for motion, speed. Like in those Pollock paintings. Movement.” Her hand cut arcs in the air. The number of pieces Zeno cut the line into approached infinity. The size of the pieces approached zero. Didn’t I see the beauty of that? I didn’t. I only wondered if the waffle iron was scrubbed out from the day before, and what manner of interest I’d have to feign in this before she’d whip up some batter.
“It’s called taking the limit. As
x
goes to zero and
n
to infinity. Get it? One’s going one way big forever, and the other’s going one way little forever?” I still didn’t. Her words washed over me as the words of every math teacher I’d ever had, like the blat of a flat-noted trombone. (Years later, a college math tutor would pick up this dropped thread, and I would let out a delayed belly laugh of understanding at the punchline of some ten-year-delayed joke.)
Some time after her calculus final, she bought roller skates like mine, the metal kind that clamped around your shoes, and went skating with me. She wobbled to a stand holding my arm. When she hung the key threaded on a brown shoestring around my neck, I briefly felt something like pride.
While Mother and I tested our balance on the front walk, Lecia hovered inside the door screen, threatening to hide in the bathroom so nobody would associate her with an activity so dopey as this. “You’re not my sister,” she said, her shapely form withdrawing a foot deeper into the murk of the house. “I mean it. No take-backs. Stick a needle.” She crossed her heart with one square finger. “You set off down that road, I’m an only child. I swear.”
Lecia’s just thirteen and heading into eighth grade, but already she can hardly stand to live here, for we are liable to say or do any damn thing that strikes us. Daddy once asked a square-shouldered date of hers, “Did you poot, young fellow?” His name was Gaylord or Ray or Daryl, and when the content of Daddy’s question finally dawned on him, his mouth slung open.
“Why no, sir!” Gaylord/Ray/Daryl blurted out.
“Well somebody cut one,” Daddy said. He narrowed his eyes. “It was a silent one, but deadly. And it wasn’t me.” He turned my way, “Was it you, Pokey?”
“No, sir.”
“Well keep that butt closed for business,” he said to the boy with a tight nod. And I held my face still as a plaster mask.
That’s why Lecia sailed around all the time on some imaginary parade float, and why that day before Mother and I went skating, she was firing invisible daggers at me. She felt stranded in our household as in a bad Okie movie, orphaned from her real kin amid us feral types.
“You ready?” Mother said. I was. Though I was too old to need help, she grasped my hand, and her touch injected a kind of warm, familiar syrup along my arm. Linked that way, we went rolling down the bumpy sidewalk toward the road. My feet shivered clear up to my knee bones. If I put my teeth together loose, they chattered like those joke teeth you sent away for from the backs of comic books. Once we hit newly tarred asphalt, we got flying. My hair blew back from my head like wings. Kids lined the ditches, for a mother skating was a noteworthy event. She kept her arms wide like a ballerina’s. It was dusk. The refinery gases pumped into the atmosphere left us manufactured psychedelic sunsets: the sun was a Day-Glo ball in the poisoned sky.
That night when it came time to go to sleep, I padded out of my room to ask Lecia was she coming to bed. She sulked on the tweed couch reading. The lavender bedroom she slept in was officially mine. Still, no matter how epic in scale our fights of the day had been, she usually corked off in there, both of us rolled into the same saggy puddle of mattress.
Lecia just lay there silent, the Siamese cat, Sally, stretched out along her sternum, ink-dipped paws between those mountainous boobs. This seemed a particular betrayal, for I thought of Sally as mine. (A lie under which
“It’s called taking the limit. As
x
goes to zero and
n
to infinity. Get it? One’s going one way big forever, and the other’s going one way little forever?” I still didn’t. Her words washed over me as the words of every math teacher I’d ever had, like the blat of a flat-noted trombone. (Years later, a college math tutor would pick up this dropped thread, and I would let out a delayed belly laugh of understanding at the punchline of some ten-year-delayed joke.)
Some time after her calculus final, she bought roller skates like mine, the metal kind that clamped around your shoes, and went skating with me. She wobbled to a stand holding my arm. When she hung the key threaded on a brown shoestring around my neck, I briefly felt something like pride.
While Mother and I tested our balance on the front walk, Lecia hovered inside the door screen, threatening to hide in the bathroom so nobody would associate her with an activity so dopey as this. “You’re not my sister,” she said, her shapely form withdrawing a foot deeper into the murk of the house. “I mean it. No take-backs. Stick a needle.” She crossed her heart with one square finger. “You set off down that road, I’m an only child. I swear.”
Lecia’s just thirteen and heading into eighth grade, but already she can hardly stand to live here, for we are liable to say or do any damn thing that strikes us. Daddy once asked a square-shouldered date of hers, “Did you poot, young fellow?” His name was Gaylord or Ray or Daryl, and when the content of Daddy’s question finally dawned on him, his mouth slung open.
“Why no, sir!” Gaylord/Ray/Daryl blurted out.
“Well somebody cut one,” Daddy said. He narrowed his eyes. “It was a silent one, but deadly. And it wasn’t me.” He turned my way, “Was it you, Pokey?”
“No, sir.”
“Well keep that butt closed for business,” he said to the boy with a tight nod. And I held my face still as a plaster mask.
That’s why Lecia sailed around all the time on some imaginary parade float, and why that day before Mother and I went skating, she was firing invisible daggers at me. She felt stranded in our household as in a bad Okie movie, orphaned from her real kin amid us feral types.
“You ready?” Mother said. I was. Though I was too old to need help, she grasped my hand, and her touch injected a kind of warm, familiar syrup along my arm. Linked that way, we went rolling down the bumpy sidewalk toward the road. My feet shivered clear up to my knee bones. If I put my teeth together loose, they chattered like those joke teeth you sent away for from the backs of comic books. Once we hit newly tarred asphalt, we got flying. My hair blew back from my head like wings. Kids lined the ditches, for a mother skating was a noteworthy event. She kept her arms wide like a ballerina’s. It was dusk. The refinery gases pumped into the atmosphere left us manufactured psychedelic sunsets: the sun was a Day-Glo ball in the poisoned sky.
That night when it came time to go to sleep, I padded out of my room to ask Lecia was she coming to bed. She sulked on the tweed couch reading. The lavender bedroom she slept in was officially mine. Still, no matter how epic in scale our fights of the day had been, she usually corked off in there, both of us rolled into the same saggy puddle of mattress.
Lecia just lay there silent, the Siamese cat, Sally, stretched out along her sternum, ink-dipped paws between those mountainous boobs. This seemed a particular betrayal, for I thought of Sally as mine. (A lie under which
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