The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [23]
And she had boobs.
Boobs were the magical thing women had. White and full and inexplicably mouthwatering.
But when I say I would have done anything, it isn’t exactly these things. What it is: I took naïve pleasure in the small acts of humiliation, and I attached them to a feminine form. The things she made me do made my skin hot and prickly. Her beauty was stern and commanding.
As my sister neared adulthood, my father took a keen interest in her many talents. He’d brag. And put photos of her up in his office. Just her.
Her art teacher guided her more and more toward the world. Her watercolor paintings - giant, sexual looking flowers a little like Georgia O’ Keefe’s, her art teacher helped her to have them framed and entered into local art shows.
She played guitar and sang in her room with the door shutting out the word family, but out in the world her art teacher helped her and a friend perform together with microphones at local venues for money. When she learned how to make giant flowers from paper, her art teacher helped her sell those, too. Her art was making a path.
I’m not saying I figured all this out at eight. At eight, all I saw was how he looked at her hair. All I heard was his yelling every year of her development from girl to young woman, like a series of earthquakes pounding the life out of things, rattling the floors of daughter.
And anyway, maybe I have the ages wrong. Maybe I was 10. Maybe I was 6. Maybe I was 35 and getting my second divorce. I don’t know how old we were as children. I only know my father’s anger built the house.
Once in the entryway when she was on her way out of the door for school, he yelled “Christ you look like a bum with those jeans and that dumpy sack shirt - you trying to look like a man? You look like a goddamn man.” Peering out from behind the door of my bedroom I saw he had his face close to hers. I saw her looking at the ground under a curtain of auburn hair. Then I saw her lift her head and meet his eyes, her literature and art books at her chest like a shield. They looked almost exactly like each other. It made the fact that I had to pee hurt.
When my sister was older, she started wearing this long, dusted gray-purple antique dress to school. And she went out sometimes with men named Victor and Park, both much older than her, men who would drive her away from our house for hours and hours, leaving my father to make a chain smoker’s chimney of our living room. Watching All in the Family. Pounding the arm of the overstuffed sofa chair.
But the big event for me was that she moved down into the basement of the house, into some spooky bedroom we never used down there. There was nothing my father could do but watch, because my mother did it behind his back. My sister was smarter than my never-went-to-college mother by the time she was in high school, but my mother had survivor smartness. Like a savvy animal.
The move, to me, was unbelievable - my sister moved down into the belly of a haunted house. She wanted to. I couldn’t even make it to the unfinished cement floors of the basement laundry room without an adult with me. Down the awful blue carpet stairs, down the treacherously dark and unfinished sideboards of the basement hallway. Through those unnamable smells. Those creepy dungeon sounds of knocking pipes and creaking wood. All the way to the other end of the house, into a room that I was sure I would pass out trying to get to. I remember asking my mother if someone could die from “hippoventating.”
Sometimes I’d just stand at the top of the blue carpet stairs and look down into the throat of them wishing I could see her, and I’d lift my foot up to take a step and immediately feel VERTIGO, and then with a little wistful sigh and my throat knotting up I’d give up. Even if I ventured half way down the stairs solo, I’d start to get light