The Wild Truth (9 page)

He told the boys to continue downhill to check things out and make sure the trail was clear. When they motioned for Jim to come on, he dug in his poles and hopped away, then shoved his skis side to side a few times to gain momentum and flew down the slope. He hit the jump at top speed and soared through the air with an impressive hang time, but then I heard a horrendous scream that didn’t sound anything to me like excitement. I couldn’t see where Jim had landed, and I also didn’t see him continuing down the hill. Quinn and Chris both yelled out, “Oh shit!”

Shannon looked over at Quinn and Chris, then up the mountain to me and announced in the quite matter-of-fact way that boys handle such situations, “He’s not moving. I think he’s dead.” I couldn’t see Shannon’s eyes through his goggles to tell if he was serious or not, but Chris and Quinn quickly aimed their skis downhill and raced to where Jim was. “Oh crap! We’ve killed Shawna’s boyfriend!” came out of my mouth as I started down the mountain.

By the time we got to him, Jim was sitting up and laughing, although through accusations that we were trying to kill him to keep him away from our sister. We all agreed that it had been a very notable jump, probably some kind of a record. A few years later at Jim and Shawna’s wedding, we all concurred that we were glad Jim had survived.

ON STACY
’
S BIG DAY,
Marcia’s father invited Mom and Dad out for a drink before the ceremony. His invitation seemed innocent, but once they were all seated, he led Dad on a scornful trip down memory lane. The reminders of Dad’s history with Marcia infuriated Mom, and by the time they arrived at the church, Mom and Dad were in a huge fight.

Stacy was beaming and beautiful as she faced her bridegroom, Rob, at the altar. He was a very smart college student and seemed a bit geeky to me as a fifteen-year-old, but I could see that he would be strong and steady. His full and gentle heart was a good match for Stacy’s wounded one. He was always sweet and attentive to her, and he noticed the subtleties that could dim her otherwise prolific smile.

With such a large and complex brood hovering in the aisle, Rob held Stacy’s hand and kept looking into her eyes as the perplexed photographer asked her questions about who goes where during the progression of family photographs. Rob’s hand lifted to her waist and pulled her close as the traditional photograph with the parents was attempted.

Tension pressed at the seams of the wedding, but Stacy rose above it all and didn’t let it ruin her day. Dad yelled at Chris to sing for the guests, but Chris had no interest in performing for our parents that day. Mom sulked, still angry about the meeting with Marcia’s dad.

These types of full-on family events were predictably poised for discomfort. Wanting to keep the mood light, Sam snuck a bottle of tequila into the reception, which my older siblings passed back and forth between jaunts to the dance floor to do the polka. I loved to see Marcia’s kids all having fun and laughing together. As I watched them tease each other, I wondered a lot about what they thought of me. With Chris, I was less self-conscious. I could be wholly and completely myself with him. As the reception wound down and I watched Stacy and Rob say good-bye to their guests, all I could think about was my brother’s looming departure.

As soon as we returned from Colorado, Chris headed out of town for his summer adventure in the Datsun. He said he would be back just in time to repack and get to college at Emory. When we said good-bye, he hugged me for a long time before looking me in the eyes.

“Be careful,” he said. Then he drove away.

CHRIS
’
S ABSENCE WAS SURREAL AT FIRST.
When I walked in the front door after he’d left, everything looked just the same. The couch pillows were still set up just so, and Buck still dozed in the same corner. But everything felt different. A dynamic had shifted between me and my parents, and the change was as palpable to me as if all the walls and furniture had been painted red. But at least I had Jimmy—and I didn’t have to worry about Chris’s annoying jokes about how I’d fallen in love too fast or his skepticism about what Jimmy wanted to gain out of the relationship.

Jimmy was a motorhead. A smart one. He drove a black 1972 Chevy Monte Carlo that he had been restoring himself. My dad—who had a love of cars himself, having owned an old GTO convertible when we were younger—appreciated Jimmy’s industriousness as a mechanic. But he warned me repeatedly that I would never have a successful life if I did not marry a man of a proper profession that earned him a large paycheck. During one of his cool-dad moments, though, my father helped Jimmy and me finance a project that we all took on together.

Jimmy had found a 1969 Stingray convertible suffering inside a ramshackle shed, and we came together as its savior. It was cheap to obtain the Corvette because it didn’t run and needed excessive body-and paintwork. Jimmy and I worked on the car every day during the summer, in the garage at his house, disassembling and rejuvenating her 350 engine, rebuilding her 411 rear end and four-speed transmission. He tested me on the parts, taught me how they went together, and thought I was a cool chick for wanting to get my hands dirty. While my interest in cars began as a way to spend time with him, as we got further into restoring the ’vette, I fell in love with the process of taking something that had been broken and abused and making it come to life again. And the actual mechanics of it just seemed to click for me. Watching a machine be put together was like my two favorite subjects in school—math and music—joining together in tangible form.

One day late in the summer I stayed at Jimmy’s house into the early evening, tinkering with a rear differential. It was almost dark when Jimmy drove me home, but as soon as we came over the hill on Willet Drive, I saw the old yellow Datsun sitting in the driveway.

“Oh my God! Chris is home!” Jimmy had barely come to a stop before I hopped out of the car. I ran inside and up the stairs to Chris’s room and busted through his bedroom door. There he was—and in such a deep sleep that he didn’t even flinch. I walked over to his bed quietly. He was so extremely thin, with a full beard and haggard appearance. It made me wonder if this was what Jesus might have looked like after hanging on the cross.

Later that night, he told me about his adventures as he unpacked his backpack. He placed cans with generic black and white labels onto the table as he told me about his long drive out west, his hikes along the Pacific coast, his final trek through the Mojave Desert, taking food to people who didn’t have enough to eat—exactly who these people were or how he came to feed them, I didn’t know and was too preoccupied by the cans to ask. I had never seen anything like them before. There was nothing commercial about the containers, no catchy sales pitches or luring pictures. It was just . . . food.

The trip was not one I would have taken or any of his friends would have wanted to go on—drinking margaritas on a beach in Florida was more the graduation trip ideal. But I didn’t think it was strange at all for Chris to trek alone across the Mojave bringing food to people who needed it. That was just Chris. Our parents didn’t get it. Though Mom immediately took to the kitchen to cook everything she could think of to fatten up her son, I didn’t hear “We were so worried.” Instead, Chris had to listen to a lecture rehashing the argument he and Dad had had before he left: “Who do you think you are to leave without telling us exactly where you were going? You said you would call and you didn’t. You said you would be back on this day and you weren’t.”

I knew Chris was irritated with them, but I also knew there was something else bothering him. The toll on his mind was as visible to me as the weight that had fallen from his frame. I didn’t push him on what it was, though. He’d tell me when and if he wanted to.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “How did it go over the summer?”

“It was good,” I said, and I meant it. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’ve figured them out. I’ll just spend most of my time with Jimmy until band camp starts. When I’m home, it’s pretty easy to just stay out of the way these days.” He looked relieved.

I didn’t get his usual intense hug when he left with our parents for Emory. It was an unfulfilling good-bye in their presence, but as always, we understood each other. The summer alone with my parents
had
gone well. Yet both Chris and I also knew that I was their last chance to either succeed or fail as parents, and the pressure was on.

O
VER THE NEXT THREE YEARS,
strange periods of tranquility among the usual dysfunction lulled me into believing I was finally earning my parents’ approval. I didn’t know at the time that the reprieves were simply because I was playing my part right. I was selected for gifted programs and my grades were good. I excelled in music and marching band, becoming drum major my senior year, and won lots of awards. I had no partners to strategize with, no detectives to investigate with who might make my parents feel insecure or equally matched.

Chris was mostly absent from our daily lives. After his first year at Emory, he’d opted for a monkish existence focused on study and a definite exit date from college. His apartment had no phone to call. Letters were infrequent. I missed him, but I understood why he wasn’t in touch. Then, when I did get a letter, he would say everything that was just right to say, and it usually arrived on a day when I needed to hear it. There was one letter that I would reread whenever I was feeling particularly lost:

I agreed with Chris in that it was hard to talk to anybody except him about our parents. But I did confide in one of my best friends, a boy named Giti Khalsa. Although Jimmy and I were very close, I was more insecure around him and thus hesitated to share too much about my home life that might drive him away. But Giti was different; I always felt confident that his friendship was unconditional and without ulterior motive. Somehow he saw past my always-animated demeanor and sensed there was something brewing underneath. Giti would sit and have long discussions with me about what drove irrational behavior in people. We would try to wrap our minds around how to exist with it while not allowing it to negatively influence who we wanted to be. When I finally opened up and began telling him—although still to a limited extent—about my troubles at home, I knew I could trust him not to tell anyone else. His summation of my parents existed somewhere between Chris’s view that they were completely hopeless and my view that they couldn’t possibly be beyond hope.

I sensed Giti’s optimistic side came from his own home life. Whenever I walked into Giti’s house, his parents were incredibly welcoming and I felt what I can only describe as a peaceful balance of energy. His family was from India, and in the early years of our friendship I thought it was just a cultural thing—as tangible as the turban Giti was required to wear, the indigenous décor on their walls, or the aromas of his mother’s cooking emanating from their kitchen. At that time, there wasn’t a lot of cultural diversity in the neighborhoods around Woodson High, but Giti was quite social and had a lot of friends. He was an excellent student and a talented musician—a good rule follower like me, for the most part. But he had experienced his own resistance to playing an expected part. He informed his parents, after much consideration, that he wanted to break from Sikh tradition and choose his own wife when the time was right for him to marry. Then one day he came to school clean-shaven and without his turban on. Even I had never seen his hair before. It was a lustrous wavy black mane that fell down well below the waistline of his blue jeans. About a year later, he had his hair cut short. Some members of his extended family thought his parents should disown him. While his parents’ beliefs in following the traditions of their heritage remained strong, perhaps the deep-rooted spiritual meaning of those same beliefs, combined with their unconditional love for Giti, simply proved to be stronger. The development of their family dynamic was beautiful to watch. I suppose I must have been envious. It was hard to find the right balance with my own parents, especially when their actions were often so confusing.

Noticing that Jimmy and I had become inseparable, Mom and Dad had several, surprisingly rational conversations with me about sex, both together and separately. They said they remembered being our age. They assumed that Jimmy was pressuring me to do it, and they doubted that I was against the idea, considering we had already been together for so long and how often I attested to being head over heels in love with him. I was absolutely positive that we were going to marry, and Jimmy had sealed the deal with a promise ring. My parents assured me that while they wanted me to wait to have sex, they accepted it was probably unrealistic. They requested that I come to them if it did happen and implored me to have faith that they wouldn’t get mad. They just wanted to ensure I could take the necessary precautions to protect myself from getting pregnant. I felt grateful for their sincerity, proud of their approach.