Wild Cats

Bex O’Brian

Sophie, the author’s sister

Word Count 1,347

“Your sister showed me her tits.” My soon- to- be husband stood wide-eyed in front of me.

I shrugged.

“She’s thirteen!”

I shrugged again. Nothing I could do. Nothing I could ever do. The maelstrom, the whirlwind, the hellion that was my sister, Sophie, had worn me down years ago. I had no fight left in me. I was wrong.

Looking at him, mouth agape, the thought did cross my mind, are we the sort of family a man wants to marry into? I had shown Frank my tits on our first date, and now there was this other sister with apparently the same predilection.

It would be years before Sophie and I and our predilections married up and we became best friends. First, we had to get through constantly trying to kill each other. It took some time.

My mother had no clue she was pregnant. She thought she was menopausal. So I didn’t have much time to adjust to this new addition to the family. I had been the youngest for eight years, a lofty position that seemed set in stone.

The first time I saw Sophie, I merely glanced at her. More interesting was the newly hired nanny. There had never been help for any of the other children. Mrs. Lewis lasted until Mother’s bottle of vodka froze solid, and Sophie was found tucked in a closed drawer rather than her crib.

Help fired. My parent’s marriage failing. We kids were pretty much left to our own devices, with me tending to Sophie. The fiddly business of getting her in and out of her snowsuit was the staging site of our first battles. I cringe now at the surreptitious pinches I gave her resisting limbs while catching her chin in the zipper.

BS (Before Sophie), the family was a scattered affair, we ate dinner together, but that was that. I liked being alone in my room. AS (After Sophie) that all ended. She was everywhere, always, mostly where you didn’t want her to be. The door to my room was no impediment. The various locks were jimmied or tripped in no time. There she would be catching me masturbating or later making out with some guy, all with a shit-eating grin, waiting for the moment I would leap across the room and drag her down the hall before throwing her into some corner where she was told to stay, on pain of death.  Seconds later, I’d see a knife slide up the door jam yet again as she flipped the hook and eye latch. 

As the older sister, I should have had more restraint. But my good intentions would instantly evaporate when she would spit out a mouth full of minestrone soup, spraying diced carrots and grisly bits of meat all over my new top, or she would steal the money that I had so expertly stolen out of our mother’s purse. It’s an odd conundrum to be painfully twisting someone’s arm until they cough up a twice stolen fiver.

Bex and Sophie

Sophie’s energy (which now, in this known universe, would be diagnosed as a heady brew of ADHD with a dash of OCD) out in the world created another kind of weird violence. Dogs bit her. She saw her best friend get run over and killed by a bus. She saw more kids go over the top of their handlebars and smash their faces than I care to count. Anyone brave enough to hitch a ride on her toboggan would most likely end the wild ride with a cracked skull.

When Sophie was twelve, she and my mother left Montreal and joined me in New York, where I had lived alone for nearly two years. I was thrown back in with the family I had fought so hard to escape. At twenty, I thought it beneath me to resort to sneaky pinches. In fact, I thought the days of our drag out fights were behind us. Now, I merely rolled my eyes when she suggestively sat on a boyfriend’s knee, or she drank half my beer the second I turned away. Though I will admit that when she was in full coltish bloom with pert breasts and high rump, I wasn’t so calm about her high beam attention on any man I brought home. But now I was in love with Frank and he loved me, only had eyes for me, wanted to marry me, which, of course, drove Sophie crazy. Thus the tits.

My young marriage afforded me freedom, no matter that Frank and I had an apartment across the road. 94th street with its SROs and attendant shrieking drunks was a divide enough. I lost track of Sophie. When mother would phone at four in the morning wondering if she should call the cops because there had been no sighting of her for a couple of days, I’d tell her not to worry. What could happen to a young, naive Canadian kid in New York City? My hair curls now just thinking about what did happen, but all that matters is she survived, though her horrible luck with witnessing terrible accidents followed her south of the border. I swear that kid has seen more car-clocked bodies fly through the air.

In the forty-odd years since those days, we have had many late-night calls, one or the other of us in our cups, usually the memories have us in stitches but sometimes we wallow in self-pity and guilt. “I can’t believe I made you walk three blocks behind me during that blizzard,” I’ll sob. Or she will say, “I can’t believe I stole your diaphragm when you were a teenager and poked holes in it.” But if we feel like delving deeper into old wounds, we’ll hash over our last and most spectacular fight. 

Author’s mother, Freda and Sophie

My fledgling marriage had barely taken hold when it began to falter. Rather than admit it to ourselves, Frank decided to head to Central America for a year with our friend Charles (who is now my husband, but that’s another story). I suspected I was pregnant but didn’t know for sure. Before Frank’s midnight flight, we planned to have a couple of drinks at our place. I invited mother and Sophie over. Hours passed. Frank and Charles were nowhere in sight. Sophie paced around, swilled my beers, grew restless, and finally wanted the keys so she could cross the street, phone some friends, and go get high at Grant’s Tomb, a hub for malcontented Upper West Side kids. Mother refused. This was family time. Whatever the hell that meant. Before I knew it, Sophie had Mother up against the wall, her forearm pressing her neck as she madly rifled through her pockets. Something in me snapped. I sprang across the room and dragged Sophie out into our building’s hallway. Where the 2x4 came from and how it ended up in my hands is still a mystery. I wielded that bludgeon though I don’t think I hit Sophie, who was prone on her back. The same can’t be said about her. The speed and ferocity of her kicks would have had Bruce Lee’s eyes spinning in his head.

God knows what would have happened. We were blind wild cats going at each other.

Ding.

The elevator doors opened. The soused Frank and Charles nearly fell over us, but their dumbfounded expressions stopped us in our tracks. Behind our neighbour’s door, I heard a faint, “Oh, thank god.”

My thighs were still smarting when I kissed my husband and our marriage goodbye. Sophie and Mother were long gone.

Three weeks later, I was lying all prepped on the abortion table, legs in stirrups, a sheet draped over my knees, when the doctor entered. He gave me a polite hello, and then I felt him hesitate. The bruising on my inner thighs was just turning that sickly yellow, the last hurrah before the ultimate fade. 

“Do the police need to be notified?”

Sophie and I laugh at it all now, but the tears flowed then.

Bex is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother.