Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories [NOOK Book]

Read an Excerpt

With Equals Alone

MY OLDER BROTHER JARED was eighteen and graduating from high school in a month. At the end of the summer he would be heading off to college far away. I was fourteen and would begin high school in the fall. These were the facts, though I refused to believe them.
Jared wasn’t — the rest of my family knew, but never admitted openly — a happy kid. He breathed, dreamed, perspired resentment. At fourteen, he’d been chubby, quiet, and studious. He’d smiled all the time, his cheeks red and always shiny. At school boys and girls picked on him relentlessly. Home wasn’t much better — though I was four years his junior, I jumped at every opportunity to tease him about his weight or the amount of time he spent with books.
But as soon as he started high school, all this changed. His smile disappeared. He went on a drastic diet and began working out with a weight set in the basement. Within a year his stomach was flat, his cheeks pale, and he joined a gym on Route 10, run by a former professional bodybuilder who’d once competed and lost badly in the Mr. Olympia contest. He’d soon be making his own entrance into the world of competitive bodybuilding: his application had been accepted for an amateur contest in West Orange, set for a week after.
The transformations had been gradual enough for me to ignore on a day to day basis. Only during sporadic, unguarded moments would I notice his widening chest, his forearms beginning to bulge, the tendons standing out like cords on his neck when he turned his head to the side. I’d see each new part as separate from the rest of Jared, as if a calf muscle were something he might have bought at a discount in the department store where he worked as a stockboy, no different than a new sweater or hat. Only reluctantly did I begin to piece together the whole. The recognition always troubled me and was sometimes so startling I had to turn away. Could this really be my brother? He didn’t seem at all like someone who could be related to my mother or father. I had the growing suspicion that a stranger had taken over Jared’s body and begun sleeping in his bed. If it weren’t for the face — undoubtedly Jared’s, though leaner than it had ever been — I would have been certain. I occasionally searched the pouchy lips we had in common, the wide nostrils, the deep-set eyes and long eyelashes he could only have inherited from my mother, searched closely for any sign of the chubby, cheerful fourteen-year-old, but that Jared was gone for good. Now his voice had deepened, and the mild New Jersey accent shared by my whole family — and which I would never even notice in my own speech until I moved to Delaware — broadened in his mouth almost to the point of parody. Cars for him became "cauws,” work was "wook.” He carefully combed his hair back from his forehead and let it fall in ragged curls at his neck, a strange combination of Saturday Night Fever and Rambo. He took to answering his name with "yo.”
Most of his time at home he spent locked in his room, staring at his muscles in the mirror. Sometimes, late in the evening, I heard him on the phone behind the closed door to my father’s office, speaking in a boisterous, excited tone I’d never heard from him before, and again I had the uncomfortable feeling of living with an impostor everyone knew about but no one acknowledged. He fought with my parents about everything imaginable, usually at the dinner table, and rarely spoke to me at all, though by this time I’d long since stopped trying to tease him and wanted, sometimes desperately, for us to get along. I’d never believed all those times I’d picked on him had ever meant anything. I’d never expected to be held accountable for my actions as a ten-year-old, and I certainly never thought they would cost me my brother’s love. Now I took his side in any argument he had with my parents, but he didn’t seem to notice. His gaze lumped me with my mother and father when he said, "You’re always attacking me. Can’t you all just leave me the hell alone?”
All this anger and aggression dismayed my parents. We’d always had such a nice family, they mourned. Where had things gone so wrong?
As young boys Jared and I had never been spanked. Not once had either of my parents struck us in a moment of anger or frustration. Our punishments were always carefully planned and calmly discussed: banned toys or privileges, extra chores on weekends, painfully monotonous lectures. My father especially managed to keep his anger under wraps no matter how badly Jared or I (rarely Jared) misbehaved. He prided himself on his cool temperament, which he claimed was a long-standing hereditary trait in his family. It was also somehow tied in his mind to his apparent immunity to the most common infectious diseases. During his childhood in the Ô40s and Ô50s — a treacherous, disease-ridden time in his descriptions — he’d avoided not only polio and smallpox, but also the mumps, the measles, and even chicken pox. This didn’t mean he was a particularly healthy man. At least once a month he came home with some new ailment: a strained back, a pulled groin, a broken pinkie toe. A doctor had first detected a slight murmur in his heart when he was only thirty-five. By the time I turned fourteen, he’d had two hernia operations, three bleeding ulcers, and a chronically spastic colon.
My mother, in contrast, never had so much as a nick on her finger, despite spending half her waking life chopping vegetables in the kitchen. But she was a magnet for every airborne germ imaginable. She’d had measles, mumps, chicken pox, all before her twelfth birthday. Without fail, she came down with a cold the first week of every December and caught strep throat in the spring of all odd-numbered years. Her assault on bacteria in our house was unyielding; she scrubbed toilets and sinks twice a day, soaked silverware in boiling water, sprayed enough Lysol in the kitchen to give everything we ate a slightly antiseptic, lemony flavor. She, of course, was not so even-tempered as my father. Though she never actually came close to violence, I often and easily provoked her into shouting or hissing warnings through clenched teeth. More than once I’d watched her grip the edge of a counter or chair so hard her knuckles blanched and thought, this is it, this is the moment I’ve taken things too far. Finally I would know what it felt like to be smacked by someone who loved me. I always felt terrible at these times — angry at myself and sorry for my mother, who’d tried so hard for so long. But when the smack didn’t come I was always disappointed, bitter at the predictable grounding or the dull speech about respect or honesty, which still left me stewing with guilt and remorse. Not like a blow, which, I imagined, would have freed me from all feelings of responsibility. I thought my mother must have known this, and was intentionally choosing the strictest possible punishment. Did she really love me after all? Already my mind would be working toward the next time I would stand before her apologetically, head lowered, hoping for the bite of her long fingers, followed by immediate tears and pleas for forgiveness.
Every time my mother was sick, my father bragged about his genes, which Jared and I seemed to have gotten the better part of — we, too, rarely caught colds or the flu, and neither of us had ever had chicken pox. He often said he was glad we seemed, for the most part, to have inherited his temperament. When either of us acted less than mild-mannered, he blamed our youth and warned us about viruses and bacteria. He sang out at every opportunity, "Keep a cool head, stay out of bed.” All of this confused me terribly. If my genes said I wouldn’t get sick, why did it matter how cool my head was? If they said I was even-tempered, did I have any choice in the matter? I couldn’t make sense of it, but my father was a scientist, and it didn’t occur to me to question him.
Only when he claimed his genes as the source of my cavity-free teeth did I begin to wonder. With this I wasn’t impressed at all — I may not have had any fillings, but my teeth were so crooked the orthodontist who’d recently attached my braces said I would most likely have to wear them for three and a half years. One tooth grew in a quarter-inch from where it belonged, right through my palate, and had to be removed in a painful surgery. The rest were covered in wire and metal hooks that tore at the insides of my cheeks and rubber bands that snapped against my gums. My best friend, Greg Farisi, had perfectly straight teeth; he was spanked more than anybody else I knew. Whenever my father talked about cavities, I cursed the whole idea of genes and wished there was a way I could still get my traits from Greg’s father, who couldn’t have cared less about keeping a cool head. At these times I decided to turn my back on my heritage, my nature, as my brother seemed to be doing. I would be hot-headed. If I ever had kids, I would smack them whenever they deserved it.
My mother was equally skeptical. "There’s something called fluoride,” she said. "I’m the one who made them brush after every meal.”
"Don’t worry,” my father assured her. "They inherited your looks. For that I thank my lucky stars.”
If only my father saw his health as a source of pride, Jared took it as a sign — as he did everything else at this time — that he deserved better than he was given, that he was constantly treated unfairly. He had nothing but disdain for anyone who could get sick and still claim authority over him. He’d say about a teacher who’d been out of school four straight days with a cold, "I don’t care what she gives me on that test. I don’t even want it back. It’s probably covered in snot.” When my mother called after him to dry his hair before leaving the house, he’d shrug and answer, "What for? I don’t have a weak constitution, like some people.”
My father still insisted Jared was, at heart, sweet and mild-mannered. "All this anger goes against who he really is. That’s why it gets him so upset. He doesn’t want to be like this.”
My mother snorted. "So what happened to his genes? Do they go to sleep during the teenage years? Is there some sort of pill we can give him? I’ll start Daniel on it now, just to be ready.”
In the fall, Jared was leaving for a small private college in Tennessee. In three short months I would be living alone in the house with my parents. Though to Greg Farisi and my other friends at school I said, "I can’t wait. I’ll get two rooms,” I couldn’t help feeling betrayed. How was I supposed to make it through dinner every night by myself? All my parents’ attention would be focused on me. Without Jared to distract them, how could I be anything other than what they wanted me to be? Before it even truly dawned on me that Jared would soon be gone, I found myself hanging around him whenever he would let me, offering to run errands for him, complimenting him on his clothes and hairstyle. I was determined to make up for all the years I’d picked on him.