Free Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood by Bill Hayes

drive-through car wash and to “he-man movies” such as
True Grit.
As the supplier of soda pop to all of Spokane’s sporting events, he received free passes to hockey games, boxing matches, the annual rodeo, and off we’d go. It was as if manliness were a destination to which Dad regularly led me. Father and son, we’d sit in the bleachers most Sunday afternoons, sharing bags of roasted peanuts and time away from “the squaws,” as he called my sisters and mom. We’d make it home just in time for dinner. As it was every night, the dinner table was like a game of musical chairs, the girls constantly popping up to fetch this or that while Dad and I remained seated, never lifting a finger.
    I’d had my own bedroom since the summer after my seventh birthday. Before that, I’d roomed for as long as I could remember with my sister Shannon, who was then unceremoniously moved in with “the baby,” four-year-old Julia. Shannon was two years older than me and the sister to whom I was closest. Togetherness hadn’t ended with our getting separate bedrooms. Her best friend, Mary Kay, was Chris’s sister, so our paths often also crossed at the Porters’, as well as at school and catechism class. Our connectedness as children was one of complements: Her emotions bubbled over, I held mine in. It’s something we still joke and talk about today: Shannon cried enough for the two of us, if not the whole family. And yet, as the fourth daughter, she was always somewhat misplaced, not allied with the eldest three and rarely getting the attention from Mom and Dad both Julia and I received. Though younger than Shannon, I tried to act like her protective big brother.
    To the senior daughters, Colleen, Ellen, and Maggie, I was the baby brother they doted on but who also got in their way every day in the tiny bathroom we all shared. We called it “the yellow bathroom,” for it was tiled the dusty color of lemon drops. We never shared the bathroom to the extent of bathing or using the toilet in front of one another; the locked door guaranteed privacy. But in the final minutes before bolting out of the house for school or church, we all ended up in there at once. In the large mirror above the twin sinks, my sisters and I were a jumble of pressing bodies, a photo booth filled to capacity. From memory, I pluck a typical scene: It is a school morning in 1969. I’m a second-grader at Comstock Elementary. We’ve all got to be out of the house in fifteen minutes.
    I’m in there first, as my bedroom is right next door and I’m already dressed, having laid out my clothes the night before—brown cords, a white shirt, and a belt; not much to it. At either side of the sinks are three drawers labeled with our names on masking tape. Colleen, Ellen, and Maggie have the left side; Shannon, Julia, and I, the right. Based on actual need, I could use the tiny ledge behind the toothbrush holder for the few possessions my bathroom drawer houses. It rattles as I yank it open, the lonesome sound of a comb and a tie clip. By contrast, the girls’ drawers barely close, containing overgrown thickets of hairstyling paraphernalia and such.
    I load Crest onto my toothbrush as Colleen enters, the first sister in. The eldest, she’s always the first at everything. First to be confirmed at St. Augustine’s, to go on a diet, to part her hair in the middle, to enter high school. A freshman at Lewis and Clark, she is twice my age, which, in my reckoning, puts her in roughly the same age bracket as redwoods and our parents. Colleen wants to be a fashion model; she has the most to accomplish here. She starts by tugging from her dirty-blond hair the pink foam rollers she’s slept in, tossing them one by one back into her drawer.
    Ellen and Maggie are next in, and the four of us automatically reconfigure. I now sit on the toilet seat, ostensibly still brushing my teeth, as Colleen takes the middle position, and Ellen and Maggie commandeer the sinks. Though they’re