A Brother's Keeper

MY SISTER ASIA loved to kick my ass. The violence began when she was ten and I was eight, after our mother started dating Freddy, a tall, bulky, dark-skinned man who chewed his tongue between sentences and had a booming laugh that sounded like it could topple buildings and crush small boys. I don’t remember exactly how Freddy came into our lives; he was just suddenly there — first as boyfriend and then as stepfather, when he moved into our apartment on Tiebout Avenue in the Bronx, New York.

By the age of ten Asia had become secretive and obsessed with her body. When she wasn’t writing in the notebook that she carried clutched to her stomach and slept with under her pillow, she was checking herself out in the bathroom mirror. She’d pull her blouse tight against her flat chest and, with her back to the sink, stare over her shoulder at her reflection while running a hand over her small behind. If I whined that I needed to pee, she told me, “Piss your pants.”

One day Asia discovered I’d gone through her things. I’d been acting out a military fantasy: I was a cunning soldier called upon to rescue prisoners of war who were being held deep in enemy territory. With a toy m-16 in my grip, I was crawling elbow-to-knee along the carpeted floor between our beds when my sister dropped a foot into my back that pushed the wind out of me and pinned me to the floor. Then she snatched from my head the dark bandanna I had borrowed from her drawer and smothered my face with it, as if she expected me to snort the cloth up my nose.

“Didn’t I tell you to keep your hands off my stuff?” she whispered close to my ear. “Huh? Huh?”

The bandanna was an essential part of my lifesaving mission that day. The same was true of her eyeliner, which I’d used to paint black lines on my face. For that she twisted an arm behind my back, scraped some of the makeup off with her fingernail, and smeared it over my lips.

“Get off me,” I cried, spitting out the gook. When I began to call for help, she dug her knee into me harder, wringing the air out of me like water from a sponge. My left cheek was pressed against the floor, and tears spilled across the bridge of my nose and disappeared into the carpet.

“Cry all you want, you little faggot,” Asia said. Then she flipped me over onto my back, still keeping me down with her knee. The bandanna was crumpled in her fist. “Whose dresser did you find this in?” she asked.

“Yours,” I said, though we shared the dresser. Only the top three drawers were hers.

She leaned into me harder. “Whose?”

“Yours!” I groaned.

Finally she got up and stood over me, giggling in that familiar, slow, wicked way that made me think of her as a monster. I couldn’t remember if our mother was home or not; if she wasn’t, and I called out for her, Asia would make me hurt even more. I pushed myself up on my elbows and lay there, tasting the salty tears and makeup on my lips. A rage swelled in me until my face felt fat with electricity. Asia continued to hover like the villain she was. Growl-crying through gritted teeth, I glared at her hard, hoping to set her on fire with nothing more than my thoughts.

And as though she had read my mind, Asia cocked her fists and came at me again. I fell backward and kicked at her with both feet. A blow to her stomach sent Asia backpedaling, and she fell to the floor hard. I’d never hit her before and couldn’t believe how easily she’d gone down. I felt as if I had superhuman strength. We both jumped up at the same time, and before I could decide on my next move, she caught me in a headlock. Then she reached between my legs, pinched my penis between two fingers, and yanked it as if snapping a rubber band.

The scream that burst from me rattled my chest and set my throat on fire. Asia released me just as our mother turned the corner into our bedroom, already working the belt from around her waist.

“He be touching my stuff,” Asia said calmly, moving into the corner between the radiator and the wall and acting bored, as if she were standing in a long line.

The belt swished down and popped like a firecracker against her arm.

Beat her ass, I thought.

Asia took most of the whipping the way she did all the others: after each blow, she touched the hurt part of her body as if shooing a fly and sucked her teeth. This drove Mommy wild and made her bring the belt back over her shoulder and swing it with both hands.

“He be touching my stuff. He be touching my stuff,” Asia kept saying.

When my sister finally broke, she dropped to the floor and blanketed her head with her arms. At one point she kicked out, trying to block the strap with her foot. Soon her legs and arms tired, and she rolled onto her side and took the blows along her back and ribs, wailing louder with each strike.

That’s enough, I thought. She’s learned her lesson.

Mommy just kept on swinging. Finally Asia was able to scurry past my mother on her knees, push herself up, and run for the door. With one last swing of her arm, Mommy threw the belt at Asia, but it missed her and fell to the floor. Only when my sister was trying to escape these beatings did she seem to me more like a little girl than an enemy.

THE BEATINGS I RECEIVED were baptisms rather than outright whippings. There was an elegance to my mother’s discipline when she hit me, her blows meant more to correct than to punish. The pain she inflicted on my sister, on the other hand, was clumsy and passionate and vicious. This disparity, I know, drove Asia wild, and she would kick my ass in part because she got her ass kicked so much for kicking my ass all the time.

What I didn’t know, but Asia did by then, was that our mother and stepfather were drug addicts. They spent hours sequestered in their bedroom while thin sheets of smoke slipped underneath the door and into the hallway. The odors of marijuana and crack were sweet and magical to me, but each time the smoke drifted out, it wasn’t long before Asia was punching me or bending my arm or smothering me. My screams would bring Mommy slowly and softly into the room, the belt unwound from her waist. She’d stare at Asia with sleepy eyes while motioning with the belt and whispering, “Cut the shit.” She never hit anyone at those times but just turned and left, the belt dragging the floor as if she had forgotten it. After our mother was gone, a quiet would fall over Asia, and she’d leave me alone for the rest of the night.

MY SISTER AND I BOTH ATTENDED P.S. 58 elementary, a forty-minute walk from our apartment. During journeys to and from school Asia was a different sibling than the one I knew at home. She became my guardian, an invincible bionic sister.









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