Whenever I paid attention to the game, I saw that my brother was really good at hockey. His legs were so powerful. The determined set of his head underneath the white helmet was so adult. I didn’t understand how my brother could just make his body do whatever he wanted it to.
Once, the teams were neck and neck, and my brother got a breakaway and scored. A few minutes later, he did it again. As he raised his gloved hand in victory, I jumped up onto the bleacher seat, raised my arms over my head, and shouted, “Eric Miller, you saved the team!”
Finding myself standing there, hearing my voice echo through the rink and realizing that everyone was looking at me, I thought, Oh, God, this is all wrong, this is not me at all, what have I done. Everyone else thought it was hilarious—and adorable, probably. All the moms howled. My father turned around and whooped, the giant overhead lights flashing in his glasses. My brother was laughing, lying down face first in the ice, pawing at it with his puffy gloves. I was at once happy that I could make such an impact on him and annoyed at my spontaneous outburst of hero worship. He got enough attention—he didn’t need mine! And he was so mean to me sometimes—why should I let him know that I was proud of him? I didn’t know what to do, so I just face-planted sobbing into my mother’s lap, which just made everyone laugh harder.
I was always very happy to get back in the Chevy Suburban. My parents and my brother would talk about the game, and it was easy to tune them out while I played my secret story in my head like a movie. Sometimes I advanced the action forward, with Trish becoming increasingly wary of Tom. Sometimes I played the beginning of the story over and over again, through the entire car trip. I could spend a lot of time selecting and then reselecting Trish’s outfit for the bar. She had a lot of different outfits: a denim lace-up peasant shirt, a white sundress with cherries, pink satin pants like I saw on Peter Frampton at my first-ever star-sighting, when he was standing outside the porta potties at Lime Rock racetrack, in Connecticut.
If I got stuck, I might ask my parents to play “the lying people song” again, and they almost always said yes. It was the least they could do. One day, my mother turned around to see if I was all right, and although I wanted her attention, I refused it. I realized you could make people feel bad very easily by saying you didn’t want things they had to offer, even if you did. I was pleased with myself at that moment, because I was just like the people in the song.
We didn’t have a totally awful relationship, my brother and I. When I was around ten, my parents told him to stop telling me I was fat, and he actually did, which was good. Also good: we invented a game that involved one person pushing the other person as far as they could across a room, using only their legs. For reasons completely unknown, we called this game “On the Job.” We watched a lot of “Three’s Company” and “The Odd Couple” together.
When my brother was not being nice, he would come into my room and lie down on top of me and refuse to get up. It wasn’t sexual, just brute force. Or he would repeat everything I said until I cried. Sometimes my parents got mad at him; mostly, they just demanded that we get along. Our entire life, our whole family was about him. One night, I stood in front of the refrigerator and looked at a hockey schedule with its list of away games: St. Johnsbury, Vermont; Wayland, Massachusetts; Poughkeepsie, New York; Fairfax, Virginia; Kingston, Rhode Island. Ten teams. Ten kids per team. How many hours was that, for each sister, for each parent? How many collective years, how many lifetimes?
One day, I was sitting under the bleachers being bored with another hockey sister. I told her I had just gotten second place in a flower-arranging contest at the Berkshire Garden Center. I think only four people entered but I was still excited. “Imagine if your parents just spent like billions of hours driving you around to flower-arranging competitions?” my friend said. We had a good laugh about this.
Every summer, my brother’s hockey team had a pool party at the coach’s house. I always worried about going because I didn’t want anyone to see me in a bathing suit. But I lived for any opportunity to visit a pool, and I was very good at putting on my bathing suit at home and taking my clothes off close to the pool, and then just getting in.
But, one year, maybe when I was eleven, I had to change at the party. After I changed, I realized I’d left my towel downstairs. I didn’t think there was anyone in the house, so I figured I could walk downstairs really fast and wrap myself in my towel and get myself outside and into the pool, and everything would be fine. Everyone would ignore me, and soon I would be alone in the water doing somersaults in the corner by myself.
The minute I walked out of the bedroom, one of the better players on the team, who scored goals like he was buttering toast, who people whispered could have a professional career—was standing right there. He smiled at me. I thought, Oh, my God, he’s going to talk to me, and he did. He said, “Wow, you’re even fatter than I thought you were.”
I didn’t say anything. I got into the warm pool and did somersaults.
That was a Saturday. The next day, I ripped a two-week diet out of Mademoiselle and gave it to my father, who got everything on the list—melba toast and cottage cheese and ham slices and apples—at the Price Chopper on Pittsfield Road. Every morning, I got up and rode my three-speed bike in a two-mile loop three times. Within four months, I had lost thirty pounds. What a relief, I thought when I finally saw the number I wanted on the scale, no boys will ever be mean to me again.
After having been a fat young girl, I found being a relatively thin young woman delightful. For example, if a boy, or even a man, was mean to me, all I had to do was say something like “You’re an idiot” or “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” and I could make them feel terrible. I could watch their faces collapse and know that I had made it happen—me—and I just loved it so much. I would try not to do it, but opportunities just seemed to keep coming up.
I did this for many years, when it seemed appropriate. I especially enjoyed doing it to my brother. I had always gotten straight A’s. I knew answers to many questions. Then I got my name printed in things and moved to a big city, then another one. He was just a jock who used to get whatever he wanted before I had made myself useful. Now it was my turn. Now I was the one my parents bragged about. It seemed like a victory, possibly even a feminist one. When people asked how I became a writer, I said that I started making up stories in the back of my parents’ car to pass the time: “My brother played Pee Wee hockey, and my parents treated him like a Fabergé egg and had no idea I existed.” I thought it was a good story, quite moving. What a little fighter I was.
When I was a sophomore in college and my brother was a senior—we went to the same college—I dressed like him for Halloween. I put on our school sweatshirt and a baseball cap, and when people asked who I was supposed to be, I said, “I’m my brother.” Then and in the years that followed, the mixed feelings of closeness and resentment I felt toward him hardened into simple hostility, even though he was softening, becoming less arrogant. I wanted to feel more charitably toward him, but something in my mind and body wouldn’t let me. It seemed impossible to become myself without hating him.
When we were in our late twenties, my brother and I got into a physical fight. We both incurred minor injuries. We managed to repair our relationship years later, which was fortunate, because we both hit middle age around the time of the 2008 financial crash and would need to commiserate over losing our careers and homes along with our youth and reconciling ourselves to not working at all, and then—victory?—working more and making less. We would need to help each other recognize the great lie of our upbringing: that achievement was our reward for being good and doing right, and not some semi-automated outcome of being born into a certain class and color. Conversely, we needed to convince each other not to hate ourselves for having failed. We had not suddenly become bad. We’d believed the exciting battle we were fighting was jock vs. bookworm, extrovert vs. introvert, favored older son vs. ignored younger daughter. Really it was just me vs. all the Eckhart Tolle books my brother was reading that told him yet another lie—that if he just had a better attitude, he would be happy.
Some weeks ago, I went to see my brother play adult-league hockey in suburban San Diego. He was still really good and scored a bunch of goals and had many assists. Afterward, as he walked toward me in the parking lot, rubbing his wet head and shouting to his friends, “Good game, Bobby” and “Good game, Ed.” I thought that I would gladly give up most anything if, in return, my brother could play hockey all day rather than go to work.
We drove down Paseo Del Norte, looking for a good place to eat, past an outlet mall and car dealerships and Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt. I asked him if he could play “Lyin’ Eyes” on his phone. He did. He sang Frey’s part, the melody, and I took Don Henley’s harmony. By the last verse of the song, we really hit our stride:
I told him I was writing an essay about this song and his Pee Wee hockey career. “Really?” he said. “Is it good?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s going to be my big break. I can feel it.”
We laughed at this for a long time. Then we went to a BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse, because there was nowhere else to go.
I texted my brother a few days ago to let him know that this essay was more revealing of our childhood than I had planned. He replied:
