If I was feeling bitter, I would remember the midsummer night when I was eleven, at the cabin—only my mother and I. The cabin next door, a short walk by road or through the woods, was full of kids. There were several girls, all cousins, around my age. The parents knew my mother from childhood. These were second and third generation cabin people just like us. Most of the summer I walked the path past that cabin and it was closed, ghostly quiet. But it was alive that week with shouts of laughter morning until night. Canoeing, fishing, boating, swimming, skiing, hiking.
Everyone at that cabin knew me. They tried to include me to an annoying degree sometimes, but this night I especially wanted to be part of their boisterous big family life because they were having a bonfire and they had invited me to bring my guitar and be a part of the evening. One of the dads was a decent guitar player and singer and he had mentioned to me several times that we could play songs around the fire. I put on my best top, a floral-print, long-sleeved, button-up shirt, and dark denim flare jeans. I pulled on my Frye boots. Assessing my getup in the mirror over the pink dresser in my room I looked pretty cool and the mosquitoes wouldn’t be able to get at me.
My mom and I were supposed to eat with them at the cookout, after which there would be the bonfire. I was hungry and excited for all the good food.
“Mom, come on, they said five o’clock. Let’s go, come on.”
“Oh Sidney, I don’t think we should just show up and bother them. It’s their family. We aren’t part of that.”
“What? What are you talking about? They invited us! We’re supposed to be there already. They are probably wondering what’s taking us so long.”
“I doubt it. They’re having a wonderful time together. They don’t need us there. I think we should just stay home.”
“What? Mom, no, please, please don’t change your mind. They invited us. I’m supposed to bring my guitar and everything.”
“Well, that’s just them trying to be nice to you. And you can’t resist a chance to show off can you? All the more reason we should stay home where we belong. I can make us some tuna salad sandwiches.”
“Oh my God Mom, I’m going. I’m going right now. I am invited and you can stay home if you want but I’m not missing this. Goodbye. I’m going. I hope you change your mind. If you don’t show up, I’ll tell them you weren’t feeling very well.”
I took the path along the water with my guitar over my shoulder like a hobo with a bag on a stick. As soon as I emerged from the dense foliage the kids all started squealing with delight, “Sidney! You made it!”
The guitar-playing dad greeted me with, “Hey Sid. We were hoping you’d show up soon. We’ve got lots of good stuff going on that grill and we’re gonna need help eating it all. Where’s that hermit mother of yours? Isn’t she going to make an appearance?”
“I don’t know. She says she’s not sure if she’s up to it tonight.”
“Okay, well she’s kinda like that. Always has been. You know, I’ve known your mother since we were little kids up here. An only child is an only child. I’m sure glad you brought that gee-tar. You get better every time I come up here. I bet you’re way better than me by now. You’re gonna show me up tonight around the fire aren’t ya?”
“Well, I don’t know, but I do have some new songs.” “Can’t wait to hear ‘em Sid. Good for you.”
I ate with all the crazy fun cousins laughing and joking around at a picnic table set up right by the water’s edge. We had hot dogs and cheeseburgers and corn on the cob. I had one of everything. The kids were all excited to make s’mores around the fire afterwards. My mother said s’mores were too unhealthy and messy so I never got to have them.
The bonfire was roaring by the time we finished eating. We burned our paper plates in the fire. The moms had the stuff for the s’mores set out and there were lots of long sticks for roasting marshmallows. I stood with my face getting hot from the fire, shoulder to shoulder with all the other kids. The girls my age were so nice and cute and funny. I was so glad to be a part of their family. Even though I only saw them all once a year for a week or two, I had known them all my life and I felt like they understood me and liked me for who I was. I felt like I belonged. I loved them.
We were stuffing graham crackers and melting chocolate and oozing marshmallow into our happy mouths when my mother came walking silently down from the road.
I heard one of the women greet her and my heart skipped a beat. I looked up and through the twilight I read that face that I knew so well. I watched as they offered her something to eat, something to drink. Someone offered her a beer and I thought, “Oh boy, you guys really don’t get her, do you?”
She only accepted a little Dixie cup of the children’s lemonade. I knew she was holding herself apart in her head, observing their behavior, their choices, their language, their clothes, and deeming herself superior in every way. I couldn’t tell whether they understood what she was really like or whether they just thought she was shy. They were being very nice to her.
Everyone gathered around the fire and the dad with the guitar told me to get mine—I had left it propped against a tree. He sat down next to me on one of the fat low logs set up as stools around the fire pit. I started to play my guitar and he said, “Here Sidney, I’ll tune it up for you. Do you know how to tune it?”
“Yeah, I have a pitch pipe for it,” I answered.
“Good for you. Okay, let’s hear you girl!”
I started in quietly, just kind of playing background music for all the laughing chattering group around the fire. I was determined to not let my mother’s face ruin my night. I didn’t even look in her direction. I knew instinctively that she would hate that I was playing my music for these people.
I started singing a song that was very popular at the time called “Country Roads” by John Denver. Everybody probably knew the words to that song and sure enough, everyone around the fire, young and old, stopped talking and started humming or singing along. I was glad I had worked as hard as I had on that one. I had the guitar part down and knew all the words. The guitar dad started playing along with a nice picking part that made my performance sound even better. He knew how to sing harmony and he joined in on the chorus and we sounded as great as anything I’d ever done with music so far.
We just kept going after that. He’d start a song and I’d know the words and we’d be off and running. I was so happy I even forgot about my mom. There was a break in the action and I went to use the family’s outhouse. When I came out, the girls my age were all gathered in a circle with their moms excitedly scheming.
One of them grabbed my hand. “Sidney, our moms say you can stay overnight! We can all sleep out in the yard in the big tent! Just the girls! The dads are getting the tent out! Ask your mom! Ask your mom!”
I loved the idea of sleeping in a tent. This was something I never got to do and the idea of an all-girls slumber party was really magical to me.
I was so excited I ran over to where my mom was talking to the other moms. “Mom! Did you hear about the big plan?”
My mother turned toward me and the other moms looked at my face and I could immediately tell. They had already broken the idea to her on my behalf and she wasn’t buying it.
“Sidney, we need to get going. This is their vacation time and they want to be together. They don’t need another child to be responsible for tonight. No, we can go home and sleep in our own beds and get out of their way … ”
“Mom, they want me to stay.”
The girls were all around me now. “Please Mrs. Duncan, let Sidney stay! We want her to! Please!”
“Sidney, get your guitar. It’s dark now and we should be getting home.”
“Mom, please. I never get to do anything like this.”
Now she was hissing, “Sidney, don’t you dare embarrass me like this. We are going home.”
I pushed past my fear of her. “No Mom, I’m staying. This is a really special night and I am not going to miss out on it.”
My mother knew that everyone was aware of what we were saying.
“Sidney, so help me, you get your guitar right now and don’t you say another word or you won’t be allowed out of the cabin for a week.”
“Mom. No. This isn’t fair. No.”
“Sidney, so help me God … ”
I snapped. “I Hate You. I’m Not Going Home With You. You go home and be miserable. I’m not coming.”
And then she grabbed me by my hair at the back of my head and marched me with her hand tearing at my scalp up the path. I was crying.
“Mom, wait, please, my guitar.”
“Go get it.”
I ran back down, sobbing, grabbed my guitar. I tried to thank them, but I was so ashamed. I was so broken-hearted. I was so afraid of her. I hated her so much. We walked back to our cabin along the road with my mother’s flashlight to guide us. She didn’t say anything. I was sniffling. I was thinking about the tent and the girls and the fun we would have had. I was thinking of all the cousins giggling and telling stories with flashlights and sleeping bags in the tent. I felt so tortured to be missing out on one of the rarest of rare chances for me to feel included, to feel like I belonged, to feel like I was part of something. We got to the cabin and once we were inside she started yelling at me.
“Don’t you ever think you will ever embarrass and humiliate me like that ever again! Do you think I would ever, ever have told my mother I hated her? You stood there, you little brat, you stood there in front of everyone and said ‘I hate you.’ Well, you will never do anything like that again. You get in your room and you don’t come out. How many days do they have left up here?”
“Six.”
“Okay, well that’s how long you’re grounded. You won’t see them again. You won’t see anyone. You’ll have plenty of time to think about what a terrible girl you are.”
The girls came to my bedroom window over the coming days bringing me little treats and telling me stories and secrets about their time at the lake, whispering and tiptoeing around our cabin so my evil mother wouldn’t catch them and send them away. The morning they left, my mother let me out. I ran down the road to see if their car was still there but the drive was empty, the cabin closed up with newspapers taped up over the windows.
But that was when I was eleven and now I was fourteen. Preston was staying the whole summer so it wouldn’t be just me and the evil queen. With it being Preston’s last summer before college, my mother wanted to get as much out of him as she could. She decided he should repaint the cabin—it was white, and she wanted it to stay white, so it was a foolproof project. He was to use a big steel brush and get rid of any loose peeling paint, and paint one side at a time. The cabin was small and only one level so he was pretty cheerful about it. I was happy to have him around.
The summer started with fine weather in June. My mother said it would rain a lot near the end of the month, before the fourth of July, so Preston had better get going with the paint project. Luckily, I didn’t get asked at all. I was fourteen, I could have done my share. No one even suggested I help. Apparently painting was perceived as men’s work in my family.
Preston and I were held to very different standards in all things. For the most part I was not encouraged to learn or to excel in anything at all and my efforts, as in my flute lessons and choir practices, were seen as annoyances. When it came to grades, Preston was held to very high standards. Once when he was in junior high, he did very poorly. The report card came home with handwritten grades from each of his teachers. All the grades were a C or below. There was at least one D. When Dad came home that night our mother made Preston put the report card on the kitchen table for him to see. Dad took one look at it and lurched at Preston, grabbed him by his shirt and started screaming into his face, “What the hell is this? What are you, retarded? Are you unable to learn? Are you lazy? What the hell did you do all semester? Do you sit up there playing with that little pud of yours? Are you playing with yourself instead of studying? I ought to kick your ass right out of this house for this!”
I always earned good grades and teachers usually said how much they liked me. I was often singled out for higher-level small groups and activities. In sixth grade, I was invited to be in a special test group for gifted children called the Learning Inquiry Lab. The parents were to attend a presentation on the individual classroom projects their sons or daughters were working on. Mine was an oil painting of the lake in the summer as seen from our cabin window. My parents came, my father in his three-piece suit, acting very uncomfortable and constantly whispering to my mother, “Let’s get going. We’ve been here long enough” loudly enough for me and the others to hear him. My mother seemed to view the event as an honor and smiled when she inspected my painting. They were supposed to walk around the small classroom and observe each kid’s project. People were making different kinds of things. I thought it was very interesting and exciting and loved being a part of it. I thought we were all brilliant as did our strangely eccentric teacher who didn’t teach anything else at the school and was referred to as Doctor. She wore her dark hair in a bun and had an elegant stance and a ballerina’s long neck. We probably didn’t understand the full weight of her background or personality. I got the feeling that my parents could not understand how incredible an honor this was for me to be a part of this group with a brilliant woman as our guide and instructor. They left that night in what seemed to me a mutual shrug, “Huh, that Sidney. Well, that was interesting. Kind of a weird deal. And what an odd woman the teacher was.”
The scraping and painting were in full swing all summer. Preston would sleep in very late and then start drinking a lot of coffee and smoking cigarettes, which he had started doing in Europe. He would put on a white T-shirt and an old white canvas boating hat that belonged to Grandpa. He wore torn jeans with plenty of air holes to stay cool and his rubber flip-flop sandals. He stood on one of the porches, smoking, thinking, drinking coffee. Brandy would cry at the screen door to sleep in the sun on the porch at Preston’s feet. Brandy didn’t like the woods that much and he didn’t want to go down on the scary wooden dock since he didn’t like to swim, so he enjoyed having Preston up around the cabin all summer. One morning I let Brandy out to see Preston and decided to stay out there and talk. Preston started talking philosophy. I knew very little of the names and the perspectives he was throwing out. When he started ranting in French I had to interrupt and say, “I can’t understand you!”
“Sister Sid, you got to get an education! What the hell are you learning? I thought you said you take French at school.”
“I take French. I don’t speak French. I don’t understand anything you say. You speak way too fast for me. And you’re probably using words I’ve never even heard of.”
“No excuse. Get one of my books out and read it. Read it out loud. Do it.”
“I’m not reading in French, forget it.”
“How about in English then? You probably don’t know half of those words either. Get a book off the shelf in there from the ones I brought. Pick one and start reading it out loud to me. It’ll be fun. I’ll help you.”
I went inside the cabin and I saw that Preston had added a small stack of new paperbacks to Grandpa’s tall double bookcase groaning already with impressive old collections like the entire works of Mark Twain. Preston’s books all had foreign titles and shiny paperback covers. I picked one called L’Assomoir by Emile Zola because the cover showed a painting of a beautiful and very young girl.
I reappeared on the porch and Preston looked happy.
“Zola, bon choix!”
The book was a translation in English, but Preston was right, it was still difficult for me at fourteen. I read out loud as the little girl went through her terrible troubles, and Preston painted and we had many happy hours that way.
At night Preston went down to the one-room guesthouse by the water and wrote his own stories at his small black metal typewriter.
He would put on his big wool sweater and blac
k wool beret and write well into the night, all the windows open to the sounds of the water, moths flapping madly to get through the screens to the lamplight. Sometimes I went down to see him. He’d step outside and light a cigarette and tell me strange tales of Europe. Our mother read a book or flipped through fashion and home-decorating magazines. She also knitted a pretty cream-colored hat, scarf and mitten set for herself, although a couple times she had me try them on and said I could wear them. She also worked on some very intricate argyle socks for Preston and my dad and taught me how to use the bobbins of different colored yarns and how to read the pattern book and count the stitches. We didn’t have a television at the cabin and we were all proud of that.
Although I had much to keep me busy—my musical instruments, journal for writing down song and poetry ideas, and my sketchpad and colored pencils, along with forays out in the canoe, I still had many hours with nothing to do. I often walked the roadside with Brandy with a small basket in case I came upon good raspberries.
My grandmother’s straw hat hung in the cabin’s living room and I liked wearing it. My mother didn’t like it herself so she didn’t care that I wore it. I had made a halter-top out of two red bandanas I found in a dresser drawer. I borrowed the idea from an article in Seventeen magazine that showed how to take a piece of white rope and two bandanas and with just a bit of sewing, make a really cute summer top to wear with jean shorts. Surprisingly we had everything I needed and I fashioned mine just the way the model’s looked. It tied with the rope at my neck so it came up high and the two bandanas met in front so it didn’t show any cleavage; it was all just gathered fabric in front. But my stomach showed which was nice because I was in good shape and a bit suntanned. I loved not having to wear a bra with it. I wore my high-waisted denim shorts and paired them with my tan leather sandals with thick cork soles that showed off my long legs. I wore this outfit whenever I went raspberry hunting with Brandy and I felt great, like a Northwoods version of a pin-up girl, or maybe even a movie star.
A Girl Called Sidney Page 7
