It was hot that night, and Lorris was in my room again. Mom pulled out the trundle bed. She smoothed the sheets. She kept her hand on his cheek, her other hand on my arm, her feet between the two beds, until Lorris told her that he wanted to turn on the other side. She went downstairs, and she put the television on, but we could hear her and Dad arguing. They were quiet. We only heard the sounds of their voices. It stopped soon and they turned the television off. Lorris got out of the pullout bed and stood in front of mine. He put his hand on the side, and I lifted up the sheet. I faced one way, and he faced the other, because I didn’t like it when our breaths hit, but he kept his foot next to mine until four in the morning. Then he got up to go to the bathroom, and I had the bed and the sheets and the quiet room to myself.
OPEN YOUR EYES
Sitting on the bus on the way home from Kings Highway train station with our shopping bags at our feet, Lorris pointed at the man sitting across from us. It was the years when we fought. Look, Lorris said. When the man reached down to scratch his lower leg his jeans rode up a little, and you could see his gun, just the holster and the leather strap. He’s a policeman, I told Lorris. Lorris nodded. I feel safe, he said.
• • •
We fought all the time. We threw punches. We kneed each other in the chest. We knocked each other down, waited until the other one got up, knocked him down again. We got angry. We squeezed each other’s fingers so hard they got jammed, or what looked like jammed, in the way that we jammed our fingers while playing basketball. We scratched pimples into our legs and called them mosquito bites.
When fights were over, when Lorris was knocked down, when I had my whole weight on top of him, I gave what was our cruelest punishment of all—the kiss of death—the bone of my chin jammed into his cheek, pushed down between his gums until he screamed, hard enough that they’d stay raw, and the orthodontist, when Lorris went to one a few years later, told Lorris he needed braces. But when I pulled my chin away, he gave me the same look, his eyes disdainful, as if he knew there was nothing else I could do. And, surprised, I’d let him up.
Then we’d lean against the wall together, breathing hard. It stopped us being angry. We could be regular human beings then, so much that by the time our father came running up the stairs, shouting, What’s going on? we’d be laughing, or doing something else, my glasses crooked but back on my face.
• • •
Every year we went shopping at Christmastime, by ourselves, near Kings Highway. There were stores for everything. Rainbow for clothing, KB Toys, a small bookstore, jewelry shops. Once I went by myself but came back ten minutes later than I’d said I would, and my mother had been sitting next to the door, on a dining room chair. My father was pacing the room. Lorris was watching out the window, and it was him who opened the door.
You’re fucked, he said, quietly, happily, the emphasis too much on the second word. With his body blocking my parents’ view, he punched me above the knee, and backed quickly away, so I had to hobble into the house. From then on Lorris and I went together, even though it wasn’t clear what good Lorris would do. Two’s better than one, our father said, and left it at that.
One winter, not long after that—on our first stop we got clothes. A turtleneck for our mother, who was trying to start running even with the snow, and a sweatshirt for our father, because he said he looked good in them. Then we went to the bookstore under the train tracks.
Morning, we said, as we entered the shop. The bell had rung over our heads. The man grunted. Good morning, Lorris said, stamping on the welcome mat in front of the door, with pictures of snowflakes on its edges. The man looked up but didn’t grunt. We spread out around the store, opening books and looking at their inside covers. Here, Lorris said, and handed me a small red one: Walking Tours of Brooklyn. Perfect, I said. One more. Mister, I said, do you have any suggestions for a gift for our father.
The owner of the bookstore looked at us. He was reading the paper. The headline rustled into the subheadline while the owner shuffled. Is he still married? the owner asked. I said yes. The shop owner kept reading his paper.