Role Model

            The scene is fairly simple.  I am outside chasing the squirrels in the walnut trees, the trees that came with the house that my mother rented when my parents divorced.  I am eight years old and simple-minded.  A grasshopper discovered in the lawn, a blackberry plucked from the backyard bush, or even a muddy puddle can keep me occupied for hours.  I am toothy-grinned, stringy-haired, and scabby-kneed.  My kamikaze ways on the sidewalk will carry on far into my middle school years, leaving me with a high threshold for pain and scars that I regret despite the glory I knew in my younger days.

            My sister Allison, only five years old, is playing in the yard as well, but with her bargain-price dolls and their combs.  Soon she will drop a doll on the ground and her tears will begin.  I do not like her right now, and I won’t until I’m in my later years of high school when she joins my silent, violent battle against my parents.  She is the one who will remain unscathed from my parents’ separation because she was young, and I made sure she never heard the things I wasn’t supposed to.

            My mother is coming back from the Texaco down the block, returning with a carton of milk.  My father could easily chug a gallon of milk, and I am working hard to emulate him in that respect.  I hear her car pull into the driveway, but I do not stop my squirrel hunting.  Allison is the one who rises to greet our mother at the garage gate.

            It is only when my mother screams that my attention is torn from the squirrels and to her.  Later my mother will say that the gate was stuck, and when she pushed on it a protruding screw caught her arm, cutting deep and brushing bone.  She denies the rest of the events that happened that day.

            I have the longest legs in the family, and I reach my mother just as Allison gets there.  Spilt milk runs down the sidewalk.  Blood runs down my mother’s arm.  Tears run down my sister face.  My mother is cursing a blue streak.  As in most times of emergency, I am completely mute.

            I have forgotten how we got into the house.  It is easy to guess that my mother walked straight to the bedroom, leaving the milk to sour on the driveway asphalt.  Allison, my terrified, beautiful sister, undoubtedly trailed after her, bawling.  I know that I was the one who snatched the bandages from the bathroom, but even I don’t truly know how my grubby fist became home to the pristine white gauze that so soon bloomed red.  Mute and operating on numbing calm, my young self had one thought in my mind, and that was to help my mother.

            I walk into my mother’s bedroom.  She is sitting on the bed with an old shirt wrapped around her forearm.  I am a little surprised by the tears on my mother’s face, but I am surprised more at the swell of anger that rises within me.  I have always hated it when I shed tears, but deep within my heart a sense of wrongness wells.  Eight years old and still a child, I know that parents are not, under any circumstances, allowed to cry.

            “This is bad,” my mother moans as I come towards her with the bandages.  “This is really bad.”

            Allison is looking at me as if I am able to fix this situation.  I am the older sister, the one who falls down but doesn’t cry, the one who picks blackberries for her because I don’t mind gouging my hand on the long spiky thorns.  I can take care of small tribulations.  However, this is something that I cannot help, and I do not know how to help.  This frustrates me immensely.

            I silently hand my mother the bandages.  She presses one to her gory forearm and then cries out in pain.  I stand dumbly, watching as she begins to dress the wound.

            “Christ, I think it’s broken.”  My mother is sobbing now.  “Emily, go get your father.  Get Daddy, he’ll know what to do.”

            Get Daddy.  The words ring in my ears.  I stare, frozen in place.

            Daddy.  Daddy doesn’t live here.

            My mother hasn’t even realized her mistake yet.  She is still asking for my father, long gone for a year.  Allison’s face is wild with confusion.

            I feel anger rise in my throat.

            “He’s not here,” I say tersely.

            My mother’s eyes widen, but before she can say anything, I am already walking away.  It is the first of many times I will leave the house in a rage.  This is the only time she won’t follow me.

            This is the beginning of the next two days in which my mother will sob over her broken marriage.  This is the beginning of Allison’s ignorance as I protect her from hearing or seeing things that hurt.  This instance has brought destruction to my little family and sparked such a temper inside my soul that I will spend the next decade angry with the world.  I will return to the house and begin taking care of my sister when my mother cannot; I will also become the caretaker of my mother when she cannot help herself.  This is the beginning of my role as the mature child, the one with strength.  It is a role that I do not want—it is both a label and a prison.