Do we say grace? I said.
Grace is what people say before the meal, said Mom. She moved to the piles in the sink. It’s to give thanks for the food we are about to eat, she said.
I closed my eyes.
For the food that is gone, I whispered. Grace.
Due to his role as moneymaker, my father was excused from doing the dishes, and Joseph was so overly meticulous with dish-doing that it was easier when he was off in his room, so it was my mother and me in front of the soapy sink: her washing, me drying. I zipped through the silverware using my new worn rose dish towel from Grandma. Mom seemed in good spirits, squeezing my shoulder, asking me a series of fast questions about school, but the aftertaste of the spiraled craving chicken was still in my mouth and I was having trouble trusting her cheer, a split of information I could hardly hold in my head. I circled the dish towel over wet plates, stacking each one in the cabinet. Dug the dish towel into the mouths of mugs. Strung it through the metal ring on the drawer when I was done.
Afterwards, I heaved my book bag onto my shoulder and headed down the hall towards my room. I kept my walking slow, like my brain was a full glass of water I needed to carefully balance down the corridor.
To my surprise, the door to Joseph’s room was propped half open. This was as rare and good as a written invitation since he’d recently installed a lock on his door, bought from the same hardware store with his allowance. He kept the new key also on that elegant silver circle keychain.
There was still a wisp of daylight outside, but his window shades were pulled, and he had clicked on the desk lamp instead. He was lying on his bed, feet crossed, reading
Hi, I said. He looked up, over his magazine. His eyes did not reach out to say hello but instead formed a loose wall between us.
Sorry for hogging George, I said.
He blinked at me.
You don’t have to get me anything for my birthday, I said. Saturday can be my birthday present. You feeling better? I asked.
What do you mean?
Just earlier, with the toast?
He returned to his magazine.
Jesus, he said. You think everyone is in bad shape. I was fine all day, he said, into the pages. I just didn’t want to spend my afternoon watching my little sister eat snacks, okay?
He turned another page, reading.
I waited there, in his doorway, for a while. I poked at the
He raised his eyebrows: Anything else?
That’s all, I said.
Good night, he said.
I turned to go and was almost out the door when something blurred in my peripheral vision near where he lay on the bed. As if for half a second the comforter pattern grew brighter or the whites whiter. Then I turned back to look and everything was the same, perfectly still, him reading away.
Are you okay? I said, shaking my head clear.
He glanced up again. Didn’t we just go through this?
Just-
His eyes wide, looking. Half interested.
Did the colors change? I said. Is George coming by?
Now? he said. No. It’s nighttime.
Did you just move, or something?
Me?
Yeah, like did you move from the bed?
He laughed, short and brusque.
I’ve been here, the whole time, he said.
Sorry, I said. Never mind. Good night.
9
Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me-I felt the wash of her love every day, pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.
He was not the expected choice for favorite. Dad, who claimed no favorites, sometimes looked at Joseph as if he’d dropped from a tree, and very few people reached out naturally to Joe except for George. He’d always been remote-I had a vague memory, from when I was two, of finding Joseph sitting in his room in the dark, so that even my baby toddler brain associated him with caves-but sometime in his third-grade year Mom started taking him out of school. He was bored in class, outrageously so, and the teacher had taken to giving him her purse to sort through and organize while the rest of the class did beginning addition. Mom would pick him up and he’d have made some kind of chain-link out of Tic Tacs, threading each one with a needle he’d dug from the classroom sewing kit. Look, Mom, he said, holding up the mint-green linked cord. Bacteria, he said. The teacher flinched, embarrassed. He is so smart, she whispered, as if he had hurt her with it.
One afternoon, Mom showed up with me on her hip, told the office Joseph had a doctor’s appointment, and took him out, right in the middle of the gym lesson on how to throw a ball. So he never learned to throw a ball. The office did not question the doctor’s appointment, and neither did the other students, because Joseph was skinny and pale and hunched and looked like he needed a lot of medical care. Mom walked us to the car and strapped me into my car seat.
What doctor are we going to? Joseph asked. Am I sick?
Not a bit, she said, driving out of the school parking lot and turning up the radio. Trumpets blared. You are perfect and perfectly healthy, she said. We’re going to the market.
What was he supposed to do, string mints all day? she asked me later, when remembering that year.
I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.
That afternoon, the three of us went to the dress store, the farmers’ market, the dry cleaner. We drove the full length of Wilshire Boulevard, from the ocean to the heart of downtown, winding our way back home on 6th through the palaces of Hancock Park. Beneath tall graceful pines, planted in 1932 by the bigwigs of the movie industry. We stopped by the market to pick up ravioli and spinach for dinner. My mother was in between jobs that year, and she did not like to drive alone. Sometimes the two of them talked about how trees grew, or why we needed rain; sometimes they just sat silently while I threw cracker bits around the back seat. Mom loved to listen to Joseph-she nodded with encouragement at every single word he said. Occasionally, we’d pull over to the curb and she’d ask him advice on her life, and even at eight, he’d answer her questions in a slow, low monologue. She would hold tightly on to the band of her seatbelt and fix her eyes onto his, listening.
All this happened for many months, and no one mentioned anything to Dad, and all was fine until one afternoon when Joseph was at school, staying in during recess because he did not like to play dodgeball. The teacher was cleaning the blackboard with a damp cloth. Joseph was crouching on the floor of the classroom, analyzing the color gradation of the carpet fibers, when the teacher asked him, with great concern, if he was feeling any better. Joseph said he was feeling fine.
But the doctors must be giving you a lot of medicine? the teacher said. She was kind of a dumb teacher. I met her later and she cried a little when she met me, like I was going to torture her again with the Edelstein brilliance. When I told her that I wasn’t a genius, she visibly relaxed.
No, said Joseph.
But so what do they do, these doctors? the teacher asked, as she cleared the remaining bits of chalk off the
