The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race Read Online Free Page A

would go outside. But then a neighbor would inevitably complain about having to hear us. There’d be the eventual knock at the door.
    Neighbor: Lynn, listen. I’m sorry to bother you, but your kids are out there right now and they are
screaming
. About … my
God
, I don’t even
know
what. Sam just said something about a “fat bitch pig with a cowlick”—is that a thing?—and then Sara said Sam was a “fat fucking Jew who should die.” And anyway, listen: You know I love you. You know I love
them
. But I’ve got my own kids at home. I can’t have them hear that sort of thing.
    MY MOTHER WAS a reasonable woman when spoken to reasonably. If a neighbor complained, she would apologize to the neighbor and come outside to get us, to bring us back inside. At that point, we’d be forbidden from watching TV, and so at that point, we’d try to behave.
    But not for long.
    Eventually, inevitably, Sam would peek his head into my bedroom and say, “Carmen Electra has big hot boobs and Sara Barron is a big dumb bitch.” Or I would peek my head into Sam’s bedroom and say, “I’m hiding your inhaler, by the way. And if you have an asthma attack, I will
like
to watch you die,” and it would all start all over again.
    Sam and I stayed stuck in this cycle for ages and then instead of getting better, it got worse. The anger I felt toward my brother was compounded over time by my parents, who condoned his sexist posters by permitting him to keep them up.
    My dad defended his position.
    “Sara,” he said, “listen to me. Please. Your brother’s having a hard time. He’s going through puberty. He’s puffed up on steroid medication. Your mother tells
me
thatthe teachers tell
her
that he gets teased all the time, and I’m sorry—Sara, I genuinely am—but if he comes home and wants to look at girls, well, I just don’t have the strength to tell him no.”
    “ ‘
Girls
,’ Dad? Did you just call them ‘
girls
’?”
    “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I should have called them womyn. With a
y
. You are absolutely right.”
    I threw my hands up in exasperation.
    “Oh, like
that’s
gonna help! Your antisocial sexist son handles his
hatred
of womyn—WITH A Y!—by staring at
objectified
womyn? And you
let him
? I mean, my God. MY GOD! Way to go and raise a rapist! I hate you all! I’m so ashamed!”
    It seemed that my parents had gone from Maintaining a Neutral Position to Maintaining Sam’s Position. This upped the ante of my attack on Sam. I went from verbal sparring to property destruction. I snuck into his bedroom one afternoon and, with indelible marker in hand, defiled Carmen Electra. I bestowed unto her a bowler hat made of penises, and handfuls of wiry pubic hair.
    The ante? It was upped.
    In response, Sam destroyed my prized possession, a framed, autographed photo of Tyne Daly. He swiped it during my Student Coalition for Awareness meeting, and used my mother’s garlic press to break the frame. On the actual photo he wrote, “I AM A BITCH. I AM A DUDE.”
    Ante upped again.
    I showered his pillowcase in the oily detritus found in an empty sardine tin. He bit my sizable calf muscle to the point of bleeding. He punched my face. I punched his face. He snuck into my bedroom, dismantled a cardboard box, and drew a bull’s-eye upon it. Sam then took a shit on the bull’s eye.
    Ante upped again.
    I cried when I saw the shit on the bull’s-eye. Sam cried too, in an effort to drown me out, and our combined volume hit such a high level that a neighbor finally called the cops. The cops’ arrival felt dramatic enough to make Sam and me shut up. As it turned out, though, one of the guys was a friend of my mother’s from high school, so she, my mom, was able to smooth it all out.
    “Howard? Mehlman? Lynn Barron! Or, well, I should say Lynn Handelman! Highland Park High School class of 1965!”
    My mother apologized on behalf of her children. She was pitch-perfectly contrite, and Officer Mehlman was charmed and