for the Allman Brothers Band, is a cardboard box filled with all of my sister’s ribbons and trophies from her horse days. Her saddle is in the storage room, too.
One day, I climb out my sister’s window in order to string speaker wire from her room to the stereo in the living room downstairs. Now my sister can listen to raucous rock-and-roll music right in her room, sometimes with the door closed. My parents, who live in the room across the hall from her, can now enjoy the not especially well muffled sounds of Alice Cooper. Welcome to my nightmare, says Alice.
My parents are not thrilled about my ingeniousness. Why would you do such a thing? my mother asks, as if by stringing speaker wire I have somehow broken some kind of unspoken promise to her.
The answer to this question, which I do not speak aloud, catches me by surprise.
Because I love her?
It is true that I have now swapped one dog for another—replaced Playboy with Penny. Likewise my identity as one kind of boy—effeminate nerd—has been upgraded to nascent hippie.
But even more unexpected, I have performed another kind of legerdemain. For as long as I could remember, I was a loner.
But now I am a brother.
* * *
I lived to make her laugh.
I became a merciless mimic. My voice was strangely elastic, and I found myself able to create, with eerie realism, impressions of a wide range of people: Richard Nixon, Johnny Carson, James Cagney—all of whom were the standard targets for “impressions” in 1973. But I was also able to create voices of my mother and father, several of my friends, even the girls that I loved. Sometimes I would call people up and pretend I was someone else.
But my primary audience was Cyndy. I developed a particular routine that she found entertaining, The Hildegarde Time Show. This involved climbing into the fireplace (which I pretended was a television) and narrating a show in which my mother somehow had become the anchorwoman of a program whose only purpose was announcing what time it was. “It’s twelve twenty-seven,” I would announce with a strange, beatific smile, and then just stare at the camera for a long, long time. Eventually I’d check my watch. “It’s still twelve twenty-seven,” I’d say.
My sister gradually assembles a group of cool friends. There’s a girl named Lily, who is a year older than everyone else, the result of being held back at her school for reasons never quite specified. There’s a group of boys who go to the Episcopal Academy who act in plays and perform in rock-and-roll bands. They all come over to the house, and my sister sits me down in front of them for entertainment. “Okay, Jimmy,” she says. “Have at it.”
In no time at all I am inventing songs for them on the piano or doing imitations. I perfect what I call the “Imitation Imitation,” which is, for instance, Bob Dylan imitating Richard Nixon; or Marlon Brando imitating Gypsy Rose Lee. Inevitably, this evolves into the “Imitation Imitation Imitation”: JFK imitating Johnny Carson imitating Dudley Do-Right. And so on.
I am highly entertaining. Everyone laughs and laughs at my incredible antics.
This is very different from staying home with my Venus flytraps and eating hot dog stew with Gammie while Cyndy braided her horse’s tail out at the stables. It is hard to believe that this other world took place just a couple of years ago.
I think it makes my parents a little sad, that my sister’s world suddenly revolves around me instead of them. A lot of the time now, if there are fights, my sister and I are on one side and they are on the other. Some of the clever, ironic things I say don’t make any sense, at least not to them. In just a couple of years, my parents find that their children have become something more like strangers to them—with secrets, and in-jokes, and unspoken understandings.
Sometimes my sister and I laugh so hard that we fall upon the floor, unable to speak or move, just shaking so hard that it is not clear if we are going to be able to survive our own happiness. It makes it hard to breathe.
* * *
My friend John leaned toward me conspiratorially. “The walls are breathing,” he explained.
An album entitled Tubular Bells played on the stereo. This included a section in which a caveman sang: Stuccotowfrash dow wonawow. Stuccotowfrash dow wonaw.
A half a dozen hippies ate Meow Mix at