Bunk Beds
Things are Always Simpler from Up Close
Article by Elliot Singer Art by Liz White
I only have two memories of when it was just the two of us. Kapp and Elliot. The first is fleeting, a whisper in the wind; I’m following him as he walks along the hallway, running his hand along the banister as we go from our room to our parents’. I know it was just us then, Kapp and I. I followed him with nobody following me. I suppose in some ways I still do.
The second memory I am more sure of. We stand on the blacktop together, holding hands, watching the other kids laugh and play. This was how every recess went during those six long months of living in New York. Forced to the outskirts by a lack of confidence and big city charisma. It was one of the only times I knew that he needed me as much as I needed him.
After that, I just remember being in the middle, sandwiched between Kapp and Emma. Big and little, leader and follower. I cried when I found out that he wouldn’t be on the top bunk anymore. Now we had to take apart the bunk beds, lay them side by side because neither my sister nor I could climb up so high. It was hard to talk across the gap to my sister’s adjacent bed, harder than it was when my brother was above me on the top bunk. I wasn’t used to sleeping through the night, no longer stirred by his bare feet padding down the wooden ladder to pee.
Kapp moved to the room next door, where I would so often hide while he was brushing his teeth, burrowing beneath the white and green polka dotted covers, the queen bed so much bigger than my own. Inevitably, I would get dragged back to a different set of pastel-colored walls, footie pajamaed feet squirming in my dad’s arms, Kapp giggling surreptitiously in the background.
Years went by when I felt too alone to fall asleep.
Kapp’s spy-themed birthday party, turning eight. I was five, and in my eyes, Kapp was a bastion of knowledge. The epitome of a “big kid,” a title to which I desperately aspired. I was fiercely jealous of his party, looking on that morning as he meticulously filled cellophane party-favor bags with cheap blue-light pens and dollar-store dark sunglasses. My parents had pulled out all the stops for that day, hiding scraps of paper with clues around the house and neighborhood for the gaggle of boys to find. Eventually it led to the cake, a two-foot-high mountain of Rice-Krispie treats — his favorite — with a wax “8” candle stuck in the melting marshmallows on top. I was a paranoid kid, fiercely afraid of kidnappers, heights, and death. I could barely stomach the first six clues as I anxiously tagged along to each hiding place. After the clue in our damp, dark basement alluded to a hostage situation, I lost it, running upstairs with my bare feet and collapsing into tears in my dad’s lap. I had barely recovered when they returned. Beaming with pride and a crumpled fistful of paper clues, Kapp showed off his tricked out plastic watch that had been the spoil of their hunt. I clung to my mom’s coat as he opened presents wrapped in the Sunday Times, visions of the forgotten hostage swirling in my mind.
The next five years are a barely permeable red, an incoherent montage of seething. Perpetual kettle whistling punctuated by moments of a rolling boil. During those years as my body changed and became foreign while Kapp only grew stronger and more secure, he could get under my skin like nothing else. Everything he did would bring me to tears, smashing books on the floor in frustration, slamming doors, kicking soccer balls into thickets of brambles. I always ended the game, the conversation, the math worksheet, before he could beat me. Better to get sent to my room — therapy even, as long as he didn’t know — than risk losing his respect. I lost myself to a deluge of jealousy, craving the way his canary ski jacket zipped up perfectly to meet a meticulously stickered helmet and matching goggles. His soccer pullover with his name embroidered on the left chest. The way my grandmother fawned over her only grandson, taking him upstairs on his thirteenth birthday to put his very own mezuzah on the door frame. I never got one when I turned thirteen.
When I turned sixteen, we had been going to the same school for two years. Our friend groups had overlapped at points, and I was elated that the people who liked him liked me, too. Evidence that I might have a sliver of the casual confidence that had always seemed so effortless for him. Now I know that wasn’t true, but things are always simpler from up close.
He drifted away the last six months before leaving. My pursuit of his approval had anything but diminished over the years, a steady yearning for attention and validation from before I could remember. I had long gotten used to his temporary absences since he had moved out of the bedroom, back when we were barely old enough to know the difference between boys and girls. But the abstraction of his departure, gently erupting from a pale twinge to conscious pain, became clearer as January — his eighteenth birthday — wore into spring, and all too soon graduation. Sometime in April, the fighting of our childhood had returned. We fought over whose turn it was to do the dishes, whether or not I had bad taste in music, who sat shotgun on the ride to dinner. I wanted desperately to just talk to him, but a mask of boyish masculinity and impatience for college rendered him taciturn and me endlessly exasperated.
Arguments always seemed to surface when we left the house for school. With each passing morning, he seemed to take a little longer eating his eggs and packing his backpack while I waited impatiently at the doorstep. Or he’d turn on a dime and rush me out the door in ten minutes, my breakfast half eaten and binders askew. One morning, finally fed up, I yelled at him as I ran barefoot to the car, with socks, shoes, and cereal bowl in hand. I told him I was sick of him dictating the time we left based on his particular whims, that my life didn’t revolve around his. He shot back that I was being ridiculous and overreacting. I slammed the door as hard as I could when I got into the passenger’s seat, and we sat in silence all the way down Masonic and over Twin Peaks.
We both cried that day, one of the few times he cried in front of me since we were little and he fell off our homemade tightrope and broke his arm. That and when Nana died. But in the car that day, listening to “A Day in The Life” by the Beatles, he confessed to me that he wanted these last few months with me to be good, for things to work. He told me he was going to miss me all the way out in Connecticut, and I told him I was scared for him to leave.
I slept in his bed for a week after he left. I felt like I was falling, the ground pulling out from under me, albeit down an all-too-familiar chute. He was growing up as I looked on, sluggish and lonely. His bed somehow felt bigger than my own, like I was drowning in the sheets and comforter, even though we had bought identical models years before. I wondered if his dorm bed felt too big, and if somebody else occupied the bottom bunk.
I’m gone now too. I left home much like he did, impatient for the promise of newness. There weren’t as many fights with Emma though, and the tears were different. Sisterhood has a script. I don’t know if we followed it exactly, but during the goodbyes my role was clear. The exasperating complexity of our dynamic was on a path well-trodden, the specifics of our particular situation dwarfed by a shared pressure towards womanhood. How do you create genuine closeness when the constraints are so plainly external? The one-too-many books about the beauty of sisterhood we had each read came with a reminder at every turn of how acutely we were failing. I was clear on the gravity of my actions as a role model, familiar with my potential to harm purely through her observation of how I chose to live. Saying goodbye was sad, but now I knew how to do it.
With Kapp, there was no structure. Our potential for closeness was unsurveilled and imprecise. Brothers and sisters are allowed to be cordial, dissonant, or inseparable, no questions asked. I think we both realized this early on, tested its boundaries as we grew apart. There was an elasticity to our intimacy, spanning far when proximity felt dangerous, and then pulling us together in a moment.
When we’re home, we cook dinners together and talk about bikes or laugh at obscure tweets. Cannellini or garbanzo, disc or rim brakes; we argue but none of it feels particularly urgent. The easy, immediate familiarity feels safe and also tragic. Why is it only now that we get this? People tell me that it’s normal that we are closer now, the space across time zones and coast cultures shrinking a gap of envy. We grew into ourselves during the years apart, and puzzle pieces tend to fit better when the edges aren’t so jagged. Still, distance feels like an odd price to pay for unity. I hope the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but I don’t know if I’ll never find out. There don’t seem to be bunk beds in our future.