Wild Things by Karin Kallmaker

fame and personality will be gathered under one roof."
    Eric sat up a little, while Sydney turned her head to look into the fire. I saw her bite her lower lip.
    "It is challenging," Eric said. "We're lucky in our parents. They like steadiness. They've been married for forty years and don't see how special they are. Mom's matter-of-fact about everything, and Dad thinks everything we do is fine by him." He shot a glance at Sydney. "Well, almost everything we do. I never worried about measuring up to the rest of the family. Mom and Dad are what matter."
    "It was easier for you. I'm not sure why," Sydney said, looking across the room at her brother. "Maybe I felt it because my drummer really has a different beat. If I was going to go against the grain, I wanted to do it spectacularly. And that just got me into trouble with alcohol, and relationships. It took me a long time to see how I fit into our family, and how..." She searched for words. "Knowing that I did fit brought me back to sanity."
    "You weren't that far gone," Eric said.
    "Don't bet on it," Sydney retorted. She turned to me. "Are you close to your brother?"
    "Close. Hmm." I thought about all the things Michael didn't know about me, that I didn't know about him, and I still vividly remembered his intercession during my father's violent outburst. "We do care about each other and feel protective. I didn't know how much he meant to me until he had an accident. In the Navy. He was in an engine-room fire and had burns on thirty percent of his body, across the chest, arms and back. He suffered..." I broke off to clear my throat. "He was in a lot of pain. Still is. At first he took some sort of painkiller that kept him from dreaming, well at least that he could recall. I think I dreamed his dreams for him — I had nightmares about fire for almost a month after it happened. But are we close? We don't share a lot of the day to day, but the connection's there. It's certainly stronger than the one I feel with my sister."
    Sydney was watching me intently, and I knew she hadn't missed the misting of tears in my eyes as I remembered Michael's painful struggle. I didn't usually talk about such things.
    "Eric dragged me to an AA meeting. He may say now that I wasn't that far gone, but I was a person I don't ever want to be again. He sat next to me night after night while I fumed about him playing the big brother, and little by little the message of the meetings began to sink in. I have my reservations about some of the AA dogma, but there is magic working at those meetings. He didn't stop coining with me until I got up, introduced myself, and admitted I was an alcoholic."
    Eric shifted uncomfortably. "You'd have done the same for me."
    "I'd never need to. And that's the difference between us."
    "I know," he said. "I'm stuffy and boring."
    "You're not," I protested. "Stuffy and boring people do not put Thai peanut sauce on their ice cream."
    "Eeeww," Sydney said. "That's disgusting."
    "It's good," Eric muttered, but he was smiling.
    Sydney wrinkled her nose at him and turned to me. "My turn. I told you about fitting in my family. How do you fit in yours, Faith?"
    "Well, I'm..." I paused with my mouth open and searched for words. A writer's trick is to picture a scene and then describe it. I pictured a Thanksgiving from my teens and saw us gathered: my mother's father the tailor; my mother the mainstay of the Altar Society; my brother the Naval officer; my sister the baby of the family; my father the assistant postmaster; his father the overwhelmed alcoholic Irishman who married one of the strong Walescu sisters, creating the Fitzgerald branch; his wife, my grandmother the beautiful and utterly cold matriarch; her brother the monsignor. But I couldn't see myself. I looked again — my mother the martyr, my brother the angry, my sister the flirt, my father the sanctimonious. Where did I fit?
    Where was the scholar, the writer, the woman who found joy in the past, who taught with such