Читать книгу Temperance Creek - Pamela Royes - Страница 15
Оглавление“Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.”
—PAUL TOURNIER
North Dakota. Never mind the high humidity, mosquitoes, eighty-mile-an-hour straight-line winds, polar fronts, or blizzards. Statistically we were the most churched and least visited state in the country, where the strong and courageous women in my parents’ economic bracket sacrificed themselves on the altar of unselfish deeds and acts of charity and succumbed to shag carpeting, ten o’clock Bloody Marys, hothouse petunias, and Lawrence (champagne bubble) Welk.
After four years at the University of North Dakota, my brother Randy—formerly a self-absorbed adolescent who rarely opened his bedroom door, collected stamps and coins, and wished me dead—emerged from the halls of academia with a diploma and the startling news that he was moving to Oregon. Once there he wrote letters home from the born-again Christian commune he’d joined, announcing his conversion to Christianity, JESUS SAVES printed in bold black letters across the backs of the envelopes.
North Dakota. Where Mom and two friends driving back to the lake cabin from the local watering hole had a head-on with a car full of teenagers. From the hospital, they would call the husbands.
My best friend Rio and I are babysitting when Mr. Rummele pulls in at three in the morning. I know because I am awake and already worried. Everyone’s okay, he says, getting out sleeping bags. But Mom isn’t okay. Thrown through the passenger window into the woods, at first they couldn’t find her. Her neck, broken. From the small, rural, lake hospital they move her to the Deaconess in Grand Forks. When I creep into her room, we both start crying. She lies in traction there for a month, sometimes upside down. I write letters every day. Dad takes me to visit. I read aloud. Before coming home, they cast her in plaster. It starts high on her neck and ends at her hips. Her chin is tilted up. Without a pair of weird, pyramid-shaped glasses, she can’t see the floor. She jokes; she never complains. For a while, neighbors and friends bring food. I make tomato or chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.
There were lawsuits and settlements, and the courts decided in favor of the carload of women, and I don’t remember hearing what injuries the teenagers suffered, though later I questioned the verdict. Knowing the women and their love for drinking.
North Dakota. Where long before the gay liberation movement was fashionable, and long before the death of a movie star riveted America’s attention on an epidemic called AIDS, my older brother Mark struggled to conceal his homosexuality in a society both repressive and standards-driven. The result was multiple suicide attempts, a lifelong battle with alcoholism, and total estrangement from my father while my mother played the odds. And in my own adolescent fear, ignorance, and discomfort, in my own struggle for identity, I was unable to understand or help him.
Who grows up in a house where no one ever yells? Or fights? Or confronts their discontent? Our collective silence became unbearable.
At fifteen, after losing both Great-Aunt Regina and Grandpa to heart attacks, I crossed the tipping point and was no longer able to hold on to the reins. I sold my horse, bought a car, and began cultivating the dark seeds of rebellion while seeking enlightenment through literature. Siddhartha, The Great Gatsby, The Outsiders, To Kill a Mockingbird, the brave Odysseus and The Odyssey and the works of Anaïs Nin who wrote, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
None of my friends talked about what was going on at their homes either. About their alcoholic parents, or their scandalous divorces. About mental illness. About homosexuality. In North Dakota we pulled the cloak of secrecy around us and bore the rumors, unable to rescue those we loved. Instead, we dreamed of far-flung places like California, the Rocky Mountains, and the saturated, postcard colors of Mexico. Roughshod cowboys, rock bands, hippies, salt water, and sand. Escaping the sheltered corners of our young lives, into the mythical and memory-free West.
