9/9/2015
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Michelle takes me up the hill to see the goats.
I’m in Arkansas for Thanksgiving and I haven’t seen my sister Michelle for going on seven
years: this is our quiet, somewhat anticlimactic reunion. She lives in the sticks with a construction
worker husband who built their house. It’s a beautiful place, but you can see the flaws. Most
glaringly, the unfinished set of stairs are nailed in crooked, which Sam explains by popping the tab
on a Busch beer – “turns out I was too many in.” The back yard, too, is somewhere between a
calendar pic and a junkyard. Right behind the house, there’s a dried up pond and a collection of
household artifacts. An ancient ceramic bathtub riddled with bullet holes, a couple monster truck
size wheels, scrapyard metal, discarded wood. But beyond that non-pond roll the wooded hills, goats
grazing near a tin-roofed house.
Every couple of mornings Michelle goes out to patrol their property borders. It’s maybe a
three mile parameter, fenced in by a wood and electric wire fence. Today I join her. I put on my
tennis shoes, a flimsy windbreaker. Michelle wears her usual getup: cut off cargo shorts over long
underwear, high rubber boots, and a Columbia jacket. “It’s the goat-herder’s uniform,” she says,
sing-song Arkansas twang in her voice. She doesn’t bring her gun (she’s says she’s still afraid of it)
but a little can of mace. “There’s meth heads out in the woods,” she says, “squatters, drifters.” I
can’t imagine encountering a meth head climbing an electric fence without laughing, but she’s
serious. “Plus,” she adds, “I think our little Chinese neighbor was stealing goats.”
“Stealing goats?”
The suspicion goes without explanation, and we head up the hill. As we climb, I keep
looking at her, endless unbelieving double takes. My childhood vision of her keeps surfacing, an
insistent holograph from the past. After all, I saw her last in the days before I left Arkansas for good.
I was eleven going on twelve. As a child, I knew her slightly. When mom regained custody of Dan
and me, Jon and Michelle chose to stay with the foster parents. It was a safe bet: college, financial
security. So I saw her sparsely. Sometimes we’d go to the mall with them, and I’d follow her around
in the chill air, window-shopping. Sometimes we’d go swimming, or take a couple hours at the park.
They barely seemed like siblings to me: more like, older guardian angels, distant aunts and uncles.
When I got old enough to notice such things, Michelle began to represent a world of
grownup-ness I had no access to. Femininity, I might have called it, if I’d had the word for it. She
was thin, and had jet black hair that hung in perfect ringlets. She wore skin-clinging Hollister tops
and white-washed jeans. Even though she was only 5’2” or so, she seemed so tall. I never imagined I
could look like that, but I admired her. It occurred to me that if I had to turn into something
eventually, it was her.
Perhaps that was because her visits often included an itinerary of instructions on my coming
of age. She “fixed” my hair, brushing out the knots and twisting it into a tight, painful knot at the
top of my hair. She told me to wear deodorant. Sunscreen, she informed me, would not help me get
tan. My pale, sun-blotched skin perturbed her to no end. As did my prematurely hairy legs, and my
arsenal of “heathen” clothes. Mom never complained at anything I wore, baggy athletic shorts or a
shin-length toga-esque dress. But my outfits often elicited a cascade of scorn from Michelle. Some
of the distaste had Mom for a target – “I can’t believe mom lets you out the door in such rags” – but
as I got older the buck passed to me. I should have a little discretion, after all: I was ten years old.
Halfway up the hill, the goats circle us in curiosity. One grizzled salt and pepper goat ripe
with age nuzzles Michelle’s hip. “This one’s my baby,” she says. He leaves a trail of white slobber on
her cut-offs, but she doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. She’s not the sister I knew: pulling every strand
of my hair into something presentable, searching my face for smudges. Instead, when she looks at
me as I shyly extending my hand to the billy goat, she says my name with wonder -- “Pilar” –
stretching the r to its limit. I ask, “what?” And she shakes her head. “I can’t believe--,“ trailing off.
Neither of us can complete the sentence: I can’t believe who you are. I remember that other
Michelle too well, and vice versa. She rubs her knuckles in the groove of the goat’s ears, and I try to
make out the discrepancy, past and present kaleidoscopically aligning and departing before me. I
can’t help but notice how thin she is—still is.
I remember as a kid visiting Michelle and Sam’s place out in the woods. Sam was a big guy
who called a plate of six tuna sandwiches a snack. The back of his neck was a swatch of desert,
sunburned to boiling, and he wore mud-caked construction boots and worked sun-up to sun-down.
When Michelle stood next to him she looked diminutive, a shadow. Sam would tease her for her
size, calling her chicken-butt, mocking her strange eating habits. Indeed, every time I saw her, the list
of forbidden foods racked up: peanut butter, bread, mayo, egg yolk. When she did eat, the portions
baffled me: one teacup of fruit salad? A sliver of hamburger? A bite of plain oatmeal? In my mind, you
just didn’t eat oatmeal that way—you added maple syrup and apples, downed a whole bowl and
asked for more. I ate the way I dressed: like a heathen, mastering a ferocious chew-swallow system
that almost matched Sam’s. “You want some food with that plate?” I’d tease her.
Though Michelle’s eating habits disconcerted my childlike gluttony, I didn’t know to worry
until I began to hear the rest of the family murmuring. My mom especially—every time she saw
Michelle she made a fuss over feeding her. Or trying to feed her: these attempts usually met a wall of
indignation. No, Michelle would not be joining in on a lunch of leftover hamburger helper. No, she
did not want a dill pickle. And no, she certainly did not want a cookie—ever.
Sickness, that’s what mom called it when Michelle wasn’t around: “She’s so obsessed with
the way she looks she won’t eat a damn thing and now it’s killing her.” I began to believe that one
day while flipping through an old family album I’d found. About a dozen or so photos had been
doctored, some unknown figure cut out, leaving behind a ragged absence. My father, I thought at
first. I tried to imagine mom rampaging against his memory, and couldn’t. Mom never cared much
for revisionist history. No, it was Michelle cutting herself out of photographs. She didn’t like the way
she looked now, but she especially didn’t like the way she looked then.
The idea struck me hard, the way new knowledge always did. That Michelle, who I idolized,
could hate her body enough to attempt its erasure set in motion inside me a whole series of
considerations: of self, of body, of borders. Before then, my body seemed a beatable, bruisable
playground thing, vessel for hunger. It fluctuated, grew, needed sleep, got sunburned—but never
failed. For Michelle, the body did nothing but fail. She perfected her appearance constantly, to no
avail. Standing in front of the only full-length mirror in the house, I examined myself in this new
light, thinking about the puff of my cheeks, the divot of my belly, how my gangly limbs intersected
my torso like mislaid roads. If Michelle was imperfect, I was even more so. After all, she had put in
enough time telling me so.
We trudge up a hill so steep I think each new step will send me flying backwards. Michelle’s
used to it but I’m sorely out of shape and probably a little anemic—I gather my breath for each
burst of chat. And we talk about nothing—or everything: what we’ve been doing for six years, as if
we can summarize our new selves. I tell her I do comedy now, write a lot, still read a lot. She tells me
she’s been collecting first editions. She buys them on Amazon and sells them on E-bay for five times
the price—“to suckers.” She promises to show me her Hemmingway collection. I promise to send
her something I’ve written. We come up against the electric fence, the strip of wire that blends into
the fallen foliage of silver, and follow it along the slope. I want to talk about bodies and borders and
all the things that cling to skin, I want to know if she’s happy, if she’s changed. But I can’t. I don’t
know how to breach the subject. “I don’t see any little Chinese men,” I say, and laugh.
There came a point, I don’t remember when exactly, that she knew she had gone too far.
She’d lost too much weight, looked sickly even to herself. But she still couldn’t eat. Every spoonful
felt like a betrayal of some long-gone ideal, an invasion of substance: teeth resisted chewing, throat
resisted swallowing, stomach resisted digestion. By the time things got easier for her, by the time she
could eat a bowl of eggs without retching, I had already left Arkansas. I never saw her heal, the slow
motion of change.
All I see are then and now snapshots that sit uneasily side by side, unelaborated.
We end up where we started, by the shed, and the goats come to slobber at our hands like
they didn’t see us an hour ago. Something mom used to say comes back to me: it is what it is.
Somewhere between enigmatic and meaningless, the phrase used to drive me crazy. Now I take
comfort in it, like I’ve concluded something. Michelle tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and
beckons me down the hill. “We should probably go clear the table,” she says. It is what it is.
On the way back from Michelle’s, Jon and I stop at a gas station to pick up a snack and cigs.
A stick-thin, all-bones burnout of a woman swimming in her clothes pushes in the glass door to the
gas station. “Meth head,” Jon says, “or anorexic – can’t really tell the difference around here.” He
laughs. It sounds like some kind of sick game show. “Back when Michelle was anorexic I used to
say, Michelle what will the neighbors think?”
I laugh too. But it hurts a little bit. “She’s better now, right?”
“Yeah,” he says, “Much better.”
But that walk along an electric perimeter confirmed what I feared—that I was more likely to
imagine Michelle than know her, or know how to know her. Meeting her again, I mapped the life I
had lived without her on her, stretched her to fit lines I’d drawn in her absence. I want to believe
Jon more than anything, want to be able to see her as she is, but cut-up photographs keep swimming
up to meet me, and I see only the girl who tried to erase herself.