A Girl Called Sidney Read online

  GIBSON HOUSE PRESS

  Flossmoor, Illinois 60422

  GibsonHousePress.com

  © 2017 Courtney Yasmineh

  All rights reserved. Published 2017.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9861541-2-6 (paper)

  LCCN: 2017930899

  Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen. Text design and composition by Karen Sheets de Gracia in the Palatino Linotype and Strangelove Next typefaces.

  Printed in the United States of America

  21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5

  © This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

  (Permanence of Paper)

  PROLOGUE

  When it’s February in Minnesota, and you’re as far north as you can go and still be in America, you’re in the coldest place on the continent. Not a comforting thought as I woke at six in the darkness to be sure I made it to the bus. If I missed the school bus, I was scared that I might get so cold that I wouldn’t be able to make it back to the cabin. I could get so cold I’d freeze to death on the trail, frozen solid before anyone came out from town to look for me.

  That morning, Grandpa’s old thermometer bottomed out at forty below zero Fahrenheit. I knew it had to be even colder than that, because the red line of mercury was already near the bottom at two that morning, when I got out of bed to be sure the one spigot of well water I had still going in the kitchen wasn’t freezing. I opened the cabinet doors under the sink to let as much heat as possible get to the pipe and I lit a match and started up the old gas oven too. I stoked the wood stove in the main room and went back to bed wearing a big wool cardigan that I found in Grandpa’s closet over my one-piece, red wool long underwear.

  At six, I rolled out from under the pile of wool blankets on my bed and went to the kitchen where it was warm. I splashed water on my face, hoisted myself up and peed in the kitchen sink because the toilet had long since frozen and it was too cold to bare my rear end outside. I told myself I’d wait to poop until I got to school so I didn’t have to deal with my other option which at this point in the winter was to do the job in an old tin wash pan, fling it as far as I could out into the woods, and then rinse the pan with dish soap.

  I went back to my room and put my jeans and wool sweater on over my long underwear. Since the deep cold had set in after Christmas, I had given up on removing my long underwear ever, at all. The wood stove wasn’t a match for the bitter cold creeping in through the summer cabin’s thin knotty pine walls. Back in the kitchen I poured some Cheerios and milk in a bowl. After I ate, I stood by the open door of the kitchen oven and wrestled with white tube socks, then snowflake-patterned, wool crosscountry ski socks that came up over the knees of my jeans. My outerwear was a red down vest and a blue down coat. I had a fur trapper hat with earflaps and leather chopper’s mitts. I tied on my heavy suede hiking boots with the red laces. Before I left for the bus, I carried in a few armloads of wood from the covered back porch and made sure the wood stove was as stoked as I could get it.

  I headed out at 6:45 in the dark. I threw my backpack over my shoulder and walked out the driveway, which was now a solid two-foot layer of ice and snow packed down by the wheels of the old pickup truck that had to stay plugged in with a block heater under the carport so it would start in an emergency. Half a mile down the peninsula was where the road plow officially turned around in the winter. This was the first year it ventured farther down the point, and only after I asked if they could plow down all the way to my grandpa’s old place because I’d be staying out there for the winter trying to finish high school, trying to hide out from my family’s craziness, trying to make a whole new life, trying not to freeze to death, trying not to give in to despair.

  I arrived at the familiar spot where the old, wheezing, yellow bus turned around and made the fifteen-mile trek back into town after picking up the ten kids from the reservation and maybe ten more who lived around the lake. The only footsteps in the snow were mine. The only eyes that would see me waiting were those of a squirrel or a deer or maybe an owl. But in this cold, at forty below, no living creature had journeyed out but me.

  My eyes stung from the cold at this temperature so I closed them and stood listening and praying, “Please God, let the bus get here soon.”

  After a few minutes, squinting against the cold, I saw the headlights of the old bus. I heard the roar of the grumbling old engine. Through the crystalline silence I could already make out the thump of the bus driver’s favorite sound track to this winter in the North Country.

  As the bus tires crunched the snow that was so frozen and packed down it looked and sounded like styrofoam, and the accordion doors cranked open with a clatter, my face was struck by the heat blasting and the blaring eight-track sound system. I was greeted as I had been every morning since this adventure began with a rock album by a guy called Meat Loaf, singing, “I Can See Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” We heard Bat Out of Hell in its entirety almost every bus ride. The driver with his Elvis Presley mutton-chop side burns and slicked back, dyed black hair beamed, “Hey Sidney! Welcome aboard! Impressive showing! Are you sure you aren’t part Eskimo?”

  I laughed halfheartedly as I stood in the heat for a moment, pulling the ice chunks off my frozen-shut eyelashes so I could see my way to take a seat with my fellow scholars.

  In the winter of 1978, as Meat Loaf was howling out his rock opera tribute to adolescence and all the North Country kids sat dozing in their seats at seven in the morning on an old rickety bus in the middle of the great continent of North America, with just a few scraps of sheet metal between us and the brutal winter air, I stood for a moment before taking my seat and said out loud, “What the hell am I doing here?”

  THE DECISION

  When I was seventeen, I followed a crazy gut instinct that set my family’s demise in motion. We lived in suburban Chicago in the ‘70s. My parents had been fighting because my mom was super paranoid about money and she didn’t want to let my dad remortgage our house so that he could save his seat on the stock exchange. The stock market had seen some major upheavals that had my dad on the verge of bankruptcy. I honestly think my mom should have chosen to be happy instead of right and everything would have just worked itself out. She could have gone along with my dad’s plan. Instead, my dad was beside himself, drinking and threatening violence toward her and myself.

  He had always been a cruel guy and was very hard on my one sibling, my older brother, Preston. My brother was a sensitive artist type but also a good athlete and my dad had played college football so he was always riding my brother’s ass to be better at the game. But my dad also prided himself on being a philosophy major who put himself through law school so he bothered Preston about academics too.

  My mom was his beautiful hothouse flower and he had loved only her and had sex only with her his entire life, so when she wouldn’t go along with his refinancing idea, when he was utterly desperate and took to driving a cab to keep things afloat, he lost it.

  I was the one witness to my parents’ strife because my brother graduated from high school, went backpacking in Europe, got a job at a vineyard in Nice and didn’t return for a couple of years. He sent about three postcards in all that time. After that he went to a liberal arts college where he wrote papers in French.

  I was the only referee left in the house and I didn’t like it. I hated my parents. I had no respect for them. Worse yet, I could see that neither of them cared about me. They were wrapped up in themselves. I walked around the house feeling like they didn’t know who I was at all.

  When I asked either one of them for one thing every month, the check to pay my flute teacher, neither of them would oblige. My payment was always very late and my teacher always had to ask me multiple times. Wor
se, they didn’t like to drive to her house and back for the lessons. I usually walked to the teacher’s house on the other side of town, several miles away. After my lessons I would lie to my instructor and say I was just going to walk to the corner to wait for them. She probably knew there were problems in my family, and maybe even guessed that I walked all the way home most nights.

  My flute teacher wanted me to have a metronome for practicing. She wanted me to buy a certain kind that was more advanced, an electronic gadget. It cost about a hundred dollars but she said it was worth it because it was so precise. I knew there was absolutely no way my parents would take me to a music store, much less pay for the metronome. I made a few attempts, explaining to each of them how important this was. Every lesson, my teacher would inquire and I’d say that we didn’t get the metronome yet but we were going to do so the following weekend. One day she asked and I said, “Yep, we got it.”

  She started writing elaborate notes on my flute music sheets with the numbers and setting instructions for each piece. I was horrified with shame. I was caught in the stupid lie. Then one lesson she stopped me part way through a difficult new piece and asked, “Have you been using your metronome with this piece?”

  “Of course,” I answered.

  “Well, it really shows. Your time is so much more consistent than it used to be. Good work. See, I told you it’d make a big difference.”

  Lying to people sucked. Living with my parents sucked. I slept with my door locked because they would wake me up even on school nights to have me referee their bullshit. One night, they picked my lock with my mother’s hairpin, came in my room, turned on the extra-bright overhead light like it was an interrogation and my mother started, “Sidney, please, your father is threatening me! You have to help me!”

  “This isn’t my problem. I have school in the morning. Get out of my room.”

  My mother was wearing her Pucci nightgown which was cut to the navel and very sheer. Even if I did not want to, I could see every detail of her perfectly slim body. My dad was only in his long, Izod polo nightshirt with nothing else on, so if he really got revved up and started waving his arms, as he was doing, I could see the family jewels which I really didn’t want to either. “Dad, come on, go back in your room. I don’t want to see this.”

  “You don’t want to see this! You better want to see this! Your mother is trying to ruin me! She’s cutting off our only chance to save my business. She’s turning to other men. She’s whoring herself! Do you know this Sidney? Get up! This is your mother we’re talking about!” he shouted back.

  He had my mother’s thin arm in his grip and her bare shoulders looked fragile. She whimpered, “Please Sidney, do something. He’s hurting me. Please, Sidney.”

  I got up out of my bed and rushed toward them. My dad let go of her arm and ran back to their room. My mother was sobbing into her hands. I stood there in the doorway to my bedroom. The overhead hallway light was too bright and I was squinting. My body ached from being woken up in the dead of night. My dad came bounding back with my mother’s purse. He was telling her he would take her purse and she couldn’t go anywhere or do anything until the papers got signed. She turned wild with desperation. I couldn’t bear to see her tortured like this. I lurched at my father, “Give her the purse! Give it to her!”

  I tried to grab the purse away. Then I started hitting him with my fists. I hated him so much right then, I felt like I could kill him with my bare hands. He tried to grab me by my short choppy hair but lost his grip. I remembered the self-defense class at school and lifted my knee to his groin. I was sickened to feel his soft flesh collapsing against my thigh.

  He doubled over and I thought I could grab the purse and give it to my mother. Instead he stood up taller, with a deep craziness in his eyes, like an angry bull, saying, “You think you can knee your father in the balls? You think that’s okay? Does that make you feel good? Come on. Do it again. Can’t take it? Come on, knee your father in the balls, come on.”

  His horrible red face pressed up to mine as he grabbed my arm. I rammed my knee into him again. It had no effect. I did it again. No effect. I tried to break away. We were all at the top of the stairs in the hallway. He shoved me away then and I tumbled down the stairs. I landed with my neck hard against the front door in the lower hall and looked up to see my parents, my father bellowing about getting his hunting gun out and killing my mother, my mother trying to grab the purse out of his still-clenched fist. “That’s it Ingrid, I’m getting the gun. Is that what you want?”

  I scrambled to my feet, opened the front door, and burst out into the pristine suburban night. I was barefoot and it was raining. The street was shining black and wet. The well-maintained houses were all quiet and dark. I was wearing my old flannel nightgown and underpants with rips in them. There was no wind, just the raindrops coming straight down. There was a smell of spring. I knew what I was going to do.

  I was not going to just let this happen and watch my dad shoot my mother. I ran across the street to my friend Jenny’s house. Her parents are Polish Catholic and have seven children. They seemed very stable and decent to me. I rang their doorbell and after many desperate attempts, the overweight father came bumbling to the door. He had a big construction business and did well financially. The house was newer, sort of like a mini medieval castle. They were not my favorite people and I probably wasn’t their favorite neighborhood kid either. He opened the door only slightly. He was clearly not happy to see me. I frantically explained what my parents were doing over at our house, but he didn’t really care and looked disgusted. “Sidney, I’m sorry, but I have to protect my family. Your father is a dangerous man. I don’t trust him at all. I am not going to let you in here and have him come over here with his gun. I’ll call the police, but you can’t stay here.”

  I was shocked when my father was suddenly behind me. I was so embarrassed, so afraid. He started yelling at Mr. Wilson. “You stay out of this! This is my family. Sidney, get back home right now!”

  “Stay out of this? You’re a madman! You take your child and get off my property! You are not welcome here! You aren’t going to come here and disturb my family!”

  Mr. Wilson was holding the door tightly, bracing his weight against it. I could see he was afraid my dad was going to try to bust into his house. My dad suddenly turned and ran back across the street. He was wearing his slip-on penny loafers and his nightshirt. I watched him in despair and shame. What an idiot! Mr. Wilson assured me then that he would call the police. He told me I needed to go home and wait for the police to come. I told Mr. Wilson I was sorry about everything and burst into tears. As I put my hands up to wipe my eyes I heard the door slam right in front of me and I heard him bolt both the locks. “Whatever, Mr. Wilson. Thanks a lot.”

  I crossed the street slowly feeling the raindrops hit my face. The smell of spring was tender and innocent, bringing memories of worms and daffodils. The neighborhood was quiet and still. I looked at our house and wished my parents would stop all of this.

  By the time I opened the front door, I saw that the upstairs hall light had been turned off. All I wanted was to go back to my room and shut my door and go to sleep. I locked the front door and climbed the stairs as quietly as possible. My brother’s door was shut which meant my mom had holed up in there to punish my dad. The door to my parents’ room was shut too, which I hoped meant that my dad had gone to sleep.

  I crawled into my bed and felt the dampness on the shoulders of my nightgown but I didn’t care; I just wanted to go to sleep. “Please God, make this all work out okay. Please don’t let anything bad happen. I’m sorry for everything bad that I’ve done. Please God, forgive me. Please don’t let Dad lose our house. Please don’t let them get divorced.”

  I slept the rest of the night without interruption. Good old Jenny’s dad probably never even called the police. Or maybe they drove by and we were all in bed. In the morning, when I came out of my room, dreading what I’d find, my dad had left for work. My
mom was all dressed in a pale-grey, wool sweater dress and lace-up, tan suede boots when I came downstairs. She was wearing her big diamond ring, a gift from my dad, and an African gold coin on a gold wire encircling her neck making her look like an exotic goddess. She had on her thick, gold, hoop earrings that she didn’t wear often. Her caramel hair was smoothed and grazing her shoulders.

  We stood, mother and daughter, in my mother’s kitchen with dark wood and colonial-style wallpaper. A sign on the wall from an old New England pub hung over us, like the letters HOLLYWOOD hung over the people in The Great Gatsby. It read: “Money’s the root of all evil, it’s treacherous, slippery and vile, but the baker, the banker, the preacher and I don’t think that it’s gone out of style.”

  I stood there looking at the sign. “Yeah, okay, I get it.” I looked down at myself, my body, the way I was dressed. I would have been categorized as a tomboy, not by desire maybe as much as by necessity. I couldn’t shop with my mother because she would insist on wildly impractical things that I could never wear to school or really anywhere. I would get so angry at her foolish ways and there would invariably be a scene in the dressing room at Saks Fifth Avenue or Lord & Taylor and I would emerge with my hopes of finding something nice to wear to school dashed again and my mother’s condemnation of my taste newly inflamed. By now I had a closet full of my old clothes since kindergarten that my mother wouldn’t get rid of because they were “so expensive and barely worn.” Dressing myself was an exercise in frustration every time. There was the pale blue, angora sweater dress that was way too clingy for my busty figure even if she bought it for me when I was only twelve. Mom kept insisting I should wear it whenever I said I needed a new dress. “A new dress? You’ve hardly ever even worn that beautiful sweater dress I bought you. Oh, it doesn’t fit now? Well, what have I been telling you about stuffing brownies in your mouth every time I turn around?”