"I thought tha guys gowen sit on ut!"
DumbBaby was a strange child.
Of course, this is a very sweeping generalization so I’m obligated to lay it down and show you why my little sister is a weirder kid than your little sister.
She was fiercely blonde, talked like a Guatemalan child with a mouthful of thumbtacks, trying to learn english as a second language. One of the charming thing about having a slightly younger crony who wanted to be just like me, was no one else could understand her.
DB was probably four years old and had just started speaking with any kind of fluidity. She wouldn’t talk to strangers, she wouldn’t make eye contact these days they would’ve just called her Autistic and been done with it. DB was four years old when something finally broke loose and proved her to be a fully functioning kid.
Mama D. played softball. Softball was no shit. Imagine “A League of Their Own” put it in Wyoming and add some trailerpark Mommy’s and lots of cheap beer and cigarettes. It was nothing for the pitcher to step off the mound, beat her kids’ ass for stealing something from the concession stand then continue business-as-usual.
DB and I loved and hated going to watch softball. The games were at the run down baseball diamonds nestled between the interstate and a handful of dirty trailers with old bath towels as window treatments. The playground was a deathpit of rusty metal and old tires bolted together. If you were going to get hurt, you’d lose a toenail at the very least, an eye if you were really playing too hard.
Anyway, DumbBaby’s 4 years old. Mama D. had a big game that night. She had made us quick sandwiches on the way out the door. She’d already learned that DB would dissect hers no matter how meticulous the filler choice or how artfully the crusts removed (DB’s cache of cheese slices in the heater vent had recently been discovered that summer) Mama D. hit Mini-Mart on the way to the field to get her soft-pack of Salem Slim Lights.
DB, our sandwiches and I, sat waiting in our seatbelts in our old S-10. DumbBaby grabs the biggest mouthful of sandwich she’d ever, in her life, taken. She starts laughing through her nose and her cheeks dimple around wads of white bread, a second later, she spits the wet blob of sandwich straight onto the window of the car parked next to us.
I sit there horrified and excited that this is all happening in front of me. Too scared to laugh, too entertained to look away as chunk after chunk of chewed up sandwich flew and stuck to the windows of the car. DumbBaby cackling and taking in deep coughing breaths.
She choked out in her broken, little talk: “I thought tha guys gowen sit on ut!”
Of course, we were busted 2 minutes later, my eyes large and embarrassed while my humiliated mother used handfuls of patterned napkins to wipe off the globs of spit and concoction from her own refrigerator. Apologizing and apologizing and apologizing…
By the time the driver’s side door shut again, DumbBaby still had not stopped her gasps and belly laughs. Mama D. couldn’t say a word to her, her jaw flopping wide and her head shaking like she was trying to wiggle free a crazy thought.
That’s when I knew DB was going to be all right. I don’t know how that made sense in my five year old mind, but it really did.
