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impossible-to-comply-with directive is a particularly effective tool for the breaking of will). I recall trying to scream and being unable to because of the apple core. The enforced silence was almost as terrifying as the core itself, and at the risk of psychoanalyzing myself I believe that this experience convinced me to consign my life to giving voice to those whom the powerful wish to silence. Finally, Paul took the apple core out and told me that I had five seconds to say “Paul is King” or I was going to get it again. So I said “Paul is King!” through snotty tears. I added “King of the Idiots,” but only softly, and only after he was gone.
    After that, the “corings,” as Paul smirkingly called them, became a regular occurrence. I would fight back, without any kind of effect—exactly once I appealed for help to my father, who informed me, as I had already intuited he would, that I needed to learn as early as possible that only I could fight for myself, since “the only law is the law of the jungle.” (There was a second time, when I was six or seven, when I told my father that, if he didn’t make Paul leave, I was going to run away; his response was that I might as well learn to fight here “because the entire world is Paul.”)
    The summer that my mother was pregnant with Emily, when I was four, I spent many afternoons in the bleachers at Paul’s baseball games, held aloft by my mother and doing my best to avoid putting my feet on her pregnant stomach, resulting in a lot of swinging of my feet. Paul was so large and so intimidating that the twelve-year-old outfielders always toddled back awkwardly when he stepped up to the plate. Sometimes he would turn back and smile at the observers, who ate it up. Sometimes he would point at me and wave, and the crowd ate that up, too, the baseball prodigy treating his baby brother so solicitously. But there was no love of my big brother in me, at least not then, and all I felt was a hatred too big for my body. I didn’t want to see him bat, so I would wail and try to wriggle free, but my mother would not have it; for the most part she was the most passive and confused person I have ever met, but to hold me up was a clear directive, and the more I tried to get out of her grasp and reach for a seat on the bench, the more holding me up made her feel like a firm, serious parent doing her motherly duty. So whether I wanted to or not I watched Paul. I was delighted when Emily was born and my mother had to hold her, leaving me to sit beside the two of them in the stands, staring either straight ahead, at sat-on suitcoats, or up at pink, squished-face Emily and her tiny, flickering hands.
    As Emily grew bigger, Paul kept shoving apple cores down my throat. He also started discarding fruit on the floor, leaving it for my mother or our maid to pick up. (I do not remember any maid clearly, since, at least compared to our friends, we had a high turnover rate.) I recall a crawling Emily putting her hand on a damp pear and dissolving into tears. Our mother told Paul and me “not to play rough while Emily is around,” but that hardly stopped Paul; in fact, he seemed to relish an uncertainly mobile audience member. The apartment always smelled of terrible juices from discarded fruit.
    Apart from some embarrassment that my humiliation now had a witness, I didn’t notice Emily very much when she was very small, as I was much too distracted by my hatred of Paul. One of the few things that I believed myself to have over him was my ability to sleep late, as my father awakened him for baseball at five in the morning. Very often I would make myself get out of bed just so that I could barge into the bathroom while he was brushing his teeth and taunt him that I could go back to bed, after which I would run back to my room and try to lock the door before he could reach me. More often than not he would outrun me and slam me