I was a very young boy when I realized that my life’s purpose was to torment my sister Amy.
Amy basically had only two emotional states: She was either in a frenzy, screaming and sobbing and shouting, or she was really upset. Anything I did to irritate or anger her would set off such a horrifyingly cataclysmic reaction that I couldn’t wait to do it again.
When Amy became a teenager it was like going from tornado to hurricane. Like many girls her age, she became weepy and moody, torn apart by foolish romantic crushes, betrayed by shifting alliances among friends. My parents warned me that she needed to be left alone, which sounded to my young ears like, “You thought antagonizing her was fun before, try it now!”
Amy turned to writing poetry in a top-secret journal that she’d been keeping since she was 10, which was the same year I started reading it. Pink ink flowed across the page in swollen rivers of angst-saturated dreck, each period a meticulously drawn heart, each “i” dotted with a sunflower.
We owned a tape recorder, and Amy read some of this stuff into the microphone, her voice quavering with emotion. Listening to it, I concluded that she was making the tape as a way of amusing me.
At this point, Amy had never had a boy call her at the house, so when my mother announced that there was a “Neal” on the phone for her, Amy reacted as if she’d just been hit with a defibrillator. “Nobody say anything!” she screamed, terrified that Neal might hear us talking in the background and conclude that Amy lived with her family and not in a penthouse apartment. Everybody froze, listening to a phone call that on Amy’s end went like this:
“Hi, Neal, ha ha ha ha ha, you’re funny, ha ha ha ha, you’re funny, ha ha ha ha.”
I sneaked down to the basement, where I had recently located a hidden phone jack by the furnace, plugged in a phone, picked up the extension and flipped on the tape recorder. Amy’s dramatic, whispery voice wafted out of the tiny speaker:
You stretch my heart like a rubber band
That snaps back into place when you smile
And though I can see me doing many things
I can see me combing the hair of angels
I can see me riding a purple cow
But I can’t see me not loving you
At the words “purple cow,” Amy came out of her stunned silence and screamed so loudly my skin crawled with goose bumps of joy. She stomped through the house in a homicidal fury.
Neal remained on the line, respectfully listening to the things Amy could see herself doing, which included living in a kangaroo’s pouch and more purple cow rides but never not loving him. I could hear him breathing while Amy kicked in the door to my bedroom and, from the sound of it, pulverized all my belongings.
I put the phone to my ear.
“Hey, Neal, are you there?” I whispered.
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“This is Amy’s brother. They keep me in the basement. They won’t let me out.”
“Huh,” Neal replied.
Because of the structural damage done to the house, my father sternly ordered me never to do anything like that again. And I didn’t.
At least, not more than a dozen times.
Contact W. Bruce Cameron at . For his previous columns visit .
