Now that it had been bone-chillingly cold, I had been driving down to the bus stop in the mornings and waiting for the bus. I could leave the heat blasting and the headlights on. Corey the bus driver had cautioned me that leaving the truck out without the block heater plugged in, even during the day, might be risky. He said, “I’d hate to see you not be able to start that thing one of these days when we get back out here.”
The thing about getting back out there in the afternoon was that I was one of the last to be dropped off and by four in the afternoon it was dark again. So I left the truck plugged in under the carport every morning. I stoked the wood stove. I checked the furnace setting. I left the puppies to fend for themselves. I headed out each morning at six on foot, walking as fast as possible or jogging through new snow. I wished I could ski down to the bus, but I would have to switch out of my cross-country ski boots to my hiking boots, which I didn’t want to deal with.
Now that it was truly cold, I prayed while I waited for the bus to come. I stood alone in the dark, my small flashlight making a dim wisp of light through the impenetrable northern woods. These mornings my grandfather’s thermometer hit a new low each day. Twenty below, twenty-five below. The numbers were surreal. Cold was a bottomless pit. Cold was what hell was described to be; something simultaneously interminable, inescapable, intolerable.
The woods were so still, especially when it was dark. I half expected some cadaver to rise up out of the wilderness, to march toward me through the thin spaces between the trees. Only the dead could survive this. This cold was not for the living.
My eyeballs would get so cold I’d have to close my eyes and just listen for the wheezing engine. I would pray, “Please God let the bus make it. Please God let the bus get here.”
I’d usually hear the music over the engine these cold mornings. Corey the bus driver was in his glory it seemed, in the battle against Old Man Winter. I’d hear the rock music blasting. Then I’d hear the roar of the old engine. Then I’d see the blazing headlights. Then I’d feel the heat as the folding doors of the bus would rattle open, and I’d step up into the last safe haven of civilization between me and death. I’d pause and self-consciously pull the ice chunks off my eyelashes, throwing them down to the bus floor to melt. Damn you, Winter. Damn you, frozen North Country.
Corey’s music would be so loud that I wouldn’t be able to talk to him but he’d yell, “Good Morning Sidney, glad you could join us!” over one of his favorite eight-track tapes blasting through his rigged up surround-sound that went front to back of the old school bus. The music enveloped your head whether you liked it or not. Often Corey’s morning party was Meat Loaf’s epic album that always distilled down to “I Can See Paradise by the Dashboard Light” with most of the kids on the bus singing along. Once I knew the words and found myself singing along too, I knew I had fully assimilated. I sat with the girls I loved. We hooked our arms together for extra warmth and sang at the tops of our lungs all the way to town as the sun came up over the pines and the white frosted icy pavement threatened to throw our clubhouse off the road at every wild turn on Corey’s treacherous route.
At school everyone acted like they wanted the cold to let up. “Everybody’s got a bad case of cabin fever,” the principal could be heard commenting in the halls. The cold made people not care about much of anything besides survival. There was a whimsical girl who sat in front of me in our English class. She was tiny like a fairy and the kids teased her about smoking too much “reefer” as they called it. I noticed that by the end of January, she wore her sweatshirt with the hood up all day every day. If the teacher yelled at her to take her hood down, I would see, sitting just inches behind her, that the back of her hair was a fried mass of short tangled frizz that in no way resembled the shoulder length smooth brown tresses she had in front. I was not going to comment on this, ever, but the other kids never missed an opportunity to find something novel to enliven the day’s passing.
“What the hell is with your hair Melissa?” one bold young gentleman launched.
“Shut up. I didn’t want to take down my hood. Just shut up.”
“What’d you do, set your hair on fire with your bong?”
More scholars turned around in their seats, more chortles.
“No, God, leave me alone. Just mind your own business. You’re all a bunch of ugly pigs anyway. Look at your hair, Bobby.”
“Oh ouch, yeah I spent so much time getting my hair right before school this morning.”
“Come on, Melissa,” one of the sweeter girls joined in, “Tell us. It does really look weird. It’s like it’s fried off. What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know.”
“No, I don’t know. All I know is I’ve been napping on the radiator at home and I think the radiator is melting it.”
Masses of guffawing. “The radiator is melting it! You think the radiator is melting it? You think so? You think so, huh?”
A big brazen girl named Lila from the lake whose parents owned one of the bars on the main highway stepped in. She was kind-hearted and smart but was illiterate for all practical purposes. She was always putting her arm around me and saying, “Sidney’s my secret weapon, aren’t ya Sid? She’s gonna make sure I graduate and all’s I gotta do is sit next to her on the bus every day between now and graduation. Right, Sid?”
I would say “Yep. You got it. We’re doing this.”
She was fun to help and to be with and I enjoyed teaching her grammar and easy math and doing most of her writing for her. She was affectionate and grateful and I loved her.
She stepped up about Melissa’s hair. “Hey, Meliss. Don’t let these A-holes get you down. I happen to be an ace number one hair stylist. I plan to go to beauty school in The Cities once I break out of this dump. Somebody get us some scissors!”
Scissors appeared and the styling began in English class; the unwanted hair fell onto my desk and I gingerly brushed it into a pile and threw handfuls into the waste-basket at the front of the room.
The English teacher slash gym teacher had long since given up on everything: the class, her career, life in general probably. She was silently grading our quizzes on Shakespeare’s biography, an essay in our lousy textbook which was only a page and a half in length and barely had one single interesting fact about the life and times of Shakespeare. It had been required reading for the past three nights in a row. Lila finished the haircut. I liked it. It was a huge improvement and seemed fresh and mod and no longer did little Melissa look like some crazy dreamer girl living her own little glass menagerie.
“Hey Lila,” I asked, “If I cut mine this weekend, will you fix it up if it needs fixing on Monday?”
“Of course Sidney. I keep telling you I’m gonna be your personal assistant. Whatever you want girl, I’m with you. You’re gonna be somebody some day.”
That night I ran home from the bus stop, freezing all the way, and was greeted by the big playful puppies. I was excited to chop off my hair. I’d been thinking about it for a while. I hadn’t had it cut in such a long time, it was sort of shoulder length but it got caught in the drain in the kitchen sink and I couldn’t keep it nice wearing my fur hat almost constantly. I even wore my fur hat to bed these days. I thought it would be better to have short hair again. Plus it would go with my tomboy wardrobe. The puppies wrestled on the kitchen porch, fighting over the new water and food I put down for them. I stood at Grandpa’s big shaving mirror with the black kitchen scissors in my hand. I figured super short was the way to go, the shorter the better. I chopped each section about two inches from my scalp. I kept going until there was nothing left to cut. The bangs were jagged and the hair around the ears was jagged. Success!
With the holidays over, playing music became a new focus. I practiced for the talent show, the band concert, and the school musical. I played music with Dale too. One weekend I performed in back to back shows with Dale and his brother and their band. I loved those gigs. People really liked whe
n Dale and I sang a couple songs as a duet, and said that we really had something special and that we should go on the road. We agreed to keep playing as many shows as we could. The band split their money with me and I went home with cash in my pocket, which was great too.
The winter cold was relentless throughout January, but some days were beautiful—bright and sunny, which made up for a lot. I practiced for the talent show that was coming up. I was going to perform my new song and play the guitar. The kids in choir heard me sing it for tryouts and everybody liked it. Some of the girls asked me to sing their songs in harmony with them too. I was happy to have so many performances to look forward to.
Dale kept asking me what I wanted to do for my birthday and Valentine’s Day—my birthday was the day before Valentine’s Day. I told him I didn’t care, it was still a long way off, and whatever he wanted to do would be great. He was good at planning fun dates.
The resort didn’t need my help in the restaurant at this point. They were managing with just the owners and the cook. The only money I had coming in was what I was getting from playing with Dale’s band, which wasn’t much. In the midst of all the whirlwind of music and fun, an unforeseen accident gave me a new job. Jeannie, the young woman I liked so much who ran the cabin cleaning in summer, had apparently been in a snowmobile accident.
Her husband, Danny, called me one evening asking if I could start coming over three days a week after school to help out with their little boys and help with cleaning the house and cooking. I was happy to have a new source of income and I liked them all very much. Danny offered to pick me up and bring me there and back. We agreed I’d start right away.
The first time Danny came to get me, I thought he’d be arriving later, so when I heard tires on the gravel I jumped. There wasn’t much for food in the cabin, mostly because I rode the school bus every day and didn’t have a chance to go to the grocery store when I was in town. I didn’t have much money, so I was just getting by on what I had. That day I had come home from school hungry and decided to make pancakes because I had the kind of mix that only needed water. I had a stick of butter in the fridge and a big glass bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup. I made myself a tall stack of steaming hot pancakes and I sat down at the table to eat them, thinking Danny wouldn’t be there for another fifteen or twenty minutes. When I heard the tires on gravel, I had just spread butter between the layers of pancakes, and was getting myself a fork. As I heard the truck door slam, and Danny’s shoes on the porch floor, I suddenly felt embarrassed. The stack of pancakes, not exactly a health- or weight-conscious option, was huge! I didn’t want Danny to think I’d forgotten or wasn’t ready because I really wanted the job. So as his footsteps grew louder and he was about to knock on the kitchen door, I dashed to the kitchen cupboard and stashed the whole plate of pancakes with the fork still on the plate, into the cupboard where the other dishes were stacked, and shut the door.
I pulled myself together, and as I opened the door to greet Danny I had a fleeting sense that the smell of pancakes was very strong especially to someone just walking in.
“Danny, hi! Thanks for picking me up. This is so great. I’m really excited to see Jeannie and the boys. Here’s my coat, let’s go.” But even talking fast wouldn’t save me. Danny was talking too, but looking around curiously.
“Yeah hey Sidney, great to see you. Is everything okay? Are you ready to go? Are you sure you got everything shut off in the kitchen before you go? Don’t want to burn the place down, haha … what’s that smoke there? Hang on, I think we better check things before we go.”
“No, I checked everything. Let’s head out.”
“No, wait a minute, it’s like there’s smoke coming from the cupboard over there. What could that be?”
I turned and saw that my hidden pancakes were steaming so much in the cold air of the corner cupboard that it looked like something was smoldering. Before I could do anything, Danny crossed the room and opened the cupboard. He stood for a minute staring at my stack of pancakes.
“Hey, did I interrupt your dinner? I figured you could eat at our place with the boys. Geez that’s quite a stack you got cooked up there.”
“Yeah well, I don’t know … ” My face was burning with embarrassment.
“What, were you planning to have a big pancake party tomorrow or something? Getting a head start on making some kind of big pancake thing like the Boy Scouts do it? Haha, boy that’s quite a stack of pancakes.”
“Yeah. Haha. Okay well, let’s just go okay?”
Danny took one more look at me, then at the pancakes.
“At least let’s put some kind of tin foil or something over ‘em.”
I got out the tin foil and covered the pancakes and left the covered plate on top of the stove this time. Danny seemed satisfied and we headed out the door.
Once we were in his truck, heading to their house, Danny forgot about the pancakes and started talking about the accident and how their lives had changed. I could hear the sorrow in his voice, “I wanted to wait to talk to you in person, Sidney. This has been pretty tough on all of us. Jeannie’s had a rough go of it.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. She’s such a cool person.”
“Well, she’s changed a lot. I want you to be ready for it. See, when we had the accident, we got thrown and we were riding together and I was unconscious. What I didn’t know was that Jeannie’s chin strap on her helmet got lodged in a funny way and while we were both out of it, she lost oxygen to her brain for a while. We got picked up by the Johnsons who thank God were out for a ride, and they got us to the Virginia hospital. We thought it was all going to be okay, but then Jeannie didn’t really know who I was when she woke up …”
Danny trailed off and turned his face away, looking out his side window.
I was silent.
“So tonight, when we get there, it’s like we’re all just kind of starting from scratch. She won’t know you, and hopefully if anybody can win her over you can, she always loved you and you’ve got a good way with people. The boys have been kind of crushed by the change …”
He stared out the window again and we were getting close to his driveway when he said, “So we’ll just get you situated. You can see Jeannie and then I’m gonna get her bundled up and take her out for a burger. We’ll just get out of the house for a while and you just do what you can. Make the kids pizza. Watch a movie with ‘em. If you see anything that doesn’t seem right, it probably isn’t. Just straighten anything that needs straightening. Jeannie has a real hard time knowing where things go … ”
We walked up to the front porch and he opened their kitchen door.
“It just kind of is what it is these days,” he finished, and then “Hey boys! Where’s Mommy? Look who I have here! You remember Sidney?”
The boys started jumping around, they were both wearing footie pajamas that looked clean. Their faces were cheerful. I took off my coat as they tugged at my knees. The bigger boy was about three and a half and they were only a little over a year apart. Their hands were a little grubby and their noses needed wiping so I turned to the kitchen to see what I could find. I had never been in their place before. But it must have changed a lot recently. I was stunned to see yellow Post-It notes taped to almost every surface. Some notes just indicated the name of the object. STOVE. Others had directions, BURNER HOT. On the refrigerator was a summertime photograph of their little family smiling. Under the photo all four of their names were written out on four separate yellow notes.
Jeannie came out of the back bedroom looking as beautiful as ever but more docile and tired. Her eyes showed no recognition when she saw me. The boys ran and clung to her legs and she patted their heads but made no show of real affection. When she spoke it was slow and deliberate with a bit of a slur.
“Hello. I hope the house isn’t too messy. My husband says you’re going to babysit the boys. Thank you. We don’t get out much these days. This is nice.”
I could see that Danny was worried about what I thought, b
ut I didn’t care, I still liked Jeannie a lot. “I’ll do as much as I can! Have a fun time and stay out as late as you want. I don’t have school tomorrow so I can stay up late.”
To me Danny said, “Okay, so far so good. Have a good time with the boys. If Jeannie feels like it, we might stay out and go hear the band at the roadhouse.”
“Yeah, fine by me. Have a good time.”
“Thank you so much, Sidney. Once the boys go to bed, feel free to check out the record collection, they won’t care as long as it’s not too loud. And see what you can do with the kitchen and stuff. I promise I will make this worth your time. I really appreciate it.”
They left and I launched into wrestling with the two boys like I wrestled with the puppies. Then we read through a few of their picture books they had on a low shelf of a small bookcase.
I took a few minutes to put a frozen pizza in the oven, and cut up an apple sitting in a bowl. I looked in the refrigerator and decided I’d try to organize that and throw some stuff away. I went to the sink and determined that some serious dishwashing and sink-scrubbing was in order too. Once the kids went to bed, I’d get on it.
The boys and I ate pizza and apple slices. We watched an old Disney movie. I played their parents’ Carole King Tapestry album and we danced to “I Feel the Earth Move. ”
Finally the boys rubbed their eyes with their chubby little fists. We went to the bathroom, which I saw was another frontier for cleaning and organizing. First we washed their little faces with a warm washcloth. Then we brushed their teeth with their cartoon-character toothbrushes.
We bundled up the boys in their little room in the full-size bed they shared and I read to them. They had a strange quiet life in the winter, but come summer they’d be allowed to roam the resort with its beautiful beach and endless wooded paths. Their mom was changed but not ruined, and maybe she’d get better with time. And their dad was a good guy. They had everything they needed. I kissed them on the forehead.
A Girl Called Sidney Page 23