Amor and Psycho: Stories by Carolyn Cooke

back into a bun. Her eyes were brown and deep. “My cousin,” Scarface explained. “Maria.”
    “Scarface,” the girl shouted, “your big brother threw my
thong
up in that tree.”
    “Why don’t you climb up and get it?” he asked.
    “You don’t know what’s been in that tree,” Maria said, and grinned.
    Scarface flashed me a beautiful smile from his ugly mug and slammed the car door behind him.
    THE LAST TIME my sister came to visit, she rode my bicycle into town every day and leaned it up against a tree behind the coffeehouse where she spent her mornings writing e-mail and opening up her heart to the regulars. Carrie has always impressed people with her stories and with her résumé, which she can recite like a villanelle. She suffered damage as a child from having been kissed and fondled by an uncle, which led to her radical identification with the oppressed. She worked at a rape crisis center and a suicide hot line, then put herself through nursing and business school, overcame asthma and anorexia, studied French, and became the crusader she is today. Carrie’s lived and worked in seven countries, four of them in Africa. We’ve had different experiences, different lives, Carrie and I. Carrie says no, we just have different versions of reality.
    I asked if she locked it—the bike—and she said, “The trouble with you is that you have no faith in people.” When someone finally stole the bike, she called me for a ride home and refused to go back to my “low-life” town. Carrie’s like that—rigid, unilateral.
    Love
is a degraded word. I love my coffee in the morning. I love sunsets and those arias from Handel’s operas—
Agrippina, Atalanta, Lotario, Samson
—sung by Renée Fleming that my ex-husband turned me on to. I feel a complicated mix of ambivalent affections for my sister, but the truth is, I have never loved her, didn’t even when we were children.
    Our uncle Gene, a policeman, caused a scandal, statutory, which infected our whole family before my sister and I were born. He lost his job, and even did time in prison. When my sister was coming up, three years behind me, nobody wanted to open old wounds. Uncle Gene wasn’t young or handsome or powerful anymore. Carrie was large and quick enough to defend herself—or, it was felt, she should have been. Even now the words my sister uses to describe her life
—molested, abandoned, alone, exposed
—sound exaggerated. My sister always seemed dull and literal to me; I loved intrigue and secrets.
    Uncle Gene died of a gangrenous leg in Aunt Bea’s living room. Aunt Bea was much older than she had expected to be when he died—but still relieved. Within a month, though, she stopped breathing fluently and had to drag around a small oxygen tank. She said, “I know it sounds pathetic, but all I really want is a cigarette.”
    From Aunt Bea I learned that you could hate your life and still love life.
    As far as I know, Uncle Gene never
forced
anybody to do anything. But he was persuasive. He made girls feel something, and when they were really feeling it, Uncle Gene was there with his avuncular touch. He was, of course, a bad man. But just as great individuals are sometimes scarred by flaws, can’t a bad man be varnished by qualities?
    Because of my experiences with Uncle Gene (the playful banter, the pressure and push-back, the tickling, the touching, the lap-sits, the terrible, interesting frankness of his desire), I understand boundaries and enjoy controlling them. Because of him, I’m not afraid of red zones in human relations, just as my sister is drawn to her African hot spots.
    In the mural, I gave Uncle Gene a cameo, a little piece of the action, even though he isn’t part of local history. I painted him lying on his back with his arms spread out, very flat and stylized, completely open. I could have emphasized his vulnerability, or punished him in some way, had his liver pecked at by ravens. But what interests me about this uncle is not