ADVERSARIES

Beyond telling the story behind the burn scar on his cheek, I realize that up until now I haven’t said much in my blogs about Doug, who’d never wanted to leave Minnesota in the first place. For one thing, he’d never been as intimidated by my father as I was. For another, he remembers his last year in St. Anthony Park, despite the divorce two years earlier, as a pinnacle in his life—a time when he excelled in school (where he was recognized both for his intelligence and his athletic ability), had good friends, and was popular, even with the girls.

But as the new kid at Whittier Elementary School—a kid with an unsightly scar—he was teased and bullied in a way he never had been in Minnesota. And from the time we arrived in Berkeley, he would treat not just Mom but me as an antagonist. Because I’d wanted to move to California—he would eventually tell me—he saw me as complicit in the loss of his happy life. In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:

I’d always thought that one of the reasons my brother was so angry at me for so many years is that, as his big sister, he saw me as a surrogate parent and expected me to rescue him from our abusive mother. He couldn’t see that I too was just a kid, as miserable and mixed up as he was, who needed rescuing as much as he did.

As I reread what I wrote twenty years ago, it strikes me suddenly that if my mother’s transformation was a shock to me, it was likely doubly so for my brother:

Throughout our childhoods she’d given Doug preferential treatment, indulging him in a way she never did me—out of guilt, I always supposed. From the time of his accident on, she had a double-standard of expectations for the two of us that she justified, saying I’d had a good beginning and he hadn’t, her psychological bias being that the very first years of life mattered in a way all the subsequent ones didn’t. I always understood that while she counted on me to be mature and responsible, Doug was free to be…well…just be a kid, even a wayward one. With him, she refused to ever set limits—even when, for example, he started throwing stones to break the neighbors windows in elementary school. Fortunately, my father had no such reluctance and provided the boundaries that, like all kids, my brother needed.

So perhaps some of the intensity of Doug’s anger at me for agreeing to come to California had to do with the cruel contrast he was experiencing between how Mom had treated him before and after the move.

If our mother was constantly inventing reasons to get angry at us, my brother developed his own m.o. with me: Knowing all my triggers, he would needle and bait me until he got a rise out of me—and once I got mad, he would lash back in ferocious affront, seemingly compelled to demonstrate to himself over and over again that I was the heavy. Apparently, while he needed a target for his anger, he also needed ongoing “proof” that it was justified— because all he would ever remember of these transactions was my eventual heated response, and all he would take away from them was the delusion that I was the source of all the contention between us.

Looking back now, he remembers how angry he was and has hinted to me that there were things he did back then that he doesn’t want to tell me. But he still insists I persecuted him for years. “How?” I ask. “What did I do?”

“You said nasty things to me—you said I didn’t have any friends!” he accused me.

Which left me dumbfounded because that wasn’t what I’d said to him; it was what he’d said to me. So I pointed out to him that it couldn’t have happened the way he remembered it because I was the one who withdrew from my friends in eleventh grade, while he always had a circle of good buddies he played sports with.

It wasn’t until we were in our thirties that he was finally ready to have a dialogue with me—and what surprised me most to discover was that we’d both felt, after the move to California, that we’d had to raise ourselves. “I always knew that Mom loved me, though,” he said. Astonished, I said, “I always thought she hated me!” And I couldn’t help wondering how different our adolescence might have been if he’d allowed us to be allies instead of adversaries.