Authors: Mari SanGiovanni
The scene ended with Dad bursting out laughing, sending an explosion of peas past his napkin back onto his plate. In the end, Lisa didn’t get punished for speaking out in class that day because Dad convinced Mom that the whole bleeding for five days for the next forty or so years was outrageous, and punishment enough for his girls.
The story about Lisa’s outburst became legend at school and solidified my sister’s position as a leader, which followed her all through her school years. Whenever she chose to run for a school position, she got it, no campaigning necessary. If she decided she wanted to be the captain of her sports team, she was voted it, unanimously. This was a comfort to me, since, until that time, I
believed I was the only one who automatically fell in line to her every command, and it was good to see the rest of the world was going to do it, too.
Years later, when Lisa was in high school, she boldly brought home a stray pet she named Hanni. The original owners called her Hannah, but Lisa wanted her newly acquired pet to have a nickname. This pet came in the form of a high school exchange student from Ireland.
She had been lured to the States under the guise that she would experience America while finishing her senior year of high school. What she got instead was a family who desired a full-time nanny for their cantankerous children, and a maid for their filthy house. Hannah was beautiful, and Lisa, having a weakness for all female things beautiful and unattainable, brought her home one Friday for the weekend.
Lisa planned to work on our mother over the weekend until she had sufficiently pleaded Hannah’s case of imprisonment and white slavery. I thought she looked quite healthy for a slave girl, but later we heard stories from Hannah about the way her host family treated her. However, those stories were nothing compared to the version Lisa told our parents over dinner, after Hannah had hugged Lisa goodbye and sadly returned to her host family’s house.
My sister painted a Cinderella story, though Hannah dressed not in long layered skirts with chimney sweep stains, but rather short corduroy cut-off shorts and tight t-shirts that fell, oddly, and beautifully, just short of meeting her waistline. Lisa told story after story of how Hannah was brought to this country as an indentured servant, as Mom ate her dinner with a permanent look of skepticism emblazoned on her face. Now, this was Mom’s natural state and perhaps Lisa in her effort to get her new pet had misinterpreted this as something out of the ordinary for Mom, and clumsily oversold her case.
Mom finally said, “Well, maybe she is a girl that doesn’t like to pitch in. Maybe she thought she was getting a vacation. I’d sure like to hear that family’s side of the story.”
I had no doubt of that.
Lisa reminded Mom how helpful Hannah had been all weekend, and she wasn’t overselling that. Hannah had made us feel obligated to take our plates up to the sink and rinse them off, so we didn’t look like animals compared to her. I resented her for that, but my brother did not. He shadowed her every move that weekend and she could scarcely turn around without bumping into him. Mom agreed she’d been very helpful, but she still kept her lips tight together, a sign we knew meant nothing foreign was getting in, least of all, a teenager from Ireland.
Vince broke the silence at the dinner table. “How old is Hannah?”
I was embarrassed for him, since all his life he had never asked about anyone’s age. All eyes were now on him, a welcome relief from Lisa’s filibustering.
“Same age as me, dumb ass,” Lisa said. Mom gave the back of her head a flick with her hand.
“Language,” Mom said.
I noticed Vince had lost interest in his dinner. If we hadn’t been having his favorite, Uncle Freddie’s homemade ravioli, I might not have noticed it, but now he was just rolling his fork over his plate.
Lisa noticed it too, and sensed an opportunity. “Why aren’t you eating that? You know, Hannah would love it if her host family fed her a homemade dinner now and then.” She paused for a deep sigh. “She has to eat McDonalds and Burger King almost every night, if she gets to eat at all.” Well played.
Mom stopped eating, her lips parting slightly. Mom’s fork was lowered slowly, laid down on her plate in horror. Lisa had her in her hooks, and now was happily eating the ravioli off Vince’s plate. Her work here was done. Lisa and I knew that no Italian mother, no matter how skeptical, could tolerate the idea of withholding food from another human being, especially a growing teenager. Mom had already judged that Hannah was dangerously deprived of food, her trim figure lacking the doughy coating that all American kids had these days, us included. This was an angle that Lisa should have considered earlier.
Hannah confessed to me months later that she had never been so fat in her life. I confessed to her that she was a lunatic, and she
must think she’d joined a family of right whales. Hannah, now officially named Hanni by our family, lived with us the entire year she was supposed to be with her host family, and little Vince, always assumed by Lisa and I to be too geeky to take notice of a girl, had fallen deeply in love before the age of twelve.
When Lisa brought Hanni home, she was meant to be a toy for her own amusement. A more improved sister, one who would act more according to how Lisa wished. A sister who happily would ask her questions to learn her way from someone who had been there, done that. As it turned out, Hanni was more of a gift to our baby brother, who taught himself how to make eggs when he found out it was Hanni’s favorite, and who wouldn’t take her yellow terry cloth robe off ever since she draped it over him one morning while he sat chilled as he watched his cartoons.
The yellow robe became his uniform, the layer of Hanni he could drape over his clothing, and even when the summer came, and it was much too warm for a bulky terry robe, Vince would wear it, still opened in the front, terry belt dragging on the floor, since Hanni was so tall. He made her a fancy card for her birthday, and bought her favorite chocolate with his allowance money. He protected the Sunday crossword puzzle from Dad to save for Hanni by ripping it out of the paper each week, having set his alarm to get up before anyone else in the house.
Lisa and I teased him mercilessly, but, for the first time, Vince took no steps to avoid being teased, his way of not denying his love. He got up on weekends as if he was the new parent of an older adopted child, cracking eggs and hovering over the stove until Hanni smelled the bacon and was lured out of the bedroom she shared with us. Out by the pool, the terry robe converted into his beach towel, making Vince appear so small when he wrapped himself up on one of the lounge chairs. Lisa and I thought he was making a total fool of himself. But the truth was I feared for his heart when Hanni returned to her country once the school year ended in September.
Hanni loved Vince and said he reminded her of her baby brother back home, and I was a little jealous of Vince, who had done what I couldn’t do: hijack Lisa’s friend right out from under her. Hanni
liked me well enough, but who could resist the devotion of little boy Vince? It would be like ignoring a shaggy little puppy that follows you around, appreciative of any scrap of love that fell to the floor.
When it was time for Hanni to go back home, it was difficult for our family. We’d all grown attached to her, but it was nothing compared to what Vince was about to go through. I was still lashing out at him for handing his heart over on his terry sleeve, while I braced myself for his pain. The day she left, Vince said he had a surprise for her in the living room. I wondered what he could have gotten her when he had already spent every penny of his allowance on a ridiculous gift, a red plastic round tablecloth with an umbrella hole cut out of the middle, simply because she said she loved the color red, and it was something he could afford. She had fawned over the tablecloth while Lisa and I shot looks back and forth to each other. Vince had beamed.
Vince had set up a boom box in the living room and told her to sit on the couch, while Lisa and I watched, uninvited, from the kitchen. He was carrying a wooden spoon and pulled two of the sofa cushions to the floor for his stage.
“Oh God,” Lisa whispered to me, “the spoon is his microphone.”
Vince pressed the play button on the boom box and Lisa and I watched in horror as he did an Elvis impersonation in Hanni’s yellow robe, worn out and dingy after a year of dragging on the floor and refusing to let Mom wash it. Vince pumped his arms and used the wooden spoon microphone in spastic, Elvis-like moves.
Why the fuck Elvis? Lisa and I were both thinking this as Hanni clasped her hands together, eyes tearing up with joy, as she shouted, “I love Elvis!” like only a non-American could do. Lisa and I looked at each other, then ducked out of view to snicker from our humiliated embarrassment of him, like two cruel schoolboys.
Vince ended the song by spreading Hanni’s tattered robe like giant butterfly wings, then, thrusting the wooden spoon microphone in the air, he bowed his head under imaginary floodlights, to Hanni’s thunderous applause. Lisa and I were covering our mouths, laughing our asses off, even as the pit in my stomach widened for Vince. I peeked around the corner in time to see Hanni storming his cushion
stage, giving him a giant hug, lifting him off his feet as he shyly looked away from her, smiling as she told him it was the best present she had ever received in her whole entire life.
I remember being angry with Vince, but I know now it was because I was devastated for him. I knew the following day Hanni would be gone from our lives and he would be checking into Heartbreak Hotel. I didn’t know it then, but my brother would meet Erica and, so many years later, check right back in.
Patty & Anne Should Have Done The Nasty
Lisa had planned a dinner at our condo the first Friday night of Erica’s arrival. In this case, “planned” meant she had invited everyone over and the rest was up to me, which meant it wasn’t going to be a home-cooked meal. Mom and Dad took a pass (Mom said her jammies had been calling out to her since 6:00) but, surprisingly, Erica agreed to come, Eddie was his typical “maybe” (which, in gay man speak, meant no, thanks, he was going to hold out for something better to come along, or go out whoring for a date at last call).
Lisa doubted it had been a good idea once the confirmed crowd turned into just the three of us and Erica, but it was a done deal once Erica accepted. To make matters worse, Vince made my heart ache when he emerged from his room overdressed for the night. It was so obvious that even Lisa resisted the urge to tease him.
I tried to keep things light as Vince and I set the table while Lisa selected her seat at the head of the table and played with her phone.
“Maybe it was sex,” Vince said, breaking the silence.
Lisa and I glanced at each other, then back at him.
“Erica,” he said. “The sex was hot at first, but it fizzled kind of fast.” Then he quietly added, “Well, for her.”
I moved away from him and the table to find something to appear busy with near the kitchen sink. It was his profound sadness, not the mention of sex that made me want to jump out the nearest window.
“One question,” Lisa asked, “you went south, right?”
“Yeah, it went south,” he said.
“No, you idiot. Did
you
go
south
, you know, did you take care of her oral needs?”
I cringed as I re-washed a cup at the sink. Unfortunately, I could still hear them over the faucet and my insane humming.
“Oh! Of course,” he said, insulted at the question.
“Well?”
“She said she wasn’t really into that,” Vince said.
“Uh, oh,” Lisa and I both said in unison.
“What does ‘uh oh’ mean?”
Lisa said, “Vince, write this down.
Every
girl is into that. Repeat with me.
Every girl is into that.
Unless—”
“Unless?” Vince asked.
“Unless the guy doesn’t do it right.”
I winced, but Vince ignored her and said, “It’s just . . . after the chase was over and we finally went to bed—”
Lisa interrupted, “Wait, how long was the chase?”
“Well, we kind of had sex right away, but then not again for about two months.”
I dropped the cup, and it shattered on the floor.
“Uh, oh,” both Lisa and I said.
Lisa put her phone down and folded her hands in front of her, looking like an angry dyke therapist who was pissed her client didn’t follow last week’s recommendations. I feared for Vince’s very soul.
“Did you at least try a vibrator?” Lisa asked.
Vince said, “What? Of course not.”