The Day I Broke My Brother

At thirteen, he has tanned Arabian skin, an unruly head of black hair, and a hidden mouth of teeth since each of them decided to grow in a different direction. But it doesn’t matter because you know he’s going to be handsome. A charmer. He bakes brownies, plays video games, reads Calvin and Hobbes comics, collects air-soft guns, and with the most wit a boy his age can muster, he never forgets to tell you the last funny thought that occurred to him.

“Uh-oh, the Hulk is coming out,” is his response when you are angry with him, eyebrows raised and hands held high in surrender. A smile tickles your furiously locked jaw, and you can’t help but forgive him – after all, he did just bake you a birthday cake.

I’m merely a lock of hair taller than him, and one day soon, my brother will be towering over me. Yet no matter how tall he gets, I hope Ahmed never gets tired of me reading him bedtime stories. I think we started our nightly rendezvous when he was about six or seven.

“Salma!” he would call from his bedroom down the hallway. I would roll out of my bed, travel the stretch of hardwood floor, and jump onto his comforter.

“Okay. I’m here. What story do you want to hear today?”

“Anything. Tell me anything,” he would say with a shrug of his small shoulders.

I would sigh. The Anything category was the hardest one to sift through. For a long time, I told him a ribbon of fairytales. My favorite was “The Three Little Pigs,” most probably because it was the easiest to remember. I would turn off the lights that spring out of his ceiling fan, make sure the bathroom door across the room was closed, and tuck his night blue blanket neatly to his chin. Then we were ready.

“Once upon a time…” was the routine beginning. I narrated to him by heart; very rarely did I actually have a book in my hands. I had memorized the plots from a set of fairytale books I had owned when I was younger. Although he never did, I always expected that he would fall asleep to the sound of my voice. At the end of a story, he would ask for another, and another. If he did fall asleep the way children do in movies, I think I would have gotten annoyed. When I’m weaving out a bedtime story, I expect him to be listening. I think he knew this too, because we were talking about it the other day.

“I always forced myself to stay awake. I thought you wanted me to. You would get mad if I didn’t,” he told me. I laughed and rolled my eyes.

“No I wouldn’t. That’s silly. Why would I get mad?”

“’Rawr! I am Salma! You aren’t listening to my story! I didn’t come here to watch you sleep!’ I know what I’m talking about.”

Honestly, I have no memory of acting this way. But I wouldn’t be surprised. I can see myself nudging him awake to hear the end of the fairytale. Even if Ahmed already knew how each of them ended, I would want him to hear it anyway.

When I got tired of retelling “Hansel and Gretel,” and he got tired of hearing about “Little Red Riding Hood,” I started reading from books. When I was in elementary school, I loved Amelia Badelia, so I think that I began with those. Peggy Parish wrote these anecdotes about a silly-minded maid in Cameroon. When told to draw the curtains, she sketches them. When told to make a sponge cake, she bakes a cake with a sponge in it. When told to weed the garden, she takes out the flowers and replaces them with weeds.

“These stories are so funny,” I would chuckle to him. He would stare at me with a cocked eyebrow, as if to say, “You’re sixteen, and you think this is funny? You’re so dumb.” Ahmed had yet to learn that simplicity can sometimes be the most satisfying.

Then I moved on to Roald Dahl. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was another elementary school favorite of mine, but I’m not sure if I ever got around to sharing it with Ahmed. He may have read that one on his own. What I did spend each night narrating to him was The Witches. We both loved it. In the book, the Grand High Witch has a Russian accent. “Vitches of Inkland!” she would bark, ordering her brigade of bald witches to have all the children of England “rrrubbed out, sqvashed, sqvirted, sqvittered, and frrrittered.” Since her heavy pronunciation of words is already printed on the page, it was easy to read with funny voices. I would never make funny voices for anyone else, not even now. It took a while to finish that book, and I think it was the only one we completed cover-to-cover.

Sometimes I would fall asleep beside him, too tired to migrate back to my bed. I would wake up and frantically try to remember where I was and why I was there. Running back to my room at 3 a.m., I had three hours to finish my homework before needing to get ready for school and catch the yellow bus, which perched at the end of out street for only a matter of seconds before it thundered away.

Bedtime stories began to be a hassle as my list of homework assignments grew longer and longer. High school consumed me. After a day of AP classes, club meetings, and service hour requirements, I would come home, sleep, eat dinner, then finish my homework.

“Can you read me a bedtime story today?” Ahmed would ask me after weeks of me being confined to my desk. He asked me regularly, and my answer was always a jumble of, “I have homework to do. I’m too tired. No. Ask Nadda.” While I fancy myself the “nice sister,” Nadda is Ahmed’s in-house nemesis. Two hands punctuated with bright pink nail polish grip her hips, and she marches him around the house with an endless spew of demands.

“Clean your room, practice paino, read a book, flush your toilet, brush your teeth. Didn’t I tell you to put this in your room? Stop leaving your stuff everywhere!” I’m not sure when, but she saw fit to adopt some motherly role. Perhaps, as a middle child, it gives her a sense of purpose to have authority over him. Naturally, he never wanted her to read anything to him. I would still say, “No.”

But this time, I buckled. I began to feel bad for never cuddling beside him anymore to share a good story. I imagined a future where he never asked for me, and I hastened to answer his bedtime call. By the time I walked from my room to his, a laziness had raveled me.

“Okay. So… how about “The Three Little Pigs?”” I would say, lacking any creative cells to make something up. Ahmed would groan and twist under his covers. I would refuse to get up and choose a book if he wouldn’t do it, and he would stuff his face in his pillow and groan some more. I had no patience. I would simply leave.

I always expected him to hold a grudge against me every time I did that. I would see him the next morning and anticipate a glare that would make me melt into the kitchen floor. When I would arrive home from school, I waited for him to snap at me, or slap me with an emphatic, “No,” if I asked him for a glass of water. But the grudge never came around any of the corners where I waited for it. He was never angry later. There’s something about little kids and their short-term emotional memory. Their feelings seem to wash away and ebb into the next. At least it was like that with my brother. I started to fear the day when a sad, angry, bitter emotion would stick. I wouldn’t know what to do.

One night, when we had settled on a book to read without any fighting, he sat up suddenly.

“I almost forgot! Our Spring Concert is this weekend! Will you come? Please come,” Ahmed asked me, frantic with joy. I thought about all the piano recitals I had missed because of lab reports and Girl Scout meetings, and decided that I had better make it to his strings performance. It was going to be held at his school’s auditorium. Longfellow Elementary is minutes from our house, and I could spare an hour to listen to him play the violin.

That night, I wore jeans and a t-shirt. It was just an elementary school event – nothing I had to look nice for. It wasn’t like I was going to the Hippodrome in Baltimore, or something. My brother was clad in khaki pants. In his button-down shirt and vest with diamonds prints, he walked down the stairs in a triumphant stride. His violin case wasn’t much smaller than him, but he carried it like a winning prize.

When we arrived at the school, kids were scampering around everywhere like mice. Parents gathered in small clumps here and there, and we made our way through them to the auditorium. Ahmed split off from us to join his classmates and get ready for the Spring Concert.

I can’t remember why, but for some reason my mother had to leave. My sister and I easily found seats in the middle section of chairs. We waited. Eventually, I suppose they were able to round everyone up to start the musical performances.

“Thank you all for coming,” a music teacher announced on the stage. “All of your children have worked very hard for tonight, and they can’t wait to share their music with you. We truly appreciate all the support from the families.”

Then it began. One by one, the second, third, and forth graders scratched at their instruments with their long, wooden bows. The sounds they made reminded me of dying pterodactyls, an entire herd of them plummeting to their graves. The notes scuffed at my ears and scraped the walls. My sister and I exchanged wide-eyed looks and swallowed our giggles.

As the children who came on the stage became older, their songs became slightly more distinguishable. Sometimes a recognizable black-board screech could be picked out among the noises. I looked around, wondering at what all the parents were thinking. No one seemed to have expressions of disgust or laughter tickling their lips. Maybe they could hear something I couldn’t. I began to ponder a phenomenon: Parents have an automatic converter installed in each of their ears. That way, everything they hear about their children, or from them, sounds amazing. Doctors probably program the tiny machines right after a mother has given birth. I’m not sure how they get them into the father, but it’s probably a much trickier process since he isn’t already sedated.

Then my brother’s fifth grade class seated themselves on the chairs arranged on the stage. They didn’t sound much better. Their notes grazed us like sharp razors, but there was no avoiding them. We couldn’t just get up and leave, then come back when it was over. My sister and I didn’t say a word the entire concert, but oh did we plan to spill it all out when we were on our way home.

Ahmed bounced in the front seat beside our mother, talking about what so-and-so said and what Ms. So-and-so did about it. He was thrilled after being around all of his friends and playing practical jokes in between musical numbers. He chattered on and on about it to my mother since she hadn’t been there. Then my sister spoke.

“Oh. My. God. Mama, it was so awful,” she began. “They sounded so bad. It was so funny how bad they were!”

“Really Mama, they sounded like this,” and I began making high-pitched, fluctuating noises with my throat, and my sister laughed and joined me. After a few seconds, I stopped, remembering that I was supposed to be the “nice sister.” But Nadda continued to hold a mini concert in the back-seat of our maroon mini-van, then ended with a passionate stretch of deep vibratos. Mama couldn’t help but giggle, yet firmly composed herself.

“Stop it, Nadda. They can’t have been that bad,” she said sternly.

“But you have no idea. They really were,” Nadda retorted.

Ahmed was silent the rest of the way home. I leaned forward to peek at his face, and the bright smile was gone. A shadow hung over his brow like a film of sadness. I jabbed my sister with my elbow and sharply told her to stop. We had hurt him, but I had had no idea how deeply.

When we arrived at home, he continued to speak to no one, and went straight to his room. I dragged myself to my own bedroom and sighed. Something heavy had sat itself on my shoulders and I couldn’t shrug it off. With every step, it weighed more and more. I laid down on my bed, face down, and closed my eyes. A power nap did no good because when I woke up, I felt like I was being pushed into my mattress like a hand slowly sinking into a ball of dough. With much effort, I hoisted my body out of my bed and washed my face in the bathroom that connects my bedroom to my sister’s. I didn’t feel any more refreshed.

As I thought about Ahmed, I heard a muffled sobbing. I walked down the hallway to his bedroom and put my ear to his hollow door. His crying was louder and I was shocked at the intensity of it. I had never heard him weep so hard before. It was a weak, hopeless, and bottomless crying – the type that is painfully dragged out of you and you are left with nothing but pangs of anger at whatever caused it.

Right then, I wanted to bury myself alive with those dying pterodactyls. An empty abyss was spooned out of my core, and I was filled with the thick, weighty guilt that had been pressing into my shoulders. It was like cement being poured into every nook of my insides. My mother tried to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. She hardly knew what to say since he had every right to feel the way he did, especially after the jokes my sister and me jabbed into him like thorny sticks.

I knocked on his door and let myself into his room, which was stuffy with sadness. “I’m sorry, Ahmed. I’m really, really sorry.” I almost started to cry with him as I apologized in despair. I laid down with him that night, trying to hug all of the embarrassment, bitterness, and sorrow out of his thin frame. He managed to choke out a few words, which sounded like, “I’m so sick of Nadda! She makes my life miserable!” I didn’t understand why he wasn’t upset with me as well, but I was momentarily relieved. When he stopped crying, I think I read to him until he fell asleep.

He never acknowledged that I had hurt him. I wanted him to be mad at me because I couldn’t be forgiven otherwise. I too ruined something he had that night. I know I did. Maybe it was his short-term emotional memory. If that’s what gives children their innocence, then I broke that too.  I’ve been trying to make it up to him ever since.

The Spring Concert was years ago, and now my brother is in seventh grade. Last week, his middle school held a play. His teacher asked him to make the music for the performance, and he spent hours on Garage Band mixing sounds that suited all the scenes. He discovered the program when I received a MacBook for my birthday a few months earlier. He was searching through the fun applications and became hooked to it. We named his first mix “An Intense Chase Scene in Europe,” because it sounded like it was the background music for something like that. I even used it as my ring-tone for a while.

The middle school was preparing Rebecca Riding Hood, a play based on a fusion of fairytales such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Three Little Bears,” and “The Three Little Pigs.”   The morning of the second showing, I asked Ahmed when he was planning to go see it.

“Oh. Um, I don’t know. Should I go?” he said tentatively. I was taken aback.

“Of course you should go! You made the music. Don’t you want to go see how it fit into the play? I definitely would.”

He shrugged and walked away. He played video games for a few hours then came back to announce his decision.

“Okay, let’s go tonight. Can I invite my friend Noah?”

I always made a fuss about picking up my sister’s friends when she wanted me to drive her somewhere, but it was never a problem for me to fulfill Ahmed’s requests.

“Sure. Call him and let him know we’re coming.”

But when he spoke to Noah, he told my brother that he already had plans with his family. So it would only be him and me. I went to get ready, making sure that I wore a nice top and some matching jewelry. I had to convince Ahmed to take a shower and put on something he hadn’t already worn that weekend. By the time I got him to get into the car, he wasn’t interested in seeing the play anymore.

“I don’t want to go anymore.”

“Why not?!” I asked, frazzled and frustrated. I wanted to take him. No, I needed to take him.

“I just don’t want to go.”

I spent another half an hour trying to talk him into going, and being enthusiastic about it. When I finally succeeded, I drove to Longfellow Elementary School hardly excited anymore. I was still proud of my little brother, but his negativity was draining.

We arrived at his school, showed the two women at a desk our tickets, and walked into the cafeteria. The rows of chairs were filled with parents and children from age five to fifteen.

“Where do you want to sit, Ahmed?”

He nodded his head towards the back of the room. I asked him if he knew anyone he saw, and he pointed out one or two people and named them. The black and white programs were sitting on our chairs, and as I looked through mine, I saw “AHMED WARSHANNA” printed on the back. He was credited for all the background music, and I excitedly brought this to his attention. He smiled slightly, and then looked back to the stage.

“I’m really nervous,” he finally admitted.

“Why? You aren’t acting or anything.”

“I don’t know,” he replied with a shrug. A hush blanketed the audience as the show began. I kept an open mind and found the middle-schoolers to be much better actors and actresses than I had expected them to be. The dialogue was funny and peppered with wit. The students messed up a few times, but glazed over their mistakes seamlessly. I was quite impressed. They played my brother’s music in between scenes, and the pieces helped shape the tone of the performance.

“This is really good,” I kept telling him, stuffing him with as many compliments as I possibly could. Toward the end of the play, it sounded like they used four or five of the mixes he had made over and over. I asked him if they had done so, but he told me that they used each of the eight that he had given to his teacher. I immediately pursed my lips, and focused on being positive. I could have easily slipped and said that some of the music he had made sounded the same. But that was the last thing I wanted to even imply. Luckily, he didn’t catch the hidden meaning behind my question.

He leaned over to me and made small comments every now and then. When one of the characters said, “Oh, shut up!” he whispered to me, “That’s something she’d say in real life.” Ahmed would also point out who he knew on the stage and what grades they were in. He chuckled when he realized that his teacher had chosen a small, mousy haired boy to play a prop – the dishwasher.

“I need to tell him he was awesome after the play. Remind me,” he said. Secretly, I think it was because he knows what it feels like to be the dishwasher.

When it was over, a final applause echoed through the small cafeteria, and we got up to leave. Ahmed was beaming now, but not as brightly as he could have been. He was eager to high-five the kid that played the dishwasher, and one or two of his friends. Before we left, he had to get his teacher to sign his program so that he would get extra credit for coming to the play.

As we drove home, I asked him what he thought. He didn’t say much, so I spoke for him.

“I thought it was really funny. I’m so glad we got to see it together. Aren’t you?”

“Yeah. It was good,” he said simply.

I knew he had had a good time, and that he was glad he went. He is going through a phase where he never wants to do anything, and when he is forced to, hardly admits that he really enjoyed doing it. But I can’t blame his attitude entirely on puberty. I know I have something to do with it. I’m not sure if he remembers what happened at his Spring Concert, but I’m sure he unconsciously feels the residue of those dark feelings. He doesn’t enjoy crowds of people, and he gets headaches when we go to events that include performances.

I think that I will always owe him something. I don’t know if he ever realized that I facilitated what happened that night. I’m too afraid to ask him; though I will have to if I ever want him to forgive me. Every time I grab a Calvin and Hobbes book from his shelf and read through the comics with him, I am redeeming myself. I still laugh at all the silliest strips, and he still laughs at me for it. I talk to him about his favorite show, MythBusters, or when he’s going to bake more chocolate chip cookies. “I don’t want to bake them alone,” he always says. But sometimes I’m just too busy to stand in the kitchen and roll the ready-made dough with him.  He calls me while I’m on campus studying for an exam, and he tells me that he misses me and hates being home alone. My heart twists in little knots and I leave, keeping him on the phone with me all the way home.