Off the cuff

Trying to get the family out of the house on a snorkeling adventure, we were searching everywhere for lost items. Under the bed: broken sunglasses, one flipflop, and a Bingtang beer bottle.  Nothing says vacation more clearly than these three random objects.  Throw in a condom wrapper and it could be a hotel room anywhere in the world. Unless there is a mother-in-law and a five-year-old in the room. Then that would just be creepy.

A motorcycle laden with son, grandma and husband is quite a sight, especially as they are pulling away, leaving me alone for the day. Ahhhhhhh. A beautiful sight, if I may.

What to do?

First I dropped off our laundry next door, then walked into the village to see if I could find some not-broken sunglasses. No-go at the first two little roadside markets, I gave up. I didn’t want to waste my free time trying to protect my eyes. Screw it. I can always have surgery later. Or learn braille.

So here I am, on the beach, a warm cup of honey tea, the colorful boats, the blue green water booming into the low lying sea wall.  I could write about the benefits and harms of open air bathrooms, or the plethora of blessed offerings left outside our gate entrance yesterday (do they think we are unlucky? Or evil?), the cat chasing the rat across the hot tin roof at two in the morning, the nasty letter I am writing to Johnson and Johnson in reference to highly-inadequate levels of cortisone in their Cortizone stick (a handful of rough sand or a wire brush vigorously rubbed over the bite is the only successful anti-itch method I’ve discovered) . . . but instead I would rather tell a story, an incident from my teens I dreamed about last night. No worries, I’ll come back to the afore-mentioned list.  I have a lot to say about open air bathrooms, believe-you-me.

Oh, but first, I may have just figured out how to get a picture onto the blog, a shortcut to be sure . . . this is from the photobooth app on my computer . . . let’s see if it works.

AHA! I can paste the pictures into this word document!  (IT snobs can bite me, I’m proud of myself when I can get spell check to work.) The real test will be when I can get online and try to paste this doc, pics and all, into the blog. We’ll see. I won’t hold my breath.

Anyhoo, a story, apropos of nothing.

When I was a teen I had my heart broken not by a boy but by a family. Sure, being slightly nerdy, plenty of unfulfilled boy crushes littered my youth, but that is not this story. Well, actually, maybe it is, at least partly.

During high school, a young girl with a fisherman father, a secretary mother, a diametrically different twin sister and a quiet little brother spent her summers in another town, staying with another family and working at their restaurant, earning money for clothes and necessities (like hair crimpers and stock in Aqua Net hairspray). Oh, how she loved them, wanted them to be her family (there was no offense meant to her own family, she was the same as every teenager across the world, believing that the grass was always greener in the neighbor’s lawn, that everyone else’s daddy but their own bought their babies a pony). This other family was wealthy (so it seemed to the girl). Their daughter was two years older than the girl, a bronzed beauty, a prom queen. The mom and dad played golf on their off time. The handsome college age son was also home for the summer. They had a hot tub. There was always good food in the cupboard, REAL food, like Kraft or Chef Boy R D or Rice A Roni – no plebian foods like venison, potatoes or fresh salmon. 

The girl worked hard at the restaurant. She loved it, really. A fourteen-year-old dishwasher, blonde hair in a ponytail, turning the radio up, singing and running the big silver steam cleaner for hours. She played Ms. PacMan on her breaks, drinking root beer by the gallon, and secretly (not so craftily) adoring the college boy and coveting the friendship of the prom queen.

The dad was gruff but fair, a good father, an excellent boss. The girl was intimidated by him, slightly frightened in his presence, cowed as she was by all male authority figures. Halfway through the second summer he took the girl aside and asked why  she hadn’t asked to be moved from dishwasher to cook, considering she has been there so long and others hired after her went immediately to cook. He told her he was moving her into the kitchen. She was surprised, not realizing at the time she even had the right to ask, or that she was deserving of anything higher on the food chain. (That was the first of many times she fell into this trap, she still has yet to learn this lesson thoroughly, to reach for more and know she deserves it just as much as the next Joe, or to even recognize the opportunity is there.)

The summers passed. She was eighteen, still a cook, still in love with working, feeling like she was fulfilling expectations while making money. She was no slacker and she knew it. The mother would often trust her with managerial tasks. She didn’t mind covering other people’s shifts, she would work night or morning hours, it made no difference to her, life at the restaurant was defined, known, and she liked it, felt safe and happy.  She certainly wasn’t perfect, maybe mooning over boys too much, maybe not cleaning her room enough, definitely not picking up the dog feces in the yard  enough (this job was hers but she could not stomach the squishy stench). 

One night she came home, entered her room and found a packed, zipped bag instead of her clothes strewn everywhere. Curious, she walked into the living room, pulled up short by a scornful look on the prom queen’s face. She was told the prom queen’s clothes had been found in her bag; the girl was struck in the stomach by such a lie, ill that the prom queen believed that or, worse, perpetrated the theft, set her up. How else explain such a ludicrous comment. The prom queen shoved the red tshirt, the bra, the shorts in her face, telling her that she was tired of her stealing. Crazy! The girl wasn’t a thief.

The girl had stolen, though.  In her room, in the closet, on the top shelf, were old clothes the family had stuffed away, out of the way. Old sweaters, old shirts, shorts, underwear. She had, over the years, “borrowed” a pair of underwear, a couple of sweaters, always with the intention of returning them, but, well, time passed, no one seemed to care . . . she could have asked, she should have asked, but pride kept her from asking for what she knew was already discarded. Obviously, this habit had been noticed. She was crushed. They thought she was a thief.

The mother came home in the middle of the argument, pulling the girl aside, saying she thought the girl had been doing better. Better than what, the girl wanted to know, but too afraid to ask. The girl tried to explain, over and over, that she had not stolen the clothes, she hadn’t even packed her bag, she didn’t know what was happening.

The mother went back to her room, the prom queen disappeared to a party, telling the girl to stop pouting, the college boy looked on from across the room, the father did not glance away from his football game. The girl snuck back to her room, broken.

She packed her bag, walked out into the night. It was midnight. She was going to walk the three miles to where her sister was staying, call her real mother, a mother that couldn’t stop being her mother even if she wanted to.  She could hear the father yelling back in the house, screaming for the wife to go get the girl. Then it was quiet. The girl was broken.

One mile down the dark road, a car swerved to the side of the ride, the mom ordering the girl in the car, to stop with the over-dramatics. The girl tearfully promised if she could rip out her heart and show her the truth, she would. The mother believed the prom queen. The girl put down her head, broken.

She got into the car but refused to return to their house, insisting, weepily, she be brought to her sister. The mom did not want to cause a late night scene but the girl swore that she would never again sleep in a house where the people she loved did not believe in her. The mother sighed, looked away, frustrated. The girl looked for love, saw none. She was broken.

The girl became a woman, a woman built on the many lessons of that night.