Read My Brother for Free Online Page B

she bought him a dinner of fried chicken, and she took a taxi back to the hospital and gave it to him. He ate it all and my mother was very happy because she had not seen him eat so heartily in months. She reported this to me with as much enthusiasm and satisfaction as if she had just seen him successfully complete a feat that no human had ever successfully completed before. In the days to come he grew more and more well, he ate more, his temperature was a little below normal, but it remained the same, it did not go up and it did not go way up. And then everyone began to wonder what to do with him, how long should he be in the hospital, should he still be in the hospital? No one had ever seen an HIV-infected person, who in fact had full-blown AIDS, leave the hospital in this condition—alive, even well; well if you did not know what his life was really, really like. He by then was sitting outside in the company of the other patients; they no longer shunned him, because he did not look like someone who had AIDS, he looked just like an ordinary sick person; an ordinary sick person was something they knew about, a person with AIDS was not. He looked like them, sick with no choice but to go to an ill-equipped hospital in Antigua. While he was in the hospital, another man came in, very sick with AIDS, as sick as my brother had been. The man died. His relatives did not come to see him. I do not know if my brother visited him and offered any words of comfort. My brother by then was well enough to go home. But what home? He did not really have a home. He would go home to live with my mother, and this was wonderful, that he would live with his mother and she would take care of him, but this became another example of the extraordinary ability of her love for her children to turn into a weapon for their destruction.
    My mother lives with her male children, who by now are in their thirties, or rather, my mother’s male children, by now in their thirties, live with her. It is an important distinction. My mother would not subordinate herself in any way to anyone, especially not her children. She would not live with anyone; they would live with her; if she were to live with anyone, they might ask her to leave, they might throw her out after she had given them one of her famous tongue-lashings. She protects and reserves her right to verbally humiliate her children. What can be so wrong with that? She and the grown-up men children who live with her quarrel all the time. At any given moment there is a small war of words going on between her and one of them. The middle grown-up male child no longer speaks to her; it has been years since he has spoken to her in even so much as the tone of voice he would use for giving directions to someone he just met on the street, someone he has never seen before. If he is forced to speak to her, his voice is full of hatred and despair. He has told me he does not recognize the sound of his own voice when he speaks to her. He calls me up to tell me he is sorry he never sympathized with me when I told him how awful she had been to me. He says to me, Mom is evil, you know, as if he had never said it to me before, but he says it to me every time we speak, as if it is a new discovery to him.
    After he was dismissed from the hospital my brother went back to my mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. He had no place to go, not even a bed of his own, and so he went to his mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. There was nothing wrong with that. It was decided that the son coming home from the hospital should move into her bed because his old house, which was behind hers, was too drafty. I could not understand this, because what kind of draft exists in a place that is hot all the time? There was another reason for him going to live with her. The oldest of her three sons had been living in the other shack behind her house, and his living quarters were really just pieces of galvanize all