthusiasm I’d planted in him.
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As ordinary as some things were, I’m sure it was unordinary, too. I was his interpreter, his only medium of communication; I was his window to the outside world for those first five years of his life. Anxiety clung to me and gathered the way gnat clouds would form near our suburban lawns on hot days. I must have looked absurd, this tiny girl with a wrinkled brow stuck in place. We didn’t attend the same schools, and I would think, “I wonder if he’ll make friends. I hope he doesn’t get angry. I hope no one teases him. I hope he can take a joke. I hope he finds good friends.” I got tired and worrying got annoying and the list of things to care about numbered to infinity. The wrinkles stayed, but I grew used to the gnats and then it was like they weren’t there at all.
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I entered high school as Phillip entered middle school, and in my hormonal adolescent rage, I yelled at him, demanded things from him, loudly complained about his incompetence in being able to read my mind. And he listened. He listened to me scream at him and didn’t say a word back; he listened to my fights with my mother and didn’t say anything because he didn’t know what to say; he listened through the thin wall that separated our rooms as I cried myself to sleep at night after fights with an insignificant other, and he didn’t say anything because he knew he shouldn’t. One night after one of these disastrous fights over the phone, I was lying in the dark when I heard murmuring coming from the other side of the wall. It went on for about twenty minutes before I finally barged into his room.
“Phil. Why are you talking to yourself?” I was agitated and tired, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why my brother was keeping me up at two in the morning.
“Oh, sorry. I was praying.”
“Oh.”
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That was the general trend of things between me and my brother. The combination of high school, being overweight, having a speech impediment, A.D.D. (he didn’t get diagnosed until he was sixteen) and social naivety meant hardship I was lucky enough to never know. And I feigned ignorance. I didn’t ask him, and of course he never complained. And that silence grew between us so that when he finally spoke, I couldn’t recognize his voice. It had deepened, and it lacked the yuk-yuk brightness of our pre-pubescence. He smiled less, much less; acne had formed on his face and arms and his stench forced me to hold my breath whenever I went near him.
During my senior year of high school, we finally shared a campus but maintained our distance. Our school was large enough so that we rarely saw each other during the day. When we did, though, I would wave fervently, trying to show him, “I know you. I want people to know I know you,” and he would lift up a cupped hand over his hunched head, his eyes only giving me a second of recognition before he stared at the floor again and disappeared into the sea of students.
I drove him to school that year, and during every car ride, I’d try to talk to him.
“Phil. Phil. Phil!” He yanked out his ear buds.
“What?”
“How’s school?”
“It’s good.”
“Hey Phil. Do you have a favorite subject?”
“Um, I like English I guess.”
“Oh, that’s so good! Who do you have?”
“Ms. Buckley.”
“Oh, I’ve never had her. Do you like her?”
“Mm, yeah. She’s nice.” I ran out of my supply of stupid small talk, and he pushed play on his iPod again.
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The heat was heavy and relentless on the night my cousin and I decided to go across the street to the local outdoor barbeque house. She was 36, married and childless, and I was staying at her place during my trip to Korea. That night, sitting in our sweat and over watery Korean beer, we talked about her marriage.
“Aren’t things good with your husband?” I asked. There had been a thread of uncertainty in her voice.
“Yeah. It’s just hard because we’re both middle children, so we’re so used to fighting for everything, you know? I never had a-ny-thing of my own.” She swatted at one of the million flies and their babies nesting around and on us. Her cigarette smoke drew gray lattices in the air. “Oldest children are the most selfish,” she said. “Middle children are definitely the least selfish.”
“Yeah.” I tended to agree with everything she said in conversations like this. “Have you heard from Terri?” Terri, one of our many cousins, had married a trader who had bought her a Tiffany diamond and a house with a perfect view of the Silicon Valley sunset. She had just given birth to her second son.
“Not lately, but I heard she wasn’t doing too well.”
“Oh, really? That’s sad, but what about the babies?” I asked.
“I mean, she just has a hard time cause she’s the youngest. The youngest always have a hard time cause they’re the most selfish,” she said as she put down her third glass of beer and gave her cigarette two taps.
“Well what about Sue Jean’s marriage? Aren’t they happy?”
“Yeah, I don’t know. She doesn’t even call. She’s really selfish. She’s the oldest, you know? God, where’s my husband? My husband’s really selfish. It’s cause he’s the middle child.”
“Lisa.” I was trying to untangle my cramped brain. “Didn’t you just say the youngest was the most selfish? And then the oldest? And the middle child, too?”
She took a drag on her cigarette, and her faded fuchsia lips, the color of a long work day, left a pink ring on the filter end of the paper. She shot a slick stream of smoke into the already congested air. “No, it’s definitely the oldest that are the most selfish.”
Maybe it was the jitters from the second-hand smoke haloing my head, or maybe it was the buzz from the three beers, but the unintentional truth of my cousin’s contradictory words raised goose bumps on the back of my arms on that ninety-degree summer night.
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I’ve had my fair share of loves and other things that would make great stories. I could talk about past boyfriends and non-boyfriends and heartache and dead flowers. But what have I really learned about love from that? I learned how to retort, “You love me? Prove it.” Because what is all that compared to a secret language, someone who gives you Hawaii and Alaska because they know you love those, someone who gets called “retard” and “faggot” and still wakes up each morning and finds a way to giggle at stupid gags on kiddy cartoon shows because despite what the world insists on making him, he decides to hold onto happiness; someone who pats your staccato back with a cupped hand as you come out of the bathroom with snot mixed in with salty tears, not knowing what to say because somewhere along the way we’d forgotten how to speak each other’s talk.
I believe I am Phillip’s sister (“No!”). I believe we once had something (“No!”). I believe I love my brother (“No!”), but as you can see, I can’t prove that by how I’ve been to him. But I believe my brother Phillip loves me. I believe he forgives me for my unkindness, and in the future, I believe things will be better because his heart is bigger than mine. I can’t prove these things, but I believe them because I have to; because selfish people have to believe these things that can’t be proven.
