Picky Eaters

Once when I was really small, like probably six or seven, Jack was three or four and we lived at 404 Carl Miller Drive in Antioch. I've already alluded to the fact that my Dad was kind of cruel. And he wasn't uncaring. It was just that sometimes he would alternate between extreme passivity and extreme irritation. It threw us kids off. Jack and I grew into irritated people and we still are kind of picky and easily unhinged.
In the beginning though, Jack and I were just two little kids who went to Tusculum Elementary School and smuggled toys in our crayon boxes. A plastic batman figurine for Jack and three little farm animals for me. At home we played Nintendo and tried to strangle each other over who won mortal combat and why. We were often at odds. He ripped up my life-size shadow drawing and I carved a tic-tac-toe board into the headboard of his bed. Still, to this day, there is one thing I think of when I decide that Jack is evil or that his defenses are ironclad.

In that house on Carl Miller Jack and I were picky eaters. One day my Mom made aparagus in cheese sauce. The smell just made me want to die. The limp grey straws lay stewing in a palid cheese gunk on our plates. With some difficulty, I choked it down. But Jack had more trouble. He was told that he would sit at the table until he finished. My father showed no sympathy as Jack wimpered and cried his way around the plate. I looked on, slurping my cherry jello.
Evenutally, Jack was forced to put asparagus into his mouth and chew. He stopped crying and held still. All eyes were on him. A tiny cheese dribble slipped from the corner of his mouth as my mom held the spoon in front of him, willing him to swallow. The stillness in his body just then was clearly recognizeable as the internal struggle to supress a retch. And thats what he did.Choking and straining, his body forced whatever fiber of asparagus Jack had swallowed into my mother's cupped palm.
"Oh, Jack," came the tired reprimand.
My father was more stern. He seemed to be even more irritated that Jack had gagged up the asparagus than that he had not eaten it.

That night in bed, I could hear my Dad spanking my brother. He might have used his belt, something that he sometimes did, but not often. I heard Jack yelp a few times, and then my father went downstairs while Jack was ordered to sleep. There was quiet.
Sometimes when this no-dinner-because-you-won't-eat-that thing happened, my mom might come upstairs and give us a handi-snack or something. I would sit up in the dark room and eat crackers and processed cheese quietly, while being told not to talk about it.
"It's never good to go to bed on an empty stomach," my mother would say.
That didn't happen with Jack that night apparently. The door cracked though, and I sat up just the same and swung my legs over the side of the bed. And I realized then that the silhouetted figure was too small to be my mother. It was Jack.

This is the part I remember best. He sort of stumbled toward me, and I realized he was crying. Really hard and really quietly. His lower lip protruding, mouth open, eyes scrunched up, he got halfway across the room ad stretched out his arms to me moving faster before he collided into me. He hugged me and I felt like mom. He was clutching my night gown at the shoulders and the little high pitched breathy sobs came out then. Jack climbed up on the bed with me and we sat that way for a while, him crying and me starting to cry, and rubbing his back like mom would have done. I might have rocked a little bit too but I can't remember.

It felt good to comfort him. It felt like he needed me. And that's probably something I remember best because it stands in so much contrast to how else we acted around each other. Jack and I don't cry around each other any more. We became hardened to my Dad's outbursts and cruelties. We never had to comfort each other because we learned not to get upset. We only got upset in private, alone. But we were close then. And the small, sweet, sensitive Jack is the one I try to remember.
The image still makes me cry when I think of it. I associate it with my dad's inexplicable irritation. And how maybe something small and sweet died then. Maybe not that day, but at some point it was just gone. Jack is so cold and monotone now. He barely comes out of his shell and instead, at some point, receded into some internal cave.
That image is only in the mind now. Like sometimes when I'm Jack and sometimes when I'm me. The little girl crying or the big sister trying to be a mom. I think about it alot.