A Blur of Sins
Montana, Day Six: Aiming for Hazards
Montana, Day Six: Curdles and Limits
Montana, Day Six: Inclinations
Montana, Day Eight: No Second Chance
Panorama
Most of my siblings are here. One by one we’ll take the oath and testify. We hate to do this, but we have to be here. And we have to speak.
I am sick to my stomach. Who wants to say words that lead to locking up a loved brother? But his behavior has become…so bizarre.
How did we come to this?
Weren’t we just a simple big old-fashioned Catholic family? A mom, a dad, seven kids, a Midwest city. Most of us grown up out of the fifties into the sixties. Sorta normal, right?
They call my name. What will I say? My testimony will be the most urgent. I’ll have to describe his recent strange demeanor, how frightened I was at his hands. We say this is for “his good.” Is it?
Years later when my sister calls to tell me John has died, these are the memories that savage.
•••
I was born in the middle. In the middle of seven children, in a mid-size city in the middle of the country, in the middle class, in the middle of the twentieth century. In a leafy neighborhood neither urban nor suburban. In the middle of surprising anxieties, given the idyllic qualities a mid-century childhood afforded: freedom, autonomy, solitude.
Our parents never beat us. We had enough to eat and wear. But one brother cut all his pictures out of the family scrapbook. Another brother: committed to a madhouse. Another: hamstrung in hierarchy; another: crippled by pain. One sister suffered and drank, one sister trembled in fear. I ate myself upwards of two hundred pounds. What happened to us?
•••
A family
