She\u2019ll grow up to take care of Mother, won\u2019t she? \u00a0Oh yes she will. She\u2019s a precious little baby and one day she\u2019ll clean up after Mother, she\u2019ll do her shopping. Yes she will, oh yes she will. She\u2019ll \u00a0make her meals and wash her clothes. She\u2019ll prune her flowers, take her to church and be there for her, even when she has her meltdowns. She\u2019ll hold no grudges and kiss her forehead and say, \u201cI love you, Mommy.\u201d Oh yes she will.<\/p>\n
Marcus, come here. As the middle child, it is your responsibility to look after your baby sister. Your older brother will be going off to war in the fall and he can\u2019t be bothered dealing with a girl. You, at the cusp of adolescence, are in an ideal position to make an impact on this dear girl.<\/p>\n
Like her, I also had two older brothers. The older was a weightlifter, a gigantic figure who could lift five hundred pounds with one hand. He was always somewhere else\u2014a job, with friends, at his own war, Vietnam. He\u2019d reappear briefly and kiss my cheek, whirl me in the air, and put a dollar bill in my hand. Until he was killed by a sniper and shipped home in a flag-draped coffin. There was a ragged line of eight bullet holes crisscrossing his chest. He was left in a foxhole for a week, body lousy with worms, M-16 oxidizing and red with rust. Surely, though, I never saw his dead body, so it must be something I watched on TV.<\/p>\n
My brother Fred, the second child, was the age you are now when I was born. Although only twelve, he was already an accomplished painter. He\u2019d shown his canvases at a Unitarian church and a nearby community college and a small art gallery, and had been praised in the newspaper as a prodigy. He was thin and pale and quiet and loved me very much. I have a painting that Fred did, a self-portrait at the age of seventeen hanging over your father\u2019s and my bed. Let\u2019s look. Notice the craggy features of an aged man, the sunken serious eyes, the uncombed hair as white as an albino\u2019s. He looked fifty even before he was an adult. He was serious like I want you to be, Marcus. He was a loner and went on long hikes in nearby valleys and summits until one day he fell a hundred feet into the Great Sembley Ravine and was broken on the sharp rocks below. The official story is that he slipped on the ledge after a rain and accidentally fell to his death, but I know it was suicide. I knew Fred so well I might as well have been there to watch him jump. Anyway, he had been throwing himself down the long, steep stairway in the hotel my family lived in for years with only bruises or cut lips to show for it. I suppose he was practicing.<\/p>\n
I was nearly a teenager by then. I had been in a few television commercials and had a small part on a sitcom and, in my free time, I waited hand and foot on Mother. As you know, your grandmother was very famous, much more famous than anyone else in our family, the type of woman who, when she wasn\u2019t starring in movies or endorsing perfume or credit cards, lazed about the pool. \u201cWould you bring me a martini, Darling?\u201d \u201cFetch my robe.\u201d Of course, she had servants, but I believe she enjoyed ordering me around. I don\u2019t blame her. It felt natural. Even when she\u2019d knee me in the stomach or trip me carrying a platter of glasses, shattering them all over the pavement and pressing my knees and feet against the shards, I felt that she was teaching me something crucial about life.<\/p>\n
Despite her colossal fame, she was the most insecure woman I\u2019ll ever know. I would have to reassure her before each of her auditions\u2014from leading role to cameo\u2014tell her that her hair looked perfect, that she\u2019d do fine. The auditions were formalities. They wanted her<\/em>\u2014her face, her voice\u2014not anything she could do. By the time I came on the picture, she was a dependable brand. Still, I reassured her, smoothing her hair from her face, reapplying her makeup.<\/p>\n The spring before my sixteenth birthday, I failed out of school. It was such a silly thing: I didn\u2019t turn in a short story for an English class. I forgot actually, and when I remembered, the night before, I realized there was no way I\u2019d write the story before the next day or even by the end of the semester when the teacher would turn in his grades and so I decided why bother. Actually, Mother said, \u201cWhy bother?\u201d I was in the hospital with my jaw wired shut and couldn\u2019t ask why bother or why anything.<\/p>\n She was so sweet to me when we got back to the hotel a few days later that a part of me felt as if I didn\u2019t recognize her. Not just her behavior, but even the way she looked. But especially her behavior. By this time, both my brothers were dead and Father had moved out and it was just the two of us and Mother was behaving very strangely. At first, I thought it was due to misplaced feelings of guilt about my stint in the hospital\u2014after all, it was an accident\u2014but then I began to suspect it was something else. She presented her body to me in what I can only describe as a seductive<\/em> way. I realize that sounds perverted, so I will try to explain it in a way that makes sense: She was aging. Despite the years of plastic surgery, or maybe even because of them, she was starting to look strange. Old, but also artificial and a bit desperate. You could smell it coming out of her pores. She would get out of the shower and waltz through my room, damp with steam, and drop her towel to the floor. Or she\u2019d want to pose in a new bikini\u2014she\u2019d wake me from a deep sleep to do so\u2014and I\u2019d be delirious with confusion and anxiety. I was on pain pills and not sleeping deeply. I realized she wanted something from me\u2014me, so less talented, with so little actually to give\u2014my youth, vitality, my beauty. I was experiencing one of those moments that affect characters in dramas: I knew I had to do<\/em> something.<\/p>\n I had been dating a boy named Paxton Dahlfleece who lived a few buildings down from our hotel. His father was a pilot who flew celebrities and other rich people out of a local airport in his little airplane when they had to leave L.A. Mother engaged him when she needed to visit family back East or a producer in New York. The only thing she hated more than flying was flying commercial and Paxton\u2019s father always had the best champagne. Paxton had spent time in an L.A. County juvenile detention center, so it was no big feat to get the proper meds to spike his father\u2019s Perrier and send him into a tailspin somewhere over Nebraska. It was the perfect crime, all the evidence burned up in the wreckage. It wasn\u2019t my<\/em> suggestion. Paxton took the initiative on his own. I guess he felt remorse, though, because a week later he shot himself in the head. I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle, daytime soap opera stars who lived in a mansion in East Hollywood. I had my own room on the ground floor facing the swimming pool and we ate takeout food each evening and lay by the pool every day. They were not concerned that I was no longer in school, nor that I had lost my mother. My aunt, her less successful little sister, had not spoken to her for years.<\/p>\n Not long after that, we moved to Arizona. The studio transferred the production there to save costs. I was a script girl at the production studio and easy prey for a long-blond-haired pretty boy actor named John Palin who wore a patch over his eye and played an ex-CIA agent who had become a brain surgeon. Your older brother was conceived on a cot\u2014a casting couch without a part at stake\u2014and, although my aunt and uncle felt that I should abort, I couldn\u2019t bear the thought of not seeing what my first child would look like. I had your brother and, not long after, I got a part in a sitcom that ran for almost ten years and is still in syndication. It\u2019s quirky, accessible, and was very popular so we\u2019re still living off the residuals. Your brother and I moved out here to the East, bought a cabin in the mountains next to a little stream full of striped bass and have never missed Hollywood or show business. I met your father, a simple man, and six years later you were born. We have no television because we\u2019re here in the woods to experience the world. To watch the sunset, to eat off the land, to reconfigure our minds to living like humans. To read. Ah, to read! Poems and plays and essays and novels. Stories. I haven\u2019t read a script in nearly ten years.<\/p>\n Look outside! It\u2019s snowing! Unlike snowflakes, we humans are actually quite a bit alike. I know what makes us tick. And that\u2019s why I want your help in bringing up this precious baby girl to be the kind and loving and attentive adult woman I can only imagine.<\/p>\n I met your father, a simple man, and six years later you were born. We have no television because we\u2019re here in the woods to experience the world. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","writer-john-duncan-talbird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11948"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12229,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11948\/revisions\/12229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}