A Girl Called Sidney

Courtney Yasmineh

Description

Singer-songwriter Courtney Yasmineh packs a stormy ballad’s punch and showcases a lyrical style in her first novel.

Set in the late ’70s, A Girl Called Sidney: The Coldest Place by rock musician Courtney Yasmineh is a searing, nerve-rattling story of a mature 17-year-old whose family disintegrates in spectacular fashion in affluent suburban Chicago.

After first spiriting her mother away and then running away herself to the family’s remote Northwoods cabin in Minnesota, Sidney challenges herself to survive alone and find her voice over the course of a brutal winter.

The narrative takes the reader on a dark and moody ride back and forth in both time and place, between Chicago and a tiny rural town. Getting inside Sidney’s head as she tries to make sense of a cast of characters – family, hangers-on, and old and new friends – the novel examines the roots of their dysfunction while Sidney plots the future and works to make real her pursuit of music, inspired by the music of Bob Dylan

With appeal to readers of the recent rash of women rocker bios – and contemporary fiction of the heartland – the story looks with a fresh perspective back to a distinct time and the experiences of a young woman that will resonate with many adults.

Informations

• Publié par: Gibson House Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780986154140
• Langue: English

Extrait

G IBSON H OUSE P RESS
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422
GibsonHousePress.com
2017 Courtney Yasmineh
All rights reserved. Published 2017.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9861541-2-6 (paper)
LCCN: 2017930899
Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen. Text design and composition by Karen Sheets de Gracia in the Palatino Linotype and Strangelove Next typefaces.
Printed in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper)
PROLOGUE
W hen it s February in Minnesota, and you re as far north as you can go and still be in America, you re in the coldest place on the continent. Not a comforting thought as I woke at six in the darkness to be sure I made it to the bus. If I missed the school bus, I was scared that I might get so cold that I wouldn t be able to make it back to the cabin. I could get so cold I d freeze to death on the trail, frozen solid before anyone came out from town to look for me.
That morning, Grandpa s old thermometer bottomed out at forty below zero Fahrenheit. I knew it had to be even colder than that, because the red line of mercury was already near the bottom at two that morning, when I got out of bed to be sure the one spigot of well water I had still going in the kitchen wasn t freezing. I opened the cabinet doors under the sink to let as much heat as possible get to the pipe and I lit a match and started up the old gas oven too. I stoked the wood stove in the main room and went back to bed wearing a big wool cardigan that I found in Grandpa s closet over my one-piece, red wool long underwear.
At six, I rolled out from under the pile of wool blankets on my bed and went to the kitchen where it was warm. I splashed water on my face, hoisted myself up and peed in the kitchen sink because the toilet had long since frozen and it was too cold to bare my rear end outside. I told myself I d wait to poop until I got to school so I didn t have to deal with my other option which at this point in the winter was to do the job in an old tin wash pan, fling it as far as I could out into the woods, and then rinse the pan with dish soap.
I went back to my room and put my jeans and wool sweater on over my long underwear. Since the deep cold had set in after Christmas, I had given up on removing my long underwear ever, at all. The wood stove wasn t a match for the bitter cold creeping in through the summer cabin s thin knotty pine walls. Back in the kitchen I poured some Cheerios and milk in a bowl. After I ate, I stood by the open door of the kitchen oven and wrestled with white tube socks, then snowflake-patterned, wool crosscountry ski socks that came up over the knees of my jeans. My outerwear was a red down vest and a blue down coat. I had a fur trapper hat with earflaps and leather chopper s mitts. I tied on my heavy suede hiking boots with the red laces. Before I left for the bus, I carried in a few armloads of wood from the covered back porch and made sure the wood stove was as stoked as I could get it.
I headed out at 6:45 in the dark. I threw my backpack over my shoulder and walked out the driveway, which was now a solid two-foot layer of ice and snow packed down by the wheels of the old pickup truck that had to stay plugged in with a block heater under the carport so it would start in an emergency. Half a mile down the peninsula was where the road plow officially turned around in the winter. This was the first year it ventured farther down the point, and only after I asked if they could plow down all the way to my grandpa s old place because I d be staying out there for the winter trying to finish high school, trying to hide out from my family s craziness, trying to make a whole new life, trying not to freeze to death, trying not to give in to despair.
I arrived at the familiar spot where the old, wheezing, yellow bus turned around and made the fifteen-mile trek back into town after picking up the ten kids from the reservation and maybe ten more who lived around the lake. The only footsteps in the snow were mine. The only eyes that would see me waiting were those of a squirrel or a deer or maybe an owl. But in this cold, at forty below, no living creature had journeyed out but me.
My eyes stung from the cold at this temperature so I closed them and stood listening and praying, Please God, let the bus get here soon.
After a few minutes, squinting against the cold, I saw the headlights of the old bus. I heard the roar of the grumbling old engine. Through the crystalline silence I could already make out the thump of the bus driver s favorite sound track to this winter in the North Country.
As the bus tires crunched the snow that was so frozen and packed down it looked and sounded like styrofoam, and the accordion doors cranked open with a clatter, my face was struck by the heat blasting and the blaring eight-track sound system. I was greeted as I had been every morning since this adventure began with a rock album by a guy called Meat Loaf, singing, I Can See Paradise by the Dashboard Light. We heard Bat Out of Hell in its entirety almost every bus ride. The driver with his Elvis Presley mutton-chop side burns and slicked back, dyed black hair beamed, Hey Sidney! Welcome aboard! Impressive showing! Are you sure you aren t part Eskimo?
I laughed halfheartedly as I stood in the heat for a moment, pulling the ice chunks off my frozen-shut eyelashes so I could see my way to take a seat with my fellow scholars.
In the winter of 1978, as Meat Loaf was howling out his rock opera tribute to adolescence and all the North Country kids sat dozing in their seats at seven in the morning on an old rickety bus in the middle of the great continent of North America, with just a few scraps of sheet metal between us and the brutal winter air, I stood for a moment before taking my seat and said out loud, What the hell am I doing here?
THE DECISION
W hen I was seventeen, I followed a crazy gut instinct that set my family s demise in motion. We lived in suburban Chicago in the 70s. My parents had been fighting because my mom was super paranoid about money and she didn t want to let my dad remortgage our house so that he could save his seat on the stock exchange. The stock market had seen some major upheavals that had my dad on the verge of bankruptcy. I honestly think my mom should have chosen to be happy instead of right and everything would have just worked itself out. She could have gone along with my dad s plan. Instead, my dad was beside himself, drinking and threatening violence toward her and myself.
He had always been a cruel guy and was very hard on my one sibling, my older brother, Preston. My brother was a sensitive artist type but also a good athlete and my dad had played college football so he was always riding my brother s ass to be better at the game. But my dad also prided himself on being a philosophy major who put himself through law school so he bothered Preston about academics too.
My mom was his beautiful hothouse flower and he had loved only her and had sex only with her his entire life, so when she wouldn t go along with his refinancing idea, when he was utterly desperate and took to driving a cab to keep things afloat, he lost it.
I was the one witness to my parents strife because my brother graduated from high school, went backpacking in Europe, got a job at a vineyard in Nice and didn t return for a couple of years. He sent about three postcards in all that time. After that he went to a liberal arts college where he wrote papers in French.
I was the only referee left in the house and I didn t like it. I hated my parents. I had no respect for them. Worse yet, I could see that neither of them cared about me. They were wrapped up in themselves. I walked around the house feeling like they didn t know who I was at all.
When I asked either one of them for one thing every month, the check to pay my flute teacher, neither of them would oblige. My payment was always very late and my teacher always had to ask me multiple times. Worse, they didn t like to drive to her house and back for the lessons. I usually walked to the teacher s house on the other side of town, several miles away. After my lessons I would lie to my instructor and say I was just going to walk to the corner to wait for them. She probably knew there were problems in my family, and maybe even guessed that I walked all the way home most nights.
My flute teacher wanted me to have a metronome for practicing. She wanted me to buy a certain kind that was more advanced, an electronic gadget. It cost about a hundred dollars but she said it was worth it because it was so precise. I knew there was absolutely no way my parents would take me to a music store, much less pay for the metronome. I made a few attempts, explaining to each of them how important this was. Every lesson, my teacher would inquire and I d say that we didn t get the metronome yet but we were going to do so the following weekend. One day she asked and I said, Yep, we got it.
She started writing elaborate notes on my flute music sheets with the numbers and setting instructions for each piece. I was horrified with shame. I was caught in the stupid lie. Then one lesson she stopped me part way through a difficult new piece and asked, Have you been using your metronome with this piece?
Of course, I answered.
Well, it really shows. Your time is so much more consistent than it used to be. Good work. See, I told you it d make a big difference.
Lying to people sucked. Living with my parents sucked. I slept with my door locked because they would wake me up even on school nights to have me referee their bullshit. One night, they picked my lock with my mother s hairpin, came in my room, turned on the extra-bright overhead light like