clean and made sure the bills were paid, and in return I kept my cadre of meaningless boyfriends down to basic parade level. It was a great setup, if you ask me. It just seemed natural that my sister and I would emerge from the mended shipwreck that made up our childhoods to have a home in the same place. In my mind she would always be there, being my little sister, believing everything I said. I remember when her dimpled fingers used to be too short to reach the bottom of a bag of candy, so I’d tell her the candy was gone and finish the bag myself. I remember accepting money from my mother for teaching her how to read when, really, she’d already learned on her own somehow. I remember having dreams in which she was horribly hurt and waking with inconsolable sobs. I still have those dreams. Those don’t go away.
Now here she was living in a tent and telling me it was nice. Sometimes I was fine with it. Sometimes I could put the thought of my homeless-but-for-a-tent little sister into a special compartment in my head and keep her there for long periods. “She says it’s nice,” I’d tell myself.
But other times I’d let it hit me with the dull thump of dead birds. Jesus God, this was my little sister, living in a tent halfway across the hemisphere, and in the end I left her there. I cannot believe I left her there. To this day I still don’t know what is best; to sit a world away while your little sister lives in a tent and do nothing but buffer your worry with walls you build in your brain, or to drop everything and make your way back to her, so that you can take her dimpled hand and bring her home. All I know is this: her home and my home had become two separate places, with walls all their own, and she knew that before I did.
She is no longer living in a tent, thank God. She lives in a nice house with real walls now, in Dayton, Ohio, of all places, with her husband Eddie, a big dreamer whom I’ve grown to love. We had our walls up, yes we did, my sister and I, but eventually our devotion returned. It made its way in, seeping through the cracks like insects, and after enough of that the walls weakened and we loved each other again, or we were brave enough to let each other know we never stopped.
A Better Thief
I F MY MOTHER HAD BEEN A BETTER THIEF , I would not be here right now. Not that she wasn’t skilled, mind you, she was. I’d even say she was better than Lary, who right now is the best klepto I know. But Lary relies on the obvious. For example, he will simply walk into the waiting room of an upscale plastic surgeon’s office with a hand truck and take the leather couch right out from under the newly lipo-sucked asses of the patients there. “Move aside,” he’d say. “Emergency couch removal.” Nobody would stop him because such a blatant theft is outside their sphere of experience. In short, they’d believe him because believing him would be so much more comfortable than confronting him.
My mother, too, occasionally used that technique—like once she stole all the patio furniture from the pool-side of the condo complex where she used to reside by simply backing a borrowed truck up to the gate and loading up—but she didn’t rely on it. Her expertise was much more refined. She had great sleight of hand. She could steal from casinos , for chrissakes. I cannot overemphasize the skill factor there, the dexterity you’d need to steal stuff off the top of a casino blackjack table. With that talent she could have performed her own show on one of Las Vegas’s lesser stages, say the Hoe-Daddy room at downtown’s Binion’s Horseshoe as opposed to the blow-ass velvet-curtain faux-Broadway number at the Venetian on the strip.
She took things from her office, too, and not just the industrial big blocks of Post-it notes, either, but outdated classified documents detailing projects she had been working on. She gave them to me once so I could present them as my own when I applied for a job as a
Now here she was living in a tent and telling me it was nice. Sometimes I was fine with it. Sometimes I could put the thought of my homeless-but-for-a-tent little sister into a special compartment in my head and keep her there for long periods. “She says it’s nice,” I’d tell myself.
But other times I’d let it hit me with the dull thump of dead birds. Jesus God, this was my little sister, living in a tent halfway across the hemisphere, and in the end I left her there. I cannot believe I left her there. To this day I still don’t know what is best; to sit a world away while your little sister lives in a tent and do nothing but buffer your worry with walls you build in your brain, or to drop everything and make your way back to her, so that you can take her dimpled hand and bring her home. All I know is this: her home and my home had become two separate places, with walls all their own, and she knew that before I did.
She is no longer living in a tent, thank God. She lives in a nice house with real walls now, in Dayton, Ohio, of all places, with her husband Eddie, a big dreamer whom I’ve grown to love. We had our walls up, yes we did, my sister and I, but eventually our devotion returned. It made its way in, seeping through the cracks like insects, and after enough of that the walls weakened and we loved each other again, or we were brave enough to let each other know we never stopped.
A Better Thief
I F MY MOTHER HAD BEEN A BETTER THIEF , I would not be here right now. Not that she wasn’t skilled, mind you, she was. I’d even say she was better than Lary, who right now is the best klepto I know. But Lary relies on the obvious. For example, he will simply walk into the waiting room of an upscale plastic surgeon’s office with a hand truck and take the leather couch right out from under the newly lipo-sucked asses of the patients there. “Move aside,” he’d say. “Emergency couch removal.” Nobody would stop him because such a blatant theft is outside their sphere of experience. In short, they’d believe him because believing him would be so much more comfortable than confronting him.
My mother, too, occasionally used that technique—like once she stole all the patio furniture from the pool-side of the condo complex where she used to reside by simply backing a borrowed truck up to the gate and loading up—but she didn’t rely on it. Her expertise was much more refined. She had great sleight of hand. She could steal from casinos , for chrissakes. I cannot overemphasize the skill factor there, the dexterity you’d need to steal stuff off the top of a casino blackjack table. With that talent she could have performed her own show on one of Las Vegas’s lesser stages, say the Hoe-Daddy room at downtown’s Binion’s Horseshoe as opposed to the blow-ass velvet-curtain faux-Broadway number at the Venetian on the strip.
She took things from her office, too, and not just the industrial big blocks of Post-it notes, either, but outdated classified documents detailing projects she had been working on. She gave them to me once so I could present them as my own when I applied for a job as a
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