DIED 2008, 2012
MY COUSIN AND I are together in the playpen. We wear thick white diapers and rubber pants that leave red circles on our chunky thighs. The game is pull yourself up on the nylon mesh walls and scoot around the edge of the pen. Already my cousin is a gentleman; he lets me go first. Our mommies are pregnant again, standing at the counter in their tented maternity blouses, a cigarette burning in the ashtray. They are stuffing celery sticks with a mixture of cream cheese, Roquefort, and Worcestershire, a recipe left by their own mother before she ran off and died young of a heart attack.
Ten years later. In the half-finished upstairs room on Dwight Drive, my little sister and I are making my cousin show us his penis. We did the same thing the other day to a boy down the street; apparently we are taking inventory. My cousin remains gallant, if red in the face: if we really must see it, he will show us. His own little sister watches in awe, half admiring our terribleness, half bristling at her brother’s subjugation.
The big brother did everything right. Worked in his father’s paint store, did pull-ups and push-ups every morning, brought bagels to his parents’ house on weekends. His little sister did not follow his example. She meant no harm and I don’t believe she hurt a soul, but she never escaped the fallout of some early bad decisions involving a glass pipe.
Hearts are a problem in our family: A few weeks after his fiftieth birthday party, at his peak and prime, my cousin went into the bathroom one morning and did not come out. His sister continued paying for her mistakes for another four years. Possessions disappeared, blood sugar spiked, toes were amputated. The night her little dog disappeared, it almost killed her, then all the other stuff actually did.
Since we have to live as if our choices matter, perhaps we should not dwell on the story of my two first cousins. Unless you can think of something else it can possibly mean.