And to think Amanda hadn't even liked Karen very much when Peter had first brought her home!
Back then Amanda hadn't quite come to see how chauvinistic all three of her brothers were -- Peter, the eldest, most of all -- and she'd looked up to him. His almost constant surliness around boys her age ("You touch my sister and you'll be breathing through your ears, man!"), even when they had done nothing to deserve it, had always made her feel special and loved back then.
Now, in her mid-20s, it made her feel infantilized and condescended to. But at least Peter paid her some mind. Their two other brothers, James (two years older than Amanda) and Andy (the baby, two years younger than she), had taken after Peter in just about every way including that one -- they talked down to her, but at least they talked to her. Not like their father, whom the whole family had come home to honor as he had survived a heart attack a few months before. Though he'd welcomed her with a kiss on the cheek and a "There's m'girl!" on her arrival, an hour or so later he hadn't said another word to her. Nothing about her new job in New York or how the train ride had been, not even any annoying questions about any special man in her life. But Amanda welcomed that omission. In the mood she was in, she just might have come out to Mom and Dad, and that would most likely mean they'd never speak to her again.
Which honestly didn't sound so bad right now, as she found herself flanked by James and Andy on the couch. They were enjoying a long stroll down memory lane at her expense. "You never even knew we used to use your bras as a slingshot in the backyard, did you?" James said between slurps of beer.
"What?!" Amanda looked at him in outrage, angrily clutching her diet cola (she never drank with her family; the risk of loose lips was too high).
Andy spewed a mouthful of beer, only just catching it on his hand, which he wiped on his pants. "Guess that answers that question, Jimmy."
"That's not funny!" Amanda looked back and forth at them both in outrage. "You had no right --"
"Oh, let it go," James said with a patronizing chuck on her shoulder. "If you didn't even know, then there's no harm done."
"And it's not like you even really needed a bra back then or anything," Andy snickered.
"You guys are disgusting!" Amanda stood up and marched off towards the stairway.
She was almost there when she felt someone grabbing her arm to spin her around. It was Mom. "Amanda, you get back there and you join us until lunch is ready! This is for your father!"
"My father who's literally only said hello to me in the past hour?" Amanda retorted. "Besides, James and Andy, I mean..."
"Your brothers tease you because they love you, Amanda, you know that."
"No I don't! I know they tease me because you raised them to think they didn't have to have any respect for me whatsoever, and I've had it! I'll come down when lunch is ready, not before then." She wrenched her mother's hand off her arm and made her escape up the stairs.
"Ungrateful little bitch," Mom said from the foot of the stairs, loud enough for Amanda to hear from near the top, and for Peter to overhear it from his perch on the hassock next to Dad's chair, where he'd been regaling Dad with his latest stories of dating since his divorce from Karen.
"Eh, she never did like family get-togethers, Mom," Peter said.
"I wish she'd at least tell me why," Mom grumbled, and she returned to the kitchen. The living room, now all-male but for Peter's two-year-old Jane asleep in a corner, returned to talk of childhood glories and recent dating conquests.
Amanda's room was the smallest, but as the only girl at least she'd always had it to herself. Mom and Dad had left it more or less the same for the first couple of years after she'd gone off to college, but somewhere along the line they'd refurbished it to what they undoubtedly thought a girl's bedroom should look like. Gone were Amanda's basketball and Wonder Woman posters and the snapshots of her pals from school and the racing car quilt she'd had on her bed for as long as she could remember, in favor of pink chintz everywhere, a satin bedspread and an ornate canopy that she vaguely recalled Mom trying to interest her in as a child. The corner where her stereo had been was now occupied by a regal floral print armchair. She sat down on the chair and tried to rekindle the sense of safe-and-secure that the room had so often offered her back in the days when no other place in the world would.
It didn't happen. Her room was no longer her room.
Amanda did not mourn that very much. Now that she had a life on her own in New York, there was no need to still have a sanctuary back in her hateful little hometown, which she'd just as soon have never visited again. But it did mean there was no use holing up in the pink purgatory her old room had become.
No, there was only one place in the house that held any joy for her now, and that was Peter's old room. Diagonally across the second-floor foyer, the second-largest of their four bedrooms after Mom and Dad's, it had been Peter's room from the earliest days Amanda could recall. James had moved in after Peter had gone off to college, but then when Peter had arrived home just a year out of college with pregnant Karen on his arm and a job that didn't pay enough to support two people, never mind three, it had once again become his room, and Karen's too. Seeing as the room was now no-child's land -- it now had an ancient double bed and chest of drawers and nothing else -- Amanda was free to go in there and reminisce.
Amanda couldn't recall just why she hadn't liked Karen at first. Maybe she'd been attracted to Karen and hated herself for it, as she hadn't yet been even out to herself back then; but Amanda doubted it. With her short hair and strong features and almost-masculine build, Karen wasn't Amanda's usual type. Maybe she'd taken after her mother, who of course resented any and all women who stole her precious little boys away. But Amanda doubted that too; then as now, she and her mother hadn't seen eye to eye on much of anything. Her best guess in retrospect was, as an angst-ridden teenager the first time Peter had brought his then-girlfriend home from college for Thanksgiving, she resented anyone else in the family being happy. Peter, back then, most definitely was happy with Karen, who had been unfailingly friendly with Amanda and the others. To Amanda's relief later on, she didn't appear to have noticed any resentment on her part. She still wasn't sure how she'd hidden it or even why she had done so, but she certainly was glad she had.
As Amanda closed the bedroom door most of the way (she wanted to hear Mom's call for lunch -- after coming all this way she was at least going to eat!), smoothed her skirt out and sat down on the bed with one foot tucked under her, she found the lamp of memory that had burned out in her own room was still shining brightly in the now-anonymous looking guest room that had once been Peter and Karen's.
Mom and Dad still called it "the summer Peter and Karen stayed here," but it had really been well over a year. Amanda recalled she had just turned eighteen, because the knowledge she'd be off to college that fall was a constant balm in the huge fights James had had with Mom and Dad about having to move back in with Andy for the summer.
"But I waited forever for that room!" he'd whined over breakfast on the morning he was to go back to campus after spring break. "Peter had it to himself forever!"
"He won't have it to himself now, sweetie," Mom had admonished him. "He's got a wife to take care of, and soon a baby too."
"Great, so if I want my room back, all I've got to do is get a girl knocked up," James had grumbled.
Dad had shoved James' head down into his cereal bowl. "I won't have you talking about your brother like that!" he'd roared. "He did the responsible thing and married Karen, and you will respect them both or else!"
And somehow, Mom and Dad had still managed to be surprised a few weeks later when James informed them he'd found a summer job at his college's library and wouldn't be coming home. Amanda had not been, nor had she been dumb enough to express her own feelings about Karen. Dad would probably have gone easier on her, she knew, but Mom might well have been even more vengeful.
So Amanda had kept her contempt for her sister in law to herself when she moved in, larger than life in her seventh month, later that same week. She'd looked the other way on Karen spending so much time in their only bathroom, and had even been grateful Andy had someone other than her to tease about how often she had to pee. She'd managed to feel a bit of solidarity with her over Dad and Peter's condescending remarks about what a true lady she was and blah blah blah, though that was tempered by the fact that Karen seemed to bask in their sexism and maybe even enjoy it. Of course, what else would she expect of a woman who married her brother?
For all that, Amanda had been delighted for both her and Peter when she'd come home from school to learn Karen had given birth to Peter Junior, and that she was resting comfortably at the hospital. Her joy had not been feigned at all when Karen and Peter Junior had come home three days later. If she still hadn't liked Karen then, Amanda recalled now, she had at least come to respect her.
Now, Amanda lay back on the bed and gazed up at the ceiling, and let the memory of when she had come to like Karen wash over her. It had only been a few weeks later -- she wasn't sure if it was right before or right after she graduated, definitely in the same month either way.
Peter's room didn't look anything like Amanda remembered it from way back when. It looked even less like it had looked as James' room. With a double bed at one end and a crib at the other, nearly every inch in between was strewn with diaper bags and baby clothes, and with Peter and Karen's own dirty clothes piling up in one corner. Assorted baby-friendly posters of cute ducklings and bears had been tacked on the walls.
Amanda paid none of that any mind as she crept into the room. Karen was in the shower, Peter was off on a job interview, Mom and Dad were working, and Amanda was officially supposed to be keeping an ear out for Peter Junior if he cried anyway. He hadn't cried out, but Amanda -- despite her own utter lack of any maternal instinct -- had wanted a closer look at him for quite some time now. With Mom and Dad and Peter and Karen always fussing over him and even Andy wanting a good look now and then, she'd never had any chance to really admire him on her own. Until now.
He was adorable, nestled in the baby blankets with his eyes shut tight. Amanda felt like she could admire him all day. She soon lost all track of how long she had been admiring him, and she didn't think to keep an ear out for when Karen turned the shower off. And so she was caught flat-footed when Karen appeared in the doorway in her bathrobe.
"Oh!" Amanda looked up as if she'd just been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
But Karen looked delighted to see her. "Hi, Amanda. Getting to know your nephew?"
