Those Two Blondes

My mother is a pretty, rather birdlike woman with long dark hair and thin legs. She comes from Portland, Oregon. I saw a picture of it once, and it looked like Oz to me--a foreign land full of strange, loud, unapologetic people, and so many bright colors that even in the faded photograph, my eyes ached looking at it. At twenty-one she left, her feelings perpetually hurt but her pride more than intact, to find her very own Kansas.

Figuratively, anyway--she found Minnesota. That was how my brother Elliot and I came to grow up here. Our house was all one level, but not horribly small. A picket fence graced the front yard, but the less-kempt backyard stopped short at a tall wire one, with train tracks directly behind it. My bedroom and Elliot’s were side by side, the only two in the house whose windows faced the trains directly. Clean, though the light fixtures on the ceilings caked with dust as the years went by, neglected by the two blondes who slept beneath them. In the summer there were plastic wading pools and metal turkey roasters full of dirty, lukewarm hose water and rubber likenesses of marine mammals to swallow the drowned insects whole, and in the winter there were tiny metal dump trucks full of snow and pop-bottle rocket launches.

Dad was a rare sort. There was nothing particularly effeminate about him, but he conducted his life with a perfect, un-self-conscious sort of androgyny that has stuck with me at least this far into my own adulthood. Almost everything I know about being a person, I learned from him. Mom was rather progressive, as Midwestern moms go; college-educated and able hold her own in most any discussion, working part-time as a research scientist because she liked to. She was secretly a bit disappointed that both of us were boys, and secretly glad--too glad--that we both got our father’s hair color. She was sad, of course, to find out we both had the heart condition, but not defeated. She hadn’t desperately wanted complete happiness anyway, I don’t think, so much as she had tenderness. And that, to say the least, she got.


Tenderness was also, coincidentally, what my brother hated most. Everything mom had ever meant to run away from, everything she had seemingly escaped, crossed those four state lines and caught up with her in the form of her oldest son. I was the spitting image of the relatives she cherished, but Elliot seemed to be some kind of unfortunate throwback, mirroring effortlessly the tastes, humor and mannerisms of the ones he had never met and had barely heard of. He swore like a logger and walked with a swagger. His nose was small and upturned, but his tongue was razor-sharp; his hair pale but his comedy pitch-dark. Our dad, having never seen anything like it, stood dumbfounded and slightly amused, a little squint on his soft-featured Midwestern face. But mom shook her head and made her mouth into a small line of patient love mixed with the deepest annoyance, and watched her own black-sheep story repeating itself, only backwards.

When I was eight and Elliot was twelve, I had to have open-heart surgery, just as he had five years prior. I had been three at the time of his, and the one vague memory I kept of it was of an elevator door opening to reveal a hallway where my brother, eyes shut and head limp to one side, was being pushed out of a room on a gurney. This image hadn’t bothered me at the time, but it haunted me as my own surgery grew imminent, and on the night of I kicked and screamed, not wanting to be wheeled out of a dark room in a gown, unconscious and half-dead looking. Elliot alternated between reassuring me and trying to scare me further with stories of his own, because sometimes the doctors were kind, intelligent people who would fix me quick and painlessly, and in other tales they were crazed maniacs who would cut me open and leave me to die. But he concluded to give me his fleece bathrobe, red with trucks on it, to wear while I was there. It was sized for a preteen and hung off of me comically, the sleeves dragging, but I loved him for it and would have worn it straight onto the operating if I could have. I remember looking at it in the chair across the room as the plastic half-circle was placed over my face, and I drifted off to somewhere else entirely.

If I dreamt at all, I don’t remember it. When I awoke mom and dad were there, but it was Elliot’s face I saw first. He sat in the chair closest to my bed, holding his Nintendo Gameboy but looking at me, his eyes puffy; with the same delicate shoulders and arms, the same pointed chin and slightly sunken chest that would follow him even into adulthood. He looked at our parents and asked quietly, “can I?”

They nodded yes, and he reached into a Styrofoam cup with a plastic spoon and carefully brought some slushy, orange-flavored ice to my lips. I swallowed as the blurriness began to clear away and I looked at him, and towards the back of the room at my father’s parents, who had come, then out the window at the lit-up, racing freeway far below, and then back at Elliot. My room was full of balloons, one emblazoned with a cartoon teddy bear and the words Hug me, I was brave. There were a few stuffed sea animals (my favorite, though I had never seen the ocean) and a quilt handmade by my grandma, embroidered with my full name, Matthew Alexander Madison, and just my size. Strange tubes seemed to be attached to my body from every which angle, but someone had draped the red bathrobe with truck over me, and I was glad.

Later on, when grandma and grandpa had gone for breakfast at the Ihop across the street and our parents were down the hall pouring waiting-room coffee, Elliot reached over and took hold of the bathrobe, carefully uncovering me and making me cold “What are you doing?” I exclaimed, frightened, but he said nothing. I began to cry. “Elliot, stop it!”

But then I stopped short, startled by the sight of my stitched-up chest. My brother smiled, lifting up his own sweatshirt to reveal a healed version of the lengthy, vertical gash that now adorned my torso. Forever, I realized. “See?” he said, pointing, “now we are twins.”

When I was well and we finally arrived home, what our grandpa called “the kiss of February” had come, and the trash cans that resided against the back side of the garage, frozen shut, were dripping water and beginning to thaw. Little green patches had appeared, scattered, in the dirty, aging snow, and I finally felt fixed and happy. That night I tried to give Elliot his bathrobe back, but he refused, saying “keep it, its too dorky-looking for me anyway.” Despite the hidden insult, I was comforted, and it remained in the back of my closet well into high school.


When I was twelve and he was sixteen, it was legal for Elliot to drive, and so he did. He drove aimlessly and usually too fast, with me in the passenger seat on days that none of his friends could come out. In the summer, when popsicles turned to liquid almost instantly on the porch and the trash cans up against the backside of the garage festered and stunk, we took countless trips to our town’s small lake. I wasn’t a strong swimmer, and he knew it, which amused him to no end. “Swim across, Matty! Swim all the way to the other end!” he’d laugh, grabbing onto me in the wet and pointing across the expanse of liquid blue.

“I don’t want to swim across” I grumbled, “Lakes are stupid. I’d rather see the ocean.”

“Go to Seattle” Elliot said.

We didn’t, but we did sneak out that winter to see his friend’s band play all the way down in northern Iowa. I had just gotten my first guitar and was learning the chords, and Elliot loved to take me to shows just to tease me, telling me to go get onstage with the bands. I didn’t until years later.

The sheer length of the forbidden trip was so that it required us to leave virtually the instant our parents’ heads touched their pillows. Elliot barged into my bedroom, wading through the mess on the floor and pulling the covers off of my clothed body. He had told me which jeans to wear (the embarrassing ones, in my opinion, that barely fit) and lent me a striped sweater for the occasion. “Matty!” he said, a whisper with the inflections of a yell, “get up! Lets go!”

He got angry at me for not having my shoes on, I almost cried, and we were both momentarily paralyzed by the sound of footsteps that turned out to be the dog’s, but somehow we made it outside, and we ran around back, frantic and laughing through the slush. It was Christmastime, and the lights of our neighborhood shone conspicuously upon us. The thick falling snow was on our side, trying to keep us hidden. I can still see him--his frail, stretched-out looking body crouching down out of view in a way that made his chest look even more hollow; his pointed, almost elfin face, unmistakable for anyone else’s.

“Elliot!” I cried under my breath as we ducked behind the trash cans, now frozen again, to hide from a passing car. “Elliot, I have to go to the bathroom!”

“Hold it!”

The taillights disappeared, and we ran, still crouching, past the garage to the driveway, him tugging at my jacket sleeve to hurry me along. The string of lights wrapped around a nearby lamppost turned his pale hair red and green.

“Its cold out here, I need to blow my nose!”

“Just use your sleeve!”

“Elliot, I don’t have my inhaler!”

“Shut the fuck up!”

The driver and passenger side doors slammed shut in unison, and Elliot turned the key in the ignition and put the car in reverse, rolling blindly backwards into the night.

The show is a tired, nervous blur in my memory. We only made it in time for the last two sets--Elliot’s friend’s band, and then a small-looking, college-aged boy with an acoustic guitar. I imagined hoisting myself up onto the low stage and lifting his shirt to see if he had a scar like we did. It seemed as if he must have, under those lights. Tears filled my eyes, and I didn’t know why at all.

We made it home in time for breakfast, which our parents were already having, and got grounded for a month. No computer allowed, but while dad was at work we used it anyway until one day it froze. We panicked, turned it off manually and hoped for the best. When dad turned it on that night the homepage for Friendster.com popped up, David Dondero blared loudly through the speakers, and we knew we were busted.

The next day Elliot told me that he was going to run away to Oregon and live with our mom’s relatives. He would dye his hair black, he said, so that no one would find him on his way. “They sound way cooler than dad’s side of the family,” he said, wrapped in an old Sesame Street blanket and eating the last of the green bean casserole, “I don’t know what the hell her big problem with them is.” He never did get around to doing it.


When I was fourteen and he was eighteen, it was legal for Elliot to smoke cigarettes, and so he did. We both did, all night long at the Denny’s one town over. This was just before the smoking ban, and the waitresses never asked any questions, even though I was underage and looked it. We rarely ordered anything but endless rounds of coffee, with creamer in the tiny metal pitcher. So many nights that summer we came home jittery and coughing, not smelling like ourselves, for four or so hours of reckless, tossing sleep. In the mornings we’d go swimming in the lake, and I would look from his chest to mine, now healed in a fashion as identical as our hair coloring, and feel glad. Twins, he had said to me. Twins, I wanted to be.

By the time fall came, smoking cigarettes in diners had gotten old. That was when Elliot met a girl on the internet and decided to fly to Seattle, the city he idolized, to meet her. I was terrified. Besides Minnesota, we had been to Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, neither of us had ever been on a plane, and the Northwest might as well have been a foreign country. But my brother had no fear. It was a big independent music festival, he said, and she could get them into the after party, which he wasn’t about to miss.

I was expected to cover for him, and did, because even though he was a legal adult he still lived with us, and didn’t have the time or the patience for the lengthy argument we both knew would ensue if he let our parents in on his plans. Elliot claimed to be spending a long weekend in Iowa, seeing a few local bands play. Little more was said, and he bought a plane ticket with his own money, left his car in a friend’s garage, and was off to Seattle, where the oddly-shaped mammals all sing in the Sound and real, live indie-rock stars roam around parties, shining, and smaller than you expected them to be.

For the next two days I didn’t dare call him, and only heard from him once--a laughing, muffled call from the corner of a men’s room during which he claimed to have just been eating vegetable tempura with Ben Gibbard. Several hours later I couldn’t sleep, gave in, and dialed his cell number. When he answered the background was silent, not full of music and laughter like it had been, and he sounded choked up. For what might have been the third or fourth time in my life, I heard something reminiscent of sentiment in his voice, which terrified me because I took it to mean that something terrible must have happened. I pried, but all Elliot would own up to was that he had gotten a nosebleed, a feat he was somewhat famed for, and that he was coming home first thing in the morning, earlier than he had planned. When he did, he seemed shaken. I tried to ask him what had really happened, but he yelled at me and then uncomfortably changed the subject. I never did find out what had upset my fearless, faux-worldly brother so much.


When I was sixteen and he was twenty, it was about to be legal for Elliot to drink alcohol, and so he planned on doing it. I felt a secret resentment at the fact that no milestone was ever my own in this family, not really, because no matter what my brother would get to do it four years before me. He lived in his own apartment across town now, much to the relief of our hurt, determined mother, who no longer had to come home to find off-color articles clipped from The Onion taped to the refrigerator door, or the John Waters movies she detested playing on the TV.

Then he got sick again. He swore at our parents, and then at the nurses in the hospital, laughing the whole time and offending them all terribly. I took dad’s car out after school and drove to see him. He looked well, and had obviously been amusing himself with trips to the hospital gift shop, because when I sat down his face broke into a smirk and he said “Here, I got you a present”, handing me a copy of Mattie Stepanek’s Heartsongs.

Elliot convulsed with laughter as I tried not to be amused. “This is for kids,” I said, annoyed. “Why did you get me this?”

“I thought you might like it,” he laughed, not trying very hard to conceal his true motives. “Its that sappy kind of shit you like, and he has the same name as you, only spelled differently. He was all sickly and shit like you, too. Look, he even kind of looks like you.”

“Funny,” I said flatly, looking down at the front cover, a picture of a smiley preteen with big glasses and what looked like a wheelchair behind him. “Didn’t this kid die or something?”

“Yeah, something like that,” answered Elliot, regaining his composure. “I would never want to go out like that, though. If I’m going young, I’m going at my own hands, you know? I’d shoot myself before I’d sit around and fucking wait for something I had to kill me. No way in hell.”

He wasn’t laughing now. “Don’t say that,” I said, “You’re not actually thinking of that kind of thing, are you?”

Elliot scoffed. “I’m not dying.”

I said nothing, and after a few second he looked irritated. “Mom and dad aren’t telling you stupid shit about me, are they?”

“No,” I said quietly, “No one’s told me anything.”

“Good. Because I’m fine.”

“I should go. I have a lot of homework.”

“Okay. Enjoy your new book.” This little burst of sarcasm was followed by another fit of laughter, which probably would have lasted longer had he not started coughing uncontrollably in the midst of it.

“You need to borrow my inhaler?”

“Get the fuck out of here, Matty.”

“I love you, too.”


A few weeks into January he was allowed to go home. I noticed that he dressed more warmly than usual, and when a trip to the lake was suggested, he let me drive. We stared out over the frozen water, too cold to even get out of the car, with the heater going full-blast and our many layers on.

Elliot shook his head slowly, spoke likewise. “That ice has got to be so thick. I bet you could run on it for miles and never even feel so much as a crack.” The circles under my eyes were from last-minute book reports or all-night song writing, blue and faint, but his were different. They were deeper, and not blue at all, but pink. “I always wanted to run out onto it as a kid. I wanted to slip on it and just kind of glide, you know? See how far it would take me. Mom and dad never let me.”

I listened and looked and felt horribly old all of a sudden.

“Matty, I’m your brother. You know I love you, right?”

He didn’t talk like that. Something was wrong.

“What the hell, Elliot? Why are you being like this?”

“Like what? Matty, I’m your fucking brother, okay? I can’t tell you that I love you? That’s all I’m saying. You know I do, right? Right?”

“Yes,” I said, dropping my cold hands into my lap and staring down at them. “I love you, too. You’re like, my best friend, okay?”

Elliot looked sideways out the window. For a second his eyes were the slightest bit shinier than usual, and then the passenger door slammed and he was gone. I got out, too, and followed him to the lakeshore--solid and terribly, terribly cold.

“Its not fair.” he said, kicking a brown patch of snow around with a bitter little laugh, “I get the more screwed-up body. Go figure.”

“That’s not true,” I said, “mine is screwed-up, too.”

Elliot shook his head again. “Not like mine. I have it worse than you. Everyone’s always known that.”

“Yeah, but Elliot, you’re fine. For God’s sake, you just got out of the hospital. Why do you keep saying stuff like this?”

He turned his face from me. “Don’t pretend to be stupid,” he managed to say, with the worst quiver that I had ever heard in the voice of someone so tough.

I put my face in my hands. Elliot continued, stoic as always. “You know, when I was a kid I used to lay in bed in the mornings, or when I was sick, and watch the trains go by outside my window. Or I would look up and watch the planes go past up in the sky. I’d make up stories about who was on them and where they were going. On days that I stayed home, I’d sleep, and I’d dream about them.”

“Oh my God, Elliot. What am I going to do?”

He smiled wryly, looking upward. My eyes are green, like dad’s, but Elliot’s were a pale, milky shade of brown. “You’re going to be an indie rock star,” he said, with such flat earnestness that I almost snickered. “Like all the ones I met at that party in Seattle two years ago… you’re going to be exactly like they are.”

“You’re ridiculous. I can barely even play.”

“Neither can most of them.” He rolled his eyes and held out his arms to me. “Ugh, for fucks sake,” he muttered, “come here, kid…”

The next week he was back in the hospital. His heart was failing.


This is the part in which the story gets rather surreal. No one was sure how my older brother managed to get out through the only exit door, past the only guard who never seemed to sleep and always questioned, even when you had on normal clothes. There always had been something fey and otherworldly about Elliot, like there often is about people not meant to grow old. And sure enough, the daring escape from the hospital and the run to the lake--without even a jacket on, in Minnesota, in January, while sick--was a feat only possible at the hands of Elliot Madison, stoic elfin boy-wonder extraordinaire. No one was sure where he got the jeans and sweater he had on when the ambulance brought him back, blue and unconscious, but breathing, somehow. The ice hadn’t been as thick as he imagined.

A very sick young man, they said. Beside himself, and didn’t grasp the reality of what he was doing. But he was running, he was gliding, he was seeing how far he could go. In between segments of a ten-year-old sitcom, the television in the waiting room sang advertisements for shower cleaner and fast food restaurants and hotels. I wondered how anything, anywhere, possibly could be so normal.

A few days later I was sitting at the foot of my own bed, practicing guitar. I had been trying for half an hour to play F major-seventh right, but I kept messing it up. Dad came in, wearing the look that he wore now and then to tell me that he’s seen and felt more than I think he has. He sat down next to me. “I used to play, too, you know” he said. He opened his mouth and said something else, and I threw the once-beloved instrument down on the ground, hard, hearing all of the acoustics rattle inside and the vibration of the strings swell and then dim behind me.


Elliot Thomas Madison. Stricken, handsome, emotionless Midwestern hero, with the concrete heart inside of the sunken chest. He had been to Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, as well as Washington State once, but no one needed to know that. A pale, frail-looking blonde with an upturned nose, he was unshakeable, and brave, at times to the point of being ridiculous. I imagined his breakable limbs running awkward out onto the ice; then the remarkable grace as he stopped running and took flight, gliding, arms outstretched for all those trains and planes to see. In four and one-half years I would turn twenty-one, and live the whole rest of my life being older than him.

On the drive home from the service, I sat in the backseat, staring up at the car’s interior light. I knew that soon I would be looking instead into the light fixture in my bedroom, still frosted with the now-consecrated dust and the tiny remains of a few unfortunate potatoes, shoved up into the crevices to their death when the back ends of light bulbs got stuck. I looked down at the floor mats, and before my eyes, I swear there were green beans--I could see them--tragically befallen from dinner plates, some of them mashed shapeless into the carpet by the malicious abandon of excited snow boots. And plastic cups of apple juice left warm on counters in the summer; and then I was crying. Dad pressed a fistful of Kleenex into my hands and I held them to my face and cried, just like a little kid. We were driving down Main Street and I didn’t even care who saw me like that. I leaned down and pressed my face and arms into my knees anyway, because I wanted to disappear.

The next thing I remember I was home, wearing my pajamas and my red bathrobe with the trucks on it that cut into my armpits now, the sleeves too short. But the worn fleece felt comforting when I touched it, and I was lying sideways under the covers in my own bed, my knees drawn part of the way up to my chest. Dad had his hand on my shoulder, and mom was stroking my hair. “Every single day now,” I sobbed, “I will have to wake up in the morning and remember that he’s not here, and remember what happened.” I took the tissue from my bathrobe pocket and blew my nose. “Every single day, for the rest of my life.”

I mashed my face down into my damp pillow and dug my fingernails into the mattress where the fitted sheet had come loose, my back convulsing in a way that hurt it. I could hardly breath through my nose, and the bed shook. I wanted to erase what had happened more than I had ever wanted anything in the world.

Neither mom nor dad tried to justify what I said, or contradict it. They just left me to the realization, letting me fight with it and bargain it away until eventually, maybe, I became its friend. Don’t tell me that he lives inside of my heart, I thought. My heart is not here; it does not freeze in the winter or stink in the summer; its carpeting and floors have known no green beans. Don’t you tell me he’s in heaven or that it’s better there. He’s my brother and I know him. I know he’s got to miss the things that make the world the world.

No one said those things to me, though. Mom could touch my hair as sadly as she ever had, and go to fix me soup. Dad could look at me, tears in his own eyes now, and gently contradict me for the first time all day. Somehow, I was consoled. I fell asleep while it was still light outside and before my soup was warm, having never felt so humiliated or so comforted before, all at once.
And when I woke up, it was morning. I heard the coffee pot brewing and long, creaky footsteps on the kitchen linoleum, a sleepy stab at normalcy. The kiss of February had come, washing both the snow outside and my own chilly, tangled bed in a golden light the color of the hot chicken broth that I felt as if my heart were full of. I woke up and instantly remembered--knowing that it would get better, wishing that I could fast-forward to when it did, and part of me not really believing that it ever would at all. I took my guitar up off the floor but didn’t play it; I just lay there holding it close to my chest, feeling the pulse of my own body in the hollow, shiny wood.

My brother Elliot was my first real friend. He was my best friend, at times my only one, and sometimes he was also my worst enemy--but that was to be expected. And the story ends there, I guess, as vague and sentimental as it started. I remember a lady at church telling me once, when I was still pretty little, that sometimes it wasn’t the meanest words that held the most potential for breaking people open, but rather just the opposite of those. So it wasn’t the cold of the lake or the blunt reality of loss that day that made me cry; it was the devastating kindness of it all, that kindness that I never talk about. I talk about the funny parts--the mean parts--and I remember us laughing, still, as we pulled out of the parking lot, shaky Christmas lights and street lamps illuminated, casting their colors and shadows onto the hair of those two blondes.