Again they both looked me over. I stood my ground.
The man went on, “My name is Mr. Harlan and I’m the principal. This is Mrs. Briggs and she’s the secretary. You’ll be dealing with both of us. Are you sure this is something you want to pursue?”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
“Okay well, then Mrs. Briggs will help you get all the papers together and go over them with you. Once you bring everything back signed, you and I can discuss what classes you’ll need to graduate. We have pretty high standards and we pride ourselves on our academic excellence, well, to the best of our abilities with our budget and all.”
“Okay, sounds great.”
Mrs. Briggs got up and started bustling around opening drawers and getting papers out. “Where did you last go to school?”
“In Chicago.”
“Have you ever moved before?”
“No but I’m not moving really. My family has had our place on the lake for fifty years or more. I’m just staying on for the winter this year.”
“But you’re not there alone?”
“No, no, of course not. My mom will be going back and forth from Chicago. And my brother will be back from college for the breaks too.”
“Oh, your brother goes to college?”
“Yep, in Northfield, Minnesota.”
“Oh. I see.”
“I’m sure we can get this all together for you. What is your name?”
“Sidney. Sidney Duncan.”
The kindly principal extended his hand, “A girl called Sidney. That’s pretty interesting, Sidney’s a man’s name around here. A trailblazer, huh? I like it. Nice to meet you, Sidney. It won’t be easy switching schools at the beginning of senior year. The kids all know each other very well. There are only about fifteen students set to graduate this coming spring. It’ll be a small group. There’ll be a lot to adjust to. And I hear Chicago is cold, but it’s nothing like these northern winters. But if you’re determined, I’m here to help. And something tells me, with a name like Sidney, you’re up to a challenge.”
I couldn’t believe they were taking me seriously. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I took the papers and ran out to the truck.
“They’re going to take me! I’m staying!”
Preston looked happy and surprised and slapped my hand saying, “Way to go, little sis!”
My heart pounded in my chest with excitement, “This is going to be so cool!”
Once I’d made up my mind to stay, I started looking at everything differently. I talked to the resort owners and they said I could stay on as long as they had work for me to do into the winter and if things went well and they kept the lodge open all winter for dinners I could keep helping as a server at least a couple nights a week.
Preston pressured Mom to send his winter coat and some other things he wanted from the house. She was trying to get the lawyer to make the people who hosted the estate sale get the stuff and ship it to us. One day Preston told me that the goods would be delivered to the cabin in the next day or two. Preston was going back to college in just a couple weeks. He needed his clothes. I was hoping they’d send my bicycle because I loved my bike and I could picture myself riding it to work instead of driving all the time. He said we wouldn’t know what they sent until we saw it with our own eyes because they could ship anything they wanted. There was nobody from our family telling them which things to work with. Unless maybe Dad himself was in charge of these people. We didn’t know for sure. Maybe Dad was directing them. Would Dad send our favorite things or ones we didn’t care about, on purpose, to be mean? Preston kept talking about what would be in the boxes.
One morning a truck pulled in to our driveway. I ran up from the cabin to talk to the driver. They said they had a delivery in our names and I said, “Yep, that’s us!”
Preston had just woken up and he was sleepily coming up the path but he was so excited that I knew he’d be right behind me.
The truck driver and his partner both got out and came around to where Preston and I were standing. One guy had a clipboard full of papers. “I’m gonna need a check and a signature. Is one of your parents here to take care of this?”
Preston stepped up. “No, our mom’s not here. She had this stuff sent for us from Chicago. It’s our personal belongings. I’m twenty-one. I can sign for my own stuff. And my sister’s.”
“Well, it’s not that simple. This stuff was shipped COD.”
“What?! That’s a mistake. That’s not possible.”
“Yeah, it is. I got the orders right here. It all got sent at the expense of those receiving on this end. I’m gonna need a check before I can open up that door.”
Preston was getting really tense.
“How do we even know for sure if that’s our stuff if you don’t open the door. What do you mean you can’t open the door. You can at least open the fucking door and let us see if that’s our stuff.”
“No I can’t and I don’t have to stay here and talk to you if you’re going to be unruly.”
“Look. This stuff is important. My sister’s gonna be here all winter. Alone. She needs the things that were coming. What do we owe you? How much is it?”
“It’s near a thousand dollars son.”
“A thousand dollars?! Let me look at that.”
Preston grabbed the paperwork on the clipboard. He peered at the figures on the paper. “God damn him. God damn him. Our own dad sent us our stuff COD for a thousand fucking dollars. It’s not fair! We can’t pay this. We shouldn’t have to pay for our own shit we already had. Look, just open up the truck so we can figure this out okay?”
“Sorry, buddy, but we can’t do that.”
The truck driver took the clipboard and turned to walk. Preston grabbed him by the back of his shirt.
“Open the fucking truck, you asshole!”
“Get your hands off me boy or I’ll get your ass put in jail.”
I was yelling, “Preston! Preston don’t!”
Preston stopped, he put his head down. When he lifted his eyes again they were full of tears. “Listen man, I’m sorry. This isn’t your problem and it isn’t your fault, I know that.”
“Yeah, we been driving all night to get here and now we can’t make this delivery so we gotta get this stuff of yours to a storage place before we can get back on the road. So it ain’t no picnic for us either.”
“What happens if we get the money together?”
“If you can get the money, great. Your things can be delivered same day at that point. We’ll see that it’s stored real close by for you kids. I can see this ain’t what you had in mind. It’s a tough spot you’re in, way up here in the middle of nowhere. You kids don’t have a parent here at all?”
“No, we don’t. Not right now anyway. But our mom may be able to get the money. What do we need to do?”
“Just get on it quick ‘cause the storage is gonna be expensive. Every day it’s in storage the price goes up. This could get so expensive it wouldn’t be worth it to pay. It’d be cheaper at some point to get yourselves some new stuff.”
“Yeah, well nobody’s going to give us money for new things. The best we can hope for is to get this. Thanks, and sorry I got so worked up.”
“It’s okay, we see all kinds, you know. Here’s your copy of the delivery notice so you have the numbers to call if you get this straightened out. Good luck to you both.”
Preston went in and called Mom.
He came out looking optimistic.
“Okay, she says the lawyer’s been telling her she can take some money from the bank up here because she owns this place outright. She’s going to take out some kind of loan. We’re going to drive in to town tomorrow and get a cashier’s check for the amount of the truck and storage bill. Then we better pray to God that the stuff on the fucking truck is worth it. Jesus Christ! What a fucked-up deal. Fuck Dad. God is testing us like in The Grapes of Wrath. Where’s John Steinbeck, man? I should be taking notes, writing this shit down. God’s fuc
king handing me the chapters. You can’t make this shit up. This story’s writing itself.”
Mom came through and the next day we drove to town and got the cashier’s check. A day later the truck drivers came back. Same guys. They had driven all the way to North Dakota and back since we saw them last, but here they were with our stuff and here we were with their check.
The paperwork was a breeze and one guy jumped up and opened the sliding side door wide. We could finally see in.
Preston craned his neck to see and asked, “How much of this is ours?”
“Everything left on the truck is yours. We got rid of all our other loads. All this is yours.”
“Oh man. I don’t know where we’re going to put all this. I don’t know where there’s room for it.”
I looked in the truck. There must have been about twenty boxes and some of them were big like they could house an appliance. The two truck drivers started pushing boxes closer to the edge of the truck nearer to the opening. Now we could see that there were loose things as well.
We could see Preston’s weight-lifting equipment. “Holy shit, they sent all my weights and the bench and everything? That’s insane. Was this by weight? Yes? No wonder it was so expensive. I swear to God Sid, Dad did this on purpose to fucking ruin us. Do you see your bike? There it is! You got it!”
One of the drivers lowered my bike down. I tried not to cry. I wiped my eyes. I tested out the hand brakes. I loved my bike as much as ever. I saw that in some ways it looked wrong here, and I wasn’t sure how I would store it for the winter, but I didn’t care. I could put it in the cabin in my room if I had to, or it could go down in the old bunkhouse by the water.
Preston was discussing the options of where to put everything and the drivers were getting antsy. The driver tried to explain, “Look, we are not authorized to carry all this down to that shed. It’s way beyond the guidelines for distance from the truck. You’d have to pay more if you wanted us to carry all this down there.”
“Okay, shit. We can’t have the cabin all full of boxes. We won’t be able to walk around. We gotta leave it all right here in the yard and we’ll figure it out as we go. Okay, Sid?”
“Yeah, okay.” It seemed bad to have the front yard all full of boxes and a weight lifting set. I knew Mom would have a heart attack if she saw all this in the front yard. But there was nothing we could do about it. As they came down off the truck into the grass I started opening boxes, looking for things I might want. I ripped the tape off box after box, realizing there were a lot of books.
Preston said goodbye to the guys. They jumped into their truck and waved. As they drove away I felt like that was the last vestige of civilization, watching us get smaller in their rearview mirror. We were alone at the end of a peninsula in the middle of North America, specifically in one of the consistently coldest places in America. And Preston was bound for his last year of college—leaving in just a few days on a Greyhound. And even after that, he’d be getting on with his life. I was staying. I was staying indefinitely and I had no plan B. I went back to ripping tape off boxes.
“Preston? Have you looked at these boxes yet? I hate to say this but it sure seems like a lot of books. And like not even very interesting books. Are these yours?”
Preston looked into a box. He looked into another, and another.
“Oh Jesus. This is unbelievable. This has to be a purposeful thing. I mean the weight set? And now these books? These are Dad’s old law books. He knows goddamn well we don’t want these. Either he sent us these to make it more expensive and fuck us up, or he had absolutely nothing to do with it and this is just random stuff. But no way, because we said the things from the children’s rooms. The children’s personal things. No one could have thought these law books were ours. Fuck them all. Fuck them all.”
We combed those boxes for everything we could find that was of any use to either of us. We moved some of the weights and boxes down to the bunkhouse. We got Preston all packed up ready to go back to college. Before we knew it I was driving Preston to the bus station in Virginia.
He was scared about his loan. “Sid, you know I took a loan from the Dallas Cowboys guy that Dad was friends with. I told him everything and he sent the check. One check for the whole year all at once. It’s all paid for already, tuition, room, board. Boom. Bullseye. Done. Incredible. But he made me send him a letter promising to pay every penny of it back over the next ten years after I graduate. Shit. I hope I can do it. I don’t know. I mean what’s he going to do to me, send somebody to break my legs?”
I had no idea what a huge pro football guy with a ton of money would do to somebody who owed him money. I thought it was such a big relief that Preston could finish school and graduate that I didn’t care about what would happen after. “Preston, I don’t know, but you’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about that now. Just get good grades and graduate!”
I sat in the truck and waved until Preston’s bus pulled out. He sat in the last seat waving back to me. He was wearing a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt and his black wool beret from France. He had his black wool pea coat that he got out of the boxes. He had buttoned the top button of his shirt and he looked great, very studious. Ready for anything. I watched and waved until the bus turned to head out to the highway.
LABOR DAT WEEKEND
August was over. In a few more days my new school would start. I dug a few of my clothes out of the boxes in the yard. It had rained a couple times already and the boxes were getting soggy. I knew that if anything was really important I had to get it now. Preston and I had dragged the most important stuff down to the bunkhouse. Dad’s books were sitting in the yard. It was eerie to walk down after I parked the truck past the boxes. I knew I had to keep making good decisions as I went forward. I knew I couldn’t make sense of any of it yet. I didn’t try.
At night I lay in the narrow pink bed and prayed to the only God I knew. I sang myself into fitful sleep on the Liturgy from my childhood in the Lutheran choir, “O Christ, thou lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us … ”
I would wake in the night wondering if I had made the right decision. I prayed that I’d be safe and would fall back to sleep. Brandy lay out on the sofa all night keeping watch.
During the day I was going through the motions, going to work, working as many hours as they’d give me. When I had free time I picked up new songs on my guitar. I wanted to learn many Bob Dylan songs so I could sing them easily by memory. That was all I wanted.
Jay was the one who had introduced my family to Bob Dylan. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. I knew that by now he would have gone back to town where his family had their other house. Jay had become more of a drinker and smoker over the summer. I didn’t like stuff like that at all. I hated being around people who were drinking. I hated it. Jay came by once before Preston left and they smoked some marijuana together and drank a lot of beer. I was very unhappy. Their giggling laughter, so unlike both of them, made me feel sick inside. When I walked past them on the porch they mocked me for not joining them. I hated that. Preston apologized the next day. But Jay was going back to town and I didn’t care whether I saw him again or not. Now that I was alone, I wanted to believe he’d be there for me if I needed him like he’d been there for my mom when she first came up on the bus. So much had changed since last April.
My mother called one morning. She said she was coming up over Labor Day weekend to see me and to check on things. I was so relieved. But I also dreaded her arrival. I looked at the cabin and tried to remember how it was supposed to look. I knew everything was a little dingier than when my mom was around, but I couldn’t quite tell what wasn’t right. I put away anything that wasn’t supposed to be sitting out. I brought in armloads of wood and stacked the wood box high. I brushed Brandy and washed his bowls so they looked fresh. I put away all the dishes, even the clean ones in the drying rack. I went to work, came back home and went to bed, all the while waiting for my mother’s arrival.
From that moment my head was swimming. I lost all my bearings. Everything I had been handling with confidence was swept out from under me. My mother’s eyes were on everything. She looked at me, not at me but at my body, my clothes, my hair.
“Sidney, what are you wearing? Where do you go looking like that?” and as I looked down to figure out what was wrong, and to try to remember what I had on my body, she followed with, “You remember Mr. Hoffman?”
Of course, I remembered Mr. Hoffman. I wished so badly that Preston was there right then. “Yeah, of course.” I mumbled.
“Well, aren’t you going to say hello?”
“Hi.”
“Brandy, oh my God, I can’t believe how heavy he’s gotten. He’s all bloated. What have you been feeding him? You know he has heart trouble. Have you walked him at all? Oh God, I should have known. I should have known.”
I tried to answer that Brandy was fine. I watched my mother’s face.
She looked at Seymour with an “I don’t think I could face this without you” look. She walked over to him and took his arm. I looked at the two of them standing there arm in arm and I thought I would cry or burst into flames or vomit. The Mr. Hoffman I remember would never have been wearing a cotton turtleneck and a leather bomber jacket. Never in a million years. He was the kind of guy who wore old door-to-door salesman kind of clothes even when he wasn’t at work. She had him all dressed up. I couldn’t look at them.
I thought to myself that my mom and I should have hugged by now, but I decided I wasn’t going to try. It was too late already.
A Girl Called Sidney Page 16