Eve Marx

The author, center, in a red bathing suit

Word Count 822

I don’t have siblings. I am an only child. My mother didn’t want or like children but gave birth to me anyhow. The more I think about it, I realize it wasn’t her choice. What she wanted was romantic partners and she had several. One came with children, much to her chagrin, but it gave me step-siblings, four exactly. Full disclosure, I’ve changed all of their names. 

Wills was a teenager when we met. I was pre-pubescent. He was tall, dark, extremely good-looking and could cook a little. His specialty was tuna melt on a hotdog roll. He also made Sloppy Joes. He was a scuba diver and got his pilot’s license.  Once, he took me up in a little propeller plane. That was exciting. He had girlfriends and a subscription to Playboy, which I read, religiously. Playboy exposed me not only to high quality fiction, but to journalism. The Playboy interviews with J. Paul Getty, Sean Connery, Miles Davis, and Ian Flemming blew me away. I still remember reading the Q&A  with Helen Gurley Brown, author of “Sex and The Single Girl,” and editor in chief of Cosmopolitan. I credit that interview for inspiring me to be a writer. Wills, interestingly, wasn’t terribly interested in the magazine. He was too busy living his life and preparing himself for college and law school. He did grow up to become a prosecutor with a life on the straight and narrow. 

Pippa, his sister, was another story. She was and is batshit crazy. When we met, she was also a teenager, a couple of years younger than Wills. She was troubled and caused trouble everywhere she went. Pippa was a shoplifter and a liar with a bad case of hot pants. It was Pippa who described to me in detail the human sex act. While still in her teens she ran off with a guy who was a fledgling bigwig in the American Nazi party. She slid deep down a rabbit hole, and to this day sends me crazy emails I never answer inviting me to read articles on white nationalist websites promoting conspiracy theories. 

Jane and I shared a bed, or more accurately, a pull out sofa bed, for over a year. After that I slept on the window seat of her bedroom where she had a twin-sized canopy bed. I loved Jane right away although I also loved menacing her. She was two years younger but much taller which wasn’t a deterrent as she was so agreeable to all my suggestions. She never objected to my bullying or my merciless teasing. One day, don’t ask me why, I took it into my head to hog-tie her, put a gag in her mouth and shut her in a closet. Hours later when she didn’t show up at the table, our housekeeper asked me where she was. Although I was ordered to release her immediately and let her eat her supper, no punishment was ever visited upon me. Jane and I are in occasional phone contact and every now and then I ask her if she forgives me for all the awful things I did to her, like never sharing my candy and only letting her lick the wrappers. She claims not to remember anything but she also won’t tell me what actually happened between her and Kip, the final brother. I know something did happen because she refuses to discuss him. 

Kip is difficult to write about. You could say he scares me. He’s three years younger but he was always big, and when I say big, I don’t just mean tall. Even as a child he was dangerously overweight. He was very strong. He could be very funny and he was smart as a whip, but he was cruel. He was that kid who pulled the wings off of flies. I would never leave him alone with my little Pekingese dog. At one point,  he was so heavy he dropped out of high school because he couldn’t fit into the seats. He spent that year shut up in his room where he had a hospital bed because a normal bed couldn’t support him. He had all Will’s old Playboy centerfolds taped or pasted or glued to the ceiling, and he jerked off, over and over, lying on his back, looking at those naked women. The room literally stank of stale semen. There’s a longstanding rumor in the family that when Kip was in his twenties and living in his father’s house, he pushed his elderly dad down the stairs which sent his father into a nursing home which is where his life ended. Kip inherited the house. He still lives in it. I visited that town a few years ago and parked in front of the house. The plate glass front door and the front windows were covered over in newspaper. I didn’t knock. 

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications.