Benjii (Read post for explanation of new organizational strategy.)

Okay, I've figured out what I'm going to do: for now, I'll title each section, like separate chapters. And to make it flow better, I'll stop including little parts of sections at the end of the particularly unpleasant parts. I realized I was doing that because I was afraid of the reactions I might get by ending on a bad note. But this story -- a lot of it isn't pretty, and you guys know that, and nobody's making you read it, of course. So I'm going to stop feeling like I'm doing something wrong by telling it like it is, and tell it like it is.

In the interest of continuity, I'm going to re-post part of the last section in order to start from some kind of clear beginning. So here goes:

The kid I remember most from the time on Plum Street was a little boy named Benjii. He was older than me – eight or nine to my five and six – but he was a stick of dynamite with unruly red hair, blue eyes, and a mass of freckles. He was always doing something so decisively boy.

Benjii would play house with me, but only if he was allowed to be the daddy or the doctor and describe the imaginary bodily functions in as much detail as he could possibly muster. Puke and poop were his favorite things. So was dirt. Benjii also loved to boss me around like I was his own personal slave, but I didn’t put up with it much. We quarreled, and I learned to hold my own in a fight, for which he held some grudging respect for me. Soon enough, we were able to play together quite amicably for long periods of time.

One summer, there was a construction project of some kind going on in the empty lot next door to my house. This meant that right on the property line, in the edge of the yard where the grass got scraggly, was the most glorious thing Benjii had seen in his entire life up to that point: a huge pile of dirt. A mountain of it. So much dirt you could play in it for years and never, ever make a dent in its awesomeness. We used to climb it together. I’d take off my leg braces – they were white, plus getting dirt down my legs was no fun – and Benjii would pull and tug while I kicked and squirmed and clawed my way to the top, reveling in the feel of cool soil beneath feet usually clad in plastic.

We made up a game: we were a powerful king and queen, and the dirt pile was our throne. Our kingdom was everything we could see. We’d take turns describing our royal subjects and all the awesome things we had built or were going to build, and all the rules we would enact or revoke. Benjii was obsessed with building the kingdom’s army into a military machine powerful enough to conquer the entire globe. I decreed that there would be lots of puppies and babies and ladies in pretty dresses, and also all the elf-shaped cookies I could ever care to eat every day until the end of eternity. We had truly stupendous plans. Then a fight would break out over whose turn it was to place something in the kingdom, or whether or not something one of us said was dumb, and we’d end up throwing dirt clods at each other like little animals. I always had to concede to Benjii’s point of view on these particular fights: I was afraid to scramble off the dirt mountain by myself, and if I didn’t let him win he’d threaten to go inside for Kool-Aid and leave me stranded on the throne. He got more than his fair share of turns that way.

I’m pretty sure I only ever spent two summers in the house on Plum Street, but I remember them well. The simplicity of them was such a gift: playing in the dirt with Benjii, running around in the sprinkler with Matthew. I used to love to watch the water from the sprinkler catch the afternoon sun and turn orange. I thought it was magic water. It was so pretty, and I’d dance underneath it and catch it in my mouth and laugh and laugh. Sometimes my mother would sit between us on the porch swing and read us stories out of a big green-and-gold book of fairytales that had Jack climbing the beanstalk on the cover. There was a beautiful glossy picture in it of a blonde girl in a pretty dress on a green hill with some swans. We used to play games, too: Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, one about Benjamin Bunny. My mother would help Matthew move his pieces and make sure he didn’t cheat.

My little brother was so cute when he was small. We’re only three and a half years apart, but I always felt so much bigger than he was. Some of it was natural, surely: being older, I of course felt superior. But there was another aspect to it, too, one that I think came from how schooled I was in the ways of power and pain. I wanted to protect him. He was mine, and I was going to keep him safe.

My mother doted on Matthew. I never really had to worry about her hurting him, but I did anyway: I was a little worry factory when I was a kid. We had our disagreements like any other siblings – we tattled on each other, we fought over toys ,we argued over who got to be the bad guy when we played Cops and Robbers and suchlike – but I vowed to protect him even though I was so often jealous of all the attention he got. Matt and I were friends when we were kids. Good friends, and we loved each other even if we never actually admitted it.

In the house on Plum Street, Matt took apart his Hot Wheels and scattered the pieces throughout the house, and then cried because he couldn’t fix them again. He opened the box where I kept all my Barbies and ritually dismembered them: he’d pluck out a doll, twist off its head, pull off its legs and arms and then throw all the pieces back in the box before reaching for the next one and doing the same thing. He’d go through every doll in the box that way. I used to open the lid and scream bloody murder. I had a lot of Barbies with stunted necks back in those days, a lot of Barbies with the wrong torsos or two left arms.

We used to go on walks in the summer, too. These I didn’t like much: I was expected to trot happily along without ever slowing down or getting tired or having a shoe come untied or a brace start to pinch. There was a place in town where a bridge ran over a shallow creek. In the creek were goldfish, and when the weather got hot and the water started to recede, they all congregated in the same spot and you could see them swimming there plain as day, flashing in the sun. Matthew was fascinated. He used to beg and beg to go see them. The walk was maybe a mile either way. It exhausted me. My feet would get sore. My legs would sweat inside the braces and start to itch like mad. It never took long for me to fall behind, whining that Mommy walked too fast, that I was hot, or thirsty. She’d snap at me: hurry up; stop dragging your feet or you’ll ruin your shoes; put your arms down right now, because you look like an orangutan. Everything about my disability made her angry: the characteristic spastic gait, the slowness, the bad balance and falling, the stopping to re-fasten a strap that had popped loose on one of my braces. She’d yell at me to hurry up while intentionally distancing herself from me. I embarrassed her; she told me as much. Sometimes she’d stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk and yell at me till her eyes bulged. People stared. I crawled with shame. When we moved out of town, one of the biggest reasons I had to celebrate the relocation was the fact that I didn’t have to go on those stupid walks anymore.