Read an Excerpt
A Girl Called Sidney
The Coldest Place
By Courtney Yasmineh Gibson House Press
Copyright © 2017 Courtney Yasmineh
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9861541-2-6
CHAPTER 1
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. Worse, 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?"
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Girl Called Sidney by Courtney Yasmineh. Copyright © 2017 Courtney Yasmineh. Excerpted by permission of Gibson House Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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