Monkey Sister

The chair feels cold against my back.  I spilled water on the jacket that's usually there; it had to be moved.  I'm glad it took most of the water, though.  My James Joyce book and the notebook I use for all of my classes were in the chair, too.  They suffered minimal water damage.  It could've been worse.

The cold makes me feel melancholy.  I'm playing R.E.M. for some reason.  I'm considering putting on Stabbing Westward or Sunny Day Real Estate.  That's my typical depressing music fare.  But I don't know, I've almost lost my taste for depressing music.  I think my taste is more along the lines of upbeat melancholy nowadays.  R.E.M. seems to fit that well, and the Flaming Lips and The Smiths, who are my latest obsession - partially as a discovery of a great artist of which I hadn't heard much until now, and partially as one of those unique coincidences where the right music just shows up at the right time in my emotional history.

I bought and read entirely today a book called Monkeys by Susan Minot.  The reason I spilled the water was I was so absorbed in it, I couldn't be bothered to put much coordination into the act of turning down my speakers, which were playing my music too loud after I'd had to turn them up for the always quiet broadcasts of Mariners baseball games over the internet.

When I was done reading the book, I wanted to cry.  But you must know that the problems boys have with crying.  It's not just psychological; it's also chemical.  I heard that on a radio show once, on NPR.  Public Radio never lies.

I picked up the book because of its title, of course.  I'm obsessed with monkeys, a fact that should not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever heard me talk about anything.  My collection of stuffed monkeys, hanging on the wall in their little basket, smiles at me when I lay in my bed.  The biggest one, Apey, lies on my bed and reminds me of my good qualities.  I need an outside source on which to project the positive side of my internal argument over the question with which I pose myself endlessly: "Am I acting in the right ways?"  My own conscious thoughts are skeptical of answering in any way other than "probably not."

I ended up buying the book because of the back, because it was compared to Salinger (not sure the connection is strong, except that it was about young people), and because when I started reading a bit of it in the store, I read about six pages and couldn't bear to separate myself from it.  It was worth the eleven bucks.

The "monkeys" of the title referred to what the mother in the story called her six children, to gather them together - "come on, monkeys!" she would say.  The book was about the relationships between these children had with their siblings and their parents.  It stirred memories.  Anything about siblings tends to do that for me.

I remember when my sister had a birthday, I think it was her sixth or seventh, and she was having a big party with her friends from school.  I was bored and I wanted to try out the Nintendo game she'd gotten, Donkey Kong Classics.  My dad saw how bored I was, and even though it was her present, he let me try it out.  It was my Nintendo anyway, I suppose.

The game was a joke, especially for a kid who'd spent every waking hour trying in vain to work his way through Super Mario Brothers.  I beat it in about half an hour.  But I felt really bad about doing it.  I'd beaten my sister's game before she'd even tried it.  I turned off the Nintendo in shame and put the game back with it's boxing and never told my sister about it.  I don't think she would've cared, but it was important to me.  It felt like I'd sinned.

There was a wedding I went to for one of my cousins the summer after my Senior year of high school.  I wore my impromptu tuxedo (a sports jacket with a buttoned-up collared shirt and gray slacks) and my sister was in a simple white dress.  Our parents let us both have a little bit of Champagne.  It wasn't very good Champagne.  I drank about two glasses of it, just slow enough to not seem like I was excited to be drinking in front of my parents.  My sister didn't drink more than half a glass.

Afterwards, we went outside bored and decided to play with some of the puppets they had for the kids.  There were disposable cameras that had been left on the tables for people to use to take account of the wedding.  We went around with a puppet and a camera, and staged humorous shots for our "star" around the house - it was this weird homely home in the middle of nowhere on the Olympic peninsula.

We were playing like we did most often when I was in middle school, and she in late grade school or early middle school, and we'd both had no other friends to play with.  In those situations where boredom and proximity united us, I felt like sister was the most important relation a guy could have.  After that wedding, we've both since gone off to college and only see each other on breaks, sometimes having conversations that start awkward, but always land quickly back in comfortable realms.

My aunt died this summer.  I remember my sister running up to her one really hot summer day when we were kids and both playing outside because my aunt would always take my sister out to places I didn't really want to go.  I remember my aunt walking in on me in the bathtub once when I was something like 5 or 6 and feeling the shame of exposure for the first time in my life.  Fragmented memories of her.  She was the nice one.  She would buy my sister and me ice cream, while my other aunt would only be obnoxious and make us go to swimming lessons, which I hated, with my cousins, who I didn't like much.

At her funeral, I stood there with my sisters and my father.  My older sisters were upset.  My aunt had only been about five years older than them, because of how much older my mother was than her little sister.  They had been close to her throughout their lives.  For me it was different.  I had never been much for extended family in adolescence.  In fact, because of a few of my annoying cousins, I avoided it like the plague.  My aunt was little more than a few childhood memories and occasional life recaps at Thanksgivings and Christmases.

I could only stand there at her burial feeling awkward.  My father and little sister were standing there silently as if they were talking it the same way.  We could only look around there and take in the responses of other people who had grown up with her, grieving sisters, grieving brother, grieving son.  We had to take their cues for how to react and to what extent.

It was when my uncle, who had always seemed so strong, so upbeat, and so stable to me growing up, started crying uncontrollably, over his little sister's grave, being comforted by his older sister - my mother - that I actually felt something.  It saw myself in that uncle.  A man who was strong in many was had had a huge weakness exposed.  Or should I say a big part of his strength taken away.  I tried to imagine myself standing over my little sister's grave, with dozens of people around me who could never understand exactly what I was feeling.  I shuddered and felt cold inside at the thought.  I hope I die before her.  It's only fair - I'm older.