How I Learned To Love My Brother Upside Down

I’ll Always Be His Girl.

I’ve been blessed and cursed with great siblings. Blessed because they are/were great people, and I love them. Cursed because I’m the last of the litter, and one day I’ll be the last one standing.

I wrote the first draft of this piece on April 23rd, my brother Frank’s birthday as a tribute to him. At 92, he’s 12 years older than I am and responsible for some of my best childhood memories. I know he was responsible for my mother’s best memory. He arrived on her birthday as well.

When his first daughter was a toddler, my mother told me she was daddy’s little girl. Frank and I lived on opposite coasts by then, and I couldn’t see her cuddling up to him to see that sweet bond for myself.

But Mom really didn’t have to tell me that Mary Jane adored her father. That she was his girl. I’d have known that anyway. I knew what kind of brother he was. When I was her age, I was his girl.

We lived in a semi-detached house on Quincy Avenue in the Bronx with our parents, our sister Rita, who kept both of us in line. She would remind us if we happened to forget for a moment of the firstborn in the family, our oldest brother fighting the war on a submarine. Where’s Jack? people would ask me to my great annoyance. Why must they ask me the same question, over and over? Jack’s in the “Pacikif,” I would say impatiently but to much laughter. As though having a Gold Star in the window for son in the Navy was some kind of a joke.

So until Frank donned Navy blues a few years later and went off to war himself, he did the work of two brothers for me, and two sons for our parents. But one job he kept for himself. Making sure I knew which end was up. Or down.

Our house had three bedrooms, all on the top floor with a banister that looked down three stories to the below-ground level front door. Remember that number. Three stories down.

On some occasions, my bedtime was a family affair, my parents and my sister gathering outside my parent’s bedroom where I first had a crib and later a bed for chitchat and whatnot. And no doubt much laughter, which has always come easily to Frank. Like all my siblings, he’s blessed with the Cassidy funny bone.

I don’t remember the arc, the trajectory from floor to ceiling or the swoop and swell in my stomach as Frank would suddenly scoop me up in the air. No doubt it happened in a flash. And before I knew it, I was high over his head. Everyone gathered at the banister, astonished at the speed of my lift, my terrified mother screeching, “Frank! Not again. Put her down!”

Because she knew what was coming, and so did I. With so much glee I can still hear myself squealing as Frank held me upside down over the banister. I’d see below me, straight down three floors our front door, the landing hard cement. The blood rushed to my head as Frank swung me upside down by my ankles.

“Whose girl are you?” Frank would laugh. And not until I’d scream with glee, “Your girl. I’m your girl,” would he swing me back up and over and plant me on my feet.

To my mother’s inevitable tongue-lashing, I’d come to his defense. “No Mommy, I like it. Do it again, Frank. Do it again.”

And some other night when nobody was looking, he would.

It’s hard to pick a favorite memory with Frank, I have so many. But when I got out of the shower just now and toweled off my left foot, I noticed the scar at the top of my arch. If I stop to think of it before I put on a shoe, that inch-long mark brings me back to my eighth year. The war had come and gone, and both brothers had arrived home safely.

Frank was my babysitter that summer’s day. I’d been prancing about in a neighbor’s hand-me-down tap shoes encrusted with sixteen coats of white shoe polish to make them look new. The tap on the toe had worn down, but not from my expert buck and wing. I’d never had a lesson, but sockless due to the heat, I’d slap those tired tap shoes around on the sidewalk in front of our house in my best imitation of Ruby Keeler, flapping my arms until the tap came loose and sliced through the top of my foot.

I started bawling, and Frank came running and swept me up in his arms. He ran with me upstairs to the bathroom and cleaned up the mess. Then he carried me down, careful not dislodge the many Band-Aids I’d insisted I needed, one for each coat of white shoe polish I imagine. Then he plopped me down on a blanket in our postage stamp-sized back yard and spent the rest of the afternoon pampering me. Bear in mind that at that time in our family, pampering was not in our lexicon.

He fixed a sandwich for me, which I’m sure was either American cheese or peanut butter and jelly, and set it on a plate next to me while I lolled in the sunshine. Then he ran up the porch steps for my drink. I can see to this day the grin on his face when he came out of the kitchen and called down, “Do you want chocolate milk?”

My mouth dropped in astonishment and delight. It was that thrill I remembered when I heard Mary Jane was Daddy’s girl. How could she not be? I’d learned to love him first, hanging upside down and drinking chocolate milk.