Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

“Surprise,” she says. And he just nods. “What are the chances of you letting me in?”

“Slim to none,” he says as he reaches for his jeans and whatever T-shirt he had thrown on the floor the night before.

When he swings open the front door, he is relieved to see that she looks so much better. A year ago, as the eight O’Connor children gathered in Buffalo to bury their father, something had been seriously wrong, but she wouldn’t speak about it. She had reminded him of pictures he had seen of hollow-eyed people, dying of malnutrition. And then there was that strange woman who arrived with Ellen, spoke only Spanish, and never left his sister’s side.

Now he can see she’s gained back some weight, not a lot, but enough so she doesn’t look like she belongs in Darfur. And he can see that her expression is more animated, there’s the promise of some fun in her eyes that reassures him she’s much closer to the Ellen he had grown up with, the Ellen he had relied on to get him through. It wasn’t just the scant eleven months that separated them that made them so close. It was their unspoken pact that they both saw the same thing — the perpetual calamity that was the O’Connor family.

Once Jamie left Buffalo and had some distance, he often wondered if all large families shared the O’Connors’ habit of carelessness and neglect. Was it just that there were too many children for any two parents to really ride herd on? In his family, the struggle was to get through each day with everyone dressed, the older kids off to school, and with some kind of food on the table at dinnertime. Figuring out which child needed what specific attention or taking the emotional temperature of any one of them was way beyond the scope of either his mother or father. Hugh Sr. was too busy drinking and his mother, Carrie, was too busy, period, simply tending to the maintenance of so many bodies.

But there was more, and Jamie came to understand this only as an adult. There was his father’s narcissism and casual cruelty. How he got pleasure from calling his sons “you little shits.” How, in the privacy of his own house, the words were hurled with scorn and derision, often accompanied with a back-of-the-hand slap, almost an afterthought, that always landed across a cheek or tender lip. How, in public, he’d announce with a broad smile and sometimes a hand clapped across a listener’s shoulder, “I’ve got so many of these little shits running around, I can’t remember all their names.” There’d be laughter. A joke, Hugh was always ready with a joke. Nobody minded that in one sentence he’d managed to label his sons as worthless and obliterate their identities. Nobody, that is, except his sons.

What it took Jamie much longer to understand was his mother’s complicity, her complete denial of the raucous damage inflicted on each of them by her husband. Jamie’s childhood battles were all with his father, but as an adult now, at the beginning of his forties, he’s come to realize that it is his mother who never, not once, stepped in to protect him against his father’s assaults. He’s certain now that Carrie O’Connor’s crime was the greater one.

Jamie has figured these things out for himself. Moving across the country to the West Coast helped. Knowing people who had been analyzed and therapy-ed gave him some language, but he has never discussed his conclusions with any of his siblings — about their childhood, the damage done, the most culpable parent. It’s not that the children of the O’Connor clan don’t talk to one another. They do. They shout, they argue, they discuss people they know, but they never delve beneath the surface. They skirt “judgment” as ungenerous. And any discussion of another’s behavior is labeled judgment. So all eight of the O’Connor siblings have their own version of what life was like growing up in that narrow brick house in Buffalo, but no one has compared notes. Until now. Ellen has come halfway around the world for just that purpose.

“What if I wasn’t home?” Jamie says to her as he opens the door wider and ushers her in.

“Where would you be at five thirty in the morning? You have no life.”

“How would you know that, Ellen? I haven’t spoken to you in a year.”

“Jaime, you wear your singleness like a sign.” But Ellen is taking stock of his living situation and not looking at her brother at all. “Holy mother,” she says as she scans the living room/dining room space, “this is goddamn depressing. Could you have decorated a little bit at least? Put a picture on the wall. A bowl of fruit on the table. It’s like nobody lives here.”

“And I’m happy to see you, too.”

Ellen drops her small bag on the couch. “Can you make us some coffee? I’ve been flying all night.”

Jamie moves into the tidy kitchen and Ellen takes one of the two barstools at the breakfast bar so she can watch her brother and talk while he gets the coffeemaker going.

“You know what today is, don’t you?” She speaks to his back as he grinds the beans, measures the coffee carefully into the machine.

“Liberation day plus one year.”

“That’s one way to look at it.” And Ellen takes a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, a lighter.

“Not in here,” Jaime says.

“When did you get to be such an old lady?” But Ellen puts the pack away.

Water gurgling now and seeping into the filter, Jamie turns his full attention to his sister. He leans against the counter and studies her. All the girls take after their father, large boned and rangy, with unruly ginger hair and the kind of skin that flushes with temperature changes or emotion. His mother contributed most of her genes to the boys. They all turned out dark like Carrie, with narrow faces, sharp chins, and a slightly haunted look. “I’m Black Irish,” Carrie would always say with a hint of apology.

“What?” Ellen says now, challenging Jamie’s scrutiny.

“I thought you were dying the last time I saw you.”

“Oh, that …” Ellen waves her hand in the air, dismissing his concern with one airy gesture. “Nope. Just a bad patch.”

Jamie wants to ask her what “a bad patch” means, but doesn’t. “You seem better” is all he says, quietly.

Ellen shrugs. “Can I at least smoke on your microscopic patio?”

“If you don’t leave your butts around.”

“Jesus, Jamie.” But she goes out through the living room’s sliding glass door and makes sure to close it tightly behind her.

On the front patio she smokes and paces, back and forth, back and forth, as if she’s working off some punishment. Thirty paces without cease. Jamie watches her and waits. He feels something within him stir, something buried under years of living alone. He loves this sister more than the others, more than the brothers who preceded him.

They were the perfect “Irish twins,” who were treated as a team, a unit. Jamie knows that without Ellen he might not have survived at all. She was his protector, his guide, his interpreter of signs and storm warnings. All he could give her in return was his love, and he did. His adoration of Ellen knew no limits. At least until they hit adolescence, they were inseparable.

Ellen finishes her cigarette, resists the urge to flip the butt into the sparse shrubbery, and watches her brother find two mugs, pour the coffee into them, open the refrigerator, and rummage for milk. He looks like an old man leaps into her mind. It’s the constrained movements — precise and miserly. The lack of energy. She shakes herself — this isn’t the Jamie she knew. What’s happened in the seven years she’s been away?

Jamie was always the angriest of them all and the bravest, taking their father on when everyone else would scatter into rooms with locked doors, waiting out the “Hugh storm” as they called it. Too often Jamie’s anger, his outrage over the injustice of Hugh’s cruelty, would propel him into battles he could never win. And the punishments were severe. There were beatings with a belt or a fist well beyond any humane limit. There were times, and she doesn’t like to remember them, when she feared for her brother’s safety — the combination of Hugh’s drunkenness and Jamie’s righteous fury a recipe for disaster.