SISTER, SISTER
in which I dream of one family member and in passing recall another and another and another
Last night I had a dream. I was visiting my mother, and my younger sister was ignoring me. Silent-treatment type shit. It was something she’d been doing for years. Something she’d picked up from my father, childhood family bullshit. Understand: from the moment my father met me at JFK he decided that I was the kid who he was going to channel all his self-loathing, rage, disappointment, fear, and resentments into. Sure wasn’t going to be my lighter, better looking, same-name-as-him older brother.
This became a six year-long scapegoat chain-attack that all my siblings picked up on, and duplicated. What else could they do, really? My father insisted.
Yet in the dream I did something I’d never done; I asked my sister Why are you being so cruel?
She just laughed. But it was not her laugh.