Birthdays

I have at least three photographs with the same number of candles on the cake.  I guess no one was counting.  Then again, maybe it wasn’t my birthday; maybe I was just seated in front of the cake.  In most of my birthday photos, I’m sitting alone which makes a terrible amount of sense because I was a pretty lonely kid.  I didn’t mean to be.  I craved acceptance and attention just like everyone else but I was good at hiding my needs. 

I’d never had a birthday party with friends who’d come over to put on silly hats and eat cake.  I’d always been too embarrassed to ask anyone.  I’d never made goody bags or iced cupcakes or had a magician, which all sound like truly magical things. 

Once, for a photo assignment, I staged a birthday party in a beautiful yellow kitchen in Lincoln Park.  I taped up streamers and bought a tall, round white cake with rainbow sprinkles.  The father in the scene wore a cute party hat.  I remember there was a turtle in the shot. The ten-year-old boy was to pull the turtle out of this blue box and hold it up for everyone to see.  The other kids in the shot would cheer and laugh.  It was a dreamy site, the kind of birthday party I always wanted as a kid. 

My sister, Annette, on the other hand, always had birthday parties.  Big ones.  The kind where you went places like Burger King or had twelve of your closest friends sleep over.  My sister still insists on celebrating.  The last birthday she had was an awkward affair.  She’d invited “friends” from Craig’s list, people from her “art” group, people she’d never met.  So when I walk past the window of the Middle Eastern restaurant I notice my parents’ distressed faces. Their shoulders are pressed up against the glass. They’re uncomfortably sitting. 

I walk in with my husband and my best friend, Candy, and wave at the seven people sitting at a table set for twenty-four.  There is a woman in her sixties with a cloud of red hair and her arm in a sling; two dark-haired women who smile and say few English words; and a black man with dreadlocks who is wearing a kilt and combat boots.  The restaurant is BYOB.  We have brought wine.  We are not sharing. 

My sister is oblivious to the awkwardness.  She is giddy and gets up to gyrate with the belly dancer. Annette told me a week ago that she’d decided to be a party planner but as you can see, she fucked up the reservations.  The waitresses began bringing out plates and more plates, mezze-style, thinking that we are the party of twenty-four that will be eating from the party menu, $19.95 a person.  My sister emphatically says, “Oh, no we just want regular menus.”  But all of our fingers have already started digging the pita into the baba ganoush and we’ve nibbled on the falafel and kibbe.  

After each of my sister’s friends contribute $5, my parents pay for the rest of the tab and as we leave I hear my sister ask, “Dad, can we give Pasqual a ride home?” Apparently, kilted-combat boy used his cab fare for dinner, all five bucks, and now he had no way to get his ass home.  So off they go, the four of them, towards my dad’s black Volvo.  My sister proudly and loudly saying, “The food was so good, don’t ya think?”

On her twelfth birthday, Annette invited ten girls over for a sleepover party.  She made the invitations herself.  I didn’t understand how she’d picked her guests.  We went to the same school and though these girls knew her I wouldn’t say they were her friends.  Most of them showed up without sleeping bags.  The party was at 6:30 and my mother came home around 6:15. 

Annette had made a poster with markers and had taped some crepe paper to the ceiling.  There was no fun activity planned and we’d be eating grilled hotdogs.  I was already embarrassed, hiding in my room, not wanting to come down.  My mom made me when she screamed my name up the hallway stairs, which meant, get your ass down here. 

Crazy fire eyes lit her head.  She asked, “Where are the hotdogs?”  I didn’t have an answer.  She said, “I just bought two packs. Annette!” 

My sister came into the room with her goofy grin and her red belt looped through her elastic waist pants, and her hair back in ribbon barrettes.

“What mom?” she asked.

“Where are the hotdogs, either you or your father…”

“I ate them,” Annette said.

“All of them?  There were twenty hotdogs.”

“I ate them yesterday for lunch.”

“You’re stupid, so what am I going to make?”

My sister’s friends could hear what my mother was loudly saying.  Annette kept smiling.

“Mom, I didn’t know they were for the party.”

“Who eats like a pig? Now I have to go to Jewel.”

Mom stormed out and Annette and I were left to entertain.  I wished everyone would go home.  I couldn’t take this.  It’s one thing to be humiliated in front of the family that’s always subjecting you to humiliation but when others are there to witness the embarrassing details, well that’s when things become excruciating.

The only party I can recall having is when I was turning some young age.  Take your pick, 3,4,or 5. My grandparents barbecue in their backyard.  I open a few presents.  There’s a pink puzzle with a sad clown with a daisy in his hat.  A red Uncle Sam bank. Something else unmemorable. There are no pictures of this event, but there is a video, so on camera my stepfather is close to my side as I open his gift.  I tear at the red-white-and blue stripes of wrapping paper.  I’m so excited.  I’m finally going to get what I’ve wanted.  I look into the brick-sized box.  I shake it, trying to see if my special watch is trapped under a flap.  I tap on the cardboard.  My stepfather laughs and pretends to put something, an invisible circle, around my wrist.  I don’t understand.  I ask, “Where is it?” 

“It’s right there,” he says, pointing at my hand.  His snickers bubble under his moustache.

“But I don’t see it,” I say.  My eyes well up. 

“It’s your watch,” he says,” your invisible watch.”

I throw the box to the ground and sob and punch at his legs and when he bends down I punch at his face.  I’d asked my parents for a watch that made me invisible.  It’s all I wanted, for no one to see me.  My stepfather still thinks this story is funny, that he was being clever.  I don’t.  I think it was cruel.

     At some point my sister and I decided we’d give each other animals for our birthdays, whatever we found; if it was a stray cat, then so be it.  Usually it was a mole or a silvery beetle or a wild baby bunny.  None of the pets ever lived beyond the birthday day.  It never worked out well and the mole or the beetle or the bunny would be found dead the next morning, huddled in the corner of a shoebox or one of my mom’s roasting pots we’d lined with tufts of ripped grass.  We’d bury our precious pet, all sad, and think of something else to play.