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Most of my childhood memories involve my brother Paul. He had a rather serious case of pneumonia when he was very young and spent a few days in the hospital. I was left alone with the cleaning lady, Deppy, a woman who rarely spoke, and when she did it was in a thick accent, or so my parents told me years later. I was only about four or five myself. I remember lying on the floor of my bedroom and holding a blanket or stuffed animal out of loneliness.
Did I miss my brother, or my Mommy? I didn’t know. I do remember being on the verge of crying at that moment, and then holding it in when I thought Deppy was coming into the room. Or did I let it go and did she hold me?
When my brother finally came home he had to stay in a plastic tent for a couple of days. I wanted to join him there, and once or twice my parents let me climb in through the flap and peer out of the blurry plastic. It wasn’t fun to watch TV from there though – the images were hazy, and if you stared too long they blurred into oblivion – the plastic tent coming into focus and evicting all outside visions – a vague shadow of our faces, dim and nondescript. But we were together in that fuzzy world, me and my brother, in sickness and in health, bound by blood and joined in familial history.
