Unhelpful

When I was growing up, a process which some have convincingly argued has never fully reached its logical conclusion, I was an Older Brother.

Being the Older Brother involved many responsibilities. Free babysitter was, of course, one of them. I was deliberately bad at it. The goal of any such session was always the same: make my sister scream with terror. There were many ways to go about this, and involved horror movies, promising that our parents weren’t coming back, a game called hide and go away which is just like hide and seek, minus the seeking, and the repeated process of tickling my sister relentlessly until she cried, and then ominously threatening to do it again. And again. I learned that particular trick from some of my older cousins, who practiced it on me.

It also involved murder. Or rather, the sincere threat thereof. Our family had a haunted basement, by which I mean it was dimly lit with bare bulbs, unfinished, and used as a storage space for those things apartment dwellers pay $75 a month to keep in a storage facility because they can’t bear to part with them but lack a haunted basement, unfinished, with dimly lit bare bulbs. It’s the most logical venue for murder that doesn’t involve getting your shoes dirty.

One of my older cousins–not so old that he would have been responsible for my formative tickle torture years–and I played this game with my sister and one of our younger cousins, who was my sister’s age. Cousins are something my sister and I have in no short supply. We were supposed to be babysitting. This involved the older boys stalking the younger girls with large knives from the kitchen, claiming to be possessed by Satan, using vocal theatrics to match, and chase scenes throughout the house that inevitably involved the final flight into my parents’ bedroom. Our parents’ bedroom was the place where all sorts of sibling torture culminated because, like the bathroom, it had a lock, and unlike the bathroom, there was a bed full of sheets, blankets, pillows and comforters with which one can successfully flee from monsters, tickle torture, hide-and-go-seekers-who-aren’t-seeking, and importantly, satanic boys bent on double homicide. Had my parents been around, the game would have started with threats, ended with tattling, and been over in two minutes.

The fact that the bedroom door was never terribly foolproof didn’t seem to matter much, in that it was nearly useless in preventing the sort of pursuit one was fleeing from. The lock was a privacy lock, not a security lock, and only took a screwdriver or a bent hanger or a bobby pin to defeat. Click. The realization that the door lock had failed yet again to protect the innocent was the most delicious part of the terror. It was a formality that had to be observed. Terror chases ended behind the defeated locked door of my parents’ bedroom. The locked bathroom door was usually where chases involving embarrassed humiliation, mortified offense, and righteous incoherent bawling ended up, and was therefore not suitable for terror.

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Another facet of being an Older Brother is that of scapegoat.

The general problem with trying to scapegoat your older brother is that sometimes you can get away with it, which acts as a variable-interval schedule of reinforcement, and acts as a form of operant conditioning. The fact that it rarely works isn’t a disincentive; the fact that it sometimes works is a powerful incentive. He’s been doing it much longer than you and had more experience at it, though, and he’s better at it. He’s much better.

There, on the bathroom floor, lay the shattered pieces of a painted ceramic chickadee. My sister was in trouble. It wasn’t a big deal to my parents, as bathroom bird decorations are pretty easy to come by, but they were very concerned about the fact that she was resorting to lying about it so quickly and earnestly. This became one of those learning experiences. I smugly approached the bathroom unseen in order to overhear the lecture and interrogation my sister was receiving from my parents. She was sitting on the covered toilet, her face scarlet with grief and shame.

“We’re not mad about the broken plaque, but we want to know what really happened.”

“It’s OK if you did it, just be honest about it.”

“We’re very disappointed that you’re lying to us about this.”

In the face of this, my sister’s story was something along the lines of “I don’t know what happened, it was already broken!”. As the psychological pressure built in the face of continued parental insistence, the official line wavered. Now my sister was willing to admit that yes, maybe she broke it, but if she did, it was an accident and she didn’t know she did it. Having achieved some progress here, my parents pushed the point home, and with a little work, my sister probably did do it, but she was very sorry. As it’s hard to be sorry about something you only “probably” did, finally she surrendered the awful, honest truth.

“I did break it, and then I kicked the broken pieces behind the toilet because I didn’t want to get in trouble.” As a reward for her newfound honesty, she was allowed to have some of the ice cream my parents had brought home for us, and she was only going to be grounded for a day or two instead of a few weeks. The truth hurts, but if it doesn’t exactly set you free, it can earn you early parole.

This was a hard lesson for my sister to learn. One got the impression at her initial insistence of innocence that she had actually believed her acting job. As she cracked and gave in, and finally delivered her teary confession, it was absolutely obvious that she had come to accept the fact of her own guilt, and was out of the stage of denial. The problem with setting up a lie to avoid trouble is that if you concentrate on it hard enough and practice it, especially as a child, you can fool yourself into thinking you’re telling the truth; you literally change the way you remember the event.

She had come to whole-heartedly believe that she had caused the chick to fall off the wall and break, and had then scooted the pieces in a half-hearted attempt to hide the evidence.

She didn’t do it. I did it. Then I blamed her.

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Perhaps the most important job of being an Older Brother is that of role-model. This was a passive behavior as well as active, and it was important for the imitated to have to observe the imitator.

As I would play an eight-handed game of Risk by myself according to a complicated personally modified rule set, my sister would also have to play a board game, which involved randomly twirling the spinner and moving random game pieces across the Candyland board according to a complicated lack of rules.

I would play solitaire. My sister would randomly stack piles of cards in different configurations. Infuriated by the never-ending copying, I would turn around with my back to her. She would likewise turn around so our backs were to each other. Then she would inch back, little by little, until we were touching, because otherwise I might not be aware that she was playing, too.

I would play battle with Star Wars toys. She would play battle with Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony dolls.

I would read. My sister would read. She would do it with the book upside-down, which was fine, since she knew the story by heart anyway.

I would build a snowman. She would build a snowball. I would steal the snowball from her and throw it at her.

I would play poker with cousins. My sister would want to play, but she wasn’t old enough. I would teach my sister how to gamble in order to make her understand that you don’t get your pennies back when the game’s over. She would lose. She would tell our parents. She would get her pennies back.

I would play my Atari 2600. She would grab a joystick and pretend to play one of the other characters on the screen.

I would use my computer. She would play my old forgotten Atari 2600.

It went on like this until I was no longer able to fool her into thinking I was a living, breathing god. One time comes to mind when I even regretted my influence.

My parents once brought home one of those gifts which has had a universal appeal since before the days of recorded history. My sister and I were watching them haul it up the steps into the living room, our eyes wide and expressions open and genuinely thrilled. The possibilities were endless.

I grabbed a serrated knife and some scissors, and she ran to her room to get construction paper, crayons, and markers. Within an hour, an enormous empty cardboard box the size of the refrigerator it came with had made a successful transformation into a Space Shuttle. She had one of those wire coil and vinyl play tunnels, so we incorporated that into the design.

My sister wanted to be the astronaut this time, so I made her a helmet out of a paper grocery bag. Of course, that’s a redundant statement, as this was before the era of the false dichotomy of paper or plastic. It was paper or paper, and get over it.

The Space Shuttle I made with her help was pretty spiffy looking, but my sister thought the helmet was the best part because I had decorated it for her all by myself.

After getting the old refrigerator out of the garage, onto a truck, and taken to wherever it is that dead refrigerators go to convalesce, our parents came back and Mom surveyed the scene in the living room: a chaotic mess of cardboard, construction paper scraps, drawing implements, and toys surrounding her two children who were getting along and playing nice. My sister, who was having a blast, crawled out of the crew compartment for a little space walk.

Mom looked at her, looked at me, and gave me that other look. The look in question was effectively the gestural equivalent of saying “Well now, I hope you’re very pleased with yourself. I think if you consider this situation, you’re going to feel really horrible about yourself later on”. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a single look from a parent can be worth a thousand hours of lecturing.

My sister’s helmet, which came down almost to her elbows, was heavily decorated, with a broken white wire hanger for an antenna, a little US flag on the side, her name on her chest, and had two little eyeholes. Since my sister wasn’t old enough to read yet, she wasn’t aware of the fact her proud, gleaming eyes were staring out of the letters “D” and “O” of the word “IDIOT”.

It seemed hilarious at the time, but after that withering glare, I traded helmets with her and we made her a new one.