One day a small round stone, hurled without warning from the Saccos’ backyard in a missile arc over the Rizzitanos’ yard and into ours, undoubtedly meant for me, struck Lexi in the middle of her forehead and laid her out flat. Though she didn’t lose consciousness, the rock left a dark-blue welt. It wasn’t long after, at the start of fifth grade, that we moved to a split-level house with mostly Jews for neighbors on Wooded Hollow Road, just on the other side of the hill, with the town cemetery atop it, between the two neighborhoods.
Not even my mother had ever given me the slightest indication of remembering or ever even having known about that time when I was punched in the neck, yet years later I found out that Lexi knew all about it. She told a girlfriend of mine when we’d come from New York on a visit. They had a conversation that I wasn’t present for, just my sister and Camila. My sister was telling her how terribly I’d been bullied as a child and that in fact we’d had to move from our house because boys in our neighborhood had almost murdered me. They’d left me for dead, and I’d almost suffocated to death, she told Camila. You mean they strangled him? Camila asked. And Lexi said, No, but they hit him so hard in the neck his throat closed. Lexi said she’d witnessed it and that she’d run to my side to help me. I didn’t want to let on what a disagreeable surprise it was to learn that my sister knew about that incident and to find out now, as an adult, in this way from Camila. Lexi had never been a part of my memory of what had happened. It felt like a too-intimate intrusion for her to be telling Camila about it now. At least that’s what I decided later, when I tried to understand why it had so angered me. I wondered if that was a sort of trauma effect or if maybe it was the corrosive acid of humiliation that had wiped her and anyone else but those boys and myself from what I did remember. That memory should only belong to me, a terror and pain I couldn’t or didn’t want to share, especially not with someone who would later make such annoying use of it and who seemed to have a much clearer and more complete memory of what the episode had looked like, at least, than I did.
Almost murdered me? I scoffed. That’s nonsense. I had enemies, but I don’t remember anyone almost murdering me.
Well, that’s what Lexi told me, said Camila. It sounded like something out of Lord of the Flies. I hated that book when I was a girl, because I used to imagine it was one of my own brothers those boys murdered.
Camila was half-English half-Cuban, and she’d grown up “posh” in England, daughter of a Tory politician. Her parents were long divorced, but she and her three brothers were incredibly close with each other and with their mother and also with their sometimes difficult Pa.
I’ve never asked Lexi what she knows or remembers about that episode. I didn’t say a word to her about what she’d told Camila.
Lexi has blue-gray eyes and is pale and blondish, her hair the tint of rain-soaked straw. My mother used to love putting my sister’s hair, when she was a little girl, in Heidi braids and coils and dressing her in frilly white smocks, like the girls from German coffee plantation families she remembered from childhood. She attributed Lexi’s hair and complexion to her golden-haired Spanish rancher grandfather whom none of us had ever seen a picture of, though now I know that Mamita’s abuelo was as far from a golden-haired gachupín as could be. Aunt Hannah had been blonde, too, but I only knew her after she’d gone gray; she was older than my father. Mamita’s natural hair is orangish and curly, even kinky, though she’d been dyeing it black and straightening it, usually doing it herself at the kitchen sink, for as long as I’d been capable of noticing. Now that her hair is so sparse, she doesn’t straighten it anymore but dyes it a soft maroon with a slight orange tinge, a sort of cranberry-orange English marmalade color. In photographs I’ve seen of her when she’s young, most of them black and white, Mamita wears her hair like a forties movie star in thickly flowing waves over her shoulders.
Lexi was tall for her age, and as a little girl, when I was still in my infirm years, she was faster than me, could hit a rubber baseball harder and farther. She was a straight-A student, too, and played violin in a children’s orchestra in Boston. All of this gave her the air of a favored child, even if her high-strung nature and explosive temper already hinted at some of the difficulties she’d have later on. Our father encouraged Lexi’s athletic gifts but Mamita didn’t at all, endlessly cajoling that a girl should always let the boy win in any sports competition, even bowling, as I recall still from a candlepin bowling birthday party when Lexi beat everybody and afterward was made to feel terrible. Mamita was still a captive back then of certain Latin American prejudices that hadn’t changed since even before José Martí’s epoch: a well-brought-up girl should have delicate, even coquettish manners and be dependent on the protection of men. Why should she be physically strong, was she being made to carry stacks of firewood or sacks of onions on her back or to till mountainside corn milpas? Later, to her lasting remorse and guilt, Mamita realized how horribly mistaken she’d been and dedicated herself to supporting her daughter in every way she could, even if it was too late now for her to become the college and Olympic softball star she probably could have been. Around when I was finally beginning to develop muscles and becoming more athletic, Lexi began having weight problems that seemed less attributable to genetic inheritance than to emotional states; in better times, at least into her thirties, she regained her youthful trimness, had romances and all that. But then would come the more difficult times, the causes of which she and my mother always kept secret from me.
Those girls sitting back there are going on about Pabla again and I don’t know what else, their laughter rising to happy shrieks. Every Sunday morning throughout my childhood, Boomtown was on TV, with its opening routine of Rex Trailer, the Boston Wild West singing cowboy in the bunkhouse futilely trying to wake up his snoring Mexican sidekick, Pablo. Staged before a laughing and cheering live audience of New England children, the show even had a contest for TV audience members to write in suggesting new ways for Rex to try to get that lazy Mexican out of bed. Pablo was one of my nicknames too: Hey Pablo, wake the fuck up. In the kitchen at a house party, Fitzy flicking lit matches at me and taunting: Wake the fuck up, you fucking Pablo. His thug friends around him putting on Frito Bandito accents, slurring: Pablo, Pablo, Pablo. Remember that? Good times. No doubt Fitzy was only trying to provoke me into a fight so that he could massacre me. I just had to keep my mouth shut, not say a word, and get out of there, that’s all. I slipped out of the kitchen, out of the house without saying goodbye to anyone, walked home in the cold dark.
My stomach just rumbled like wet pebbles inside a shaken bucket. I won’t be able to resist that hero much longer. If I were traveling in the other direction and had bought the exact same sandwich in an Italian deli in Boston, same meats, cheese, and garnishes, same bread, it wouldn’t be called a hero. It would be a submarine sandwich.
I know that some of the distance between Lexi and me, which I do regret, though apparently not enough to do much about it, is rooted in those childhood resentments and rivalries. My mother is always asking me to be a better brother to Lexi, and I’m always promising to try, but then nothing really changes. But when I suggest that I might possibly resent Lexi for other things apart from her having inherited all of our parents’ money and property, what do I mean? What is it that I actually resent? Why should I resent Lexi at all? If it were only the other way around, wouldn’t it be justified? That time when we were small, when Lexi took all the money out of our father’s wallet and planted it around our yard because she thought money trees would grow, it kind of established a pattern. True, Bert was always complaining and ranting about money, and she wanted to help. He must have just collected in cash from his bookie or had a run of winning trifecta boxes at Suffolk Downs or something, because he went totally berserk. It took Lexi a couple of days to own up. They went out and dug in the yard, under the shrubbery, in the vegetable garden, in the dirt around the trees and bushes he’d planted, but they only recovered about half of it. So adorable, right? Something to make any good boy feel even fonder and more protective of his little sister than before. I dumped on Lexi about it like she’d done the stupidest thing in the history of humanity. What, you think if that was how to make money trees grow, you’d know about it and Daddy wouldn’t? You think he wouldn’t have already planted money in the yard? Now look what you did. You’ve made us poorer.
Then