The water that day was clear and blue, as swimming pool water should be. My mother was on the concrete edge of the pool. I presume she was talking to her cousin, that would make sense. There were other legs in the water. Two, making a grand total of four. It’s possible they belonged to a relative I didn’t know very well at the time.

Not that I know my relatives very well now, but back then, I had youth as an excuse. I hate it when they talk about my childhood because I cannot remember their presence, meaning there are gaps, and I don’t like gaps. I was there, you know.

In the water with me was my mother’s cousin’s oldest son. Phillip. I always liked Phillip, but he was a little strange. I come from the normal side of our family, I see now, but at the time, I thought my cousin was just fine. I didn’t get that things weren’t normal then. I don’t know if this is a reflection of my judgment in general or lack of experience with real people at the time.

It’s possible that my sister was born by this time – that would make me like a year-and-a-half, but still within range. If she was alive, then I’d already tried to kill her, thanks to a perfectly legitimate misunderstanding on my part. I am not aware of any psychopathic tendencies. I suspect that even though there is no way that my sister could possibly remember what happened, the fact that my little mistake became the stuff of family legend surely contributed to The Break-Up. She is one for harboring a grudge.

We were living in Downey at the time. That’s where my sister was born. Or maybe it was Bell Gardens. It’s all the same, really.

So I remember clearly that it was sunny and the water was nice and it was a family thing. I have a recollection of a flowered swimsuit, the one-piece kind with the frilly tutu skirt thing, but maybe that’s because I’ve always secretly wanted to be one of those cute girls who wears that kind of stuff. My memory is fuzzy on color, I was underwater, and now I’m looking back at me being underwater, but I’m thinking navy blue with white flowers. That feels right. Red makes me nervous.

It was a good day, the day of my first memory. I don’t know why we were living in Downey or Bell Gardens, funny how I’ve never asked, but I guess it was because my father had a job in the area. He worked for IBM, at least he did for a while. We had a lot of punch cards in the garage to prove it. I never could come up with a good game involving punched punch cards.

My mother would have liked living down south. Her parents, such as they were (my family has never taken the linear approach to building a tree), lived in the middle of the state, on the coast. It was a nice place to raise a family, and eventually we settled back there, very close to her parents, three houses close. But then she was starting to be independent, it turns out that wouldn’t really happen until my sister, not the one I accidentally tried to kill but my youngest, moved out for college, and so being down south was surely a good thing for her.

Her cousin Joy, the one who may or may not be sitting next to her in this memory, lived near us when we in Downey or Bell Gardens. They were best friends in addition to being cousins, though I’ve never understood that either. Joy is earthy and coarse. She’s loud. She’s crude. My mother is more refined, though she can swear like nobody’s business when the mood takes her. My mother didn’t go to college, but most people would never guess that. She comes off as educated. Which she is. Sitting in a classroom and passing tests doesn’t really mean you know about art and the world. The priests made sure my mother could survive with what they gave her.

The swimming thing, I know, never happened, but it’s remained consistently my first memory since I became aware of it. Maybe it was a dream that I somehow have held onto all these years – that doesn’t make sense, very rarely do we remember dreams with such intensity, especially dreams that happened around age five or six – but it really does feel like a memory, even though I’ve now added the third person perspective, filling in colors and whatnot that a baby swimming underwater wouldn’t know about. I mean, how could I know what blue was at the age of one? How could I tell my mother’s legs from Joy’s? But I know I headed for my mother. I wanted her to notice.

That sort of detail does support the dream theory, but those details seem like after-facts. It’s the part where my eyes are wide open in the blue water and I can see my mother’s legs, white and feather-edged, dangling in the pool that I remember the most. It is a shame that it probably didn’t happen because I am having fun in my memory. I am aware that I’m in the pool having fun.

This is a good first memory. It was before my father crashed his car on the highway and there was another woman in the car and police and I didn’t even know what that meant but knew that things were not okay. It was before he forgot that eight-year old girls are not the same size as four-year old girls and before he forgot we existed and before we forgot he existed. He doesn’t exist at all now, not even in my first memory.

Making the list were some pretty bad things: I am a bitch (true), I am sarcastic (also true), and I use big words (sadly, also very much true). These are the kind of horrible traits that paralyze someone seeking a little self-analysis. Where do I start, I wondered?

It seems like I could cure the bitch thing with very little effort, but will that just cause other problems? You know how you play that game where you stack the pieces of wood and then start pulling them out. The person who knocks over the entire structure loses – and it all it takes is one wrong decision or wobbly hands. Is losing my bitchiness the right life choice for me at this time?

And if I’m not a bitch, what am I? I worry that suddenly being nice to everyone would be suspicious. I wouldn’t trust someone who is always sunshine and light. I’d think she’d found religion, and that’s clearly not the look-and-feel I’m going for.

The sarcasm? I’d say it’s a defense mechanism, and probably in a way it is, but mostly it’s just my sense of humor. I don’t take much in this world seriously and have no patience for stupidity (see also: Being a Bitch, Me). Look, I’m never going to be tall, thin, or beautiful. I do have brains. At least for now.

I realize my sarcasm can be cruel and sometimes I go over the line. We all go over the line. If I lose the bitchiness and sarcasm simultaneously (or at least within a noticeable period of time), what will be left? Will I even be me anymore? Will my friends still talk to me?

There would have to be a lot of changes in my life, great and small. I’d have to change my work; though largely based on sarcasm, it has a healthy dose of bitch in it. I’d have to change my friends; I may not the fastest or funniest in the crowd, but I do hold my own. I’d have to change my music, my reading, and even my television. Though it’s not always overt, they surely contribute to my dyspeptic worldview.

I did, I confess, take a token stab at correcting the big words problem. In a moment where I was clearly feeling distraught, I confessed the sordid details of the break-up to a friend. For a long time after, whenever I crossed the line, he’s shake his head and say, “There you go again, using those big words.”

It was then that I realized I have no control over my vocabulary. I cannot stop myself when a multi-syllabic word escapes. It sounds like I’m bragging, but I’m not. I simply don’t know what constitutes a big word. It seems so relativistic, and my sister is a black-and-white world person. See my problem?

Of course, there’s a bigger problem – what if I do all this changing and my sister doesn’t want me back? Not that I’m trying to win her back, but there’s a chance that her problems with me are really not my problem. I may be an innocent bystander. Well, mostly innocent. Somewhat innocent. Kind of innocent. When she said, “You know we’ve never really gotten along anyway”, was that all my doing? I cannot believe that’s true.

I don’t think I like the idea of bowing and scraping to her view of what I should be. I have spent a long time becoming who I am, and I don’t see her sitting down, doing a lot of self-reflection. I don’t see her saying, “You know, you’re right, I should take responsibility for my decisions rather than acting like it’s your fault that I made a mistake.” I don’t see her admitting that she’s unhappy and all the changing on my part isn’t going to heal her marriage or make her job better or help her achieve her lost goals. I could give up all words over three syllables, and that won’t make a bit of difference in her life.

Everyone is afraid of my sister, but not me. They don’t want to cross her, to make her mad, to get her worked up. I do. Of course, she’s still not speaking to me, so my opportunities are few and far between. But that allows me to rely upon one of my other lousy qualities: I am smarter than she is.