Hide and Seek

by Steven Wineman

          I was sitting next to our cabin in a low-slung canvas folding chair, waiting to see what would happen next. It was the summer of 1962. I was thirteen, my brother was seventeen. He had called my parents from Detroit, saying he was going to kill himself by driving his car into a tree. It was over a boy, David, who apparently had rejected him. My mother told me all this. She spoke in an even voice, trying to be calm and matter of fact. But I had been reading my mother's emotional state all my life, always on the alert for the next outburst, and I could tell she was using every ounce of strength to hold herself together. “I don't think he'll do it,” she said. “It's a plea for help. If Jimmy meant to kill himself, he wouldn't have called.”

          It was a warm, bright day, and I maneuvered the chair into a patch of sunlight that managed to wend through the branches of tall trees surrounding our cabin. I felt the heat of the sun on my face, on my bare arms, and I listened for the approach of my brother's car. Instead I heard the subdued voices of my parents from inside the cabin. It was a rare event for my mother and father to be carrying on a civil conversation. I couldn't catch the words, but their tones said everything I needed to know.

          I was riveted on all of it—the depth of my parents' concern, the looming panic in the air, the drama of the moment—and feeling nothing. It was an old trick, one that I had mastered over many years of being the quiet, good boy in a family where everyone else was ready to explode at any moment

          I had an internal switch that I flipped to turn off my feelings. I used it every time my parents screamed at each other. It had become an automatic response, one that enabled me to take in all the details of their fights—the points of contention, the escalating decibels, the swearing, who was more logical (always my father), who was irrational (always my mother), the predictable patterns at the end when my father would denounce my mother as impossible and walk away, and my mother would fling her final epithets and dissolve into sobs as she shrieked to the walls, “What did I ever do to deserve this?” I somehow knew that I couldn't afford to feel how my parents' warfare was affecting me, so I didn't. I listened, I noticed, I drew conclusions, and then I went on with my life.

          With Jimmy, I was not as successful. When I was four he started physically assaulting me. He'd lure me into wrestling matches by promising to let me win, and then he pinned me on the floor and clawed at my stomach. From my perspective, he was an impossibly big boy; he had complete physical command over my body. Each time I let myself be tricked into believing that he would keep his word, that he wouldn't hurt me, that I could have fun with him the way I imagined other brothers relating and come out unscathed. At the key moment, every time, my trust was betrayed and I knew then exactly what was coming, the physical reality of being held down on my back on the floor, unable to move, his legs on top of mine, one big arm dominating the upper part of my body as I tried to squirm and push back without the slightest effect. I could feel what he was going to do to my stomach before he did it, a physical memory that had been stamped into me. And then it came, the abdominal claw hold. With his big hand Jimmy dug into my belly, and it was as if his fingers were inside me, twisting, stabbing, inflicting a burning relentless pain at a depth that didn't seem conceivable, and all I wanted in the world was for him to be off me and for the pain to stop, and there was nothing I could do to make that happen. He announced what he was doing like a sportscaster at a wrestling match, and he laughed and said that the fans were going wild, and after an expanse of time I could not measure, he would pin me to a count of three, pounding the floor with his terrible hand, and declare himself the winner.

          Afterward, when he had left and I had rolled over onto my stomach in a hopeless gesture of self-protection, as I sobbed and felt the fibers of the rug moisten under my face, I would fantasize about growing up to be bigger than Jimmy and beating him up mercilessly, so he would feel what I was feeling.

          When I was ten we moved to a new neighborhood, and something about that change of place somehow affected Jimmy and the abuse stopped cold. In many other ways, he was still a pain in the neck, with his domination of the TV and his nasty habit of jerking the sports section out of my hands, his bizarre behavior in public and his constantly provoking my mother to yell at him. But he never touched me again; and I didn't look back. I left behind my revenge fantasies like a bad dream. Jimmy's role in my life was to be someone I moved away from. He was the bad brother; I was the good one, an identity which my mother assigned to me and I eagerly embraced. My mission was to be as unlike Jimmy as humanly possible, not to emulate his sadistic behavior.    

          Now, at thirteen, sitting outside our cabin in the warm afternoon sun on my personal suicide watch, I could so easily have hoped that Jimmy had gone ahead and killed himself. But I didn't. I just stayed small and quiet and out of the way, and waited to see what would happen, not hoping anything. When, after about an hour, my brother pulled up in his blue and white Buick, I allowed myself the thinnest sliver of relief.

          We spent summers at the University of Michigan Fresh Air camp, where my father served as Clinical Director of a program for disturbed and delinquent boys. Well before Jimmy threatened suicide and was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit in Ann Arbor, I was aware of the irony that my father had a son who was deeply disturbed.

          But camp had always been a respite for all four of us from the troubles that beset my family the rest of the year when we were at home in Detroit. My father was in his element, doing work that he loved and too engrossed to get sidetracked into fighting with my mother. Besides, we had our meals in the huge dining hall filled with campers and staff, our cabin was in earshot of a women's dorm up the hill, and these benign social facts of community life helped to keep us on good behavior. Camp was the only place I can remember my mother being happy, as she spent her days at the waterfront sunbathing and chatting with other staff wives. And at camp, Jimmy kept his hands off me.

          That summer of 1962 had started with Jimmy bringing David out with us for the first few days before the campers would arrive. Neither of us had ever had a friend visit before. I was aware that Jimmy was gay (not the word we used then); I knew this because my parents knew and talked about it freely in front of me. But it didn't occur to me, during the time his friend was with us at camp, that David might be his boyfriend. The living presence of a same-sex relationship, the tenderness and pain of longing and rejection between two boys—all of us together in one small cabin—was beyond my imagination.

          David was a pleasant guy, polite to my parents and nicer to me than I had any reason to expect. He and I practiced golf shots on the vacant athletic field, and he reassured me that I was hitting the ball a good hundred yards with my seven iron. I didn't see anything weird, in any sense, happening between him and my brother. Just the opposite: David's entire visit seemed refreshingly normal. Jimmy, who had gone through high school without any apparent social connections, finally had a friend, a regular guy. Then it was time for David to leave, and Jimmy drove him to Detroit. 

          When Jimmy returned to camp, not having crashed his car into a tree, he went with our father to the back room of the cabin. They stayed there for a long time. They had to be talking, though I couldn't hear anything. Finally, Dad came out and told my mother and me that he would be taking Jimmy to Ann Arbor to go into the hospital. I don't know if my brother actively agreed to this, having reached a place of desperation from which he wanted help, or if he only acquiesced, feeling he had no other choice. Jimmy wasn't saying anything; I had never seen him so subdued.

          My mother, in tears, started gathering his things to pack. She found a marker and as she wrote Jimmy's name on the collars of his shirts, the waistbands of his pants and underwear, she kept saying that she was ruining his clothes.

          My brother wrote me bland letters from the hospital. The Tigers were collapsing again in the heat of the summer; did I think they could rally? If not Detroit, did any team stand a chance to catch the Yankees? What was going on at camp? Would I be swimming across the lake? Or had I already? Nothing about what it was like being in the hospital, or how he was coping with having had a breakdown. No acknowledgment of the dissonance between these friendly, superficial letters and the long years when he had terrorized me.

          I wasn't happy to be hearing from Jimmy every week or ten days, but I took it in stride. My overriding feeling was relief to have him out of my daily life. I wrote back, short dutiful letters, matching his tone, despairing of the Tigers, answering his questions about life at camp. And for me, underneath that dissonance between our vanilla correspondence and a history I was desperate to leave behind, there was something I recognized: Jimmy liked me. I always understood this, a barely articulated knowledge from which I tried to shield myself as best I could. All those many times that Jimmy pinned me on the floor and clawed at my stomach, it was a wildly distorted act of affection. There was a reason he wrote to me and not to our parents.

           Two and a half years later—after he would get out of the hospital, enroll at U of M, drop out after one semester, and spend the better part of a year sitting in his room at home rocking back and forth while he listened to music on his phonograph; after he would enroll at Wayne, and drop out two semesters later; after he would be called in by the police for questioning following complaints that he was sitting in his car during early morning hours looking into people's homes with his telescope—at age twenty Jimmy would place a collect call to me from somewhere in Ohio, saying he had left the state and not to worry about him. And forty years later, following decades of adult life in which we had almost nothing to do with each other, Jimmy and I would again correspond, this time while he was serving fifteen years in a Michigan prison for child molesting. He would sign each of his letters, “Love, Jimmy.”

          Homosexual was one word we used for my brother's attraction to boys. But my parents, both of whom were social workers, also referred to it as Jimmy's symptom. This reflected a conventional wisdom among mental health practitioners, taken to be a kind of enlightenment, that homosexuality did not make a boy like Jimmy bad; it made him sick.

          It was a distinction without a difference, given the stigma attached to both sexual “perversion” and mental illness. But in my mother's case, it was hardly even a distinction: she had been calling Jimmy bad for as long as I could remember, out loud and using that exact word, if not about his sexuality then in regard to many other things about him. He was disobedient, causing scene after scene. He was bizarre, engaged with imaginary playmates, the Pookeeboo Man and the Klockaboong Man, long past the stage of early childhood when this could be considered appropriate. He embarrassed her in public, for example by asking waitresses personal questions or quizzing them about obscure facts when we went to restaurants. To my mother these were devastating events, and later in the car, or at home during yet another incident, she screamed at Jimmy that he was throwing his life away, that he would grow up to dig ditches. During Jimmy's senior year in high school, my mother was called in to speak to his guidance counselor after he had written the lyrics of a rock song, “Mashed Potatoes,” on a math test. When she got home she was in a kind of frenzy, shrieking at my brother, mortified that a child of hers could do such a thing.  

          Mom talked openly to me about Jimmy's problems. She said she discovered his homosexuality by reading his journal when she was cleaning his room, also during his senior year. Growing up in my family I took things to be normal—like my mother cleaning the room of an able bodied seventeen-year-old—that later I would see as signs of dysfunction. Even at the time, though, it seemed creepy to me that my mother had read Jimmy's journal. But she persuaded herself that he left it out in the open because he wanted her to read it. It was his way, she said, of letting her know about his symptom.

          The closest town to camp was Pinckney. Its business district consisted of one long block with angle parking. There was a general store; a drug store with a soda fountain, a pinball machine, and racks of comic books; a Gulf gas station with a red coke machine; and La Rosa's bar, where my father took me sometimes and we would get individual-sized pizzas, not slices but small circles topped with pepperoni.

          We were sitting at a table at La Rosa's a couple of weeks after Jimmy was hospitalized, my father having a beer with his pizza, me drinking a coke, when he asked me if I wanted to see a therapist.

          “Why?” I asked.

          “You know, Steven,” my father said. “With Jimmy in the hospital, I thought—well.” He took a sip of his beer, put the glass down, then raised both hands, palms up. “I wondered if it would be helpful for you, to have someone to talk to.”

          “About Jimmy being in the hospital?”

          He nodded, his eyes regarding me from behind his glasses with kindness I could not miss, even in the semi-darkness of the bar. There was a Johnny Cash song, “Walk the Line,” an oldie even then, playing on the jukebox.

          “I'm fine, Dad,” I said.

          He said okay, he just had wanted to check and to let me know this was an option. If I felt differently at any time I could tell him. I said sure, but I didn't think I would feel differently. And that was the end of it.

          I took my father's offer as a genuine expression of concern, which it surely was, though I was a little taken aback that he couldn't see how Jimmy being in the hospital and out of my life was great for me—almost to the point of finding the conversation humorous. It was so easy to see my father's blind spot, and impossible to see my own. I had no clue what a good thing it might have been for me to talk to a therapist about my brother—not because he was in the hospital, but because of everything that had happened before, the vast swath of damage he had inflicted on me for most of my conscious memory.

          There was a kind of conspiracy between my father and me to believe I was fundamentally okay. Neither of us could see beyond the immediate question of how I was affected by having a brother in a mental hospital. We explored the terrain of surface wounds, a comfort zone for each of us. It didn't occur to him or me that there might be internal bleeding.

          Several years later, when I was in college hundreds of miles away from Detroit, I would start making efforts to understand my brother's life from his point of view, a project which has continued episodically ever since. In college, I wrote a play with a character based on Jimmy whose parents view him as sick because he speaks in poetry. In my thirties, I would spend a few years working on an unfinished novel in which the protagonist is a reindeer, born into a human family, his true nature invisible to almost everyone despite the antlers sticking out of his head. Only his mother, in her most desperate moments, acknowledges his antlers, his hooves, his impossible body; she sends him to a psychiatrist, and eventually puts him in the hospital to be cured of being a reindeer. Just as Jimmy was put into psychiatric care to be cured of being gay.

          Who would my brother have become if he had grown up in a family and a society that had embraced healthy gay sexuality? The answer is that I don't know. Homophobia must have played an important role in distorting Jimmy's sexuality. After his debacle with David, Jimmy would become sexually oriented to younger boys, I believe, because of the safety and sense of control he got from his ability to manipulate their acquiescence, as well as the sheer physical attraction. But Jimmy's own humanity was crushed by many forces—a social intolerance of difference that included but went beyond homophobia; a mother who placed impossible demands on him to conform to her desire for a child he could not be, and who consequently made him an object of her rage. It's true that I was raised by the same mother, with very different results. But I had the advantage of being designated the good child, in maximum contrast to the bad older brother. Being good imposed its own costs, but nothing like the burdens suffered by my brother.

          If I think of Jimmy being a victim—of homophobia, of a mother who crushed him—as one theme in a fugue, then the second theme, the stark counterpoint, is the incalculable harm he has done. When Jimmy was finally arrested in 2000 for fondling two boys, the police searched his apartment and found bags of boys' underwear, more than a thousand recordings and photos of his sexual encounters with boys, pictures on his walls of adolescent and adult males whipping him, which he acknowledged having paid them to do. These monstrous acts, the suffering my brother caused others and himself, the number of lives he touched, the cascading effects of his abuse: these things make his life an excruciating story about chains of violence, how suffering passes down and passes through so many people who stand in its path, how it can spread like wildfire. Within the broad and awful sweep of Jimmy's acts of abuse and manipulation, there is a long string of personal stories that I don't know but can imagine from my own experience. Stories of boys who are now men and harbor secrets and shame. Men who carry deep and private violations, who are hounded by unbearable feelings which in some of them undoubtedly erupt and cause further damage. Men who were lured by my brother into sadistic acts, a descent into their worst selves. 

          Then there are my feelings, the third part of the fugue, feelings I've been playing hide and seek with all my life. I have tried to escape or resolve my feelings by leaving home, by taking Jimmy's point of view, by analyzing how the same person can be victim and perpetrator, by going to therapy, by not thinking about my brother and attending to my own life. For all these efforts, inside me there is still a little boy lying pinned on the floor under the big body that I can never budge, helpless against the onslaught of Jimmy's fingers, his relentless will to dominate me, my world reduced to the burning pain in my gut. Decades after I moved away, when I was back in Detroit for one of my infrequent visits with my family, I was standing next to Jimmy and found myself shaking with rage; the years collapsed, I could feel him all over me and all I wanted was to get him off my body. Becoming a father released an onslaught of feelings tracing back to my childhood abuse that left me barely able to function. I still feel shame at never having said no when Jimmy wanted to wrestle, at having allowed myself to be duped over and over again by his promises to let me win. Now, in my sixties, I work at accepting what seems obviously true, that these feelings are here to stay, that I can't outrun or outflank them, that my task is to find ways to hold and be with the history that lives in me.

          When I was a little boy, our house had a vestibule with a coat closet, and on the closet door was a full-length mirror. Sometimes when I had nothing to do and no one else was around, I would stand in front of the mirror and imagine that the boy I saw was not me. He looked a lot like me but he was someone else, standing in the vestibule to a different house. If I moved all the way to the wall on my left and turned my whole body at an angle, I could glimpse into the living room of that other house. I would try to crane myself to see more but there was always a limit. Somewhere in the other house lived a different family, which must include a different brother, always beyond my reach.

          Jimmy and I corresponded for several years after he went to prison. It was something I undertook with hugely mixed feelings. How to strike a tenable balance between some kind of compassion for my brother and an allegiance to the vulnerable part of myself that still carried wounds Jimmy inflicted when we were children? I don't think I was ever able to adequately answer that question.

          The first letters reminded me of our correspondence when Jimmy was in the hospital in 1962—they were mostly chatter. Jimmy described the daily prison regimen, but said nothing about what it meant to him, emotionally, psychologically, to be there. Eventually I asked what he thought about the things he had done that led to his imprisonment. He acknowledged having made mistakes but in the next breath dismissed it, writing that gaining insight in prison is like locking the barn door after the horse is out.

          By this point it had become important, maybe necessary, for me to communicate honestly to Jimmy about what he had done to me. I wrote him a long letter in which I described how he had abused me, and that he had done this many times over a period of years. I told him that he had injured me psychologically in ways I had never fully recovered from. I said that I thought he had also wounded himself, even more deeply than me, by treating me so badly. I told him I believed he had the capacity to learn from mistakes and use the learning to heal old wounds.

          In Jimmy's response, he said he didn't remember events from our childhood as well as I did, though he didn't deny or dispute my account. Then he wrote, “Sorry if I overdid it.” That was it, five words, a throwaway line. I felt like I'd run into a stone wall. It didn't surprise me, if anything it was what I had expected, and still I was furious.

          I don't think that committing monstrous acts makes someone a monster. I believe there is a core of humanity in my brother. But it's also true that I don't know how to reach it.

          On Saturday afternoons during the summer of 1962, my parents would drive to Ann Arbor, twenty miles from camp, to visit Jimmy and meet with a hospital social worker. For days after each visit my mother would berate the social worker—that vile woman, she called her, the nerve of her to suggest there was something my mother might have done to cause Jimmy's problems. “I was nothing but good to that boy,” she would say over and over again, to my father, to me, to the air.

          Most of the Saturdays I stayed at our cabin. I would listen to a Tigers game on the radio, or I would read. I enjoyed the quiet of the surrounding woods and the time to myself. But as dusk would gather and my parents had still not returned, I found myself anxious that they had gotten into an accident and were dead. My father was a careless driver, but I didn't worry about him crashing the car at other times. Only on those Saturdays. I sat in our cabin holding an image of myself as an orphan. What would my life be then? I didn't really believe this would happen, but I couldn't shake the fear. I waited, straining to hear the sound of my father's car. Then they would pull up, and I would let out a breath, and my life would go on.

Steven Wineman's novel The Therapy Journal is forthcoming from Golden Antelope Press. He is the author of The Politics of Human Services (South End Press) and Power-Under: Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change (www.TraumaAndNonviolence.com). His work has most recently appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Blue Lyra Review, The Bangalore Review, Catapult, and The Furious Gazelle. Steve retired in 2014 after working in community mental health for thirty-five years.

The Summer Before My Brother Died

by Rob Stanley

The first punch hits me in the left ear and it actually feels good, invigorating. I duck around the next few but the second one to connect hits me in the jaw and it hurts a lot. By the time the third one hits me in the forehead the sweat and moisture gathering on the faux leather gloves has a stinging effect, and that, combined with the actual force of the blow through my neck and spine, leaves me reeling.

“You hit like a girl”, I mutter as I step back and roll my head low across my chest a couple of times, my chin tucked in a defensive position.

My brother smiles. Even he finds that funny.

We’ve been combatants like this for most of my thirteen years, but this battle is different than the others. Those were usually fought inside, on our paper-thin carpet during miniature versions of sports we’d seen on TV; knee hockey in the living room, sponge-ball tennis in the upstairs hallway; full-contact mini-hoop basketball against my brother’s bedroom door. Those were battles. Sometimes just for fun, but most times they had an undeniable edge that my mother hated seeing in us. This boxing thing today though, this is fun.

“That’s enough,” my brother says as he extends one of his gloved hands to cup my shoulder. The air is warm and were both sweating. 

There in our driveway, perched on a hill amidst a hay field that never seems well kept, we draw deep breaths and eye each other. In years past I might have cringed at the prospect of my brother delivering a sucker punch at this point, but Billy and I had changed a lot recently and the thought of a sneak attack doesn’t cross my mind. 

I step into his embrace and let my shoulders slump in a sign of respect to my big brother. This male-affection thing is something we do now, ever since he got back.

“You want some more?” I ask with just enough sarcasm in my voice for him to know he shouldn’t take me seriously. 

He grins again and doesn’t even bother responding. We both know his sinewy strength is more than my pudgy frame can bear, especially considering the fact that he’s three and a half years older and four inches taller than I am. 

To me it seems as if those final inches have been added in the past few months, during the time when Billy was away. That’s probably not true, but I’m shocked at how grown up he is now and can’t settle in my mind why it is I’m viewing him in that light. It’s only been two months since we last saw each other, but it seems like years.

I had been surprised back in the spring when I walked into the kitchen, saw Billy and my parents huddled at our round country table and caught the final hushed syllables of the default advice that my father always seemed to give whenever we asked for help on a topic he didn’t really care about.

“Well Billy, I think you should do whatever you think is right.”

There was usually a passive-aggressive tinge to Dad when he said stuff like this, a sense of him knowing more than you and not wanting to bother having to share on a topic so menial as one that dealt with emotion or a simple life decision, but this seemed different. This time he seemed to be choking back his true feelings, keeping his heart safe behind a wall of good sound advice.

With my back to the table, pretending to rifle through the cupboard for an elusive glass while I tuned my ear to process the emotion in the room behind me, I sensed a slight waver in Dad’s voice, one that he hid it with a quick forced cough, as he probed Billy further

“So, what exactly do you plan on doing in Toronto?”

This being the first I’d heard of my brother in Toronto, or of something as stupid as him willfully leaving me, I dropped my act of lingering over the glasses and quickly turned to face the conversation. All three heads swung toward me, and I was happy to see that none of their faces conveyed malice or annoyance. I took a chance and stepped toward the table, leaving the cupboard door to swing shut behind me, hoping that my presence would be tolerated amongst the adults.

It was. 

And it was there, standing beside the table, hovering over a conversation that would ultimately change our family forever, that I heard of Billy’s plans for the summer. Mom had family there, and his idea involved heading to one of their homes to enjoy the big city as well as the much larger minimum wage that jobs in Ontario offered. He and I didn’t know much about Mom’s family; the bare minimum, really. We knew there were lots of aunts and uncles, and that the word “abuse” often got thrown around whenever the topic of Mom’s absent father came up, but the whole scene was sheltered in some urban dream for us.

Obviously, Billy was ready to experience some of that scene for himself. Dreams didn’t scare him. There was always a sense of largeness and destiny about him, and most of us knew that he wouldn’t be in small-town New Brunswick for long. Back then, he often spoke of travel, of the army, of radio technology school—all large dreams in their own right—but each of them seemed firmly within his reach. He’d always been blessed with an innate sense of accomplishment and likability. Friends gravitated toward him, teachers loved him and young women flocked to him. Even at a young age, he radiated a quiet warmth and a sense of safety that people just found endearing. Listening to his plans to head to Toronto then, wasn’t some flight of fancy, it was the first step in an unfolding plan that most of us thought would end very well for him. 

Of course had I known more, I would have been better able to identify the strange case of déjà vu at play in the room that day. Unlike my brother, who enjoys playing by the rules and excelling, my father has always majored in challenging authority—a trait I certainly come by honestly—as his means of getting ahead. So, when he was seventeen, Billy’s age exactly, Dad had made his own pilgrimage to T.O. Like Billy, it was outwardly because of work, but inwardly a lot more about finding himself. Dad had bounced from job to job until he found what he was looking for while working as a manager at a Kresge’s department store downtown. Not only did he come by security and a steady paycheck, he also found a girlfriend, an unexpected twist, and in a very unexpected turn, she was soon pregnant. Dad, sensing that this teenage tryst needed a man to guide it as opposed to a boy to tease it along, forced his own hand and spirited his girlfriend—my mother—back East on the first bus he could find. She soon became his bride, and soon after, she gave birth to William Jr.—Billy.

It was memories of these days of struggle that soaked my father’s words with unspoken fear as he listened to my brother’s plans at the table that day. He hid them as best he could, but even I could sense the unconvincing tone in his voice as he heard my brother out one last time and offered a final retort, this one even weaker than the last.

“Whatever you think’s right.”

I know my Dad didn’t mean it. I know he wanted to make him stay. 

But he didn’t. 

He let him get on the bus, alone. He let him make money. He let him test he bounds of his overprotective mother’s patience. He let him experience whatever he needed to. 

He let him go. 

And now, standing out of breath beside my brother in the driveway, my face flush with exhaustion and pride, I’m glad that Billy got to go and do all that stuff, but I’m more glad that he’s back. Yeah, I know he just beat the shit out of me, but it feels good to be here, alone with my brother again.

Just then, a flicker of movement catches my attention in the windowed porch that runs along the side of our house. The Rorschach-like reflection of the sunlight on the glass makes it hard for me to make anything out, but as the shadowy object moves and takes shape behind the panes, I can see that it is my father. Apparently, he’s been the lone spectator of our little battle, and he’s stepping out to comment on it.

Before I have a chance to acknowledge him or protest, he quickly covers the five or six strides necessary to reach me and wordlessly lifts one of the boxing gloves off my hand to place it on his own. His eyes are on Billy the whole time, and as he slides the other glove onto his hand I can see that something more primitive than age or ego is fueling this. He circles his son, and they both look like they’re relishing what’s about to happen. 

Billy has Dad’s body down to a T, save for the thick padding that years of office work have added to my father’s midsection, and they both share quick feet and great eye hand coordination. Right now they also share the same bemused look of concentration and outright fear, part cocky grin and part studied intensity. This appears to be in good fun, yes, but I’m sensing there’s a lot more riding on this.

A rush of warmth fills me as I step back from the fray and realize that the grown-ups have again let me be involved. I’m glad I’m here, that no one is telling me to run along, and no one is holding back so I won’t be adversely affected in some way. I’m a participant in this, even if it’s just as an occasional brow-wiper and potential referee. Just the three boys, mano a mano a mano in the driveway. Hell, Mom isn’t even invited.

Before I have time to dwell on things for too long, I’m snapped back to reality by the first wave of punches. Billy and Dad are circling each other and straight right jabs are flying. Only straight right jabs, the safest of all the punches. Each volley is cautious and aggressive at the same time. Skinny arms extending for a quick sting but never venturing too far from a defensive position. As the seconds roll by, the feeling-out process evaporates into the late summer air and the punches extend. They’re longer, a tad slower, but a hint of menace accompanies each one. Adrenaline crackles with every slash, and each one is yearning for some damage.

The cars on the road well below us pass by every so often without even a hint of recognition of what’s happening on the hill above. The waves lapping against the shore of the rocky beach just beyond the road continue unabated as well. All is at it should be, yet a seismic shift for our family is happening right here in the open.

A constant patter of nervous laughter and semi-audible grunts fly back and forth, but the punches aren’t matching the ferocity of the verbal assaults. No one is really connecting, and I’m rather proud of the fact that my bout with Billy had a lot more action than this. Less emotion, but a lot more action.

Just then, a punch lands. Then another. Then there’s a spirited reply that’s none too polite. Eyes are now slits and the mood changes. Another punch lands. My adrenaline begins to flow and the warmth of simply being there evaporates. The action spills into my face and I’m forced to recoil to move away from them. 

They don’t even notice me. 

Another punch. 

Another. 

Soon my hands are flailing in front of me, trying in vain to deflect the action and voice some protest, but nothing stems the tide. My heart pounds and I realize that this is inching toward the danger zone when a shriek pierces the melee and I cringe from its fierceness.

“God, Bill! What are you doing?”

My mother’s voice jerks us back to reality, and for a moment we pause awkwardly and by instinct try to look as nonchalant as possible. Our hands fall, our backs straighten and the pained expressions ease from our faces. Frozen in time, we all try our best to deflect the intensity of the past few moments.

Mom though, isn’t falling for it. She missed the run-up to the bout because she’d been busying herself inside our house, and now all she has seen is her entire family, all three of us, flailing and spitting at each other in the driveway.

Her shoulders sag incredulously and a look of complete bewilderment causes her mouth to gape wide open. She bores a hole in my father with her knowing gaze, and an elongated blink and a shake of her head is all she leaves him with as she closes the porch door and retreats to the safety of the home she’s created for us.

We’re still frozen in place. Dad is the first to relent, removing his boxing gloves just as silently as he put them on and handing them to me without even so much as a gaze in my direction. He steps toward the void in the doorway where Mom stood seconds before, knowing that any sort of comment would be fruitless. This is going to warrant a longer conversation than that.

Billy and I stand staring, transfixed on Dad’s back as he walks, and wondering if there might be repercussions for us too. As Dad steps up into the doorway he uses the shift in weight as an opportunity to glance back at us over his shoulder. We immediately catch his eye. 

A slight grin crosses his face.

It isn’t a defiant look, or one that could be misconstrued against Mom in any way. It’s simply a man speaking through a look to two other men. Nothing more needs to be said.

Dad disappears into the house. Billy and I shuffle for a second, then realize that we should busy ourselves with something else. We go our separate ways, both filling time with nothing.

I think I ended up listening to Aerosmith, probably “Permanent Vacation”, and reading an Archie comic. I don’t really remember. For me, the beauty of the day had already been cemented.

Rob Stanley lives near Toronto, Ontario with his wife and children.

Black and White and Red All Over

by Kristin Troyer

The tour was meant to deter us grade-schoolers, I guess, from slipping checkout-aisle candy bars in our pockets or from letting our friends drive drunk or from doing something truly terrible like joining the Mafia. Or maybe it was just to instill in us that cooperative attitude known to teachers as “appreciation” for our local law enforcement. A policeman (maybe his actual role was different, but I remember a uniform) let us peer through the unbreakable glass to the small colorless cement room with a toilet where arrestees stayed initially. Maybe there was a cot or a board in the wall for a bed, or maybe my memory is confusing the school tour with pictures I’ve seen of torture chambers.

No one is in the cell now, but my memory has juxtaposed this dull chamber with an image of my brother that I have never seen—bruised, stumbling, confused, belligerent, ratty t-shirt, ripped jeans slung low on his pelvis, laughing, arguing, shoulder-length curls matted together in a rubber band—a lot of detail for a scene conjured from imagination. I must imagine because no one ever told me, and I need the details. I wondered whether he was still unable to see straight when they shoved him in here to wait out the first night, or if the impact had shaken some of the alcohol from his brain. Did anyone watch behind the wide window as he stumbled up against the naked toilet and there vomited (or maybe it was already out of his system by that point)? What a terrible place for a hangover, with the gray cement converging on an already spinning head.

Funny how gray is a mixture of black and white, and yet its monotony bears no witness to the harsh contrast between light and dark. If white is all colors and black, the absence of color, then is gray a color? It can’t be. Colors spark and bite and whisper and mew and protest. Gray simply drones on in endless blah.

On days that my shirt is black or white or gray I usually add a colorful headband or a flower in my hair. Somehow a touch of red makes me feel more alive.

All Mom and Dad told us was that we had to pick up Stevan’s truck in town. I thought then that I hadn’t seen him in several days, but that was hardly unusual since he was often out late. My six-year-old sister and I rode along to the courthouse, curious as to our mission but sensing the need for silence with a childish intuition. Like any courthouse, ours has imposing stone steps and carved letters with U’s that look like V’s, imprinting on my mind words such as eqvvs, eqvitas, and vnitas, probably none of which were actually etched in stone marquee around the basilica that held my brother.

Dad got out of the van, and when I thought Mom’s forehead crease had lightened, I quietly asked why we were picking up Stevan’s truck. I took her answer in stride, as I’ve taken most news since then, because I could think of no other response. “Oh. Okay. Is he okay?” Since we were uptown, we probably ate at Kewpee for lunch, the squashed greasy burgers and thick salty chili that had been the forerunner to Wendy’s sloshing indigestibly in disillusioned stomachs.

I vacillated between which of my brothers was my favorite. Brent, nine years older than me, was closest to my age and let me play with his Micro Machines and would swing me by my arms through dizzying circles. Stevan and Seth were twins twelve years my elder. Stevan was funnier, but Seth taught me wrestling moves. Both let me play their Nintendo on occasion.

The truck, if I remember correctly, was peeling navy, with a band of skinny multi-colored stripes, dilapidated to begin with and completely mutilated after its rendezvous with an oak tree.

Everyone knows the old joke that goes, “What is black and white and red all over?” Children are quite young when they first hear it, and when they confess their ignorance, the time has come for the wiser child or capricious adult to crow, “A newspaper! Get it? It’s read all over!” And the child blushes and wonders how she has missed such an obvious answer, secretly considering it unfair that the joke must be heard rather than seen. In ink the solution presents itself plainly, with stamped-out letters. Out loud, anyone could have made the same mistake.

In time I would learn to associate black-white-red with pleasanter things, like music. The ebony and ivory of piano keys, the crimson roses or carnations from my family, the satin sheen of concert black, the warmth of faces under hot stage lights: cool elegance and sharp contrast to stimulate the eye as well as the ear. The black and white are sensible, the red, exotic. For my high school senior recital, my outfit was red and white, and my sister left some of my curls in dark ringlets around my face. It was my time, my show, and I was beautiful. My brothers, of course, wouldn’t notice.

Stevan’s six months were marked for us by “pay to stay” bills from the jail, white envelopes with cobalt writing that I handed to Dad without comment. This is the only incarceration I remember, though I have since gathered that he was in and out of jail for DUIs and drug possession for several years. My older sister mentions this casually, as if our brother’s record is common knowledge. It is not. Sometimes at family dinners I can hear Seth or Brent toss out a suggestion of past trouble from the other end of the twelve-foot table, but a glower from Stevan usually terminates the sentiment. My sister’s nonchalance sends a crawling, wormy sensation into my stomach.

I don’t remember any doors clanging behind us, like in the movies, but there was a small waiting room with black padded chairs, where we bounced until the guards finally escorted us through even though my sister and I were technically too young. Aren’t jumpsuits orange? Maybe Stevan actually wore orange when he appeared at the window booth, his sandy hair tangled into a snarling tight ponytail, but I remember stripes. Black and white. Good and bad. But now just bad. No crisp, clean distinction between colors, just dirty smudges where white faded into black and back into light again, over and over, numbing in its repetition.

Recently Stevan asked if I remembered coming to visit him in jail. “Of course.” He was really mad at Dad, he said, for bringing his kid sisters to see him in jail. If the goal was to shame him, it worked. I was eight, I think, and Megan was six, and it was summer because I told Stevan over the echoing phone about my birthday. Between awkward pauses we made polite conversation, ignoring the black plastic wood of the cubicle and the muffled metallic clink of voices across the phone and the cigarette smoke wafting from the visitors flanking us, the families of actual criminals. The phone was black. The walls were white. My pale arms glowed against the dark cubicle. The stripes on his suit went black-white-whack-blite, like a straight-line version of those spiraling optical illusions. Strawberries. I had just turned eight. Was it a strawberry pie I had for my birthday, or chocolate cake with strawberries?

Strawberries were my favorite fruit and they seemed safe to talk about. Sun-burnt skins, miniscule hairy seeds that lodged in your molars, their oozing sugary juice would have contrasted richly against the white of the pie crust or the almost-black of chocolate cake, redeeming the bland non-colors into rich vibrant taste. Stevan said my birthday dessert sounded delicious, and I envisioned myself rolling the pin over the wax paper and dough, lifting the round into its shallow dish and crimping the edges, stirring the mashed berries and cornstarch over medium heat until the mixture was clear, at last sliding the glowing pastry into the fridge to cool. One glance at its ruddy radiance and the grumpy officers would wave it on through in dazed silence, mindless of any opiates it may contain. My pie’s presence would vivify this entire dingy institution, and return my family to normal.

Kristin is an undergraduate student at Cedarville University, pursuing interests in music, theatre, and writing. Whether you call her a bookworm or a nerd, listening to and telling stories have been an important part of her life since she was small. This is her first publication.