My sister calls from college to say she’s never coming home. She had a fight with my parents during her last visit. It was about her new boyfriend. They think he’s disrespectful. He didn’t shake their hands when he met them. And there were other things. She had just gotten out of the shower. They were on the bed when Mom walked in. “But we weren’t doing anything,” my sister says. “They are crazy,” she says. “I’m finished with them.”
“How am I going to see you now?” I ask the pinholes in the phone. A small volcano rises in my throat.
A few months ago, we all drove upstate to move her in at Vassar. Mom put the sheets on her bed. Dad unloaded the rest of the suitcases from the car. I wandered the dormitory hall, sliding my hand along the smooth surface of the wall, peeking into other rooms where other students were unpacking. Meanwhile, my sister sprayed her old boyfriend’s cologne on her sheets, a ritual she invented for another boyfriend two summers before, when we dropped her off at acting camp. “So I can smell him in my sleep,” she had said.
I hate her boyfriends. I hate them all. They keep her from me.
“Slut,” my mother called her once—the word from her mouth so sharp and shrill, I could hear her epiglottis vibrate. We were on Fire Island a summer ago and my sister was dating a lifeguard. The house where all the lifeguards lived for the summer had a strict policy: no female visitors. But she had visited her boyfriend, and word traveled easily down the wood-slatted paths from one beach bungalow to the next until it reached my parents.
“Slut.” The word traveled from my sister’s room down the hall to the living room, where I sat on the couch, trying to absorb The Golden Girls in their Florida languor. All pastels, breezy swinging doors, and satin robes. Every third line a joke.
My sister’s bedroom was narrow, shrunken by an el of twin beds, a chest of drawers, and three bodies behind a closed door. My mother, my sister, and my father. Every third line a joke. I listened for it. I tried to silence the alarm going off in my brain as their tempers rose to piercing levels.
The anti-harmony of their enraged voices, the slanted orchestra of hurled curses crashing and clanging against each other. It was frightening. Almost more frightening from afar than up close—the distance blunting meaning, turning screams into vibrations, tremors you could feel with your feet on the hardwood floor. The dog curled tighter, neck to tail. The TV spasmed with laugh track.
Down the hall, they boomed and thundered, knocking limbs against furniture. A closet door swung and screeched, books tumbled off a shelf in a hammering succession, the bedroom door buckled. I ran to it and pushed it open. It hit my father’s elbow. He turned to face me, teeth clenched. My mother’s jaw jutted out, her eyes widened—a threat to scram. My throat hitched, but I didn’t move. Stop it! I must have screamed, though my ears roared in their canals like the ocean down the street. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Their faces drained of pink. We stood encased in an icy silence for seconds, minutes. Hearts belted. One last book flung itself off the edge and landed split open, facedown. My father left the room, my mother following, slamming the door behind them. I was left alone with my sister, who was curled up on the bed. A spasming laugh track drenched in tears.
“It’s okay,” I said, climbing on the bed and covering her with my whole body, but I was thinking of myself, of what I’d done, trying to understand it. I’d overpowered them. I’d shut them down and made them listen to me. This is what it took: a willingness to walk inside the rage. An attraction to the danger. Bravery, is that what it was?
On that first ride home from my sister’s college, I watched the number signs on the side of the highway count down from a hundred, each one marking her distance from me. Back at home, her room still held her sleepy smell. Even the bed, the jewelry she left in a box by the window, the sweaters in her trunk, were still warm with her impression.
Now it is colder in her room, and quieter, too. I watch the ticker run across the TV with my father. I load the dishwasher with my mother. I swallow my temper and wait until everyone falls asleep.
The wooden block that holds the kitchen knives. The black plastic knife handle. The place behind the armchair beside the heater. The chalk-white scratches on skin. The thin beads of blood that bubble up. Always looking for new, clean surface areas to carve and chisel.
Sometimes I imagine I’m cutting the pretty faces of boys; others times I imagine they are cutting me. There are cuts for each mistake I’ve made, cuts for how lucky I am, how much I have that I don’t deserve, and for each bone that twists inside me, each imagined fantasy, too dark even to scribble on paper. And then come the research cuts: How hard is it to cut through skin, how deep can you dig, how close to the vein can you get, when does the pain become unbearable, what are you so afraid of?
After, there is a good burning. It feels like opening a tightly sealed jar, screaming as loud as you can without making any noise.