Eyes Wide Shut

My adolescents was doomed from the start. It was absolutely terrible and really I never had a chance. My father had flown in from Italy to our brownstone in New York City, just for my birthday, but before the night was over he was gone and it felt as if my mother was nowhere to be found the day after. I had gotten what I wanted for my birthday, but that was meaningless because I always got what I wanted for my birthday.

“What the hell is this?” I was reading a first edition of the ‘Catcher in the Rye’ that my father had gotten me for my birthday. I could hear Samuel yelling from two stories down; I began to race up our endless, carpeted, spiral stairs.

“What’s going on?” I tugged at his arm as he covered the entrance way to our parents’ room.

“Go downstairs, Blair.” Samuel blocked the way so I couldn’t see a thing.

“No! What’s going on!” I shoved him as hard as I possibly could.

“Go downstairs now!” He was obstructing my view on purpose.

“Listen to your brother.” I heard my mother’s raspy voice behind him.

“I’m not a baby anymore! Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Fine.” Samuel dropped his arm. “Our mother is having an affair. Do you feel like a grown up now?” I watched as my mother wrapped her silk robe tighter around herself and a blur of a man was buttoning up his shirt. His pants had been shoved on and they weren’t buttoned or buckled.

I could feel my face growing red in anxiety. I wiped my eyes before tears could hit my cheeks. My mother kept opening and closing her mouth, as if she were going to say something, but kept changing her mind. I pulled myself closer to Samuel and he glared at the man who spoke fast French to my fluent mother. She looked at him and hesitated to answer.

‘‘Foutez le camp de cette maison en ce moment. N'avez-vous pas honte? Le dégoût vous deux et moi vous êtes un être égoïste humaine. Si jamais vous-.” Before anyone could do anything Samuel was off on a rant. You see, she wasn’t the only fluent one.

Translation? ‘Get the hell out of this house right now. Have you no shame? The both of you disgust me and you're a selfish human being. If you ever-’ We had both been trained in French, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. And for a moment it was worth it to be too worldly.

“Samuel! Stop!” My mother shouted.

“You first!” He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me down the stairs. I was stunned into place, surprised that I was moving. He pulled me into the New York winter and took me to a Starbucks.

“Don’t tell, Dad. Okay? It’ll break him.” Samuel rubbed his hands together for warmth and took a sip of his coffee.

“Okay.”

Samuel and I didn’t talk about what we saw ever again. I liked to take it as us having a mutual understanding, but truthfully we were both terrified. I told myself that my mother was a good person. I told myself that she would tell my father what she had done in her own time. For a long time I believed myself, but no one ever told him and no one ever would. It all sounds sort of hypocritical, but our constant moving and their constant bickering was something we had grown accustomed to. We didn’t enjoy it, but it was the only normality we had ever known. It was all we could remember of our parents and it was hard to let that go. Then what normal would we have had left? As a result, Samuel and I never spoke of it; too much emotion would’ve come from that. We were being selfish, but how were we expected to know any better? We were just children, but that fact was all too easily forgotten.

Up until that moment, I had been sheltered with my naiveté still intact, but on that day something changed. I came to realize just how much Samuel was hiding from me. I saw how much he had bottled up for my sake. Soon I began to wonder what else I didn’t know. Samuel was, after all, perfect in the art of deception. He had never once revealed something to me that I wasn’t already well aware of. He sat me down and tried to pretend that he was okay, but really Samuel was never the same after that day, and neither was I.