My older sister does not know profanity unless she is, briefly, crazy. From inside her panic attacks, she’s a different person (aren’t we all?), a woman who knows how to call my mom bitch and how to identify herself as pissed off.
This is starkly different from her normal idiom, which tends to echo the quite young and quite old women, not all of whom speak fluent English, who have cared for her over the years; sometimes I hear our grandmother and great-grandmother in there (warsh, my stars!, tickled pink), plus expressions from 1930s Shirley Temple joints and Barbie PSAs about minding your Ps & Qs. For my sister, profanity is not a matter of manners. The little girl of her can’t physically accommodate fuck you unless her body feels that it is in danger, in which case she leaves it for one better suited for the fight. Afterward, she returns to the little girl body that won’t repeat the bad words that once got our mouths washed out with soap, unless as a part of her always-heartfelt apology. I’m sorry I called you a bitch, Mom. I’m sorry I called you a fuck you. The bad words disappear into the place where trauma goes when it’s not standing between us and the danger, demanding satisfaction. Like all traumatized people, my sister is sometimes Two-Face, Mr. Hyde, Venom.
But even those bad words—most of them learned from me when I, sick of helping to enforce the ableist infantilization of everyone tasked with caring for her, allowed myself to begin using them in her presence—can’t do everything. Mere obscenity was not enough for her fury when COVID was new and it became clear that, for the second climate change-driven disaster to threaten her safety in our adulthood, our father didn’t care. Once again he abandoned her, and at a time when the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Last spring, she called me five or ten times a day to rage, to demand to know where our father was, to tell me what she wanted to do to his body in retribution for this final, unimaginable betrayal.
I feel like I could call him a dragon.
I want to put hot sauce on his tongue.
I want to take out all his veins.
I wrote down her curses because they were a stark and beautiful about-face from her awkward use of normal profanity, and because until last spring, I had never heard her speak about our dad in such a way. She had not expressed anger with him since we were kids. Even back then, she was restrained in a way she wasn’t with our mom. She was afraid of him—we all were. We were not going to gamble with our dad, who already could take us or leave us. We were not about to lose him by making demands.
Last year was very hard, but I think the hardest part was listening as my sister was at last confronted with a truth I had the luxury of learning at a much younger age: that her father did not care if she lived or died. He’s alone without me, his daughter who loves him, she told me. He makes me feel like a maniac! I feel like I'm losing my mind. Alternating between claims of love and desire for his literal blood, with language that was baroque, biblical, voluminous, more mature than any I had ever heard her use, she seemed to be occupying a new body, one that was both as innocent as the girl who needs to hold my hand to cross the street, and as ancient as only a survivor can be.
At the time, I wrote in my journal that I felt like a failure, like my whole life was a mistake. All I could do was listen while my child—because my sister is also my child—grieved for a loss that happened the very day she was born wrong.
My heart is broken, my journal reports her as saying sometime last May. Lord help me. Will you pray with me for daddy to come back, brother? So I prayed to god with her, doing my best to keep hold of the messaging, falling into a cadence that had gone rusty after 15 years away from the church.
Please god, I began, Please help change Dad's heart...
and make him love me again, she interrupted.
and if not, I gently persevered, help all of us to understand that sometimes...
…make him go back to the way he was, my sister soldiered on. And make him love his daughter again. In Jesus’ name…
I remember lying on my bed in my Brooklyn apartment, rubbing the burn out of my eyes. Why can't I be better at this? I wrote. No answer.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
wow i sure do love you
Beautiful. Thank you.