Christmas morning, around five a.m., my younger sisters climbed onto my bed and whispered excitedly, asking to go downstairs to see what Santa had left under the tree. After about half an hour, I suggested we tiptoe to the stairs and sit on the top step. As soon as we did so, we heard Mom’s voice from her bedroom, telling us we could not go downstairs until she’d gone first to snap on the tree lights. She said we weren’t going downstairs until six a.m. but always relented before the prescribed hour, slumping downstairs and lighting the tree. As soon as she did, my sisters and I dashed down the stairs. But we were too young then to wonder whether my mother, who loved giving gifts, could afford so many.
We had moved from a city apartment to my grandparents’ rural summer house. It had no water except for a hand pump in the kitchen and an outhouse in the rear of a shed that connected to a barn. A rough house, but it was a good home near a lake.
Our father was a low-paid salesman for a meat-packing company. He traveled each week to restaurants and phoned in their order to the company headquarters. During tragic times in our family, the top of the stairs was a frightening place. That’s when Donna and Karla would huddle behind me, whimpering about whether our raging alcoholic father was going to kill Mom. I tried to assure them our home was safe and that he was just trying to scare Mom.
On the day I turned three, I was with my grandparents while my mother was in the hospital giving birth to Donna. For a while, I resented having to share my birthday with her. Later, I realized our yearly celebration together renewed a loving connection.
When I was eleven, I retrieved my father’s old boxing gloves and tried to persuade Donna to box with me. She said no. I told her I’d learn how to dance rock-and-roll with her if she boxed with me. I told her she could hit me as hard as she wanted, and I’d just tap her lightly. She still said no. When five-year-old Karla came home on the weekend from the family that was caring for her during the week (Mom had taken a job to help support the family), she said she’d do it.
First, I removed her eyeglasses. Then I slid a football helmet over her head, tied pillows around her middle, and pushed the large boxing gloves onto her tiny hands. I knelt and slipped on the other set of boxing gloves. I told Karla to try hitting me as hard as she could. I blocked her punches. Now and then I tapped her pillows with a light jab. I laughed when she couldn’t get close enough to hit anything except my arms. I blocked her wild swings. When Karla became frustrated, she rushed me headlong and slammed my nose. I laughed, but my nose stung, and there was some blood. Karla smiled. I said, “Okay, you win.” Later, I thought Karla was releasing her frustration at being farmed out during the week to a family that she disliked.
In later years, I liked that Karla saw her big brother as a role model. Since she was athletic, I took her to the mountains to ski. Some years after I graduated from college, Karla spent a couple years at the same school. After my vagabond year in Europe, she found the courage to explore Europe on her own and visit her pen pal in Germany. She seemed to build courage the same way I had—by forcing herself to move into the anxiety of new ventures until she’d conquered them. I admired her for that, especially since she’d been shy.
As kids, Donna and I had had our squabbles. But as we matured, we found some common ground, such as collecting Elvis Presley records, learning to dance rock-and-roll together, and occasionally displaying our dance moves at school functions.
When I was a senior in high school, Donna introduced me to a freshman girl who’d asked to meet me and later tickled my neck while we danced at the senior prom. When I was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, I fixed Donna up with a classmate who didn’t have a date for June Week. Flying to Annapolis and dancing at all the fancy balls with Jim were, according to Donna, the thrill of a lifetime.
One of the fondest memories I have of my sisters was when I was returning from my vagabond year in Europe. The night before my ship docked in New York, I tossed and turned. In the morning, I ate breakfast quickly and scrambled up on deck. I saw the Statue of Liberty in the distance and choked up. As Lady Liberty loomed larger, I couldn’t restrain the tears. Crying about being home felt stupid. I hadn’t wept when I stood before Michelangelo’s statue of David, even though that had been an emotional moment. But when I saw my two sisters waving at me from the dock, my eyes dried, and I began to laugh. They had flown from Boston to surprise me. My sisters had provided me the unexpected euphoria of being home after a long journey. With them, it would always be home. It was one of those times that reminded me of how much I loved them.
Kurt Schmidt is the author of a young adult novel, “Annapolis Misfit,” (Crown Publishers) the chapbook memoir, “Birth of a Risk-Taker,” (Bottlecap Press), and many personal essays. With significant anxiety, he flew in a small plane piloted by his newly-licensed son, who, as an adolescent asked insane questions like “What’s God?” Their flight story appeared in The Boston Globe and The Rock Salt Journal and can be viewed among others at www.kurtgschmidt.com. His nonfiction has appeared in Magnets and Ladders, The Mersey Review, The Examined Life Journal, Puerto del Sol, and others.
Featured image by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash.
