Three Weeks With My Brother

Roasted guinea pig.

"Come on," he said, "let's try it. I had one of our guides order it from a local restaurant. We'll get pictures."

Looking at it made me feel suddenly queasy. I leaned toward Micah. "It still has the head. And the claws."

Micah shrugged. "It is supposed to be a delicacy. And besides, the painting shows that it's what they served at the Last Supper."

"You're not really thinking of eating it, are you?"

"I might taste it . . . it's the only chance I'll get. It's not like they serve it where we live."

"Really? You're going to take a bite?"

"I think I have to. And do me a favor."

"What's that?"

"Get a picture. For Alli."

"That's mean. She's going to scream."

"No, she won't. She'll think it's funny. And I'll get a picture of you taking a bite, too."

"Me?"

"Of course. I can't let you throw away a moment like this. Like they say, When in Rome . . ."

I looked at the guinea pig again. "It makes me a little nauseated to even consider it."

"That's why I'm here. To help you experience new things. To make you stretch."

"Gee, thanks."

"Hey," he said, shrugging. "What are brothers for? Now get the camera ready."

I did and snapped the picture as he took a bite. He did the same for me when I took a small bite, my stomach churning like a lava lamp on amphetamines.

"Now that wasn't so bad, was it?"

"I think I'm going to throw up," I admitted.

He laughed before putting his arm over my shoulder. "Think of it this way--it's just the latest in a long line of stupid things that we've done. And this time, it wasn't even dangerous."

During those first years in Fair Oaks, even as we began to test the limits of our courage through daredevil stunts, we continued to drift apart. Micah was spending more time with his friends, and I was spending time with mine. Occasionally, our friends would end up in the same place, but more often than not, they didn't.

Still, there were certain rites of passage that we both underwent, albeit at different times. With the fields and woods in our neighborhood disappearing as new housing developments sprang up, we both began spending more time at the nearby American River. There were bike trails and places to skimboard (sort of like water-skiing, only the board is larger and tied to a tree along the bank instead of a boat; the current keeps you upright). There was also a pedestrian bridge that spanned the river about forty-five feet above the water, and it was an accepted ritual of childhood to jump from the bridge into the chilly water below. Land wrong and the breath would be knocked clean out of you. I first jumped from the bridge when I was ten; Micah had done it a year earlier. Later, I jumped from the fence atop the bridge (intended to keep jumpers from jumping, of course), which added another ten feet to the jump. Micah had done that jump, too, well before I did. Our favorite activity, however, was riding the rope swing, and we could spend hours at it. Tied to the center of the bridge, the rope was stretched taut and with a board fastened to it. We'd jump from the bridge with the board between our legs, and clinging to the rope, feel the g-force as we swooped over the water at eighty miles an hour before swinging up toward the bridge again. It was dangerous and illegal, and frequently the sheriff arrived to confiscate our rope swing. As he did so, he'd eye me or my brother.

"Don't I know you?" he'd sometimes ask.

"I don't see how," we'd answer innocently.

Micah and I also climbed the bluffs alongside the river. They were nearly vertical and the dirt unstable; both of us slipped on more than one occasion, sometimes falling as much as thirty feet and nearly breaking our ankles and legs. Once, I nearly lost a finger bluff climbing--the cut went clear to the bone of my knuckle--but my mom told me not to worry because she knew exactly what to do. (She put a Band-Aid on it.)

But for the most part, Micah and I weren't doing these things together. If I went to the river occasionally, Micah went there almost daily. If I jumped from the bridge once, he would do it ten times and find a way to increase the danger (let's ride our bikes off it!). If I went over to a friend's house on Monday, Micah would be at a friend's each and every afternoon. Micah was simply more in everything, including the trouble he was beginning to get into. Though a relatively good student, he continued getting into arguments with teachers and fights with other students, and my parents were being called to the principal's office at least three times a year. I, on the other hand, spent year after year garnering perfect scores on exams and doing extra-credit assignments, all the while hearing teachers remark, "You're so much easier than your brother was." And I read constantly. Not only the encyclopedias and the Bible, but almanacs and atlases as well. I simply devoured them and, strangely, the information just seemed to stick, no matter how obscure or irrelevant. By the sixth grade, I was prodigious with trivia: If someone pointed to any country in the world, I could recite statistics, name the capital, tell you what the major exports were, or recite the average rainfall months after skimming the information. Still, it wasn't necessarily something that other kids my age found too impressive.

A group of us might be standing around at recess, for instance, when one would say to one of the others:

"Hey, how was your camping trip at Yosemite?"

"Oh, it was great. Me and my dad pitched a tent and went fishing. Man, you should have seen how many fish we caught. And we saw the sequoias, too. Man, those are the biggest trees I've ever seen."

"Did you hike around Half Dome?" another would ask.

"No, but the next time we go, my dad says we can. He says it's supposed to be awesome."

"It is. I did that last year with my dad. It was so cool."

Meanwhile, noticing me standing quietly off to the side, someone might try to include me.

"Hey, have you ever been to Yosemite, Nick?"

"No, I haven't," I'd answer. "But did you know that even before it became a national park in 1890, the land was actually given in trust to the state of California in 1864 by the U.S. Congress, and signed into law by Abraham Lincoln? You'd think that with the Civil War in full swing, he wouldn't have had time for something like that, but he did. And in the end, the use of land trusts set the stage for Yellowstone to become the first official national park in 1872. And did you know that Yosemite Falls, which are the fifth tallest in the world at 2,450 feet, is actually made of three separate falls? Or . . ."

My friends' eyes would glaze over as I went on and on.

Yep, that was me. Mr. Popularity.

My sister, too, was becoming her own person. Like me, she got along with her teachers, although her grades usually hovered around a C in nearly every class. Though my parents were both college graduates and viewed education as important--my mother had received her degree in elementary education, and my father was a professor--neither seemed concerned about my sister's academic performance. They didn't push her to work harder, nor did they help her with her studies, nor did they mind if she brought home poor grades, the reason yet again being, "She's a girl."

They did, however, enroll her in horseback riding lessons, thinking a skill like that would serve her well in the long run.

The more I excelled in school, the harder I tried to do even better, if only to stand out from my siblings. Somehow, I believed that my parents would then shower me with the attention I felt was given automatically to my brother and sister. If Micah got attention because he was the oldest and my sister got attention for being the only girl, I wanted recognition for something, anything. I yearned for moments when I could be the center of attention at the dinner table, but no matter what I did, it never seemed to be enough. While I never doubted that my parents loved me, I couldn't help but think that had my mother been given Sophie's choice, I would have been the one sacrificed to save the other two. It was a terrible thing to believe--and as a parent now, I know that attention isn't the same as love--but the feeling wouldn't go away. Even

worse, I began to notice those moments with ever increasing acuity. In the fall, when it was time for new school clothes, I would get a couple of new items and Micah's hand-me-downs; both Micah and Dana would receive far more than I did. And my mom, if she acknowledged my feelings at all, would simply shrug and say that "Micah's clothes are new for you." As I grew older, both my parents seemed oblivious to how a child like me would view their actions.

I'll never forget one Christmas when we woke up to find three bikes under the tree. Christmas was far and away the most exciting day of the year for us, because we seldom got anything we wanted the rest of the time. We would count down the days and talk endlessly about what we wanted; that particular year, bikes were on the top of the list. Bikes meant freedom, bikes meant fun, and the ones we'd owned previously had become unusable through sheer wear and tear. When we crept out to the living room, the tree lights were glowing and we stared at our gifts with wonder.

Micah's bike was new and shiny.

Dana's bike was new and shiny.

My bike was . . . shiny.