Ode to My Graphic Designer: A Story of Violent Affection

My cousin is designing the cover for The Music of Pedro. She’s almost done with the final version and I felt like wrapping up the week by sharing a story I wrote about her for one of my college classes as a response to Bless Me, Ultima. The main character has a very hands-on, rough relationship with his friends and it reminded me of the ways one half of my family grew up showing affection. My cousin belonged to the other half of the family. This is the story of how I lured her to the Cuevas ways.

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When I was two, my aunt set her infant son within my reach and I leaned over him as if for a kiss. The adults looked on in anticipation of an awww moment between cousins, but with my sprouting tic-tac teeth, I chomped his face with the unhesitating resolve of a caterpillar.

The Cuevas family has never forgotten. More than once over the years both my aunt and her son have bitten me as payback for the original offence, but the Cuevas habit of affectionate violence didn’t begin with me. I was simply a player in a prewritten script that rarely contained the words “I love you,” that swapped hugs for carpet-kickers and kisses for bites. There were comically large boxing gloves in my cousin’s basement that got a lot of use. We were like a pack of wolf cubs.

One by one those that have married or dated into my family have become biters themselves or tolerant recipients. To a degree. My fiancé didn’t grow up with siblings and I’ve had train myself toward a special gentleness just for him. But when I’m around my little brothers, I struggle not to start shit—a jab to the ribs, a twisting tricep pinch, a full on slap to the face—anything to start a scuffle that tells me I’m loved. LT frets on the sidelines, alternately amazed and horrified that the rest of my family takes it in stride when my now-overpowering brothers wrestle me down with ease, drag me across the kitchen floor by my feet.

Then there’s the other side of my family, the Berrett half. The half that, as children, cried when you ate off their plate, or tattled when you got too rough. Theirs is a wonderfully normative physicality, cheek kisses for G-pa and side hugs for the rest. But for my closest circle, I still don’t know how to love, or read love, where there’s no impulse to claim a body with my fingers and teeth, to harm in a heartfelt way.

My best friend is a Berrett cousin I’ve patiently corrupted. We were both in junior high when we discovered our mutual love of writing and spent the weekends co-writing stories that featured our wish-fulfilling counterparts, one blond and blue-eyed like my cousin and the other a brown-skinned brunette. I was fearless in those stories, nothing like my actual, wall-hugging, orthodontiaed self at that age.

One day in her basement, she was on the phone with a friend from her school, a boy, and I resented the call and the time it took from our writing. I charged her like a dog and bit her ankle. She yelped and kicked me off.

“Oh, my gosh, my cousin bit me,” she told her friend, laughing.

“She bit you?” he said.

She checked her ankle for teeth marks. We laughed so much I felt faint, swelling with love for her, never even thinking that instead of biting her I could’ve just told her out loud that she was the best thing in my angsty, awkward life. Maybe it would’ve been redundant.