Loud in the House of Myself Read Online Free Page B

it’s the only way they can find out what’s wrong.”
    My mother said, “I know,” and cried.
    I lay on my side, buried one ear in the carpet, and covered the other one with my hand. I started tapping my foot. It calmed me to count the taps. I fell asleep there, wishing my mother would come and tell me she remembered me. I thought of the rabbit and how she’d once held my hair. I wished I were sick so I could have her back.
    Cameron came home from the hospital a week later, healthy as ever. He didn’t have meningitis. He looked the same as he had before he left, but my mother looked different. Her face was pale and she wasn’t smiling. That night my dad told me he was moving me to the bedroom down the hall and putting Cameron in the room across the hall from his and my mother’s. They could hear him better that way.
    This is how my mother came to belong profoundly and definitively to my brother. Many years later my dad would tell me she did the same thing to him when I was born—she stopped being his and started being mine. For some reason, she could only belong to one of us at a time.
    I watched as she attended with obsessive devotion to Cameron’s health. He turned three years old, then four. My mother continued to treat him delicately and fearfully, as if his life depended on her every decision. He parlayed her sympathy into a diet of frozen pizza (meaning he ate it uncooked) and chicken nuggets (cooked), eating almost nothing but these two items for the next several years. He crunched the ice off his pepperoni and my mother hovered over him making sure pieces of frozen meat didn’t get stuck in his throat.
    I grew separate from my family. At ten years old I went somewhere else. I started to focus on how I looked through the eyes of others, as if their critical gazes could help me fine-tune my image and one day be recognized by my mother for all my talents, intelligence, and compassion. I wanted her love, but I convinced myself I didn’t need it. I spent most of my time ensconced in one of the many fantasy worlds I created—Hospital, Mad Science Lab, and a reality I called “Baroney,” in which I was an orphan girl who wore a square-dance cancan and lived among the weeds and wildflowers in the empty field behind our house. In Hospital, I lay on my dad’s workbench in the garage reenacting the latest disease-of-the-week movie—the bench was my deathbed and I had cystic fibrosis, or multiple sclerosis, or muscular dystrophy. I flipped through my identities like a card catalog, selecting the one that fit that day, that hour, that minute. I learned how to disappear. This is how it started.

2
    THE FIRST TATTOO I got was for the first girl I loved. She had blue glitter eyes and I loved the way her skull felt through her face. In her room in the summer of 1994 we kicked aside the chicken-wire armatures for her papier-mâché sculptures and fell giggling into bed, whacking our heads against her ballet barre on the way down. She smoked Marlboros while she did pliés to the guitar practice of her ever-changing roommates. She pierced her own nipple in the mirror, and, with things thus put into perspective, I got a tattoo. It was that simple: something needed to be commemorated, marked. I had to do something so permanent I would no longer be allowed to break my promises. It all started with a tiny woman symbol, black, about an inch tall.
    It wasn’t just family life that made me retreat. It was also school. If you are an intelligent, overly sensitive, arguably mentally ill child, and you are bullied, you get sicker. Because I preferred reading to recess and drawing to sports, because I made the mistake of telling someone I was going home after school one day to play Mad Science (and that I had a special pair of Inventing Pants with Inventing Suspenders I wore to do so), the popular girls at my school relentlessly teased me. Although I now look at old photographs of myself and see a cute little blond girl, not