A Girl Called Sidney Read online

  I tried sneaking into her glorious walk-in closet with the designer items each under a plastic shoulder protector to keep the dust off. She would invariably discover that I’d been in there. “Don’t you dare try on my things, you’re too fat. You’ll stretch them all out of shape.”

  I couldn’t think about myself and my clothes issues now; I had to help my mom. I was planning to go to school, but she started talking to me about her situation and I realized that I wouldn’t be able to leave until a decision was made and it was pretty obvious to me that I was going to have to bite the bullet.

  “Sidney, your father is serious about these papers. He left this morning threatening to kill me if I didn’t sign them. I think I should leave. I am not signing away our home. He wants the money for his business. Well, he’s had plenty of chances. I gave him all I had when my mother died. I gave him money for law school. I don’t have any more. This is our beautiful home. I am not going to let this happen. I don’t know where to go. I was thinking I could go to the cabin but it’ll be too early. There’s probably still snow. And I don’t know what you’ll do then.”

  I thought about calling my friend Sophie on the kitchen phone once my mother went back upstairs to fuss over herself some more. My friend Sophie was the Junior Miss of our suburban town and a senior with a car, which was huge for me because I had only just turned seventeen, and had no hope of getting my parents to help me learn to drive or let me borrow one of their matching Jaguars to take the driver’s test. I had never even heard of being Junior Miss until I met Sophie. She was the most interesting girl I knew at our suburban public high school. She had a strange defiant streak but was also totally involved in the fabric of the high school and the town. She once told me that when she was crowned Junior Miss, she gave the pageant manager the finger behind his back, but only her friends who were at the side of the stage could see it. I thought that was very daring and made up for the fact that she was in pageants in the first place. For me, the best thing about Sophie was that she hated her mother like I hated mine. When I once went to Sophie’s house for a sleepover birthday party, I saw that her mother was very cruel to her. The next morning, her shockingly thin mother was in the kitchen pushing waffles and bacon at all the girls including me. I watched as she set half of a grapefruit in front of Sophie and gave her the evil eye. She wanted her daughter to keep being the Junior Miss and that had a lot to do with being thin. The mother had said, “Eat up girls! None of you are beauty queens so it doesn’t matter but Sophie has a big future ahead of her so she can’t afford to eat like that.”

  Sophie’s mom was right about her daughter, I thought. Sophie knew a lot of people, she knew a lot about our town, she knew the lay of the land and where the power was. I had none of those skills, and I admired Sophie.

  I knew hardly anyone and my parents had practically no friends. My mother did not speak with any of the neighbors and they were all suspect in our house, suspect or looked down upon by both my mother and father. My dad would say, “Oh there’s that fat ass Wilson. Look at him, driving that junker of a car. He’s pathetic.”

  I was taken off to northern Minnesota every summer to fend for myself all day with no friends, no playmates, no activities. I had no understanding, no access, no context.

  My mother didn’t like my friendship with Sophie. She knew that Sophie had her number. She knew that Sophie didn’t like the way I was treated. My mother was aware that through Sophie I was getting out beyond her tiny torture chamber of influence and I was seeing another way.

  But as much as my mother wanted to dislike her, Sophie was very fashionable and beautiful. Sophie’s parents were well connected. Sophie was the Junior Miss. My mother would be too impressed to treat Sophie badly. Sophie was perfect leverage for me. Plus Sophie really loved me and I knew it. And I loved her back.

  Sophie’s mother answered the phone. I didn’t like to be polite and schmooze but I had to if I had any hope of talking to Sophie. “Hello, Mrs. Carlson, this is Sidney. May I speak with Sophie? Is she at home by chance this morning?”

  I could hear her disgust through the phone. Mrs. Carlson thought I was no good. But she was honest, thank God, and she answered that Sophie was at home, finishing an important project for school.

  My heart leapt to hear Sophie’s funny bratty voice. “Hello? Miss Sidney? To what do I owe this honor?”

  I felt myself smile and it felt like smiling was the most foreign thing in the world. “Hi Sophie. I have a big problem. My parents have totally gone crazy.”

  “Well, we saw that coming.”

  “I know. My dad says he’s gonna shoot my mom with his hunting gun tonight if she doesn’t sign some papers that he left on the kitchen table.”

  “Wow. Seriously? He said that? That’s so intense. Are you okay?”

  “Aside from the fact that my hands won’t stop shaking and I can hardly hold the receiver, I’m fine. I want my mom to get on a Greyhound bus and go up to our cabin today. It’s gonna be pretty cold up there this time of year, but at least she won’t be dead.”

  “Okay, that sounds good. Do you want me to call the bus station and find out when buses leave for where … Duluth, Minnesota? Is that a real place? Is that where you go in the summers?”

  “Yeah, well that’s still way south of the cabin, but it’s the right direction anyway.”

  “Okay, you stay by the phone. What’s your mom doing? Will she go along with this?”

  “She’s upstairs primping or crying or vacuuming. Those are the only things she ever does. Yeah, she’ll do whatever I tell her to do. She really doesn’t have any choice and she keeps asking me what she should do, so this is it.”

  “Okay, I’ll call you right back.”

  I got off the phone and took the pale-green carpeted stairs by twos. I banged on my mother’s pale-green painted door. The color she reverently referred to as Celadon.

  “Mom. I have a plan. Open the door.”

  This kind of approach often worked with her. She knew on some level, as I did, that I was the only sane one in the bunch, and when I got serious, I could think my way out of just about anything. She also knew that she could not say the same about herself.

  I was not surprised when I heard some rustling around, which meant she’d been lying on her perfectly made bed with the custom-sewn French toile quilted spread that matched the French toile wallpaper, all in the same sickening pale green. The bedspread had a silky sheen to it and made a noise like the rustling of a ballgown skirt if anyone lay on top of it. Ridiculous.

  The door opened and there she stood with her perfect hair and her not-that-pretty-and-very-sad-almost-all-the-time face. I watched her look at her daughter and I grinned. I was wearing ripped jeans that I wore all last summer at the cabin with a heather grey turtleneck wool sweater that my brother brought back in his knapsack from Europe but didn’t take to college and is mine now. I had suede Minnetonka beaded moccasins on my bare feet. I saw her looking at my messy hair. My hair was cut short like a boy’s. A young and Italian Vidal Sassoon woman came to our house a while ago and cut my mom and dad’s hair while they were all having wine in the kitchen. My dad knew her through someone at work downtown. My parents thought it was super cool to have her there and it probably cost them a lot. The woman had a short, sexy haircut straight from Milan. She was busty like me and I liked her Italian attitude. She asked me if I wanted a haircut too. At the time, my hair was long but cut in an awkward shag that I didn’t like. I said sure, and she cut off all my hair right then on the patio and I didn’t even have a mirror to see what was happening, just big locks of hair falling everywhere on to the cement floor. When she was finished I went inside to the powder room to look at the result. I liked it. I liked it a lot. It made me feel rebellious and cool. The next day, people at school said, “Why did you have to cut off all your hair?” as if I had a disease or something. Teachers complimented me on the new cut. I kept it short after that. Sometimes if we went into Chicago, people stopped me on the street
and asked where I got my hair cut.

  But times were changing fast, and I was standing at my mother’s bedroom door with my expensive haircut growing out and my ripped jeans with the knees completely gone and I was saying, “Mom, you’re going to have to go up to the cabin. It’s April, it won’t be that bad. I can call my friends up there and they can give you a ride and help you. Unless you are going to sign Dad’s papers … ”

  “I can’t sign those papers! He is trying to ruin us! He is going to lose this house, he is a madman! He is going to lose everything!”

  I could see she had not had a change of heart. I believed her. My dad seemed reckless. He had already been through investigations by the SEC regarding insider trading. I didn’t know what it all meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. He hung around with some strange characters too. There was a guy who would come to our house. He said he used to be a priest. He was poorly dressed in a shabby suit and seemed to be unbathed all the time. He had become a stockbroker and was hanging out with my dad. They both had an air of desperation about them. They would sit at night in our kitchen after carpooling to the stock exchange for the day. They would read the sign over the kitchen table and drink red wine and laugh about how absurd and philosophical it all was. It seemed like they were fooling themselves about something. The idea for the papers was spun out of one of their late-night, wine-fueled conversations—a brilliant last-ditch effort to use the equity on our house to infuse cash into the business so they wouldn’t have to give up their seats on the exchange. I could see that my mother didn’t like Dad’s friend, the ex-priest, any better than I did. And when the papers arrived on the kitchen table some weeks ago, she made her initial outrage clear. I thought my father would back down or my mother would give in. I didn’t expect Armageddon.

  “Okay, Mom. I am going to get Sophie to give us a ride to the bus station and you can just buy a ticket for Duluth. I can call Jay and see if he’d come down and get you.”

  My mother had her hands up over her face and she was crying again. Shit. I was so scared I was trembling on the inside. I couldn’t picture how the situation with my dad could get any worse without him pulling the trigger next time. I thought about hiding the gun, but he’d go crazy if he found it missing.

  The phone was ringing so I ran down to the kitchen to answer it. Sophie was saying, “Hi, I called the Greyhound station and there’s a bus at four. She rides all night and gets there in the morning, but whatever, it’s better than staying here and being dead in the morning. Right?”

  “Yeah, right, I’ll tell her. How much does it cost, do you know?”

  “It was like a hundred dollars, I think.”

  “Okay, yeah. So when can you come?”

  “I’ll just come get you at like three, is that good?”

  “Okay, thanks Sophie. Okay. See you then.”

  I ran back up the stairs and told Mom the plan. She was sniffling and slowly packing a small leather suitcase with her beautiful pieces of lingerie, each wrapped in tissue paper. She had some camel color wool pants and her elegant cowl neck sweaters in camel and cream laid out on the bed. Her long wool coat was out as well. I thought for a moment how impractical a cream-colored coat would be, but I didn’t say anything for fear of worrying her or worse yet, making her mad at me.

  I decided to go back to my room and wait. With the door closed, I thought about playing my guitar, but I had a strong fear that my dad might be coming home early to resume the fight and I thought I’d better be listening for the electric garage door to go up just in case.

  I lay on my stomach on my bed and read the textbook for my English class. I hated missing school. Most school years I only missed one or two days the whole year. I loved the other kids and I loved the teachers. Everyone was fun, and funny things were always happening. Teachers liked me and I almost always had good grades. I had known some of the kids since kindergarten and I had fun rivalries with some of the smartest ones. We were always comparing grades. I usually felt great about my abilities in the classroom. I was in band and orchestra, playing the flute, and I loved that too. I was second chair out of maybe twenty flutists by my junior year. I always wanted to be first chair, but some other girl was always beating me out of it.

  Sophie arrived at three. We got my quivering, sniffling mother into the car. I was struck by how thin and frail and frightened she was. Sophie was very thin too but strong and confident. My mother seemed like a small child that day. We drove her and her leather suitcase to the Greyhound station. She let out a whimper when we pulled up. “Oh, this place is horrible.”

  “No, it’s not that bad Mom, look at those people over there, they look nice.” There were many men who looked down on their luck standing around smoking. There were hobos, men unshaven and threadbare, and there were hippies with long hair and love beads, army coats and knapsacks. There were more conservative-looking older people over on a bench. My mother didn’t look like anyone there. My mother looked like she belonged in her husband’s Jaguar going for a Sunday drive. Once she got to the cabin she’d be okay, I told myself. She’d been going to that cabin all her life. She knew people there.

  The cabin had been built by her parents when she was a little girl. My grandmother had delivered a stillborn son and after that my grandfather brought his wife and little daughter to northern Minnesota from Chicago to buy a summer cabin. My Scandinavian grandparents had been to the area on their honeymoon, because it reminded them of the birch forests of Sweden. A cabin was purchased and from then on, the three of them spent every summer—all summer—about fifty miles from the Canadian border on a sparsely inhabited and often treacherous big lake in the northern wilderness. My mother knew that place. She knew the locals. She would be in her beloved cabin where she seemed to have nothing but good memories.

  The bus for Duluth pulled in to the loading area. My mother was sniffling in the front passenger seat of Sophie’s dad’s old tan Buick. I was sitting in the back. Sophie’s parents were very conservative and practical and it flitted through my mind that nothing like this would ever happen to Sophie because of her parents’ values and temperament. “It’s okay, Mom. It’ll be fine. I’ll make sure Jay gets there at the right time. The cabin will be nice. You can have a fire in the fireplace and Jay will help you get the truck started. You’ll be fine. I’ll come up when school’s out and this will all be like it never happened.”

  My mother was nodding and dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “Okay. I better go. Thank you Sophie for all your help. What would we have done without you?”

  I opened the door and got out of the car. We hardly ever hugged and she stood stiffly as I came toward her. She allowed me to hug her. Her white wool coat was soft and smelled of her perfumed elegance. I felt a deep pain in my heart and the fear in my throat was rising. The gravity of the situation rose around me, and for the first time I glimpsed what was about to happen.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, Sidney.”

  “I’ll call you once I get there. I don’t know where I’ll be able to call from, but there will be a pay phone I can use.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  My mother said goodbye to Sophie. I got in the front seat. Sophie leaned over and hugged me. “It’s gonna be okay, Sid.”

  I watched my mother in her white coat, with her Halston bag and her tan leather suitcase, as she walked to the teller’s window to buy her ticket. I watched as she fumbled for her money with slight and trembling fingers. I watched as she picked up her suitcase and walked to the back of the line of passengers waiting to board. Sophie and I sat in silence as we saw my mother walk down the aisle on the bus and carefully adjust her things and herself in a window seat about a third of the way back. She waved at us with her thin hand. She was wearing one of her pairs of kidskin gloves. We both waved back. Everyone boarded and the bus door closed. The driver eased his vehicle out of the loading space. He shifted into drive. They pulled out of the Greyhound parking lot and out onto the street. I kept watching
my mother. She was still waving at us. I knew then that this was the exact moment that my childhood ended.

  THE UNWINDING

  That evening Sophie left our house and said she was worried about me being there when my father got home. I told her I was too but I had nowhere else to go. Plus there was our big old boxer Brandy, whom my mom always fed and took care of, and although he mostly slept and looked out the window all day, he needed me now and I couldn’t desert him. Brandy had been my companion for long walks when I was younger, but I had almost forgotten about him in all the chaos. He had learned to avoid the shouting and the scuffles. He kept to himself in his dog bed behind the table in the kitchen near the heat vent that he loved. But Brandy and I were in this together now and I was newly grateful for his companionship. After Sophie drove away, Brandy and I sat in the darkening living room watching the street. I was never allowed in the living room and my mother would freak out if she saw “footprints in the new carpeting” which was also celadon green and a finely woven short shag that showed every mark. This first night without my mother in the house, Brandy and I sat on the silk brocade loveseat with the down cushion. Mom could tell if anybody used it and you’d get in trouble for that too. Brandy and I perched on it and I rubbed my bare toes in the carpet, making designs. Brandy’s big neck was perfect to wrap my arms around and I sat with him and cried for my lost childhood.

  The sun went down and I watched the lights come on in the houses on our street. My mom always turned on the outdoor lights, which included the lanterns on either side of the garage door, another lantern over the front door, and some spotlights that were hidden in the front landscaping and made the house look classy. I didn’t have the heart to turn them on without my mom being there. Those lights meant a lot to her. I left them off out of respect in a way, I thought. I wondered if my dad would show up at all. Maybe he would know my mom was gone and he wouldn’t come back at all. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I went to my room with Brandy. I filled the porcelain drinking glass that sat on the sink in the bathroom my brother and I were supposed to use and brought it into my room in case Brandy or I got thirsty. I pushed my big brown wooden dresser up against the door. I knew this would make my dad mad if he tried to open the door, but I also knew it would be harder for him to come into my room and if he was really crazy, I’d have time to maybe get out through the window or something. I left my clothes on in case I needed to make a run for it, and I got in bed. Brandy needed help up but he got on the bed too and we curled up together. I cried some more.