The Hap-Happiest Time of the Year

When the political season kicks into a roar tantamount to a Hell's Angels splinter cell revving up all at once (you know, more than your average human being can handle without having an eye or nut or something explode) that's when the whole Herring tribe gets boiled down to our bare essentials. For as long as I can remember, the grand surfacing of the thing has meant that Dad gets in his 65-going-on-10 plaid pajamas, sits in front of the t.v. and watches the golden-boys and shucksters duke it out for what he says is going to be "a few minutes". He outwardly tries to discourage this balls-out, raccoon-eyed obsession, but it's like trying to stop Janie from watching Maury Povich and coming up for air just long enough to toss a Bugle Boy or what have you at my head (as I'm sitting there talking on the phone, studying maybe…) and saying, "Ey! Want to see something that'll make you puke your guts out?"

We never watch political debates and coverage for just a few minutes. This is because we, unlike the huge mackin' majority of viewers, make no bones about getting high on the--sometimes--geniusely choreographed cock-fight aspect of it. We, by the way, is Dad, my sister Janie, myself, a constant change-out of guests and the big bad eldest. At this point, Ginger will have already moved half her worldly good into her old bedroom and told her man she'll see him on the other side of November. She does this--I'm going to take a crazy stab in the dark--because her husband, Tom, doesn't possess a piddly slice of our stamina for debate, yelling and lobbing slippers at the t.v., running a white-gloved finger over candidates' answers and rebuttals, and communally working out our own script for what shoulda hit the fan.

Spectators calling themselves friends and relations frequently just happen to be palling around the neighborhood and decide to pay us pow-wow during the debates.

Dad looks on not quite in the style of alumnus watching a Conference game and sucking a vicarious glory out of it. No, the daddy-look here is more careful. One part admiration for the spunk and steel stomachs of these guys getting deeper than he ever cared to. One part "You poor dumb kids".

After a healthy serving of spiced Morgans in Dr. Pepper, Janie chimes into the commentary, and from the point on, I got to tell you, it's a peach plum gorgeous sporting event. It's the one time Ginger and Janie can't draw battle lines over their opinions (with the sole exceptions of legalizing grass and the precise extent of gun control) so their hollering back and forth takes on the brand-new tone of "Yeah!" "Well, of course you're right because that's what anyone with a brain thinks. [pointing at whoever on the screen, now] That prick-gobbling douche --"

At which point Dad--sopping with bourbon--pats Ginger on the crown and says, "Watch your sailor mouth around the child." Ginger looks over at me while pouring strawberry-vanilla-something-other wine that dribbles down the chin of her glass. Smiles. Changes the topic to: "I've been grinding my teeth like a mad woman all week and I can hardly open my jaw now. What should I do?"

My heart goes rabbity in the most ridiculous, proud way when they ask my opinion these things.

Janie answers her, "I'd say apologize to your husband, but I'm sure even when you can open your mouth, you don't --"

And because there's some crafty magic afoot in Herringville--with the warm brightness of the red and blue ads flickering, aunts and cousins socializing on our parameter, fumbling-smiling journeys into the kitchen for one more nip of the high-brow gut-rot--Ginger laughs.

I tell her she has TMJ and always has, to down a couple asprin when her blood returns to human thickness.

The scene around our living room consists of open salsa, ranch and cheese dip jars; bags of multi-grain tortilla chips; forgotten, replaced glasses with a half inch of pulpy wine at the bottom. Lights. Camera, Action.

The first year I weighed in with an opinion I know for certain they took as that of an adult, I had just been completely dismissed from a speeding ticket after the cop read the full name on the license. Because the ticket deal happened with a carload of my soccer compats watching, I was momentarily revered but thereafter saw my name come up in Sharpie digs on the chipped manilla bathroom walls a few times. My friends, I guess, think I don't recognize their handwriting.

When I got home from school and complained to Janie about this ("I didn't aaaas-kah! to get out of the ticket. Why are they being tools?") she gave me a smile I wasn't accustomed to seeing on her. The gleaming-eyed variety that just keeps repeating "You are cute and you are naïve." I finally stopped, flopped down on the couch beside her and said, "What?"

"Do you think I don't know what you're talking about? When me and Ginger were in high school, the old man was governor."

"How'd you guys handle it?"

"Way-ell, Ginger was student body president three years running, took over FBLA, headed the service committee for National Honors Society and I'm pretty sure ate lunch in the teachers lounge. In order words, she alienated everybody to let them know she didn't give a rat's twat what they thought." I nodded at her, asking "You?" "Oh, I beat their asses. Every day, for like three weeks, freshman year, I fought the biggest, ugliest bitches in the place. And every once in a while I lost --" Probably where the slightly recessed nick on her right cheek bone came from. "-- but I established an important point with all the little chicken-head hos out there." She is the only person I've ever met who can sound sage in the echelon of Sophocles while saying chicken-head hos. "I let them know that I had my own way of handling things that wasn't copied wholesale from the Herring Bible and my way didn't restrict me to solving things with my words."

Wanting to get this right: "You're saying I should beat up my friends?"

"Probably not. It'd be really funny if you did and everything, but you should just let them know, uh…" She hesitated in such a way that I could tell she wasn't just searching for a word; she was questioning her advice-to-be. Then, "Let 'em see how you distinguish yourself from us, if that's what you want to do."

If that's what you want to do. It was the scrolling banner in my head all day and into the night.

The next day, I told Dad and Ginger and Janie and Bread and Aunt Olive and my twin cousins, Ashley and Rache, that the politico chode on t.v. was lying--that I had personally read the voting record on immigration of his opponent--and Ginger looked it up on her Vaio on the spot and did that small, impressed down-turning of her mouth to say "She's right!" They looked at me like I had just answered correctly on a verbal pop-quiz that all the seniors about to graduate didn't know.

In the bathroom at school, I drew a thin black line through the words "is a fucking spoiled daddy's brat" which still allowed them to be viewed but left only the word "Clarissa" untouched. After it, I wrote "Herring." Nothing else; no snarky "and you're not" or anything. But after that I was spare any further opinions on the ticket dismissal.

© Jane Eisenhart, 2008

3:12 PM - 12 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Let’s hope I never have to operate on her.
Current mood: nauseated

For a while there, my sister Janie was turning up regularly with her shoulder blades practically split-level from her body and these hurricane-colored welts from her neck to the range of her chest you could see in wide-cut necklines -- beat-down cotton tees that wouldn't agitate her raw nerve endings under all those bruises. Shotgun qualification for the office. And though this has been nigh on forever-evah ago, it made me accustom myself to the sight of my sister dosing herself with extra-strength advil, holding an ice pack over the deformed left-overs of her shelf. I tried to come to terms with it the same way I would many many times after regarding shiners and contusions on the home-front: by reminding myself that just below the skim of My Sister HURT were the usual suspects: clavicle, scapula, top of humerus, reactionary tissue mopping up a spill and a few split-hair capillaries. Gravy.

Did reiterating all that crapola to myself make for even a par-middlin sister's-helper? Pfffft. I learned to chomp on my tongue through it; drills and tests eventually fizzed out (either that or she got her hands on some woozier-making candy than OTC -- not totally out of the question -- and grinned and bore it).

I'm thinking about this now because the other day, I came home to see her on the couch with the arm of her "If I had balls, they'd be bigger than yours" t-shirt pushed up, pressing a little mallet of cheesecloth into her upper arm. Suspicious red pin-pricks showing through.

"Is that a bullet wound?"

She wouldn't cop to this, even though I've got these nifty blue dials in my head called eyes and, with them, can generally draw conclusions. "Scuffed." Scuffed in the line of hush-hush superhero work, her against the more volatile bad cats of Pennsylvania.

I'd like to report I champed it this time -- seeing this kind of glitch on her. After all, it's been damn long and I've seen the thorax of a Donate-to-Science sucker sheered open when I tagged along to my host-daddy's autopsy class in Addis Ababa. (Summer vacation, right after high school, awesome and we-eird.) Didn't personally feel up the cadaver's organs to see if they would indeed feel like wads of those crisp, sucked-down marshmallows in hot chocolate packs, but not because I didn't repeatedly ask to do this. Which is all to say, I've become a cultured woman with intestines of steel. Yeah!

I fainted. Actually first announced to her and her partner Peter who was watching Murder, She Wrote next to her that I was going to hurl. Caught that sensation of all weighty bod-bits crashing to my feet, leaving the top half of my body all cloudlike in a way that was transiently codeine-sweet. Fainted on the way to puke. Over a scuff.

As the rest of the Herrings and our counterparts all know I bug my brains out when Janie, you know, stubs her toe or picks a scab off, they get high-and-mightily cheesed when I stay calm through their injuries. How to explain that? It's the same way I get when I hear that slight rasp stacked under her breathing from 18 years of smoking. Like I want to tell the universe or God or who/whatever to back off -- to quit taking things so seriously.

Anyway.

Zat would be zat,

Claire

3:07 PM - 12 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Scratching the study-plan
Current mood: insubordinate
Category: Life

I cannot think tonight because my toads-for-brains sister (Ginger the poli's who I'm talking about -- I wouldn't blaspheme the Janie like that) is downstairs with her henchcrew from the DA's office.  Let it be known that I'm within my god-given rights being irked because homegirl has her own house complete with her very own husband, and she so could've invited these people there.  To be fair, I know she hunkers down with her pals here and camps out for days on end herself here because Dad has this stegosaurus of a legal library.  The bad boy is to the gills with law volumes and it's convenient and she's a whore from the Crypt of the Evil Living who feels the tic to work All.  The.  Time.  At this house.  This house where she receives no mail.

I only bring it up, and complain, because I'm trying to study for a biology exam, and the economy most conducive to my studying is Nine Inch Nails or the Cranberries (as you can see, specifications aren't crucial) bringing this stiff bedroom air alive.  But uh-uh.  This apparently would offend her arch friendlies or some jazz.  Jazz -- that's exactly what I picture them bumping around to when they're forced to do something entertaining.

Hubbedda.  Let me stop.  The folk are normally fine, it's their head chief making beef where there need be no beef. 

When I gave up studying and flicked on the X-Box, she came up here and point-blank said that if she heard one more death wail of a ninja she was going to peel my cabasa open Hannibal-style and take the ice cream scoop to my brains.  Maybe she didn't say that.  But she gave me that look when I went downstairs for Malox and Zyrtec and gummy worms. 

Janie isn't here.

She and Ginger have been in their corners all week.  Striking with the eyes, recooping with some damn mean sarcasm.  I don't know what all that's about, and they're none too likely to tell me.

About to blow off Herringville for the night, run over to the boyfriend, Bread's, for a while and Mortally Combat him.  No, his folks weren't on the blotter when he was born; his real name is Brett.  Bread came about because his little brother Rocket had a rough go with the t's. 

Think I'll take him over some cupcakes.  Yesterday while he was here I wound up in a funk over nadda.  We were doing fine, I was telling him how you do spades, uh... somebody in the house cranked up 60 Minutes which never really got sizzling hot -- that was a nonevent.  Dad left to take his ladyfriend, Gail, out for viddles.  Ginger passed Janie at our cornflower blue kitchen island and listened to her tell some lascivious funny and then Ginge curled her fingers in like an arthritic woman -- you could tell her patience with all things middle-child was busted.  I asked what's up.  Stood there fifteen seconds wondering if I'd somehow failed to speak, if I was only catching a reverberation from the words because they were still in prenatal form in my head.  Didn't feel like tutoring on spades after that and, while he didn't call me out on being a snarling dog...

So, yeah, cupcakes.  Games.  That boy has a diamond heart. 

Peace,

Claire

5:18 AM - 10 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment