Grow Up!

Little big bangs and fighting with my family

To exit the planetarium at the Natural History Museum you have to walk a downward spiral through the history of the universe. I did it last weekend on my first visit there, starting at the big bang and traveling 15 million years every six feet or so. Moseying past the creation of the Milky Way and a dozen different mentions of something called a “quasar,” the concept of which I did not grasp no matter how many times I saw them rendered in diagrams meant for children.

I like the clean incomprehensibility of the big bang theory. I’ll never understand its mechanics (Wikipedia keeps saying “hot and dense hot and dense” so I’m picturing only sticky toffee pudding, Rob Gronkowski), but I take great comfort in it as proof that everything can change in an instant. That at any moment my life could expand infinitely from a single point. And it has repeatedly. My life looks like a timeline of so many little big bangs — job offers and first dates and doctors’ appointments. They’re the contents of every internal pep talk before a night out I’m struggling not to skip, the gamble that makes every $70 ticket to another supper club, another book talk, worth it — the possibility that I could alter the course of my existence for the price of entry.

Somewhere around the birth of the Andromeda galaxy my phone rang with a call from my big brother. This was strange. Not because it’s abnormal for Harry to call me, but because I could see him standing ten feet to my right, looking at me as his name lit up my screen. I thought he must be bored or he needed to pee again or he was going to make fun of me for reading the plaques (he is firmly against reading plaques, on principal.) But when I picked up he said “Yo come here there’s a 2 billion-year-old rock over here.” I walked the centuries it took to meet him and there it was, a craggy chunk about the size of a grapefruit, glowing with all-knowing wisdom accrued since time immemorial. I gazed at it in awe and wondered what its favorite dinosaur was, and its favorite Beatle. I wondered if it liked my outfit or if it missed women in bustles.

A photo of Harry and Emma I took from underneath the whale. They’re looking for me.

This was Harry’s second time visiting me since I moved to New York. He came two Novembers ago but not since he’d been married, and never with Emma, his forever girlfriend and now wife. I’d just seen them both at Christmas. They arrived on the 25^th, the second to last of my 6 day trip home, which turned out to be one day too many. By 3PM on Boxing Day I felt like an anxious, itchy knot — the sniveling cliché of an ungrateful 20-something in her cushy childhood home surrounded by her loving family who just couldn’t wait to get back to The City.

I travel through space and time on every trip home, backwards up the spiral of my own personal history. The version of me that is self-assured, patient and fully-grown gets gagged and bound and shoved into the upstairs linen closet while my body plays host to a testier, needier entity who does NOT think that is FUNNY, you guys and who needs my mom to rub her back. It was thus that I’d last been with my brother, with all my parent’s children in the place we’d grown up together nearly unchanged. My mom’s reupholstered a few couches but you can still find the Bob Books we’d used to learn to read. School photos from the aughts still hang on the bulletin board.

I boarded the plane at Charlottesville airport feeling defeated, my personality waking from its forced hiatus, lamenting the fact that my family so rarely saw me at my best. I reverted to a Pavlovian state of sensitivity, born from years of the compulsory torment that comes with being little sister. Now twenty-seven, it looked like answering the question “what’s that shirt” not with “it is vintage Missoni :)” but instead with “what’s that supposed to mean??!?”

In New York, though, things would be different. But for a trip at age nine to see Wicked, New York has only known me as I am now. I have not had braces here. I have not been pinched so hard in the arm that I bleed here (Harry and Bairdie call that a hamster bite). I have only been close to being myself here, someone Harry’s barely met.

We went to the Met on Saturday afternoon. An optimal visit would require careful guidance, I thought. The place is riddled with plaques — a minefield of things that wouldn’t capture Harry’s attention for more than 10 seconds. A painting? Forget it. I took us first through weapons and armor to arrive at the Temple of Dendur, and we lingered in Ancient Egypt for the better part of half an hour

Just past the 2,000-year-old sarcophagus that I watched Harry touch when he thought no one was looking stood a tall glass case full of tiny antiquities. Gold rings, ceremonial cups and on a shelf at my eye level, a dozen figurines no bigger than my thumb, all of men holding penises the size of their torsos. We couldn’t believe it. One had his slung over his shoulder.

We went to Russ and Daughters for breakfast the next morning. We had a sweet waiter named Tom who kept really messing up our order and laughing it off saying he was trying out a new thing of being a bad waiter. He couldn’t have been older than 23 and we all adored him. He wore leather jewelry.

When we finished our bagels, sturgeon, latkes (Harry ate like four) Tom brought over the iPad for Harry to sign the check. I watched Harry draw a straight line, pause, and proceed to etch a full penis. I said “Harry!!!” and he said “what,” and Tom said people did it all the time.

Some things are eternal, ancient — space rocks, men’s obsession with penis imagery — and while I could do without seeing another rendering of a dick and balls I take great comfort in things that haven’t changed. I love the dusty, outdated atmosphere of the Natural History Museum with all its taxidermied animals kept behind glass, as if they’re going anywhere. I like looking at the Bongo antelopes and thinking about 1940s New Yorkers looking at the same Bongo antelopes. I like talking to my brother, now pushing 40*, and seeing the same face I used to see every night across the dinner table, mouths full of the same chicken curry.

There is an essential tension between growing up together and being grown together — the former tends to negate the latter. It is difficult to convince someone that I’m actually pretty cool and a good hang when that someone used to wipe my butt, and saw my room when it was wallpapered floor to ceiling with pages from One Direction fan magazines and navigated the Whac-A-Mole of emotions that I was at my most depressed, my brain shrinking and my nerves raw.

On their last night in town, Harry and Emma came over for dinner in my neighborhood. We’d had a really good day — it had snowed, we’d seen that rock — and we sat and talked and laughed at each other’s jokes over calamari and Brussels sprouts. For hours. Then we walked back to my apartment and talked for hours more, all the way past midnight. Harry didn’t say anything about my top, and I think I could’ve handled it if he had. “It’s way more fun seeing you in New York,” he said. It was.

They’re back in Colorado now, where they’ve lived for the last decade. Harry’s been texting me Spotify links to Trampled by Turtles songs and full playlists of other bands covering The Grateful Dead all week. To the naked eye it looks like nothing’s changed. And it hasn’t, really. This was no big bang, no cataclysm. I’m the same and Harry’s the same and he still can’t stand to hear me talk about boys and I still “can’t believe you would fart right now.”

But as a historian of us both, I know there’s been an essential shift. One worth the price of a museum ticket to see us we standing in our own diorama, just beside the Bongo antelopes, preserved behind glass, too. Harry and I have the same noses, the same gigantic heads that run in both sides of the family. You can look at us and see we’re brother and sister, but to the right of our exhibit there’s a brand new plaque installed. It gives our names, our species, and it calls for a recontextualization of what I thought I knew. A shared history alone doesn’t link us, or make us fight. The plaque says we’re both grown up now. We get along now. The plaque is worth reading.

*He’s actually only 36 but I think this is so funny to say.