by Yocheved Friedman
The moment I realized my brother had turned into a man, I went up to his room to find a suitcase at 2 am. I flicked the light on and saw his bare leg jutting out from a wrung-out blanket. It was enormous, and somehow it took me by surprise to see my little brother all grown up with a grown up leg sleeping in a little boy’s room.
He loves to barbecue at night instead of eating dinner with us inside. He watches all the games on TV and once, he wrote me a play by play of a basketball game because I asked him to. He used all the sports jargon I didn’t know like a rebound ball and shooting a three and then he got on the computer to show me highlights of the shot he was trying to describe in his writing. And then he was ten years old again, beaming at an assist by some nameless player and arguing over my shoulder that I misrepresented his testimony to basketball history when I tried to revise his work.
I don’t mind his becoming a man on me today, in this moment. But I know that years from now, maybe when I’ve got my own family in a house upstate or I’m settling into a job on one of my very first days, it’ll come back to me like the sound of an old song that reminds you of some July 4th party when you were eight and the touch of summer stained on a childhood album and watermelon sticking and running down your elbows. And when it hits me like that, maybe when I look at my own son just beginning to learn what a foul ball is and how to throw a spiral and who the starting player is for our home team, then, suddenly, I’ll mind.
I’ll mind that he turned into a man on me and that it happened in its time which now feels way too short to have ever been recorded. And I’ll be that nostalgic woman flapping a tear-stained handkerchief at some ghost town train platform, listening to the rails carrying little boys to war and my hopeless efforts to stop the unstoppable and the sound of a breathless caboose lugging on.
My brother using a shirt hanger like a bow, shooting an invisible arrow into our dining room chandelier. Smacking of wheels on a metal track and he’s all grown up holding down a summer job and staying home alone that time when we drove off to New Hampshire for a week in July. And then he’s calling my father that first night in New York by himself, while we’re in the middle of unpacking in the mountains and he’s scared of the silence and some commercial on TV and of sleeping in his room in the top corner of the house. That night my father had told him to sleep in their room instead, in his great big bed with the TV on so he might fall asleep to the Late Show and the street lamps intruding through the windows. And his huge body on a little boy’s bed where I found him that night before we left at 2 am.
My brother is a grown up man. The kind that still has tiny flecks of little boy clinging to his elbows like watermelon juice under July 4th fireworks. His body is bigger than his mind that he’s letting on, which means that he could probably join the army and drag a pile of bricks across a desert but then he’d get cut on a passing thorn and wonder where we are in the world and whether his team won that afternoon’s game.
One day all the boyhood will be drained from him like a vein of rainwater dipping below a sewer grate beside a rebelling train. But they say all men are little boys at heart and I believe that too. My father throwing a makeshift flag at the TV because they didn’t call a penalty when they should have. My father barbequing on weekends, making hot dogs on the stove in the winter when it’s too cold to grill outside. Steaks in tin pans under a blanket of garlic powder. His trip down to Fenway park in Boston to watch the Red Sox once a summer with my uncle.
Men that are little boys covered in thick arms and beards. Me betting against a shot he’ll make of an apple core into the trash can six feet away.
Toy cars and model trains cluttering his room this night like yesterday night and maybe some of tomorrow. That’s all I know. All I can be okay with in this moment.
I don’t know when they’ll be gone.
