Chapter 2

My sister's name is Geraldine, after my grandfather, Gerald Oxley, who was famous. Well, not exactly famous, but he did play with the American Piano Quartet on the radio in 1944, and had his picture in the newspapers quite a bit when he entertained troops during the Second World War. He was my father's father and he died before I was born, but my father liked him a lot and still keeps his picture in a frame right up on the piano, next to mine.

My father takes after my grandfather too. He has perfect pitch and plays really well, although he is not a professional musician; he is a stockbroker, but he can do fantastic things with the keyboard, and he writes songs. He wrote "You Put the Oh in Love" and a rock group almost made a record of it last year, but the deal fell through.

My father wants me to play too, and I try, but my fingers seem to skip a lot and hit the wrong keys, although Mrs. Reinhardt, my piano teacher, says where there's life, there's a possibility of a Mozart.

Geraldine was born a year before I was, and at first they thought she was okay. Pretty soon, though, my mother noticed that Gerri couldn't suck her breast enough to get milk and when she cried, she sounded more like a toy you wind up with a key than a baby. She wasn't getting any bigger, either. When it was time to take Geraldine home from the hospital, she'd gotten smaller instead of larger. The doctors agreed she was impaired but couldn't agree on why. My mother told me that Gerri's condition was no easier to explain than it was to explain a birthmark. So Gerri, who was born damaged, stayed on at the hospital and my mother came home.

Geraldine didn't grow for a long time. After she did begin to grow, she could never learn to hold up her own head. My mother said if she didn't hold it up for her, it would flop right over like a flower in a downpour. Later, when other babies were sitting up, Geraldine just lay in her crib. She couldn't turn over and she couldn't seem to learn to hold things in her hands, or to laugh. My mother wanted to bring her home, but she got pregnant with me then and people started giving her advice. My mother says she's had so much advice she's gotten allergic to it; she says it makes her itch. Everybody told my mother to put Geraldine into a home where she'd be better off, and my father said, "Do whatever you think is best," and so Geraldine was put into the Roxbury School, which was closed down after two years for health violations, and then she was sent to the Woodstream Academy, which was very good but went bankrupt, and then the Lower River School, which was too overcrowded, and finally my parents had to send her here, to the Green Valley Regional Training Center, which is so far away we rarely got to see her. My mother said the Woodstream Academy had been better. One thing is sure: in all the years we'd been coming on holidays and long weekends, we'd never seen Geraldine looking like this!

I heard my mother gasp. My father turned white around his moustache. He said to the attendant, "What's happened to Gerri? Why does she look like that?"

The side of my sister's head was blue-black and there was a bump over her ear. What was even worse was that where the bump was sticking out, hair was missing, as if it had been pulled out by the handful or shaved clean off her head, leaving just a few wisps that couldn't cover the bulge.

The attendant and my parents moved off into the attendant's corner and got into a huddle; whatever it was that had torn the hair out of my sister's head was going to be super hush-hush, judging by the way they were whispering, looking her way and nodding. It was like they wanted to keep the secret right in that corner, like a wrecked piece of furniture.

As awful as her head looked, it didn't seem to bother Gerri. All this time she was holding on to my sleeve, or running over to pick up the suitcase and set it down again, or coming back and hugging me and wrapping her arms around my arm. You would think with all the moves she'd made, she'd be used to it. Or did she understand she was coming home? Geraldine has this funny laugh that sounds like it's climbing a ladder, up and up, higher and higher, like ho, ha, hee, and YEE! She was talking too, but when Gerri talks, no one understands what she is saying because–no kidding–the words all come out sounding like she's reciting the names of Santa Claus's reindeer: Dasha, Dansa, Blitzen–like that.

Sometimes, between words, Gerri forgets to close her mouth and just leaves it open. That's when she looks all wrong and funny; otherwise, when her hair is combed right, she looks pretty much like every other kid and a lot prettier than some of the girls in my class. Her top teeth are crooked, but mine were too, until I got braces, and although my father doesn't think it's necessary to put Gerri through all that trouble, my mother says she hopes we'll be able to get Gerri a toothpaste smile exactly like mine.

I couldn't help noticing that the girl in the next bed wasn't sleeping at all. She was watching us through the metal protecting bars, just lying there, not moving, not speaking.

When it was time to go, my father lifted the suitcase and held out his hand. "Come on, Gerri," he said. "Time to leave."

Gerri opened her mouth and stared, not moving.

"Come on, let's go," Dad said. He took a step in her direction and Gerri backed up and moved away from him.

"Hey, what's wrong?" Dad said.

Gerri made a sound in her throat. It sounded like "Donner" or "Donde" or "Dahnda." You could see her tongue moving in her mouth, like it was trying to find the right place to land. "Dahanda, dahan."

My mother rushed over to put her arm around Gerri. She pulled her very close. "What's wrong? Don't you want to come with us?"

"Dhanda." Gerri's mouth stayed open. It was wet in one corner. She'd backed right up against a locker.

My mother turned to me. "Neil, can you understand her? What is she saying?"

I didn't know. She could have been talking Czechoslovakian for all I was getting.

The girl in the next bed all of a sudden pulled herself up on the steel protecting bars and pointed to my father. "His moustache," she said. "She's scared of it."

"Of course!" my mother cried, sounding very relieved, and we all had a laugh. When Gerri saw everybody laughing, she joined in, and little by little Dad got closer and closer to her until she finally let him take her hand and move it up under his nose to feel the brushy new hair. Gerri's laugh went higher and higher and then she said, "Tash." I heard it and Mom heard it and Mom said, "Hey, I think Gerri said 'moustache,'" but when we asked her to say "moustache" again, she said, "Blixen."

More weird words come out of her when she saw that we were going to get into the car. She'd been for a few automobile rides, but she didn't get to go very often. I guess she felt about our old blue "ord" (the F has been missing off the back for about five years) the way I feel about roller coasters: that's how her voice sounded as she climbed in, like oh-boy-here-it-comes! Then for the first half-hour she never shut up; it was like having a tape recorder sitting right there next to me on the back seat. I even saw my father look over at my mother and smile a couple of times, and when we passed the cows we'd passed coming up out came the old ha-hee-hi-Yee, with Gerri pointing out the window and bouncing in her seat like she was sitting on a spring.

Then, oh gross, no warning, she just got quiet for a couple of minutes, put her head down, and threw up. Just like that.

Dad pulled off the highway and drove a few minutes until we found a gas station, and while my mother walked Gerri in the fresh air to clear her head, Dad and I went to the men's room to get some paper towels and to fill our thermos with water for the cleanup, and Dad all of a sudden turned to me and said, "Neil, it's not going to be easy," and I thought he was talking about cleaning up the back of the car and I said, "I know." But later, when we finally got home and had that awful scene in the elevator, I realized Dad wasn't only talking about the mess in our car.

Dad was trying to warn me about what it was going to be like living with Gerri.