When the shock of getting way too close to my brother’s sex life started to wear off, I began to realize (against my will, I should note), that the information I got from Christine just represented another thing to worry about. Another challenge for Ben. I rapidly began to forget the bright line that seemed so obvious just a few days before. Where was the limit of the kinds of problems that a sister could solve? I wasn’t really sure anymore. I realized that Christine had probably not just stumbled into the “perfect 10” conversation. She’d been wanting to give me the real reason she didn’t want to sleep with Ben, without saying it harshly. She didn’t find him attractive. And she didn’t believe he was well endowed. If he couldn’t bring at least one of those things, from a physical standpoint, she wasn’t even willing to do something for him out of pity. A sympathetic friend of mine who was… morally loose. That was pretty much the best-case scenario for Ben to get to spend the night with a girl he deserved. And it wasn’t going to happen. Everything was stacked against Ben. And there was nothing I could do about it.
By New Years Eve, I was back where I’d been before I spoke to Christine: worried about my brother anytime I saw him. That’s not to say that I spent that entire day sitting around, being worried. Or that it was all that I thought about. But, in stray moments, or when I looked at my brother, those concerns would well up again. Maybe they weren’t fully clear in my mind. I didn’t run through every concern every time. But I felt that guilty ache in the pit of my stomach when I thought about Ben, and I knew what that meant. I knew that if I probed that achy feeling, all of it would come back right away.
And the idea that I was really stuck on was the one that I had latched onto with Christine. I couldn’t make my brother physically attractive to other girls. I mean, I guess that is obvious. But I knew I couldn’t just go on like this for the rest of my life, or until I got old and no one found me attractive anymore either. It was too much, I needed to do something to sort of… cleanse the guilt. And I knew I was guilty because other people desired me, and Ben didn’t get to know what that felt like. And it wasn’t fair. And so, it seemed to me, the solution was to find someone who could make Ben feel like that, even if just for a little while.
Despite everything I’d told myself just a few days before, I was once again trying to figure out a way to get someone beautiful to sleep with my brother. And, just like the information about my brother’s penis, the longer I lived with the idea the less weird it seemed. I mean, yeah it was not a normal sister thing to worry about. But, sisters set their brothers up on dates sometimes, right? Everyone knows that dating can, eventually, lead to sex. So why was it so weird? I was just… cutting out the middle man. Let’s not pretend this is about dating. And who would be hurt by it anyway? Certainly not Ben. And not some girl who would be willing to do it.
Clearly, Christine was not that person. I realized that I had probably misplayed my hand with her. I suppose I might have been able to convince her to do something at one point, but I had been much too blunt. I came in too hot. I thought through some of my other friends, especially friends who lived in town. I didn’t really think of anyone who was both stunningly attractive and who would be willing to have sex, no strings attached, just because I asked. I tried thinking if there were other ways of setting it up. An app of some kind? I didn’t know, I wasn’t tech savvy. As I grew increasingly frustrated with my lack of progress, I even considered making a call to one of those escort services I heard about. But I figured I would just get arrested or give my brother herpes or something.
I guess that was what I was thinking about on New Year’s Eve. My family had always made New Year’s a family holiday on par with Christmas. We didn’t go downtown to the party, we didn’t scatter to friend’s houses, and we didn’t ring in the new year from dorm rooms. We were at the house, in the basement, watching the ball drop while we played Uno and Connect 4. That year, the plan was the same. We were all in the house for the New Year. Ben and I had both grown out of the stage where we complained about my family’s New Year’s tradition, we both kind of liked it now, it was tied in with the nostalgia of childhood.
But something was different that year. Of course, I was obsessing over my brother’s love life and Ben was still stewing about his ex-girlfriend. But more fundamentally than that, our parents had been getting older. They had started to wake up at around 5 o’clock in the morning, even when they didn’t have to work. They took mid-morning naps. And they fell asleep early. Normal, getting older stuff. But the thing was, they couldn’t even stay up late for a special occasion. My mom had almost fallen asleep playing cards at 10:30. She went upstairs, apologizing and yawning. My dad had mocked her, but half an hour later his eyes were drooping. He was in bed by 11:15.
So for the last 45 minutes of the year, it was just me and Ben in the basement, watching performances on TV and reminiscing about past New Year’s Eves. It was fun, almost fun enough that I could drown out the dull pain in my stomach.
The big ball in Time’s Square began its descent at 11:59. Just like every year that I could remember, it was reflected off the family pictures in the basement of my parent’s house. But it was quiet that year, my mom wasn’t counting down with the television host. My dad wasn’t saying random numbers to try to throw her off. It was just me and my brother drinking the same sparkling cider we drank as kids.
“Thirty seconds left in this shitty year,” Ben said and I grunted in agreement.
“But I guess it could be worse,” I said. Now Ben grunted, not so much in agreement.
“How do you figure?” he asked, looking away from the screen at me. I shrugged.
“We could be watching this completely alone, like my roommate is at school right now,” I offered. Ben sighed.
“No offense, but I am pretty alone anyway,” Ben said wistfully, “For the 18th straight New Years, I don’t have anyone to kiss at midnight.”
And just as he finished speaking, the host on the television started the final countdown on the year. “Ten!” he said. I thought, ‘Perfect 10s.” And something clicked in my brain. It wasn’t a complete thought really. It was just all of the pieces of the puzzle falling into place all at once. A eureka-type moment that was so powerful that it sort of overwhelmed my circuits.
Later, thinking through what happened, I think I was able to piece together my thought processes. My guilt with Ben had always stemmed from the fact that I got something he didn’t. And he never complained about it. He never gave any indication that he ever even really thought about it. I just… got lucky and he didn’t. And he was too sweet to resent me for it. And so, desperately, I had been trying to figure out a way to share with him. To make up for the accident of genetics and the particular ways our double helices came together differently. And I couldn’t figure out a way to give him, even for just a little bit of time, a taste of the world as seen through my eyes. I couldn’t share my luck with him like that, the world didn’t work that way. But maybe, I could share my gift more directly with him.
I was a perfect 10. That is what Christine said. I always tried to downplay the impact of my looks, always uncomfortable with the unearned benefits that accrued as a result. But I knew that they were there. Men found my body to be irresistible. They desired me. Ben was my brother and so he had to shut that part off from his mind. But he was a man. Eighteen years old and full of… youthful vigor. He knew what he looked at when he was looking at me, intellectually, even if he couldn’t allow himself to feel in in his… body. I could show Ben what it was like to be desired by someone sexy. Not by creating a fake scenario with Christine or someone else. But by sharing my beauty with him in a way that was real. I didn’t care about Ben’s appearance or the size of his penis. I loved him and always would. I didn’t have to pretend I was looking past those things. I really didn’t care. So, why couldn’t I, just this one time, change the love I felt for him from the love a sister has for her brother, flip the switch to… an erotic love?
But like I said, these thought processes were not entirely clear to me at the time. Instead, I simply had the thought, “well, why can’t I just do it?” And all of the perversity and impracticality of that idea just didn’t appear to me in that moment. Maybe, if I’d taken a moment even to think about it, I wouldn’t have just shaken my head and never admitted to anyone that I’d ever had the idea. But the host was still counting down on television. And for some reason, it was like the decision to act was tied in with that timer. Like I needed to act when the ball dropped or… I don’t know, it wasn’t clear. I just knew that some threshold would be crossed, that an opportunity would pass and I would never have the chance again. Maybe that instinct was right. Whatever it was, it seemed like the idea had just flowered in my mind, when the clock hit zero. Happy New Year!