Susan Steinberg - Spectacle - Stories

I walked all the way to my brother’s part of the city. At my brother’s place, I rang the bell, then rang again. Then I called his name from the street. I was surprised to hear the front door’s click. Surprised to see my brother standing in his doorway. And before I was even down the hallway, he was looking too hard at my face. It was terrible, how he was looking. Terrible, how banged up I was. I had seen those banged-up women before. I had seen them on streets, all terrible looking, all banged up. It was wrong, the way my brother was looking. Dumb, how we were just standing there. I said, Is your girl here still. He said, She’s not my girl. But is she here, I said. Fuck you, he said. I knew my brother way too well. I knew he fucked her and sent her home. He often fucked them and showed them the door. I held up my hand for a high five. My brother was that guy, always holding up his. I said, High five. But he left me hanging, my hand up high.

There was a day I had solved a difficult puzzle. And I went into my brother’s bedroom and told my brother how I had solved it. And my brother said he understood how I had solved the puzzle. And he suggested a different way of solving it. And his way of solving it was somehow better than mine. And it was in this moment I saw his brilliance. I hadn’t seen this brilliance before. And I knew it was more brilliant than mine.

I should say again we were in the bar to celebrate this thing that went right, once, years before, the thing being, simply, my being there, that miraculous spark that kept on going, and there I was.

And I should say that my brother won, of course. He slammed my boyfriend’s knuckles into the table as hard as he could. People in the bar applauded. The girl kissed my brother on his mouth. My brother went to buy a round of drinks. My boyfriend was angry and he looked very angry. Your brother’s the biggest prick, he said. But my brother was not the biggest prick. He was buying us a round of drinks. He’s not the biggest prick, I said. There are way bigger pricks, I said. And my boyfriend said, What does that mean. And I guess this was when the fight began. My boyfriend said, It must mean something. You must mean me, he said.

It was dumb how we were just standing there. I said, Let me in, but my brother didn’t move. I said, Let me fucking in, but he just stood there staring at my face. So I pushed past my brother and went to the kitchen. His kitchen was the worst kitchen ever. It could barely fit two people at once. It could barely fit even one. The kitchen table was not in the kitchen. It was outside the kitchen. It was against a wall in the other room. In the refrigerator was a case of beer. I took a beer. My brother squeezed into the kitchen. He grabbed my arm. He shook the beer from my hand. It rolled to somewhere, to under something. Then my brother pulled me from the refrigerator. He pulled me from the kitchen. He pushed me into a chair. Then he sat in a chair. And we sat, like anyone, on any morning, at the kitchen table.

My mother left three dolls in the house and my father gave them to me. They were my mother’s dolls from when she was a kid. But I was not a girl who played with dolls. And I did not want my mother’s things, besides. So I gave the dolls to my brother. They wore dresses from other countries. My brother named them girls’ names. He kept them in a row on his dresser. I don’t think he ever played with the dolls. I think he just wanted to keep them like that, in a row.

My boyfriend walked ahead of me home from the bar. I was fine with not walking next to him. We were in a fight, and I was fine. I was used to our fights. I was used to the door slamming in my face. I almost loved when the door slammed in my face. Because it meant my boyfriend would sleep on the couch.

On my brother’s kitchen table were dried dots of something red. There were crumbs of something white. It was a mess, the table, a mess, the whole room. My brother reached toward me as if to grab me. What happened to your face, he said. And he could have grabbed my shirt or my arm, but he didn’t. What happened to your face, I said. I was pushing the crumbs into the dots. My brother was watching me do this. Tell me, he said. You tell me, I said. He was watching me pick off each red dot, which was made from something, ketchup, pizza, I don’t know. He said, Tell me. He was getting angry. I didn’t care if he was angry. He had every reason to be angry. It was an accident, I said.

My father’s dirty underthings were always all over the house. There was nowhere to go except for my bedroom, where his dirty underthings were not. So one day I collected all of his dirty underthings in a bag. And I took the bag out to the yard. And I shook the bag out onto the grass. It looked absurd, all those dirty underthings all over the yard. But it made me laugh for a second, the utter absurdity of this.

I slept better when my boyfriend slept on the couch. That night I had slept straight through the night. But in the morning a bird flew in through the bedroom window. It was filthy, circling, crashing crazy into the walls. I was screaming for my boyfriend to help. I felt dumb screaming for help. I felt dumb screaming at all. The bird left streaks of dark on the ceiling. Feathers popped out from its wings. The bird is not a metaphor. It’s not meant to symbolize anything. It was just a bird.

I should say there was one puzzle I never solved as a kid. In it, a hotel has an infinite number of rooms. There is someone staying in each of the rooms. Then an infinite number of people walk in. They each want a room, and, though the rooms are filled, they each get one. The question, of course, is how.

I picked at the red dots on the table. They came up from the table in perfect circles. My brother said, Stop that. I said, Stop what. He pointed to my hands. He said, Stop that. It was like he was the one older and I was the one younger. It was like he was tough and I was not. I said, Where’s your girl. He said, She’s not my girl. There was no reason to talk about the girl. She was trash like all of the girls. I said, She wouldn’t fuck you. He said, Yeah, right. I said, Yeah, right. She wouldn’t fuck you, I said. Then my brother slammed his fist into the table. The crumbs on the table jumped, and I would have laughed if things had been different. But I didn’t like how my brother was acting. He was trying to act tough. And he looked tough. But that didn’t mean he was tough. He said, Tell me the truth. I said, What truth. I said, I told you the truth. I said, There is no truth. But what did I know about truth. I was only fucking around. And my brother knew I was fucking around. So he reached across the table. He grabbed my arm. He squeezed too hard. He said, Tell me the truth. I said, Let me go. But he squeezed my arm harder. I hadn’t thought he could squeeze it harder. I could feel the bone in my arm. I could feel the bone about to snap. He said, Tell me the truth. I said, Let me go. I felt like I would cry. But I was not the type of girl to cry. So I said, He hit me in the face with a book.

Several times, my father threw the dolls into the trash. And my brother would find the dolls in the trash, clean them up, and stand them, again, on his dresser. Then my father would sit my brother at the kitchen table. Boy, he would say. You are not your father’s son, he would say. No one will save you, he would say. There’s no great man in the clouds, he would say. And my brother would get this look on his face. It was the same dumb look he often got. Though at that one point I did see brightness. I never told this to my father. That I saw brightness at that one point.

My father had been dying for a very long time. It was something with his lungs. They sounded like a storm. They were going to stop working, we had been told. We waited years for them to stop working. And when they did stop working, he called my brother and said, Pray for me, boy. Then he called me and said, Pray for me, girl. But neither of us knew how to pray.