Soul Sister - Part I

What would it be like growing up as a girl among three brothers and two parents, who by their own admission, "didn't know much about girls?” Such was the turbulent world Carol, my sister, grew up in.  Looking with wise eyes, I can now see that she could have been the "gift" of womanhood to our family, to our family of "men."  That didn't happen.  Mom seemed befuddled at times, struggling "how to be" with a daughter.  ET and us boys were easier.  She could say, "Well, the Hell with all of you," then return, later, contrite, a Basque "pepper-pot," as Dad affectionately and compassionately called her when, especially, he tried to referee a misunderstanding between us and Dollie.

Dollie's penitence?  Clothes.  For me, it was the two of us at Jack Port's Men's Shop on a Friday night, the years before the blond with the unmanageable hair and body would, as I said earlier, "eat my heart raw." [Would cooking my heart have helped?  Such a silly metaphor.  But I was in a "silly" stage then, i.e., "dazed and feeble minded," if I remember my dictionary.]  Yes, Jack Port himself: tall, gentle, a quiet voice, your personal sartorial guide.  Mom made the choices:  a Tom Sawyer corduroy shirt. Two, which had to be dry-cleaned!  I stray here, ever so lightly. There was a "Jack Port" in Carol's life.

Carol was also part of the constant reconciliation project. Tuesdays she returned home from the beauty salon, her hair, her coiffure "grown up," each hair in its right place.  Dollie's gesture of worry and kindness--and she didn't know how to "fix" a girl's hair, anyway.  Carol often came home on a Saturday, twirling, singing, "Momma's got a New 'Do.”  Gospel-choir style singing.  Was she secretly listening to the radio?  Apparently. She and Michael knew all about a guy named Elvis Presley, the King. When did they do this? Where? Who were these children, becoming young adults? 

When I left for Germany, the family meandered, Oakie-style, North, to Napa, where Dad and partner,Terry, bought a wrecking yard.  One thing Mom made clear. Thompsonville, with its texture, its violence and the sex we didn't know much about, was behind. "My daughter is not going to grow up next to a wrecking yard, ET."  He agreed, and they moved closer to town.  Carol got what they called “braces.”  In earlier days when I heard that word around Thompsonville, I thought it was brackets--something that fit into that jungle of pipes and widgets and quidgets Dad called the Internal Combustion Engine.  Too dangerous and enigmatic for me.  I just wanted to be back at the store counter with my hidden copy of Swiss Family Robinson.  Carol twirled again, but painfully now, a mouth full of metal, "Mama's got Straight Teeth...soon."

For Dollie, the braces were both a motherly gesture and self-exoneration. Lucy, her mother, had promised Dollie herself "braces" if she went to Beaumont and lived with her beloved aunt, Annie, and her cousin, Jaunita. Juanita happened, but the braces never happened.  Momma didn't have straight teeth.  And neither did we boys. Carol got the nod . . . because she was a daughter--and a girl. 

Germany behind me but never forgotten, married, soon a surprised father, a graduate student, eyes barely above water, I remained "Big Brother" to her--something I've always cherished in my siblings, even when I got off the trail.  Carol became Woman.  All four of us were now at BYU. Carol was a transfer from a junior college.  More mature now, she did her own hair.  

Our lives converged when "the boys" decided to go on missions.  Dad was thunder-struck.  Michael, the dapper Silverado Kid, yes the Eagles' "New Kid in Town," clean-cut, up-graded clothes [no Tom Sawyer shirts for this Boy], always reading people like--well, names no sophomore could pronounce. Something like Dostoevsky. Carol fell in and out of love.  She even "did" the dreaded "Survival" class at BYU and lived in the infamous Escalante Desert for several weeks. But she already knew about survival.

Carol graduated, certified and began teaching in a local elementary school.

Fresh from her BYU Survival Expedition, plunged into teaching.  She sported a '58 Chevy Dad "built" for her at "The Yard."  She taught and then went to France.  France, where she walked into a bad situation.  Darkness and fear:  A Mormon branch president gone evil.  The abused daughter, terrified, took Sissy with her and jumped on a train for the mission home. Carol traveled, worked her French, met people, tracked with the LDS sister missionaries, and worried, but finished and came home to waiting Love.

But it was the Wrong Love.  A strong lad, cheekbones like Cochise, the Apache, olive pigment, tall.  "What's wrong?" I asked, visiting from the University of Oregon. "I don't know.  I send the ring back, and he returns it." He didn't know Carol, because he didn't know ET.  Dad didn't say anything at the time, but he could have said, "You don't break a Basque girl:  you give her lots of line--you 'troll,'" as my friend, Don Hammar would try and teach me.  [It never worked. "Just keep talking," Don said. "I'll fish for both of us while you talk. I like to hear you talk."]

CAROL'S CONFUSION.  Carolyn and I saw in Carol what Dollie called "nervous cleaning," a skill I also mastered early on.  Then Mom, modest and withdrawn in all things sexual, stopped Carol in the hall.

Profound change often occurs in odd places.

Einstein is said to have had a "moment" while, yes, darn it, Bruce, while fishing.  Fyneman, the boy-wonder-physicist, is said to have "walked" an equation.  And how many poets and prophets and scientists have dreamed wondrous things. Young Elihu cautions a faltering Job: "For God speaks once, twice, but men don't listen . . . to whisperings."  We do listen, though, Elihu says, "when in a dream, in a vision of the night."

We're back in the HALL!  Mom uncharacteristically says, "Can you see yourself in bed with him, Carol?"  Carol pauses, visualizes, weeps--and finally returns the ring for the last time.

Carolyn and I are off to the University of Oregon for summer school.  We stay in a friend's cabin in Lake of the Woods. Carolyn and Carol cavort. They are kind and a bit flirty.  The guys with the boat pull them around the lake. I watch Marcus and read.  The Lake is calm today.  There is no wind. Walking alone the next day while Carolyn and Marcus sleep, we saunter, which means we walk without direction.  An epiphany, a sweet moment. 

Tears fill our eyes.  We miss the boys.  Michael is lost in snow and wind in Noranda, a Jonah without A Nineveh.  We miss the boys.  Pain binds us. It's like Superglue. We are bound--again.  With France and Cochise and Survival  behind her, Carol finally negotiates/wrangles/entices--as Johnny says in Moonstruck, "I don't know," meaning he could have known-- but he's not sure.  I'm not sure how Kim Christensen, a former roommate with the boys, re-enters her life.

And so this quiet Norwegian re-enters her life. Still Waters.  Calmness.  After medical school and a child, Kim, a second generation Scandinavian, returns to his missionary land of snow.  A child is with them and another joins them. Gavin.  With dual citizenship. [Family story: Gavin is drafted by the Norwegian army while serving with his brother, Kari, where their Dad served, they are on their way to visit an aunt. "Convince them you're more American than Norwegian; speak terrible Norwegian," the mission president says.  "We can't loan you to their army; we need you in our army."  The Norway chapter closes.]  But Carol's five years in Norway leave her with friends and memories and huge, Viking-hewn furniture.  "Damn," Dad says,"only a real Viking could find that bed comfortable."  Carol laughs. More beautiful children enter her life. 

She has become herself.  A blessing comes with her, for us.  She's like Lucy, her eyes black diamonds, like Mom's as well.  But she clucks and murmurs, shifts the modulation of her voice, speaks small animalese, cuddles her children, enters their confused heads and broken hearts, talking for them, speaking out as if she were they.

And we find  her in Lora, our oldest.  They bond immediately. The pepper-pot occasionally sizzles.  Dad and Mom, glancing over from The Other World, laugh. "She's still a little of you, honey," Dad says. Calmly, Dollie smiles. "She will be heard."  All is Quiet Now.  Not really.  In Sissy, then, resides a "Soul," full of Mom's compassion and her "ET," Kim moves through the wind and the heat smiling. He becomes the Good Bother-in-Law, hugging  [Scandinavian?], quietly reading through Gavin's library. Home from Washington DC, he off-handedly says, "Lar, I really enjoyed the Odyssey.”

Carol continues to learn because she listens and she reads books.  Dozens of "Love and Logic" classes become her "calling" in the LDS church.  When she calls, she sings; she listens.  Sometimes she lapses. Her bond with Michael is strong and true.  Reaching out, she does her best.  Busy Boy, bright, but the Silverado Brillo is dead.  Sad for me.  She finds Eliza, Michael's daughter, just as she finds Lora and Alison, my daughters.

How do you grade out as an Uncle or Aunt?  Old Son hovers around the C+ range, a failing grade nowadays at BYU-I.  Sociologists tell us that a bereft child is better off with a third cousin than a foster home, full of love. Blood. Kinship. Then a geneticist tells me that the most remote of Mongolians is no further away than 50th cousin.  A Global Family.  "One World, under God, indivisible."  Cynics sing that fifties tune: "Oh that'll be the day, when . . . ." Keep your hopes up.

Keep one eye on the East.

Thank you for surviving, Sissy.  You are the Balm of Gilead.