What I Did to the Littlest

MEMOIR (and) CREATIVE NONFICTION GRAND PRIZE WINNER

JESS WIGENT
 

                       Mary, Mary, on the contrary
                       Your untidy garden grows
                       With wild and tangled trite flowers
                       Withered spinsters slouched in a row.

In the kitchen my father whistles an off-pitch Simon & Garfunkel tune and brews a stew I refuse to eat while I break the littlest. The littlest who follows me across Castle Creek Street, the littlest who follows me into the backyard where the pecan trees litter snacks about the ground, the littlest who tries to follow me onto the #7 school bus in the mornings, the littlest who has never once worn a hand-me-down. 

I push the littlest into the big bedroom, past our mother’s rug with the grape juice stains she’s given up trying to conceal. “Sit down,” I point to the waterbed and arrange myself next to him while the mattress buckles then bucks as we plop awkwardly.

“What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?” 

He won’t stop moving. I can’t stand his sweet breaths between us. The batter he’d licked from the bowl of German Chocolate Cake mix has spread across his lips and onto his chin where he’d missed. 

“Calm down or you’re not gonna play.” I know he won’t continue to wiggle and risk exclusion. I’m right. While Oklahoma’s winter winds plead against the windows he is quiet. He awaits instruction. 

“We’re playing Slap the Face.” 

He looks confused. 

“I’ll go first.”

He looks a tiny bit terrified. 

“I promise it won’t hurt.” His eyes close in an anticipatory half-grimace. I reach back my open hand, ignoring the way even the dent in his chin whispers trust me, and watch that hand, the nails unevenly covered with purple polish, swing slowly toward him, until I just barely touch his cheek. My fingertips tap lightly, leave a partial print. I don’t even know he’s holding his breath until the whoosh of his exaggerated sigh when he realizes it didn’t hurt. His eyes pop open. “It didn’t huwt,” he says, unable still to pronounce his Rs correctly. 

“Your turn.”

I poke him with mean fingers, until he leans back to catch his balance. 

“Soft, soft,” I tell him in my voice that, at nine, sounds like I’ve smoked menthols for decades. He giggles nervously, reminds me to remove my glasses. I rearrange my as yet unshaved legs, settle my scabbed knees. He begs me to close my eyes. I keep them open. He bends back, hoping, I think, that I’ll laugh at his ridiculous back swing, the way he’s about to topple over…but I don’t. 

I do hold my breath. Without realizing I hunch my shoulders, brace for the blow from someone whose hands are half the size of mine. Then he presses his whole palm against my cheek, holds it there for several soft moments, as if to say, “I’d never huwt you.” And like the way I pull away from my mother’s hugs, I lean back from his warm hands, his index finger that, just like mine, has a freckle on the supposedly pigment-free underneath.

“My turn.” This time I come in a little harder. His hands grip the comforter that doesn’t match the curtains; he blindly flinches. I touch the base of every finger to his face. I know it doesn’t hurt.

When it’s his turn again I scoot farther away, force him to awkwardly balance on one chunky wrist so as not to tumble to almost hit me. He bites his lip when it’s over, seems to feel bad after making contact. He looks towards the door, nervous our mother might march in, abandon the pile of socks she spends Sunday afternoons matching, and end the only game he’s ever played with me.

All I hear are sounds of water sloshing inside the mattress as we lean away and toward each other. And our exhalations when we both realize it still doesn’t hurt.

Back and forth we hit each other beneath the picture of our parents, in a cheap ill-fitting frame, unimaginably young. Our mother in a white sundress she had sewn herself, wearing a floppy hat she had to pay for in installments. She holds hands with her groom, our father, with a full head of hair then, and the same neatly-trimmed mustache. 

The heavy smell of overcooked tomatoes and underdone carrots sneaks beneath the crack between the bottom of the door and the carpet. Every blow comes down a little harder, but nothing yet leaves a mark. 

Anxious waiting between slaps inspires sweat on his forehead, clumps his hair my mother refuses to cut—his hair that makes him look like a little girl, even though we call him Bubba—so that women without children ogle over him at the supermarket cookie counter and say, “She’s just precious.” 

Still a little harder each time, on his part not mine, I swear. He, again and again and again, puts his whole hand on my cheek, like he just needs to touch. 

Quicker now. It still doesn’t hurt. 

I know his routine, and without realizing it, I give him the satisfaction of a giggle. It pains me at first, to give in to his infectious sweetness, but for the moment I’ve forgotten to dislike him, and even move around a bit to confuse him. He laughs. He’ll do anything, I think, to prolong the afternoon. 

It’s warm on the bed; after every seasick nap I ever took in this room I woke up in a fevered sweat. I’m too old for napping now. But the littlest isn’t. 

My sister is not invited to play with us; she’s almost my size and I can’t trust myself not to close the open palm that I would’ve swerved in her direction as a fist and mash her teeth for going through my diary and writing footnotes like, Brad doesn’t like you.

I look at him, his little brown nose, that scar above his right eyebrow (not from me, I swear). I close my eyes for this round he doesn’t know will be the last. I cannot see the sensitive boy with the mild speech impediment who will purposely run into doors to make me laugh. 

I slap him with violet violence. 

By the time I hear the high-pitched noise that skin on skin makes when it hits hard and open-palmed, I don’t even remember doing it. But I’m afraid I’ll do it again. His eyes open wide. The imprint of my betrayal on his cheek, bright red. And if it is healed by tears, I don’t see, as I sprint into the living room to hide beside our father who never lets anyone interrupt him during the football game.

Even now, my fingertips burn sometimes when he doesn’t talk at the dinner table, when he quickly hands off the phone when I call, when he walks past me with a nod. He spends so little time in my presence I can’t tell, now, whether he still smells of uncooked cakes.

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