Free A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White Page B

father's belt. In one case her zeal left welts, which led to parental questions and eventually exposure of the whole drama. My sister, at that time a tall, taut platinum blonde who didn't like grown-ups, answered my mother's furious questions with indignant yeses and noes, lowered eyes and a set jaw. She was afraid of my mother, the interrogation alarmed her, but not for a moment did she feel guilty or question what she had done. She was the queen of her tribe of girls.
    My sister resented the interest some of the girls took in me and banned me from the meetings held beside the empty swimming pool choked with dead leaves. When I disobeyed her and toddled smilingly into the assembly, she spanked my bare legs with a hairbrush. My father, resolved that his son should hold his own, pinioned my sister's arms behind her and ordered me to switch her on the back of her legs with a stinging branch. But I knew that soon enough he would disappear again, my mother drive off, the maids look away; I dropped the branch, howled and clattered up the stairs to my room. I think I also knew that my father preferred my sister to me and that his interest in me was only abstract, dynastic.
    My sister was his true son. She could ride a horse and swim a mile and she was as capable of sustained rages as he. Still better, she was as blond as his mother. My grandmother had not wanted my father; as she told him, she'd pummeled her stomach with her fists every day while she was bearing him. Nonetheless, my father somehow got born and survived to serve his mother humbly and lovingly, washing the family's sheets in the bathtub when he was still only a child and brushing out her blond hair every night. One night, soon after my grandmother died, I stole into my father's study and found him standing behind my sister's chair, brushing her hair and crying.
    Right now I'm looking at an ancient photograph of my sister and me. I'm three and she's seven, both of us bundled up for winter and posed against a door under an ominously black Christmas wreath. She's much taller than I. My sister is dressed in a fashionably cut camel's-hair coat belled out above black leggings. She's sporting a matching hat bordered in brown piping, the front brim flipped up and the whole thing placed rakishly far back on her head. She's smiling a thin-lipped, obviously forced smile. Her eyes, so blue they're bottomless and white, express the pain of an unhealed convalescent, as do the shadows, like bruises below her temples— bruises forceps might have left.
    Because my sister tormented me and I loved her but feared her, I turned away from her to imaginary playmates. There were three of them. Cottage Cheese, the girl, was older than I, sensible and bossy but my ally. She and I tolerated our good-natured younger sidekick, Georgie-Porgie, a dimwit we fussed over for his own good. We felt nothing of this benign condescension toward Tom-Thumb-Thumb, the hellion who roamed the woods beyond the barbed wire fence guarding the neighbor's property, off limits to us and to him too, I'm sure, though he ignored this rule and all others. He was just a rustle of dried leaves, a panting of quick hot breath behind the honeysuckle, a blur of tanned leg and muddy knees or a distant hoot and holler—an irrepressible male freedom (all the freer because he was a boy and not a man). He needed no one, he'd listen to no reprimand. One time Cottage Cheese and I cornered him (we'd taken him by surprise as he was furtively pawing my father's untouchable tools in the garage) and we lectured him at length, but his eyes, the whites flashing wonderfully clear and bright through the matted hair, never stopped darting back and forth looking for an escape route— and then he was off, leaving behind him only the resonance of the concrete vault and our voices calling Tom, calling, calling out to him, Tom, to behave, to be good, Tom, as good as we had to be.
    He never cared for me. Cottage Cheese and I, determined that