Monday, November 26
Another exerpt from a little story I am working on.0 comments
In the beginning
I was admitted into University of Chicago the same summer my Aunt Julie decided to refuse chemotherapy. When I mix facts with fiction, I recall those two adolescent mile markers as two separate events. The beaming smile on my father's face and the late night phone calls with my mom softly sobbing into the receiver are two events that never coincided in the same time period. Most of the time I mix my facts with fiction which often leaves me vulnerable to misrepresentation and ultimately nostalgia. In reality, the two events softly overlapped like separate waves of a much larger entity.
"The doctors said it would possibly grow back curly. I was kind of hoping it would," Julie, my mother's sister, said. She pulled down the sun visor of our little Mazda 3, flipped open the mirror, and watched herself pull a tuft of thin, blond hair protruding from her head. "My hair never had the body of yours, Sharon. I think you were lucky and got Dad's hair." Julie pulled at a short black curl of my mother's hair. It briefly unwound and then snapped back into place with the vigor of a clothespin.
"Yeah, Dad's thick, burly head of hair. Lucky me," my mom said. We both knew she loved her hair and her pretend sarcassm was a pathetic front. Julie stopped pulling at her hair, readjusted the bohemian scarf around her head, and we made eye contact in the mirror. I was sitting behind Julie in our little car. She rotated herself in her seat to see me.
"Are you excited? I haven't been to Chicago in years. I am so jealous of you."
"Jealous of what? Indecision? Adolescent angst? SAT and ACTs?" I challenged her kindly.
"Jealous of you. Your grandpa gave us one choice for college. Local."
"Here we go again," my mom sighed.
"It's true, Sharon. We had little choice about going to college unless we paid for it ourselves. And today, well these kids can go anywhere they dream of."
It was early October and my mom, Julie, and I were cruising down interstate 94 from Minneapolis on our way to Chicago to look at colleges. I had just completed my SATs and I had dreams that were Chicago bound. I allowed my mom to call the weekend a girl's road trip and she briefly morphed into the woman we knew before Julie had gotten sick. Half of my mother's curly hair was piled on top of her head and she sported a sweatshirt that was dad's fourteen years ago. Her driving drove Julie crazy and my mother was at a point where she could take Julie's poking fun again without breaking into sob.
Julie was back into the savvy hipster that she had always been. She made losing her hair seem fashionable with long, scarves that wrapped around her delicate, round head. She was wearing jewelry again and in fact, that had been my mother's first indication that Julie was coming back to her.
"We are in the middle of Wisconsin. Should we bet on how many super conservative radio stations we can find? I bet six." Julie reached for the radio knobs.
"You have to qualify that with if we are counting only AM, FM, or both," my mother insisted. "And I bet eight."
"Three," I piped from the back seat. The radio static wavered as I watched the fall colors deplete as we moved from north to south.
posted by Jenny Monday, November 26, 2007
