Crazy Together

"What'd you say to them?" she asked in a soft voice when Max climbed into the driver's seat.

"I told them not to talk to you like that and to let you move out," he said. "You're a grown-up now. They shouldn't treat you like a little kid."

Warm tears cascaded down her full, smooth cheeks. Her upper lip trembled a bit; Max noticed it was a rich rose color, probably from lip gloss. She looked so beautiful: feminine, soft, yet fierce and alive. She hadn't cried when her parents yelled at her, even when her dad flew off the handle. Hearing Max, though, brought on the waterworks for a totally different reason.

"So I can live with you?" she asked, her eyes widening into a look he found hard to resist.

"Slow down," he said. "You can crash at my place, and I'll totally help you get on your feet. But you've got to decide if you're going to go to school, or start out on whatever thrilling career path is open to somebody with just a high school diploma these days."

It was obvious what he favored. Tammy fell silent. Max guided the car effortlessly back towards his place, giving her the time to process all the big life decisions that she had labored so hard to put off. The reality of being an adult was starting to sink in: living with her parents may have been awful, but it was a safe, predictable kind of awful.

They were already at his place when she spoke again.

"I'll go to State. I mean, I could still enroll. I think Mom and Dad would even pay, at least tuition. If I could just stay with you—"

Max cut her off.

"I don't think that's a good idea. Can't you just live in the dorms with everyone else?"

Tammy tried not to look hurt, but Max could tell he'd made her feel unwanted. They entered his apartment without speaking, and Tammy fled immediately to his bathroom. Max could hear her sobbing softly from behind the door; the sound was wrenching him inside, and he longed to find some way to stop acting like he always did, and to communicate to her, in a language they both spoke, that he only wanted the best for her, that she would be happier as a normal college student, and not with him, a semi-functional depressive and probable sexual pervert.

He knew she could have so much more, and despite his intense desire to have her there with him, to talk to her, to laugh with her, to look at her as she breathed, ate, smiled, cried, thought—he had to do what was right. His feelings for her were wrong—for the first time, he had admitted them to himself. Now there was only the matter of getting her ready for the rest of her life, a life that wouldn't need him at its center.

Tammy finally exited the bathroom, looking fairly composed despite the redness of her eyes.

"OK, Max," she said with an air of acceptance. "I won't bother you. Let me crash here for a while, and I'll get a job and an apartment or something."

Max could have left it at that, but his resolve was much shakier than he knew. She just looked so...wounded. His overriding wish was to scoop her up in his arms and tell her that he loved her, more than she could ever know. Instead, he fell back on something he knew she'd like.

"Hey, you want a drink?"

Tammy's eyes lit up.

"You really are a bad influence," she said impishly. "What's on tap?"

"Beer?" he asked, taking her expression literally. "Just a few stouts. But I was thinking maybe a 7 and 7."

Tammy decided to bluff, hoping he wasn't going to serve her some foul concoction.

"Yeah, that sounds great."

She was relived to see the liquor pour out clear, and the drink was refreshing and pretty good.

"Do you do this a lot?" she asked. "Get hammered by yourself?"

Almost immediately she regretted asking the question. Max looked ashamed.

"Maybe. I mean, I don't miss work the next day or anything. It's just...something to do."

"No, sorry, it's none of my business," Tammy responded apologetically.

Brother and sister sipped their drinks in silence for a few minutes, the alcohol slowly washing over them. Max was the first to break the uneasy silence.

"Do you want to talk about tonight at all? Like, tell me what happened?"

Tammy frowned and then began to fidget, almost imperceptibly, as if pulled by invisible strings.

"Not really. They're talking about fucking Haldol again. That's for, like, actual fucking lunatics," she said, clearly agitated. "And I'm not crazy."

Around anyone else, Tammy would be terrified to let herself get so emotional. She was always on guard to avoid acting "crazy," but with Max she knew she could let herself unwind a bit. Constantly repressing anything that might look crazy was enough to drive her crazy in itself.

"Christ, Tammy, you were right to get out," he said, sighing heavily.

"I know, right? Like, Mom is the one who needs to be doped. I just need to talk to you when I get freaked. You make me feel better," she said, her voice growing calmer as she spoke. "I mean, I'm not seeing imaginary shit, Baxter hasn't told me to kill anybody, and I'm going to do anything stupid like slit my wrists."

Time seemed to slow. Tammy saw, with evident horror, how Max's expression transformed, from solicitous and engaged, to vacant and taciturn. She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but some unknown force within held her tongue. Her mouth was suddenly dry, and she felt uncomfortably warm.

"Yeah," he said, finally breaking a silence that seemed to have stretched on forever. "That would be stupid."

Max downed what remained of his drink but made no effort to refill his glass. He hovered for a moment, torn between saying something, anything, to her and leaving the room, to be alone. In his indecision, he merely froze in place, uncommunicative and immobile, a great figure of stone, while Tammy stared at him with fear and a kind of searching scrutiny.

First, her lip began to quiver. Tammy knew she was going to cry only a moment before she began.

Fuck being a girl, she thought. I'm so sick of crying.

So many anomalous pieces from her past were starting to make sense, though.

"Fucking camp," she said between the sobs.

Max, normally moved by the sight of his sister in distress, had emotionally locked down. He offered no response to Tammy's cryptic statement.

"You were supposed to be in fucking camp. Those goddamn lying...what...how? I mean, why?"

Tammy expected no response from Max. She thought he had disappeared, vanished into the walled-off fortress of his mind. But he was still there, hurt, confused, but processing nonetheless.

"I took pills," he responded in a voice barely above a whisper. "Enough. Dad found me before it was too late. They took me to the hospital, and then they took me away for a couple of weeks."

Tammy thought back to those days, in the immediate aftermath of the death of their brother, Jeff, a year younger than Max and by everyone's agreement the family favorite. She remembered, even at her young age, being immensely confused that Max would go away to camp only weeks after their brother's death. She had been so mad at him; first, he had been distant and withdrawn, then he vanished for weeks when she needed him most.

Tammy might have held that abandonment against Max forever, had he not returned in the way he did. Once he had come back from camp, he was a new person. He had always been the raincloud to Jeff's sunshine, a good friend and brother but always perpetually morose. Something about being away changed him, though; he came back so...full of life. He had taken her everywhere, relished in spending time with her. For once, she had someone to share her secrets, take her side in the running war she had fought with her parents for as long as she could remember. Tammy had held on to those six months, their time together before Max left for college, when she was only thirteen, as the greatest time of her life.

"Why?"

Max paused, his eyes now rimmed with tears of his own.

"Because I wanted to go wherever Jeff went," he said, taking a long pause, "and because I've hated being alive for as long as I can remember."

Tammy's heart sunk. Max had always been her hero; even his chronic depression had always seemed like a kind of jaded wisdom gleaned from not falling for the bullshit that made up far too much of daily life. She never thought of depression as pain, something so bad that going on living seemed unbearable.

"But when you came back—"

"I realized that I didn't want to die," he interjected, "but...I needed help. So I latched on to you, because Mom and Dad couldn't stop looking at me like a mental case. They never told you, so I could be around you and not have to feel...ashamed all the time. Then I went to school, met Emily, and she didn't know. And even though I guess I never really loved her, I mean, really, deep down, it was just...better that she was there."

Though it had hurt her immeasurably when Max went away to college, holding onto those memories had kept Tammy sane. Now she knew that she didn't need Max to protect her from the world—she needed to protect him, most of all from himself. Given her own experiences, though, she knew instinctively not to make him feel like a freak or a reject because of his struggles. Her brother needed her, and she knew how to help him.

"Max, listen to me," she said, her voice ringing with confidence. "I'm going to be your roommate. I need your help, but you need me too. I'll help you forget about Emily, and you'll help me get away from Mom and Dad. Deal?"

Tammy expected Max to relent, but he only frowned.

"Tammy, you've got to believe me. I really would love for you to live here. But...it's complicated. I've thought a lot about it, and I just don't think it's right for you."

Max had shared his old secret, but he wasn't ready to share his new secret. While Tammy had crystalline memories of Max, practically as an adult, to draw from, Max's memories of Tammy were of a young girl, scarcely recognizable as the burgeoning woman sitting before him. In his long semi-absence, Tammy had become more beautiful than he could imagine; he wondered if others saw what he saw.

She seemed unlucky in love, which Max could never understand. What he was certain of, though, was that he had fallen hopelessly in love with his sister, and that, consequently, she should stay as far away from him as she could. Living with him would either lead to something very wrong between them or simply cause him unremitting daily torture to watch her without being able to touch her.

"Max, I know I don't have the right to tell you this," she said, almost smirking, "but—fuck it, I'm totally claiming the right: you're gonna let me live here. So deal with it, dude."

She isn't taking this seriously, he thought, before remembering that she couldn't know what he was feeling. She herself would never have such feelings, he believed. Yet he wanted to say "yes" so badly, even though he couldn't. He searched for excuses.

"You won't make friends if you don't live on campus," he said, instantly cognizant of the weakness of his objection.

Tammy rolled her eyes, brushing her fingers through her blonde locks.

"Number one: yes I will. Number two: don't care anyway. You gotta have something better than that."

"OK, well, Mom and Dad won't kick you in rent money if you live here. The last thing they want is for us to team up against them like we did when we were kids. You saw the way they were tonight."

Tammy smiled.

"I've got months before school. I'll save up my money, and I'll do so much work around here that you'll never want me gone. I'll be like your domestic slave."

Max took a deep breath, which Tammy interpreted as incredulity. She couldn't have intended to set his mind racing with her words.

"It'll be weird for you trying to date," he said, reaching for what he hoped was his best argument. "I mean, living with your brother."

Tammy shot him a shrewd look.

"You mean I'll cramp your style. Brother, you can bang all the undergrad sluts you want here. I'll totally cross-stitch you some pillows that say 'Pussy Palace' on them for the couch. Mom taught me how years ago."

Max blushed. She had a way of getting under his skin.

"No seriously! Don't you want a boyfriend?" he asked.

Tammy dropped her smile. She wanted Max to really hear what she was about to say.

"To be honest with you, no. I hate it—I mean, you know, sex. It sucks. At least, it does for me. Maybe there's something wrong with me, but it always—hey, this isn't too weird, is it?"

Max wanted to scream from the rafters: "Yes! This is too weird! Because I want you!" Instead, he decided it was more important to be a good listener.

"No way, Tammy," he reassured her. "You can tell me anything."

Tammy paused for a moment, screwing her mouth up to the side as if she was a cartoon character concocting a devious plan.

"Let's drop this Tammy shit. You remember my real name, right?"

Max didn't miss a beat.

"Tell me all about the inadequacy of your lovers, Joelle. I'm practically agog at such incompetent cocksmanship," he said in a faux sophisticated accent.

Tammy burst out laughing.

"Cocksmanship? That's the worst word of all time," she said giggling. "And why do you assume it was their fault?"

Max, for once, could draw on one of the few forms of social superiority he had over his pretty, outgoing (if often misunderstood) sister: actual long-term relationship experience.

"Because inexperienced girls hook up with inexperienced boys, who suck in bed, but don't know it, and then girls blame themselves for not liking it. And the only way to actually satisfy a woman—and might I add that this is the weirdest conversation ever—is to learn how her body works and to give a shit about making her...I'm going to go with 'climax,' or this will get too weird to go on."

Tammy started to giggle like a schoolgirl hearing dirty words for the first time. She had not expected the conversation to take this turn.

"Can I continue?" Max asked with mock petulance.

Tammy nodded, afraid to speak for fear of bursting into open laughter.

"So, my assumption is that you're not hideously and improbably deformed, incapable of enjoying sex. No, chances are you just hooked up with gawky teenage wannabe Lotharios, who wouldn't know where the clitoris was if you gave them GPS coordinates. I guess I'm saying that the second you have sex with a guy who actually cares about you and knows what he's doing, all this 'down-with-sex' talk will fly right out the window."

In the middle of Max's rant, Tammy found herself shifting from nervous tittering to something like awestruck attention. In her heart, she knew he was probably right. She felt a sudden, weird twinge in thinking that Max was, like, some kind of sex expert. Sexpert? He had been in a long relationship, at least long by her standards. He'd undoubtedly had sex way more times than her. Had he been with lots of other women too? Not just Emily?

Tammy had a strange thought: she really hated those women. Those hypothetical, possibly non-existent, but probably-in-fact-existent-because-I-mean-come-on-Max-is-a-good-looking-guy-with-a-job-so-he's-probably-totally-boned-some-college-sluts women.

And Tammy felt strange for that thought too, but when she looked up at Max again, she felt a little unsure of herself. There they were, both drinking, talking about sex, and suddenly he'd gotten this weird upper-hand. She was jealous of his hypothetical hook-ups, jealous of his certainly real ex-girlfriend.

In all fairness, Tammy thought, Emily's way prettier than me in, like, an objective sense.

Tammy was also suddenly confronted with the reality that she had, if only for a split second, wondered if her brother could make her come where no other guy had done so.

Tammy, not yet consumed by lust, but at least now curious about Max in a whole new way, sat only a foot or so away from her brother, who had come to accept his complete love and devotion to his sister, though that love was doomed and impossible, making it, of course, purer than any real love could be.

And that was when Max kissed her.

And after that kiss, which wasn't long, but was long enough for both of them to enjoy a moment of pure, irresponsible pleasure and unbridled joy before hurtling at terminal velocity back towards the earth, Tammy realized that something terrible had just happened, and that her dreams were shattered, because she couldn't live with Max, and couldn't make him whole again, because she was crazy, just like her mother said, because only crazy people want to kiss their brother, or take off his clothes, or try to find out if he could be the man that made sex the passionate, magical thing that everyone said it was supposed to be, instead of the embarrassing, awkward, unfulfilling disappointment that it had always been for her.

And Max only felt heartbroken when Tammy started blubbering and stammering and making up excuses to leave.

And when she left, he thought he would maybe never see her again, and he wondered if he could live with himself.

And as she ran, Tammy wondered if she had just made the worst decision of her life, and she felt so ashamed and so guilty that she knew she'd die if she tried to go back to Max's place and talk about what happened.

***

Tammy didn't recognize the number on her phone, and usually that meant she wouldn't answer it. This time, though, she answered. She'd started to do that lately.

"Is this Tamara Belsham?" asked an annoyed, wheezing voice on the other end of the line.

"Yes, can I ask who this is?"

"Ma'am, I'm the manager at the Target at Pemberton Ridge Pavilion. I believe we have your brother here, and he's very...agitated. We need to know if you can pick him up, or if we should have the police escort hi—"

"I'll be right there," she interjected. "Just give me time, I need to get a cab."

On the way over to pick up Max, Tammy felt a crushing sense of guilt. She imagined the horror story awaiting her: rejected by her, Max had slipped into a growing psychosis. Now he was a raving lunatic, unhinged, wandering the strip malls and office parks of their suburban wasteland landscape. She would have to check him into a facility, then check herself in right after.

Shit, she thought, this cab ride is going to wipe me out, too.

The manager was more concerned than angry. The store security had caught Max shoplifting, only when they stopped him, he seemed, not belligerent or evasive, but utterly confused and uncertain of who or where he was. He only babbled, semi-coherently, her name and number, repeated like the mantra of some madman.

Tammy feared the worst. She agreed to take her brother home, and the manager graciously agreed not to press charges. Finally, she got to see Max.

He didn't look particularly...unhinged. In fact, he looked pretty hinged. He was running his fingers constantly through his hair—in imitation of her?

Once they were outside, Max whispered, out of earshot from any store personnel.

"I wasn't sure that was going to work."

Tammy had to work hard to suppress a gasp.

"Did you fake being crazy to get out a shoplifting arrest?" she said, in a whispered shout.

Max shushed her. It wasn't until they were in his car (Thank god no cab fare home, she thought) that he finally answered her.

"No faking required," he said in an even tone. "I am crazy, remember?"

Tammy felt like her body was plugged into an electrical socket. Max had taken her utterly by surprise. In an instant, she knew just what to say.

"Then we can be crazy buddies together."

Both of them wanted to pour their hearts out, to apologize to each other. The car, though, just didn't seem like the place.

"So you suck at this, huh?" she asked.

Max grinned.

"You just think that because I got caught. I've gotten pretty good in the last few months."