“Who took this candy bar from my room and ate it?”
Surely my mom knew who it was based on the chocolate smeared around Jennifer’s mouth, but she wanted to offer the chance to come clean. To her surprise it was I who confessed.
“I did it,” I said in a small voice.
My mom looked me in the eye. “Lindsey, are you sure you ate the candy bar?”
“Yes.”
I was stone-cold serious. Jennifer smiled innocently, and a crumb of chocolate flaked off the corner of her mouth. My mom sighed, So this is how it’s going to be.
And that’s how it was . . . for a while. I hated pizza because Jennifer wouldn’t eat it, and I loved orange sorbet because it was her favorite. But Jennifer was very controlling by nature, so we only got along if I agreed with everything she said. Eventually, I realized I had a few opinions of my own—mostly that I didn’t want to play with Gus anymore. Once Brooke was old enough to play with me, it was game over. I wasn’t just the younger sister anymore; I was an older sister now, too. Eventually, I started refusing to play Jennifer’s games her way, which frustrated her to no end. So began the clash of our personalities that lasted through high school.
Twenty bucks says you didn’t notice Jennifer was in this picture. Don’t blame me; the tree costume was her idea! But this picture pretty adequately sums up our childhood.
When my mom first tried to explain the term depression to me, I was seven. I already knew Jennifer liked to be alone, that she was irritable and short-tempered, and that she didn’t think I was funny. But the thought that someone could be sad for no reason didn’t make sense to me. As I got older I learned to accept her depression as a reality, but she was difficult to be around, and I never tried to make it any easier on her. We grew up, and we grew apart.
Although we weren’t the best of friends growing up, we did come together out of necessity on occasion. Once, during an argument, I threw a broom at her. I missed (on purpose!) and it punctured a hole in her bedroom door instead. We gasped in unison, and the argument was over as quickly as it had started. She pulled the broom from the door and I cut an appropriately sized circle out of a shoebox. Together, we painted it to match the existing wood grain and taped it over the hole. Then we stood back and looked over our handiwork.
“She won’t notice, will she?” I asked.
“Not a chance.”
My mom didn’t notice the hole until we pointed it out to her years later—teamwork at its finest. But, more often than not, we were at odds.
When she was a teenager, nothing was more important to Jennifer than running, and for good reason. In junior high she broke the school record for the mile, and by the time she was a high school sophomore her face was showing up in every local newspaper: STIRLING TAKES FIRST or SOPHOMORE FOR STATE. As the season progressed, neighbors kept bringing their clippings to our house. This was partially because they knew we didn’t get the paper, and also because my mom sent out a mass e-mail asking for them. After we had a sizable pile by the door, I started stashing my own collection under my bed. I waited until everyone was asleep to admire them so no one would see me. Brooke, on the other hand, read them by the door every morning. She saw me watching one day, and I expected her to be embarrassed. Instead she held up the paper, smiling.
“This one is my favorite. It has the biggest picture.”
“I like the photo of her running on the track,” I admitted.
In my seventh-grade social studies class we talked about current events every Friday. While most kids brought in stories about Supreme Court decisions or local elections, I repeatedly discussed Jennifer’s latest victory in cross-country. If anyone got sick of hearing about it I didn’t notice. Every time she was in the paper, I signed up to present again.
Over the next few months Jennifer continued to run faster than anyone else in the region. In the weeks leading up to the state race her face appeared in the city papers again, this time next to a picture of Sara Gorton, a senior from another region with similar times. State was going to be a match race: Stirling v. Gorton.
On the morning of the race, we arrived early so Jennifer could warm up with her team. The freshly mowed park smelled of wet grass, and all around us were runners with bright uniforms and tight ponytails. Jennifer, like the others, was noticeably preoccupied that morning. The local hype over the long-distance face-off was taking its toll on her. Still, no one expected the extra attention would affect the outcome of the race. Jennifer was a driven winner by nature.
As the runners lined up, she looked down at her hands and turned to her coach, “My fingers won’t stop tingling . . .”
“Take a few deep breaths,” he said, “run your race, don’t worry about anyone else.”
He clapped her on the back and she jogged toward the lineup, her blond French braid bobbing up and down against her uniform. As she weaved slowly through the crowd of opponents I watched her face. It was expressionless, but her hands revealed what her eyes would not. Every few seconds she shook them in front of her body, closed them in fists, and clapped them together.
“Runners, on your mark!”
The announcer held a megaphone and a starter pistol.
“Get set!”
He lifted the gun above his head and a loud shot cracked through the air.
“Go,” I whispered as the horde of runners burst forth into motion.
Earlier that morning Brooke and I had scouted out the course. We knew all the shortcuts around the park, and we had mapped out a plan to cheer Jennifer on in multiple spots throughout the race. The first time Jennifer passed she was in a group of ten runners in front. We yelled her name and ran down the hill and across the bridge to our next designated cheering location. A few minutes later she passed us again, going a little faster this time and alongside Sara Gorton. The next closest runner was at least two hundred yards behind them. Brooke and I high-fived and ran to our third destination, the two-thirds mark. Again, Jennifer and Sara were neck and neck, but this time the next runner wasn’t even in sight. From there, the course went around a hill and wasn’t visible again until the final stretch. We found a place near the finish and waited for our sister to come around the bend, in first place.
Several torturous minutes later we heard the crowd roar and saw Sara, not Jennifer, round the corner. She’ll be close, I thought. She can still pass her. But Jennifer didn’t come. Instead, there was a gap and then another girl ran into view, and another, and another. Brooke tugged at my shirt.
“Where is she?” she asked nervously.
I kept staring at the course. No, this isn’t right. Jennifer was going to win. After a few agonizing minutes, Jennifer stumbled into view, and I knew something was terribly wrong. Brooke started to cry and tugged even harder at my clothes.
“What’s wrong with her? Why does she look like that?”
I stared at Jennifer in disbelief—her face was the color of ash, her head tilted back, barely supported by her neck. Like a newborn animal trying to walk for the first time, her body shook with each step. I wanted to run to her, to hold her up and steady her steps, but doing so would disqualify her from the entire race. So I watched in shock as my famous sister staggered through the last hundred yards, disoriented, weak, and being passed on either side by girls who had never come close to her times. When she finally finished the race, I saw her collapse into the waiting arms of my father.
By the time Brooke and I got around all the ropes at the finish line, paramedics wearing neon-green vests had already surrounded our sister. One of them put an oxygen mask over her face while another stuck a needle in the crease of her arm. Blood squirted onto his sleeve, and he didn’t even bother to wipe it off. My parents knelt on either side of her, so I held Brooke’s hand and tried to be brave. We both sobbed while she went in and out of consciousness.
At the hospital the doctor explained that Jennifer had suffered a severe hyperventilation episode.
“The lack of carbon dioxide in your daughter’s blood s
hould have made her faint long before the finish,” he told my mom.
But that’s the thing about Jennifer: she didn’t want to faint, she wanted to finish the race. Later that evening her coach stopped by to visit and deliver her medal. She got tenth place out of a couple hundred runners.
When the newspapers came out the next day a photo of Jennifer’s fragile body covered the local sports section, side by side with a snapshot of Sara crossing the finish line. Jennifer cried and my mom gently threw them away. In her mind, she had failed her coach, her team, and herself. What she didn’t realize was I had always secretly admired her, but that day of the race she became one of my heroes. I know how badly I wanted her to win, so I could tell my class that my sister was the best runner in the state; but watching her struggle to the finish after she had already lost was the most incredible thing I had ever seen. Later, I pulled a few articles out of the trash and took her medal to school for my current events presentation. I told my class about the race, what the doctor had said, and I passed her medal around the room.
“She could barely walk at the end, but she wouldn’t give up until she crossed the finish line.”
I had never been more proud.
SCARFMAN
My dad was practically born wearing a scarf and a hat. According to him, the Chicago winter of 1976 permanently damaged the nerves on the back of his neck, leaving him feeling eternally cold. He wears a scarf to work, to church, and all year round, even in Arizona. For as long as I can remember, he has only ever worn his scarves one way: hung limply around his neck. His straight-hanging scarf is a trademark, and from an early age I knew it set him apart from the other dads. In kindergarten, my class made cards for Father’s Day and mine read, “I love my dad because he always wears a scarf and a hat, and it makes him easy to find at the beach.” I should have also mentioned that it could double as a towel if needed.
Stephen J. Stirling is a sweetheart. But if my mom hadn’t been around to clean his clothes and prepare his food, he’d still be sitting somewhere dressed in parachute pants, chewing on a piece of wood. My mom only went out of town once when we were kids. I remember, because my dad fed us cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three days in a row. Best three days of my life. Saturday was the one day he could sleep in, but every weekend without fail he woke up early to the sound of my little feet pitter-pattering toward his bedroom. I’d crack open the door, he’d crawl out of bed, and together we would have a cereal picnic on my blanky.
As a freelance screenwriter and journalist my dad was an exceptional storyteller. While we ate, he told me stories—both from his own life and the made-up lives he wrote about. He told me about the winter he started wearing scarves, which was after he opened an underground theater in Fresno, and right before he was chased out of the city by the Italian Mafia, who didn’t want a theater there in the first place. He told me about the day he became an honorary member of the Black Panthers in high school, and the time he jumped through a window to get on the last train heading out of La Calera during the 1973 Chilean revolution. He told me about his post-college career as a vagabond, drifting around the country in an old camper. Along the way, he met Dick York from Bewitched, mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, Mormon leaders Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson, President Ronald Reagan, head of NASA Wernher von Braun, and Richard Simmons. He ended every story by reaching out his palm and saying solemnly, “And I shook his hand.” I got more than a passion for cereal from my father; I inherited the desire to have a life full of adventures that I could tell stories about. And I wanted to shake everyone’s hand along the way.
Once my sisters and I were born, my parents settled down and my dad sold his motor home. But he never did let go of his passion for life and adventure—even if the adventures changed from roaming the country to raising three little girls. When I was young he frequently worked from home in an office behind a set of glass-paned double doors. If the doors were closed, he was “at work,” and we weren’t supposed to go in. I always did anyway, but he never made me leave. I would lie on the ground with my blanky and listen to him type. The sound of a keyboard still makes me feel at home.
My dad’s income as a writer was meager, to say the least. Even though I knew we weren’t rich, I rarely felt poor as a child. Every weekend my dad searched the papers for free events, and sometimes he even pulled us out of school to attend. On the sign-out sheet he would write “Free day at the planetarium” in the column labeled REASON FOR LEAVING. Most frequently, these free events were city orchestra and symphony concerts, where I first saw and fell in love with the violin.
At six years old I wasn’t a brilliant child, but I was smart enough to notice the important things—like the fact that the first chair violinist was always the star of the show, and that the violin section played the melody as well as the fastest parts, and was always seated toward the front of the stage. I had to get my little hands on one!
When I first brought it up, my parents were hesitant to invest in lessons. I was the child who played with a new toy for a few minutes and then moved right along to the next. But when I persisted my mom eventually started looking for a teacher. Most violin lessons were thirty minutes to an hour and anywhere from thirty to sixty dollars a session. At the time, my parents couldn’t afford anything in that range. Instead of giving up, my mom searched until she found a college student who was willing to give me a fifteen-minute lesson every week for a low fee.
My first violin was made of cardboard—no bridge, no strings, no sound—just a cereal box with a paper towel roll attached to one end.
“This is your instrument for today,” my teacher said with a smile.
I remember raising an eyebrow at my mom and thinking, Oh no, she bought me cardboard box lessons. But once I understood that the fake violin was temporary, I practiced holding it until I could do it with my eyes closed. When I demonstrated that I was coordinated enough to hold it correctly, I earned my first tiny violin.
For years my dedication to practicing annoyed Jennifer to no end, which is probably why I kept it up. “Mom, make her stop!” she would yell. In return, I would squeak even louder. Shortly after I started, Jennifer picked up my dad’s old trumpet. The mouthpiece was bent and permanently stuck to the body of the instrument so that it didn’t fit in its case anymore. When Jennifer first expressed interest in playing the old horn, my dad tried to remove the mouthpiece with a pair of pliers and succeeded only in denting it further.
“It appears that this mouthpiece has severe separation anxiety. I think we better leave it where it is,” he said.
He found an old briefcase that would hold it, and Jennifer carried her trumpet to and from school in that. It may have been misshapen, but Jennifer had no trouble making it work, and we were finally evenly matched. From that time forward, if she didn’t want to listen to me practice, all she had to do was take out her trumpet and play even louder. When Jennifer had proven her devotion to the trumpet my parents got her a normal mouthpiece that fit inside a normal case. She excelled throughout high school and was the principal trumpet player in the band through college, where she majored in music performance. I take partial credit for her success. After all, it was I who motivated her—by being annoying—to practice so often as a child.
• • •
For the next five years my parents rented instruments from the local music store as I went through different sizes. When I was in the sixth grade I finally grew into a full-size violin. By this time I had proven I was dedicated to the instrument, and my parents decided to invest in a violin that could take me through high school. My music teacher had one for sale and my parents paid two thousand dollars for the violin, the bow, and the case. Two thousand dollars! The amount sounded crazy rolling off my tongue. I never told any of my friends how much my violin was worth, because I didn’t think they would understand. To them it would be an expensive instrument, but to me it was the air-conditioning my mom’s car didn’t have and the unfinished floorboards in the bas
ement.
Shortly after, my music teacher suggested I audition for a local orchestra called the Metropolitan Youth Symphony (also known as MYS to all the kids at school). By this time I was old enough to know that extra activities cost money, but when I was admitted into the second division group I was ecstatic. It was a bit of a stretch financially, but my parents made it work anyway.
At rehearsal every week my mom sat in the back of the room, clipping coupons and placing them in categorized Ziploc bags. One day she couldn’t stay during rehearsal, so she sent my dad to pick me up. As I watched the other kids leave in their SUVs and sports cars, I saw my dad pull up in what my family referred to as “the Clunker”—a dented 1979 Buick Skylark with no AC and a ripped-up interior. My dad considered it a classic, but to me and everyone else it was rust on wheels. At that moment, it was smoking and rattling as he approached the curb. I considered ducking behind the nearest tree and walking home, but my dad leaned out the window and yelled, “Hey Lindsey, I need your help!” I dropped my head and walked quickly to where he was parked. He asked me to show him to the nearest water faucet—the radiator needed fluid. I was mortified. The only entrance to the bathroom was through the back of the rehearsal room, which was currently occupied by the first division symphony. I tried telling him there wasn’t a bathroom nearby, but he insisted. So we pulled a few cups out of the trash and walked back and forth between the parking lot and the bathroom, collecting water for the Clunker. My face burned as we passed my peers, over and over, carrying water in filthy, dented cups. When we were finished, I sank in my seat and my dad cranked the engine until it finally started. The car roared and I felt the shame showing on my face—shame for the water in dirty cups, for the smoke coming from the Clunker’s hood, for the sweat darkening the back of my dad’s dress shirt. Looking back, I realize I should have felt shame for other reasons—like being embarrassed of a man who continued to drive a broken car so my sisters and I could go to our music lessons each week, and so that I could participate in a group like MYS.
The Only Pirate at the Party Page 3