My mother was getting upset and who knew what might happen. She might faint, or have to go to bed for the rest of the day. She lifted her shockingly thin wrist to her smooth forehead, ready to make a pronouncement: “Sidney, please … ”
I did not want to hear one of her invalid speeches.
“Never mind. I’m sorry. I have to do my homework. I’ll be up in my room.”
After all that, I knew Aunt Evie would never like me again.
Preston returned in May. My dad drove to the airport while Aunt Evie, my mom and I got everything ready for his homecoming dinner. We hadn’t seen him in over a year. Aunt Evie made a relish tray and cut little red radishes so they looked like little red and white flowers. I didn’t like anything on the relish tray but appreciated that it looked so fancy. My mom was making a beef roast and mashed potatoes, Preston’s favorite. Aunt Evie was also overseeing my peeling of the chilled shrimp, making sure I left the tails on for the shrimp cocktail that I was to arrange on small white plates shaped like shells. I was happy Preston was coming and that everyone was cooking together. I was happy that my mom seemed much healthier. She was still very thin, but she was doing more and she seemed happier. We heard the garage door opening and Brandy got up and barked as if he knew somebody special was coming.
The door to the garage opened and there stood my brother, so different. His hair was longer, sun-bleached. His face was wind-burned and tanned like he had spent many hours outdoors. His expression was changed, more serious, thoughtful, older. He was wearing faded jeans and a cotton button-down collared shirt, one I remembered always liking, but which was faded and worn soft like a favorite T-shirt. His eyes were a bit dazed I thought, and I couldn’t tell if he was glad to be home or not. He hugged Aunt Evie first, whom he had always loved, and she wiped away tears as he let her go.
Mom gave him a big hug, “Oh Preston, you look good. You look strong like you’ve been working hard.”
“Yeah, I was telling Dad I worked long hours in a field clearing rocks every day unless it rained hard.”
Preston was talking in a strange way like he had a foreign accent.
Mom smiled, “Oh, listen to you! I can hear your French accent.”
“Yes, well I speak French pretty damn well now. I told Dad I could maybe test out of at least French, maybe German too, for college. I was in Germany at first. I worked for a farmer and he had two wild daughters who were really fun and we had a great time but he didn’t need help after the hay was brought in last year so that’s when I went to France … ”
Mom was getting worried about the roast in the oven and said, “Preston, we can hear all about it later. You can’t sit down at the table like that. You need to go take a shower and change your clothes.”
“No, I don’t. I’m fine. I’m not showering every five minutes like you people do any more.”
My mother immediately looked at Dad, “Don, please. He needs to shower. We’ve made a nice dinner. Please, Preston. You need to put on deodorant.”
“They don’t use deodorant in France, especially not in the countryside where I was.”
“Alright well, that’s fine for them, but we aren’t going to live like that here.”
The shower was taken and we all bustled around getting the dinner on the dining room table. It was a chilly rainy evening so Dad started a fire in the fireplace which didn’t happen very often mostly because Mom didn’t want to get the living room dirty.
From my seat at the dining room table I could see the fire and loved it. Our house felt like a home. My dad poured red wine into all the crystal wine glasses and even a small amount in mine. Preston came down clean and dressed in a heavy, olive-green wool sweater with suede patches on the elbows.
My mother kissed him on the cheek and remarked, “I love that sweater, what a great color on you now with that suntan Preston. You look so European and grown up!”
“Yeah, I forgot I had such nice clothes.”
Dad made a toast: “To our young man returned home after a great adventure! May we hear stories for many nights to come and then it’s off to college! To Preston!” And we all raised our glasses, “To Preston!”
Preston took a drink. He put his glass down and dropped his head. I was watching him carefully, realizing again that I did not know this changed young man who had been my brother. Really I probably had never known him. I didn’t think anyone at the table knew him either. And so much had happened. Were they all pretending that they didn’t remember anything bad that had happened? Or did they just want to make it all go away?
Preston was crying. Mom noticed and said, “Preston, are you okay?”
Dad jumped in. “He’s fine Ingrid. Leave him alone. He’s fine. Preston, come on. Your mother made you this beautiful dinner. You’re not going to spoil it now when you just got here?”
Aunt Evie jumped in, “Don, the boy is upset. Something must have upset him.”
Mom stood up to refill her sterling silver gravy boat, “I knew he shouldn’t have gone. I knew this was too much for a young boy out there alone all that time, who knows what went on … ”
I looked at my brother again, his head bent, and I noticed a scar above his left eye, a reddish line that ran along his eyebrow and then trailed off to his temple before it disappeared. I wondered what it was from and I knew there was a lot we didn’t know about him. He was only eighteen. I knew he was a very sensitive person. I knew that a lot of things hurt him.
I remembered then how on my twelfth birthday our parents did something very out of the ordinary and took us to see Cat Stevens play a big-arena show. I loved his music and the show was a real life-changer for me. But one of the most moving things was when Cat Stevens sang “Father and Son,” one of his most famous numbers, about his frustrations trying to get his aging father to understand him. I was mesmerized by this lone man at the front of the stage in this packed arena singing a song that made every person freeze and not make a sound. At first, as Cat Stevens sang, I didn’t notice my brother crying. He was next to me, and when I put my hand on his shoulder I could feel his body wracked with sobs. I started to cry too and he put his arm around me and we let the words Cat Stevens was singing envelope us and speak for us. We were silent all the way home that night.
As I was lost in thought, Aunt Evie was single-handedly saving the homecoming dinner by asking Preston sincere and enthusiastic questions about all the places he’d been and things he’d seen. Later, after we had each eaten a piece of our mom’s homemade apple pie, Dad brought out more red wine and he and Preston began to talk in more serious tones about what had happened to him over his long absence. He told the story of the scar while mom was distracted doing the dishes so she wouldn’t get too worked up.
“Early on before I took the ferry across from England to France, there was a guy in one of the bars in London who didn’t like Americans, or didn’t like me, probably both. He kept hassling me until I told him to back off which is when he knocked his glass bottle on the edge of the bar to make a weapon and started yelling, “Come on, come on!” like he was a crazy pirate which he may have been. I was pissed off and told him to leave me alone and pick on somebody his own size because he was pretty heavy, and out of nowhere he jabbed at my face. The bottle was so sharp! It jumped out and cut into my skin so easily. It was like a thing he knew would work.”
Mom was back in the dining room holding her dish cloth, her apron with the ironed white ruffles tied around her waist over a sleeveless pale-pink wool dress. “Preston, are you telling the truth? Let me look at the scar,” and she lifted her hand to his face and looked closely at the red line, “How did it heal? It looks like it was a very deep cut.”
“Well, that’s the best part. The bartender saw this guy go after me and now my forehead is bleeding down into my eye.”
Aunt Evie, my mother and I all gasped.
Preston excitedly continued, “So he just grabs me by the shoulders and lifts me up ‘cause he sees I’m about to faint, and he has me lie dow
n on top of the bar so he can see better. He gets a needle and thread out and he pours me a shot of whiskey. And then he sewed it up with a couple of stitches!”
Preston got the response he wanted from all of us then. Dad was impressed and Aunt Evie and Mom were horrified. I was impressed too. Preston’s face was beaming. This was a good night. When it was over, I went to sleep on the carpeted hallway upstairs in my pink flowered sleeping bag because Aunt Evie was staying overnight in my room. Since she didn’t drive, Dad would take her back into the city the next day. We were all under one roof, we had good food in our stomachs, and we all loved each other. We really did.
THE CABIN
Preston did test out of French and German and was accepted into a good liberal arts college in Minnesota he wanted to attend especially because it was closer to the cabin our grandfather had always kept north of Duluth near the Canadian border. He had the summer to prepare and then he’d be off to college in the fall. My school got out for the summer and the whole family got in the car like we did every year and headed north. Brandy sat in the back seat of the Jaguar in between Preston and me. We were squeezed in and Brandy drooled on us constantly, but we were excited so we didn’t care. Preston curled up and slept most of the way. I usually got carsick on long rides, so we had to pull over a couple times. When I did, Preston woke up to make jokes while I stood knee-deep in wild flowers along the old highway, doubled over. “Sister Sid always barfs right around Janesville. Good job Sid, you made it all the way to Spooner this year.”
My parents liked to make this drive. They had similar tastes in music and the drive gave them a chance to listen to whole albums together. They played Beatles tapes in the car’s cassette player: “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” the Righteous Brothers: “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the Supremes: “Baby Love,” Creedence Clearwater Revival: “Lookin’ Out My Back Door.”
Our parents sang along and I did too. I liked to riff a harmony part even when there wasn’t one on the recording. They listened to folk singers like Simon and Garfunkel and The Kingston Trio too and I liked it all equally. Sometimes my family would say I was a good singer. Sometimes they’d say I was singing so loud that they couldn’t hear the tape and they’d make me stop. I knew all the words and could just keep singing along straight through every tape my dad had.
Twelve or thirteen hours in the car is a long time, but we were all so happy to be returning to the beautiful Northwoods that there was no arguing or trouble. On the final stretch down the winding gravel road that lead to Grandpa’s old place we rolled down the windows and my mom exclaimed, “Smell that air! It smells like pine! Look at how green everything is! And the lake is up! It must have rained a lot this spring. Look at all the flowers! Isn’t it beautiful … ”
The narrow road was lined with the first blooms of summer, yellow buttercups, white wild daisies with yellow centers, wild phlox in white and pink, Queen Anne’s lace.
When Dad eased the car into the old driveway in front of Grandpa’s cabin, there was only a faint path of car tires in the grass, which was as high as my knees. We opened all four doors and spilled out. Brandy went crazy with the tall cool grass up to his chin and started darting around back and forth running farther down toward the water each time and back up to the car. He was not a swimmer and the shoreline was rocky, so he stayed away from the water.
My mother fished the old skeleton keys out of her handbag. Grandpa Pederson had been dead for at least five years. He died up at the cabin at the age of 86. In his final years, he stayed all winter. The story I heard was that the natives found him face down in the snow, not far from the cabin door. He may have just had a heart attack. Preston told me Grandpa killed himself on purpose by going out and freezing to death in a snow bank but that didn’t make sense to me at all and I told Preston that was stupid. Preston added that Grandpa was an alcoholic and that he got really drunk and then went outside to die. I never believed that either.
My mother had been an only child so now the cabin was ours. We hadn’t been there since last August, so the place looked pretty deserted. There were some huge branches lying around in the high grass. The cabin was white with a red roof, “just like in Sweden” my grandfather used to say. And the birches were white “just like the birch forests of Sweden” he would say. Painted red shutters lined each window and each shutter had a pine tree cut out in its center. We all stood examining and admiring the old place. There were branches on the roof too but it was quickly agreed that there was no damage anywhere.
My dad took the keys and fussed and swore until he got the main door open. Everything was orderly and cool and quiet inside. I didn’t like to see the cabin with newspaper taped to all the windows and sheets on all the furniture. I helped my mother and we quickly got the windows uncovered and opened to let in the warm fragrant air and the sound of the lapping waves on the rocks below.
Oh God, what a beautiful world it was there! My grandmother had died much earlier but her touches were everywhere. Mom would often refer to things as “my mother’s soup tureen,” or “my mother’s embroidery.” My mom was not the kind of parent who made the extra effort to give their children a sense of shared history by saying, “your grandmother’s soup tureen,” or “your grandfather’s tool chest.” We always had the feeling that we were guests in her shrine to her parents’ memory, to her own wonderful childhood as the precious only child of two people who were very much in love. We were not real players in the game, just spectators as my mother lived out her childhood summer life with her parents.
I was there alone with her for weeks on end throughout my childhood. My dad would take Preston with him and they’d go back to civilization. Preston would have summer school or football camp. Sometimes he would go down to the floor of the stock exchange with my dad in the summers and be a gofer. I heard them talk, but I had no idea what the stock exchange was like and no clue what a gofer would do. I was left to fend for myself all day every day in a beautiful but completely primitive wilderness. Other kids would come for a week or two and stay with relatives or at the resort down the road. The families that came for just a short time all acted manic, riding on the water, in the water, through the water, in every possible vessel and contraption known to mankind.
The hyper-positive dads in the vacation families would invariably stop by our dock in their speed boat with their kids and water toys spilling out on all sides and try to get me to join them. “Sidney! Hey, Sid! Come on out and join us! Can we pick you up? You want to ski? You want to go tubing?” To me their invitations all sounded like, “do you want to ride around like a bouncing idiot on our inner tube?” and my answer was always a resolute “No thanks.”
I hated it when they tried to get me to join them. I would be sitting on the dock in the only bikini I had, a sweatshirt of my brother’s over it. My flute and guitar were often laid out on a big quilt covering the wooden boards. I’d have my notebook, and some songbooks, and an issue of Seventeen magazine my mother would have bought me the last time we “went into town.” I had my day mapped out with practicing, journal writing, song-writing, studying the construction of a famous artist’s song. When it got really warm in the mid afternoon I’d swim and work on my stuff some more. I had no goals. I had no dreams. I did not envision myself becoming anything except maybe more fashionable when I went back to school in the fall. I never thought about status clothes like my mother’s. I thought about cutting my hair short again and maybe wearing a piece of leather tied around my neck with a few beads on it. I thought about wearing my hooded sweatshirt that was way too small, but pushing up the sleeves and wearing it super tight because it hit right at the top of my jeans and made my curvy figure look pretty nice. I would think of new style ideas during the day and then try them out at night when I would sometimes be allowed to walk down to the resort lodge and play ping pong with the vacationing kids. Many nights my mother didn’t let me go because she said I shouldn’t make myself into a fixture down there especially since we didn’
t rent a cabin there. When I was allowed to go she would give me a few quarters which I could ponder the best use of on my walk to the lodge down the gravel road. The local kids from the towns near the lake were around all summer like I was but I didn’t run into them very often. Even though I was up there all season long, they didn’t entirely trust or understand me probably because I was delivered in a Jaguar from the city of Chicago and went back at the end of the summer never to be heard from again until the following year.
At the cabin, from just after Memorial Day to just before Labor Day I was a girl without a society. My queen was a cruel and unapologetic ruler. I was her Cinderella. I folded clothes, washed windows, swept bugs off screens, spiders out of corners, pumped water from the red iron pump on the porch. I assisted in the kitchen in every conceivable way. I vacuumed the white wool rug in the main room whenever she made me. I carried a big aluminum canoe down the crooked stone steps whenever I wanted to get on the water and carried it back up to the grass each time to be sure it didn’t blow away in a storm. But I had endless hours to myself as well. I often begged my mother to come canoeing so I could show her all the wonderful little secret treasures of the shoreline that I had discovered. She maybe ventured out with me in the canoe twice a summer. Usually she got upset and we had to turn back. Mostly I went alone. I liked to go early in the morning and paddle right up to the lake’s middle. If it was very still, the sun would come up and shoot its rays in a fine spray of diamonds that would come up right to the edge of the canoe. I liked to go in the mid-afternoon when it was hot enough, even that far north, for me to be wearing just a T-shirt and bikini. I’d paddle to a small island that we could see from our dock slowly around to the far side where the resort people couldn’t see me so I could get out of the canoe and drag it by its rope like a pet horse. I’d walk in the cold water in the few places where the bottom wasn’t rocky but beautiful fine sand. I’d watch mother ducks with their babies. Mergansers, mallards, wood ducks, all with their own personalities and preferences. I’d watch loons with babies riding on their backs, and painted turtles sunning themselves on floating logs. Most of this was very easy to observe on the far side of the little island. In the early evenings there was the sunset, majestic in its color and splendor, reaching across the big sky over the lake. If I canoed then, I liked to watch the heron getting in his last lone fish of the day. I loved the heron the most maybe because he was silent and serious and alone. As was I.
A Girl Called Sidney Page 6
