Cracked: A Sibling Conspiracy
In the fall of
every year, two things re-percolate to the surface of my stream of childhood
memories. I remember Smurfs and indoor
baseball. What child wouldn’t grow up to remember Smurfs? But indoor baseball is a different story. There were originally only two people on the planet who knew the rules, and even we disagreed on our rule interpretations.
For instance, the
“instant homerun” rule stated that any ball hit against the back wall without
bouncing first on the playing floor was an automatic homerun. My older brother
demanded that only balls that struck above the sliding glass door on the back
wall were homeruns, as the rest of was sliding glass door and therefore not
technically a wall at all. I contended that a ball that struck any part of the
back wall, glass or otherwise, was a homerun – mostly because I had a hard time
even hitting the back wall, whereas Brian could smack the wall above the door
every fourth at bat.
He was an awkward
gangly teenager then, but he managed to mass enough coordinated power to win
most Saturday morning games. Not that beating his seven-year-old sister
was a big deal. Only losing to his little sister was a big deal, unless,
of course, he planned the loss to make me feel better—so I would keep playing. He
thought those losses were necessary anyway to keep me from ratting him out to
Mom and Dad for inventing the game, but truthfully, I wouldn’t have finked on
him. We couldn’t play outside until they got home, and after cartoons were
over, it was the best thing we had going in the way of entertainment.
Late one morning
in autumn, after our Fruity Pebbles gorge-fest and the Smurfs were over, we decided
it was indoor baseball play-off season. As the all-powerful older brother Brian
was responsible for moving the minor furniture out of the base paths. I dug the red plastic bat and slightly
oversized lime Nerf baseball from their sacred hiding place in the back corner
of my closet.
After a short
review of rules and boundaries, Brian flipped a quarter for sides. I was the
‘visitor’ and with a cheery tap of the bat, I bounced over to home plate. Being
first to bat meant that I would have at least one at bat where I wasn’t
trailing by three or more runs. I could set up some padding on the scoreboard.
As Brian readied
himself to pitch, I cocked my bat ready above my shoulder, tucked in my chin,
and nailed my stare to the ball in his hand. He wound up and delivered a
weaving spongy sinker. I swung the bat in a curt slice and missed.
Strike one.
I squeezed the
foam ball up from the carpet backstop and tossed it back left-handed,
disillusioned.
Brian wound up
again.
I focused my magic
mantra on the ball, “BASEHIT. BASEHIT. BASEHIT.”
The throw was fast
and straight –only fast throws with a Nerf ball can ever be straight, as the
slow ones wobble around like a turkey in hunting season.
My bat swept over
the plate in a long calculated arc and I pulled my hips into the swing. The hit was a head high drive toward the long
right corner of the back wall.
I thought to run,
but the enormity of the ball’s perfect trajectory towards “automatic homerun”
territory kept me planted two steps toward first base (the corner of the TV
unit).
As the ball
crossed under the air vent just before the right edge of the back wall, it took
an inexplicable hard turn for the fireplace mantle along the right field wall. The
ball struck Mom’s fine china vase (replica Ming Dynasty) dead center.
The ball dropped like
an ancient horse-fly on a hot day and bounced from the vase to the brick below.
In the following spot of time and space, the vase tottered.
The rasping sound
of ceramic wobbling over brick caused us to hold our breath, and then there was
a suspended second of silence before the vase hit the base of the fireplace
with a pistol crack.
We stood looking
at the cracked shards of ceramic speckling the parquet floor, mottled rug, and
fireplace in an exploded star shape.
Super nova
achieved.
The big bang, Mom
exploding into a super-heated rant about how she couldn’t own anything decent
that we didn’t deface, was inevitable.
Brian’s posture
from the mound read “game over.”
Humpty Dumpty came
to mind. My eyes watered. I tightened my lips, in case that bottom lip decided
to start a mutinous tremble.
I went through all
seven stages of grief and back again, settling on shock and denial. I didn’t
hit a homerun? I broke Mom’s vase?
Brian jogged
toward the laundry room for a broom and dustpan.
I drug my bat over
to the carnage and stared at it thoughtfully, trying to will the pieces
together like a parapsychology lab subject mind-bending spoons.
No luck.
Brian broke the
reverie by commanding some mindless action—the best balm we knew for scabs of disappointment.
As he swept everything into the dustpan, I nit-picked slivers from the tile.
“We could say the cat did it,” he suggested.
I thought about
the time Dad whipped Brian, like some mutinous first-mate, for lying about
feeding the cat when he didn’t. “No.”
“Yeah. You’re not
so good at lying anyway,” he conceded.
“What if we just
put it in the neighbor’s trash and act like it never happened? Mom probably
won’t notice it’s gone, and if she does, it’s not really much of a lie to act
like we don’t know what she is asking about. And even if she suspected,
she couldn’t punish us or stay mad without ‘the evidence’, right?”
Brian laughed and
shook his head, bangs flying. “Sure, she can. Mom will notice it is missing,
and she is smart enough to figure out we are to blame.”
He said “we” but I
knew, as he did, that even if Mom thought it was only my fault she would punish
him because he was “responsible” for me on Saturdays. He walked toward the
kitchen trash.
“Wait…” I called.
He looked at me
wearing his big-brother half-grin of enforced patience, his shoulders still facing
the trash.
“Uh. Don’t throw
it away. What if we glued it back together as perfectly as possible and
stuck it on the mantle again? We could tell Mom we broke it, but show her
how hard we worked to get it back together for her and she won’t be so mad. Maybe
she’ll forget to ask how we broke it. And . . . even if she asks, she still
won’t be so mad.”
Brian raised an
eyebrow and coddled the dustpan. He was thinking. We both looked at the
clock. Worst-case scenario, we had an hour to work, best case, three hours
if they worked overtime closing up. He dumped the dustpan carefully on the
kitchen table and bolted up the stairs to hunt out his model glue.
I started stacking
big pieces together.
We didn’t say a
word after that really. We worked heads down, hands talking for a little
over two hours. Big pieces glued together first, then little pieces glued on to
fill in the chinks. Brian used a wet paper towel to wipe away the excess glue
before it could become hardened. I used my two smallest sharpest
fingernails to cut and pick away stray strings of glue. Brian laid a piece
of cardboard down to protect the table while we worked. We used the
cardboard to pick up the glued vase and transfer it back to the mantle as soon
as we deemed it safe to transport the goods from steady tabletop across the
uncertain abyss of hall and living room toward the towering mantle.
“Maybe we should
rotate it so the biggest pieces face front? The sunlight from the sliding door
shows those hairline cracks too well.” He put his hands on his hips and tilted
his head to one side.
“Yeah.” I nodded.
He gave the vase a
quarter turn from the bottom rim with surgeon steady hands. “Not bad, huh?” I
asked.
“We’ll find out,”
he grinned.
We moved the
furniture back into “living” positions and I went upstairs to color something.
Mom and Dad pulled
into the driveway fifteen minutes later. I applied my innocent face and floated
downstairs to stand near the kitchen table toying with a grocery store flyer
Dad had just put down.
Mom asked Brian to
gather the dirty clothes so she could do laundry.
Brian looked
hesitant, and started to say something.
Mom interrupted,
“Now, please? So I can get it started while we take a quick nap.”
Brian nodded and
bolted off on assignment.
“What did you two
eat for lunch?” Mom demanded.
“Cereal, I think,”
I fibbed.
Mom murmured
disapproval, “Well, no more junk before dinner, but I’ll make you a sandwich if
you want one.”
Dad said something
about taking us to see the latest Star Wars movie after his nap. I tore out of the kitchen and up the stairs
to find the Yoda t-shirt Brian had out-grown into my wardrobe.
͠
I came home from
college for Thanksgiving my junior year to find Brian and Mom in the living
room tidying things up before assorted relatives amassed at our house for
turkey and dressing. Mom had made a new flower arrangement for the occassion,
and during extended placement trials, she decided the flowers might look best
on the mantle above the fireplace.
I noticed Mom
hesitate as she lifted her Ming-imitation vase from its central post on the
mantle. She tilted the vase back and forth in the dusty afternoon sunlight
looking into its archeological origins.
“It’s so strange, look at how it’s all cracked up. What
caused all the cracks? Why hasn’t it broken?” Mom mused.
Caught completely
unaware, Brian and I cracked up, boulder rolling on the floor, in gut-busting
peals of laughter.
Mom looked on from
all five feet of her height above us. “What?”
Laughter kept us
from responding, but the uncertainty was already starting to spread into
recognition on Mom’s face.
“You two did this?”
she smiled and raised two eyebrows with as much authority as Queen Victoria.
Brian nodded
between laughing convulsions that were more fit for a five-year-old boy than a
man with three kids of his own.
I snorted, held
myself still on the floor, and tried to explain, “Of course we did. We broke it
about fifteen years ago playing indoor baseball while you and Dad were at work,
but we glued it back together to keep from getting into trouble.”
“You never noticed the cracks before?” Brain
inquired.
“No.” Mom laughed from her belly.
I met my siblings eyes and we
smiled at each other with our whole beings.
I remembered that the winter after we cracked the vase, my younger
brother was born and we shared our love of indoor baseball with him over the
following years. We never broke another
vase, and no squabble ever broke us apart.
I realized that some cracks help keep a family whole.
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| Brian and I dance at my wedding reception |
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| Kirby and I drink scotch |
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