The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey Read Free Book Online

one of the few seniors in the cast of Death Takes a Holiday , and he comported himself like Brando on the set of The Godfather —like a zany paterfamilias, mooning the other actors, obscenely improvising, cutting up a lot in general. Of course he was stoned most of the time. Our drama teacher was a clueless woman who wanted to be called by her first name; she was fired after that first year on the job. I can’t remember her ever reproaching my brother.
    Scott seemed to think his talent had outgrown our provincial high school, or at least this particular production. The day before dress rehearsal he asked me to run lines with him, whereupon the worst was revealed: he could only recite odds and ends that he’d soaked up through repetition, and there were quite a few longer speeches that he hadn’t even begun to memorize. I was appalled; I was going down with the same ship after all.
    “What the hell have you been doing these past two months?” I said with sincere amazement.
    His reaction was curious. Without a word or change of expression he yanked me to my feet and punched me in the chest as hard as he could. I managed to gasp some sort of protest, and he shoved me over a table in our living room and began kicking me there on the floor. Anything I said or did seemed to provoke him, so I stopped struggling and simply grunted with what I hoped was a kind of poignant agony. If anything, this had the opposite effect: when one of his kicks made my head crack against a doorjamb, I affected a semiconscious daze (“ Unnnh ”) and my brother began taunting me. “ ‘ Unnnh ’—! ‘ Unnnh ’—!” he mimicked, kicking. The size difference between us was greater than ever (I was maybe five-five, the victim of a late puberty), and so he went on kicking and hitting me from room to room, careful not to mark my face lest our parents find out how bad the beating was. Toward the end he began to accompany his blows with a histrionic monologue about how everyone was against him (kick), how no one would help him (kick), and so on. We ended up in our father’s study. I cringed on the sofa while my brother stood over me ranting and waving his fist. Then he fell to his knees and threw his head in my lap. He was crying or pretending to cry. The idea was that I should feel sorry for him .
    I didn’t feel sorry for him. He’d just beaten the shit out of me because he felt like blowing off steam, and now he was pretending to be in the midst of a terrible strain—because nobody would help him. I resolved to bide my time until this crazy bastard was out of the house, to be careful above all, and to make him pay for this little episode somewhere down the road.
    I told nobody. Too humiliating. On the opening night of the play I was joking around in the dressing room—I’d flung off my shirt and begun flexing my spindly chest—and a girl in the cast, for whose benefit I flexed, said “Oh my God ” and covered her mouth. My chest was an ugly mass of bruises, as though I’d been trampled by something large and hoofed. I can’t remember what excuse I made.
    One benefit of my brother’s cathartic outburst was that it sobered him into memorizing his lines somewhat. Every time he was about to speak onstage there was a fraught little pause, as though he were pondering the world and its sorrows, but I knew the truth. “Come come, your Highness!” I couldn’t resist ad-libbing in my role as the bluff old Baron. “Life is short! Out with it!”
    A WEEK OR so later, when it was clear I wasn’t going to rat him out to our parents, my brother gave me a peace offering: several fluffy buds of high-grade marijuana, stuffed in one of those plastic 35-millimeter film containers. I’d noticed in my brother’s bankbook a recent lavish withdrawal of eighty-five dollars (leaving the total balance in two figures), and I assumed this was part of that purchase. He’d handed it to me with some brusque remark as we drove to school one day. I didn’t