So this might be mostly fiction but enjoy.
My family loves each other. We most likely always will. However, my mother’s attempt one summer to bring our family all together by going on a two-week trip could have pulled us apart. You see, my family is not your average Provo Utah Mormons. We are very mush the opposite of the conservative ridiculously large in numbers, Bush-loving republican hunters. There are one of the only things (outside of basic human needs) that bring us together.
I was excited to get way from Provo and take a nice trip to the Oregon Coast but my sister Annelise started changed that we I started walking down the stairs.
“Is it really necessary to wear make up, do your hair all cute and dress up nice when you’re planning on spending the day in a car where no boys will see you?” I had known it was coming as i had knows it would be coming every morning, but the repetitive and obnoxious manner in which she nagged me bothered me nonetheless.
“Sorry, just a habit now,” I said too tired to explain that just as she preferred to wear no make up (because she believes it exploits all woman and gives more of a power advantage to men over us) i prefer to wear it. Annelise, who had gone to Palestine and tagged the wall with Langston Hughes quotes translated into perfect arabic preferred to “save the world” and writing poetry and novels.
“Lindsay, don’t listen to her,” I heard my brother say, jumping to my rescue from behind the living room doors we stood in front of, “I think you look very sexy today.”
“Why thank you”, was my reply and I opened the door to see him sprawled out across the largest couch, with his moccasins, grey skinny jeans, tight blue t-shirt with an underground indie rock band name and a dinosaur on it and one inch gages in his ear. He resembled the exact opposite of my sister standing next to me, now with a frown on her face.
My mother running down the stairs and into the kitchen said, “Eric that was very inappropriate. Don’t refer to your sister as being “sexy”, of anyone in that case,” she said with a revolted look on her face. “But at least good job at being positive, although Lindsay, your sister is right, I mean you didn’t need to bring more than your father, sister Eric and me in luggage”. I thought that was no fair since Eric was bringing his guitar and all of this art supplies.
And then with my sister’s smile returning to her face i replied in a sarcastic tone, “Well, I had to bring me stilettos just in case we fun into Brad Pitt and he asks me out for dinner.”
Although I had to admit I did pack a lot, but my bags were not full of large amounts of clothes but C.D.’s, movies, a personal DVD player, a journal, writing book, sketch pad, about eight books ranging from poetry to science fiction to How To Do Ti Chi, four fashion magazines, who Ipods, and absolutely anything else that would keep me distrackted and enertained while on the two-week long trip.
Normally our family goes on trips to England and fills up our time wth castles, catherals, plays, the Shakespearean houses and more, my father guides us through it all reading the original Latin plus Middle English as we go and translating it to us correctly (unlike the signs that are often so very incorrect). But this yearit was my mother’s idea to finally have a vacation where we were to do absolutely nothing. We might go out and go whale watching and maybe shopping but there was no real need to so anything at all.
Trying to avoid another obnoxious conversation I sauntered into the kitchen to see if I could help my mother with packing the snack basket. I could tell when I walked in by her slumped shoulders and teary eyes that this might not be a good idea. I’d just seen my father leaving with big paw prints on the shoulders of this favorite King Lear shirt to take the dogs to the kennel. My mother loved our two German Shepherds so much that I though she was going to explode when my father told us that we had to leave them behind because the resort did not allow pets of any kind there. She did not only love the dogs, although she’d written articles on how to save them, and of course gone out and done just that. We have had numerous pets from a blue and gold macaw to hedgehogs, and she frequently told people about how the only reason for having bable was ffor Animal Planet although no other animals could match our dogs. Quickly turning on my heels and leaving her to mourn alone i walked back into the living room where my second sister Shannon now sat on the coach opposite my brother.
I could not see her face from behind the Quantum Physics book she was holding up to her nose but could imagine her thick glasses and slightly squinted blue eyes concentrating hard on the pages in front of them. Her shirt read “Heisenberg might have been here.” After I had repeated her name a good four times she finally recognized my existence and smiled at me for a brief second before popping back down into her book.
My father pulled into the drive way and I was finally able to have some task to keep myself busy and not think about the melancholy trip that was about to take place. After loading the car and piling into it I put my head phones on and tired to ignore the sounds of my brother’s snoring, my sisters deep conversation on Bush’s empty efforts to prevent global warming, and my mothers yelling at my father because he had not noticed her telling him to stop and pull over because there was stray dog in the road because he was too absorbed in his book he was reading while driving.
When I woke I could feel the sun shining brightly on my face. I looked up to see my reflection in the window of the car and the scenery passing behind it. Everyone was peacefully asleep or reading quietly. Peace warmed me and i fell back into unconsciousness. We stopped three times to take bathroom breaks and eat meals at some local cafes. I could tell we were getting closer by the rising amount of fish on the menus.
We finally stopped at a hotel to rest after ten hours of driving and we all fell straight into bed. There were not even any arguments over turning the lamp off because someone was reading and Eric had stopped saying outrageous things just for the sake of shaking things up. Sitting in the car all day and doing nothing for some reason had strangely exhausted all of us.
The only change in the nest day form the last was that we all switched seats, and it felt as dull as ever until we finally reached it-the ocean. It was wide and dar the cloulds lingered closely aboive it waiting until the sun went down to mesh with the waves and the currents. My mother insisted on opening all of the windows so we could smell the fresh sea air and when we finally reached our resort she insisted on leaving the windows there open too, making our little apartment about fifty degrees and everyone freezing but smelling the ocean breezes.
We all stayed up quietly watching the ocean rock our minds land imaginations to sleep. It was peaceful and careless. The ocean did not care about war, the president, the Middle East, or any politics for that matter (except maybe global warming). It didn’t care about books, German Shepherds, Quantum physics, or even “Branjolina”. We all fell asleep on the floor next to each other depending on the other’s body heat.
The next morning while eating our cereal my father came in from the balcony coughing.
“The neighbors on the porch next to us are smoking cigars and blowing them, I think purposefully at us into our open windows.” He seemed a little shocked that someone would be so inconsiderate. But my brother, two sisters and I loooked at each other and smiled. It was the beginning.
“Mum, you don’t happen to have any perfume with you do you?” said Eric after he had peeled his eyes away from ours.
“No Eric, you aren’t going to spray them down with my perfume!” my mother responded as she frowned.
“I swear I wont spray them. I will just spray it in their direction. If the wind is blowing in the right direction it will carry it..”
“ERIC I SAID NO!” But we weren’t done trying yet.
“Um. Mum, I was wondering if you brought in that fish from the store last night. I wanted to thaw it for tonight. You don’t mind if I cook for you today do you?” My dear sister Shannon was always great at getting her way and being brilliant at it too. My mother of course was not a stupid person and could see the truth right away but just smiled and went into the freezer and pulled out two cod and one salmon.
“Thank you, just make sure that you open up the package a little and place it under the sun on the patio table closets to the neighbors. I think it will thaw better there.”
We all rushed outside, and placed it exactly where she said and waited until we hear their complaints, and still left it there. Shannon explained the thawing process and what biological breakdown was occurring to cause the release of the chemicals causing the odor.
Soon they were blasting music and so we decided to play karaoke and have a pillow fight and dodge ball with the wall we shared with them. At this point mother, father, sisters, and brother call joined in and planned what was to be our last and final attack before they checked out.
My sister having visited the used bookstore had found an old copy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for fifty cents and when our neighbors left to go swimming Eric and Shannon distracted them on their way our by saying that there was some animal in the dumpster and thought it had bitten one of them. While trying to move around my family members and ignore what we knew they would think of as a brank, my other sister Annelise and I slipped into their room and jumped into the coat closet behind the door as they began to shut it.
Annelist with book in hand walked over the microwave and I rushed over to the balcony to watch the pool. We waited a few minutes, hearts pounding and adrenaline rushing, as we waited for them, and then I saw them, large white balls splashing water everywhere in the pool and then float almost helplessly.
“NOW!” I whispered loudly to Annelise and she placed the book in the microwave and turned it on high for three minutes.
We were forty three seconds into when Annelise’s cell phone began to vibrate, she was about to turn it off when she noticed it was my mother and picked it up so fast that she almost dropped it.
“Foury five seconds and counting Mum...yeah..it’s already on fire. The smoke’s covering the room. I know you said no but I can’t really stop that now..what?! Good frick! Yeah, were coming now!”
We both ran out onto the porch, praying that we didn’t get caught and hopped over the small fence and ran safely inside our apartment. Right as we closed our porch door we heard the beginning of the screaming.
And as our family sat together watching the ocean and reading our books in peace an quiet except for my mother’s interruptions on occasion to explain the vibes of the whales n the ocean, I realized, I love them. It was on odd feeling to be so happy and content with being a part of a crazy democratic, Shakespeare watching, anit-war family sitting all together with our individually, pre-ordered from one thousand miles away, copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And I knew as I know today that even something so simple as a old copy of Fahrenheit 451 can bring a family as strange as ours together.
