There was one Saturday morning when she didn't knock on my door. She'd try to sing along with it, but her voice would crack every time she came to the bridge: And I would be sad if our new love was in vain. Usually it was "If I Fell." She loved that song. She always wanted to listen to the same song over and over again. It was only when she was pounding on my door, begging me please and apologizing for everything she'd said about the Beatles, that I let her in. But every Saturday morning, as I sat on my bedroom floor listening to their records, she came knocking. My sister reacted the way most little sisters would: She told me the Beatles sucked. When I was 10 years old, I was obsessed with the Beatles. I was only four years older, but it felt like we were a generation apart. I was always encouraging her to build model airplanes with me or to play Parcheesi, but most of the time my efforts just backfired.
When we were growing up, I tried to be a good brother to my sister. I watched her peel back the shells with her fingers. She seemed entirely focused on her food, a plate of shrimp and green chiles. Part of me thought she had but was just pretending she hadn't. Don't worry, she told me with her eyes, we'll talk about this later. It sounded like the name of a character from a Victorian novel.
"You don't believe me, check it out for yourself." I felt like the floor was giving way below me. "You know she's doing porn, don't you?" he said. I was spooning Pad Thai onto my plate when my brother mumbled something to me about our sister. My mother was there, and my brother and his wife, and my aunt. I bore my family no ill will it was just that I couldn't be around them very long without feeling sick. I'd moved to Massachusetts in 1991 to go to graduate school, suspecting, even then, that I wouldn't return to L.A. It had been a long time since I'd been back home. Amy and I were married by then, and we were there with our son. Six years later I was in a Thai restaurant on Van Nuys Boulevard in Los Angeles for a family reunion of sorts. I taped the page that had the picture of her to the page before it so I wouldn't accidentally turn to it again. She was wearing a lei with green and yellow and pink flowers. She had a fake smile and an orange tanning-booth tan. My sister was the only one who was looking into the camera.
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