They said I'm nothing like Amy? Who is they, Mister Dex? Your Mother? Like I'm the bad and Amy the good? Do I look bad? Like I look in the mirror when I get up the morning and I see bad? I don't think so.
No I have not seen Lay Miz. Would I be coming with you if I did?
Though you are mad good-looking. For a Korean lad that is. But I hope you're not taking me out because I am and you are too. Siblings under the yellow skin? I don't think so. No spikee dee lingo Dex, no spikee any of that shit. When I get the money I am gonna cut the slanty eyes right out of my face.
Know what I like best? Talkee talkee. Little Miss dog-eating bitch that never shuts up. God I love Margaret Cho.
What are you Dex, like at Harvard? Stanford? M.I.T.? Amy was Brown. Nose. Oh man, you go to City University? A loser like me?
I even remember the smell of Amy's breath! I was just a fat little baby in Inwood where we lived until Daddy bought enough bodegas to get us out of Ellwood Street, no'ahm saying? Colombians playing dominoes in the street, smoking cigars, screaming they asses off (those folks don't even know how to talk normal!). Just a few of us slanty eyes, cowboys among the Indians. Amy and me in the one bedroom, Mommy and Daddy on the plastic-covered living room convertible.
And we would be playing in the school yard across the street with Mama sitting on a chair reading the TV listings, and I would scrape my knee and Amy would bend over me with her First-Aid doctor's kit with the Bugs Bunny band-aids and paste them all over me and breathe all over my body and cradle my head in her arms, her dress stained from making bahnchahn with Mom all day, eyelashes fluttering over crossed eyes like I was a runnedover cocker spaniel. "Oh God Wendy. Are you OK? Talk to me!" Her breath smelled like Altoids! She didn't even have to eat Altoids to smell like Altoids, her stomach was a Altoid factory!
But so that was how I spent my earliest years: figuring how to kill her.
Ooo I shock the Harvard boy! Sorry but you still look Ivy-covered to me. But I loves you anyway. Can't you take a joke?
Not exactly kill her Dex. Make her suffer. You can understand that can't you: if one gets all the good shit because she was there first, what is the other going to do? Try to take it away. That's good Dex. You learning.
When Amy was out the room, I would go through her closet and put a rip in her dresses or accidentally on purpose put Little Pretty Pony too close to the stove and light the plastic mane so it spit sparks, that shit is like dangerous, man! And Ma got a weak-tea-colored look and Amy threw herself on the floor and flopped around like a fish out the fish bowl. I knew what she was thinking: she wanted to kill me! But I was clinging to Mama's apron strings while she talked dog talk, yipyapyup, and Amy got crazier and crazier till it looked like somebody lit her hair, and she was gasping and groaning so Ma run for the inhaler and Amy like sat propped up in a kitchen chair trying to breathe deep, and Ma was on the phone talking to the doctor's retard nurse ("My daughter, my daughter! Can't jew understand no English?") and Amy ends up in Jewish Memorial laying on the pillow so small and pitiful, I at bedside biting my lip and winding the lift handle back and forth. For a second Amy makes a face like she ate a mouthful of shit. I knew what she was saying. May be fat but I ain't stupid. But I just stood there tut-tutting, such a terrible thing happened to my sister, won't somebody please join our pity party? All I really wanted was to loosen her up, you can see that Dex can't you?
So where is this thee-ater we're going to? You wouldn't be taking me to where you take all your hotties? That really gives me a thrill!
But then so we move to a big house in Riverdale with screen doors and attics and rooms you go into just to look at bare walls. Amy gets into Bronx Science, me to shitty old IS 24 down the hill on the bad side of Broadway. Everybody Latina or niggers, I the only dogeater in the class.
One day the bitches surround me in the school yard. Hey girl, they say, where you live? Fuck it, none of your business. Don't give us that shit, we tell you where we live, you fucking well tell us where you live. But I knew if they ever like see the house I live in on Iselin Avenue they going to beat the shit out of me before giving me a aspirin. So I tell them I live on the street. Oh girl, don't bullshit us. We see what you wearing ain't from no Salvation Army. Where you get them from? They start pulling on my hair and slapping me upside the face. I mean it Dex this is one tough school!
Then Cecile comes along. Fat chick like two grades ahead? Michelin Man hips and big hippo space between her front teeth? She sees me like crouching down protecting my titties, and her little eyes get even littler. "Look at the little Chink. Ain't she cute?"
That was it for me, Dex. I teamed up with the lezzies. Don't look at me like that. I know better now but then I was just a little kid, sisters all bigger and older and blacker than me. Finally I had friends!
Sometime Cecile and me made out in dark places. "I don't really know how to do this, Wendy. But you are mad pretty. Like a China doll." Me? Pretty? She really meant it! We would be sitting under the stairs or in the girls' bathroom, and I had to like put her hands where they were supposed to be but wasn't, pull her head back, her legs apart, and she was huffing and puffing like the little girl I was. Then I leaned back and sucked her tongue into my mouth-this gross you out Dex? But you got to understand. I had so much love in me. I couldn't let it go to waste!
Along the way I kind of forgot that I wanted to kill Amy. She gets into Brown and majors in Political Science, I in Substance Abuse. The second year she is up there, Daddy gets the bright idea for me to get a taste of college life. Yeah right.
At the bus station Amy is waiting for me, holding hands with Mr. Perfect Dogeater! Excuse me Dex, you almost perfect but he was a preppie asshole you wouldn't even want to be.
"This is my boyfriend Kevin," she says, but she is looking real bad, like she been in bathwater too long.
Boyfriend Kevin is one wack motherfucker: smiley like a clown, sweat dripping down his piggy face, little piggy feet in bright white Adidas. He has this annoying twitch so it looks like he is coming onto you when really he couldn't give a fuck. Gives me a tour of the campus: "This is where John F. Kennedy stood (wink) when he visited in 1963. This is where the Reverend Brothers Brown put down the first brick (wink) of Brown University. This is where Roger Williams, extreme radical (wink), welcomed all the dissenters of America." That wink is like driving me crazy! Can't look at it and can't not!
"You fucking him?" I ask her.
"That is none of your business," she says in her fancy voice. "And must you talk like that?"
"You wants to be Mr. President Asshole's First Lady?"
If looks could kill I was road kill Dex.
That night the preppies was standing around drinking Absolut with cranberry juice, listening to U2, shit like that, very bullshit grownup talk about the Stock Market and their fucking futures. Tell me one thing Harvard boy: why do all smart people talk so much about nothing? Boyfriend Kevin is the loudest of all: patting everybody's backs like he is running for Junior Dogcatcher. Amy comes up and gives me a wet kiss. Pulls me off the sofa and calls out: "Hey everybody! This is my baby sister. I'm crazy about her, and you should be too!"
Tears of fucking joy in my eyes. Maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe I fucked up my whole life. Maybe she is my one and only sister-girlfriend.
But then President Asshole grabs Amy and gives her a tongue kiss all the way down to her tonsils. Amy pretends she likes it, but I can see that she is taking air in hard and holding the crying back.
He comes up to me and smiles like a knife cutting meat. "Having a good time, little sis?"
"Oh sure Mister Asshole. Excuse me, President Asshole."
"You're too fucking cute for words."
He pinches my cheek like he is tearing the flesh off my face! Starts parading me around the room by my fucking cheek! Tears pouring out my eyes. All the preppies thinking that we are just one big happy family.
I don't fight back, Dex. Not because I can't. But his cold eyes behind the smile are saying he could kill me for a penny. That paralyzed me, turned me into a girl!
I run to Amy's bedroom, she sees me crying and runs in after me. "Oh, Wendy. Are you feeling left out? You poor thing. Everybody thinks you are so awesome. Kevin said to me, 'Where did you get a sister like that? She could teach you a thing or two.'"
Hear it Dex? No way that Kevin said that. This was her chance to tell the truth but what did she do? Fill the room with bullshit!
She like married the sonbitch! Giant wedding in the New Rochelle Yacht Club: flowers as big as your head and a band and dj, duk and chestnut strings, President Asshole's stomach making his cummerbund stick out like a money belt: "I can't express enough gratitude to Dad for his Flower of the Orient. I promise to water it like the prize orchid it is!" Dad rocking back and forth in his alligator shoes, greasy hair like a Indian needing a shampoo. Does he realize that maybe he could like protect his other little orchid now? I don't think so!
Amy and Kevin become the first dogeating couple in the history of the Harvard Law School! But right away rumors start flying that she is like cracking up. Living on toast and kimchi soup. When the semesters break and snow is on the ground, Amy comes home for a visit. Girl looks like a walking pencil. Doesn't even notice the weird shit I have taken pains to put up on the walls of my room: Hannibal Lector face-masks, blow-up of Dad's colonoscopy, pictures of the Ten Most Horrible Skin Diseases.
"You okay girl?" I say. "You look like shit."
She grabs my hand and puts it next to her cheek.
"Wendy, I want to be a good big sister. I want to get to know you better. Show me how you live!"
Dex, was that bitch wack or what?
We get into the little VW Golf with stick shift that Daddy gave me (he got lots of cars Dex, maybe he'll give you one someday if you marry his daughter) head down to the Bulgarian Bar on Broadway and Canal, do you know it? Just a funky old place with a good box and waitresses right off the boat from Bulgaria, wherever that is.
"Wow this is cool," Amy says. "They don't have places like this in Cambridge." After a few tequilas straight up (that bitch knows how to drink!), she pulls me onto the dance floor.
Some Latino tries to hit on her but she gives him the flared nostrils: I'm dancing with my sister, motherfucker. Wait your turn! But Luis knows what he wants. He is cool. Got time. Over my shoulder Amy is batting her eyelashes just enough to keep the dude lit. That is when I realize that I do not know this bitch at all.
Soon we are drinking in a booth with Luis or Pedro Whatever. Amy says she works in a Pinky nail salon on Broadway, just an ordinary Korean girl living in the Bronx with her sister, me, who is like the smart one going to college. Tell me Dex, why would she want to turn things around like that?
Not that Luis gives a fuck. He knows where he is heading. Right up her pants. When he invites us back to his place, I kick Amy under the table: This is not safe, sister, gonna be a gangbang tonight!
Luis' building on 165st Street and Audubon Avenue stink of Roach Motel but his own apartment is all nice and clean. He is a subway driver or shit like that, takes care of his old Mama who is snoring in one bedroom while Luis and Amy go into the other. Me all alone in the living room with the remote and a rerun of Six Feet Under. I hate the sound of love through the wall, Dex. Makes me feel so lonely. And what was the shit about getting to know me better? Soon they come out the bedroom with their heads bowed at the ground.
"Was he mean?" I ask.
"No."
"Couldn't get it up?"
"No."
"Then what the fuck is wrong?"
But you can see that whatever it is she wants, she didn't find it on 165th Street.
"You coo stay over," Luis says to the floor. "Both yous."
But we are out the door before she has a chance to look back. He shrugs his shoulder and says something in Spanish like who the fuck cares.
When we get home Amy and me trip over each other's feet, shushing, laughing, shushing some more. She falls down in the dark and I like pick her up, light like a cat. Tiptoeing up the front stair but then she says Uh oh and bolts upstairs to the bathroom. Both of us giggling, Shut the fuck up! Kneeling together and like praying before the toilet. Moaning and groaning and vomiting but laughing in between.
Afterwards, when we are laying in my bed with one of Mom's washcloths on her head, Amy finally spills the beans. How Mr. President Asshole likes to make it with blonder the betters, dyed or not makes no difference. Fucker loves Xvideo.com, watches it on his iPhone and jerks off whenever he has a free moment and a free hand. One afternoon Amy walks in on him with her best blonde friend, he is like spreading ketchup on her body, Kev begs Amy on his knees, please baby we were just fooling around, wanted to see what Gwenda looked like as a hamburger, you the only girl for me. But Amy is not buying. Once he is elected to Junior Dogcatcher she knows she's going to be hamburger for the first hungry dog.
"Wendy, I admire you so much," she whispers. "You don't care about looking pretty or getting good grades. You just want to be yourself. That is so cool."
Hear it Dex? This is like the point of the whole story! How Amy does not get it! How could she say something like that and expect me to give her sympathy?
"Dump the fucker," I say.
"I knew you were going to say that," she says. "I'm pregnant."
I knew she was gonna say that. I saw it on "The Young and Restless."
"Kill it then."
"I knew you'd say that too."
"So why'd you ask?"
Then she like puts her head on my titties and asks me to hold her. I stroke her hair until she passes out. Damn if she didn't get to me even then. Tears blurring up my contacts.
You don't know what happened, Dex? You the sole dogeater in New York who is out of the loop.
The only question I have is if Amy had a sense of humor. I mean like did she get it that if you drink a bottle of oven cleaner you must be trying to clean your oven? I wish I could ask her. Because I want to be a comedian, and you gotta know what is funny and what is plain stupid.
In the funeral home I kneeled next to her coffin and clasped my little yellow hands together, knocked my head against the coffin until I didn't know what I was saying.
Then cried my eyes out just like Amy did when she was covering me with band-aids. Sister-girlfriend taught me a thing or two, no'ahm saying?
Everything changed for me then. Now my parents worried about me. Got a date with my boy Dex. Don't care if we never get to the theater. Could I like hold your hand? I could be sort of pretty if I lose a couple pounds, couldn't I? And if I put on a show for Mama and Daddy maybe they would start liking me as much as they liked Amy. Everything feels different now. I don't know what the fuck it is. But I like it. I really do.