it’s a secret
I have been a reader for a long time. I read with the expectation of entertainment or enlightenment. I’ve been a writer for much less time, but I readily recognize the monumental burden of these goals.
Consequently, there are two types of writers. The first can be called responsible. These writers prioritize the needs and wants of their readers. They use an outline and write with an organized plan. The second can be called cathartic. They write to discard what is inside. They don’t manipulate their words to gain a better position, they just run with them. They spit out their thoughts like tobacco from a ranch hand, sometimes they get lucky and hit the spittoon. They tell their stories as they happened, just as I do now.
Life is full of turning points, and I can clearly remember one that occurred at the beginning of my fourteenth year of life. Inadvertently and innocently, I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see; I witnessed something that was not meant for me to witness. But no one can stop seeing what has been seen. Oh, how many times I wished I could!
It was the middle of summer, my freshman year of high school floating in and out of the water a short distance, and I was full of anxiety and anticipation. My best friend Cara Hale and I spent the weekend at her lake house on the 4th of July. Her parents, whom she had come to love, were having a barbecue with music, fireworks, and all sorts of patriotic things. It was an adult party so we were relegated to the top floor which contained a TV room, small kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. We were armed with film and nail polish and expected to “do our thing” while the adults partied downstairs. Cara even suggested we sneak downstairs and “share” a bottle of bootleg beer, a first.
It was easy enough, as all the adults were outside, sprawled along the lake shore, watching the occasional fireworks shoot their rainbow of colors over the water. We put the kidnapped bottles in the upstairs mini-fridge and headed out to meet the adults for the show and for me to say good night and say goodbye to my parents and my Uncle Joe, who had been friends with Cara’s dad for years. University.
As the group dispersed and the noise from below subsided with each creak of the gravel driveway, we closed the bedroom door, turned off the lights, and opened our illegal loot. After the first couple of sips I realized that I would only go on long enough that I seemed to be sharing the experience, and that became easier to do with Cara drinking her bottle and then “sharing” most of mine. .
Fast-forward past the giggles and gossip, and an hour later I found myself standing next to a snoring Cara waking up wondering what high school boys would be like and how I would do my hair that first day. In fact, I was so awake that I decided to go into the living room and start reading “The Odyssey.” I knew I would be assigned to freshman English, and I wanted to get ahead of myself to make a good first impression.
After turning on the small table lamp, I saw the beer bottles standing accusingly as evidence of what we had done. We had never thought about how we would get rid of them without getting caught, we had only thought about how to acquire them without getting caught. She knew that if Mrs. H. saw them in the trash upstairs, Cara would be in the deep end. She had very strict parents who went to church (despite her own tendency to party). My life was a little more flexible.
I decided to take the bottles downstairs right now, while the house slept, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it in the morning, especially since I wasn’t sure when (and under what conditions) Cara would wake up. I gently opened the upstairs door and, hardly breathing, began to descend slowly and silently, one step at a time. Halfway up, where the stairs turned into the living room, I froze. It was the sound that first caught my attention; had it come from me? Then I saw them. Mrs. H.’s unmistakable face on the couch under the unmistakable melon-colored polo shirt now pulled up to my Uncle Joe’s shoulders. The same broad, tanned shoulders that took me on one too many long walks with my family outdoors. Those iconic shoulders that would henceforth and forever be stained with the sight of Mrs. H.’s bright red fingernails dug into them.
Lord, please erase this vision from my memory, I thought, as I stood wide-eyed and standing stiffly long enough for the reality of what I was seeing to settle in. Then, on shaky legs and a pounding heart in confusion, I silently backed up the stairs and closed the door behind me; he still had two bottles of beer in his hands. I took my jeans that were scattered on the floor, put a bottle in each leg, piled them up and put them in the bottom of my bag. I slid into the big bed next to a half-conscious Cara and tried not to look at the vision that played mercilessly inside my tightly closed eyelids.
What is a newly crowned fourteen year old supposed to do with a secret like that? Tell Cara, potentially devastate her family? Tell my father that his brother-in-law (and partner in law) cheated on his own sister? Blackmailing the culprits wasn’t even a concept, and I knew enough about the school’s gossip ring that if I told any of my other friends, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore. Suddenly I was carrying a load that was thrown at me, and I think that was the moment when my shoulders started to sag a little bit.
I managed to survive the ordeal, feigning enough fatigue the next morning not to arouse suspicion, and made a quick exit. For reasons I can’t explain, instead of placing the empty bottles inside our household trash bag for pickup the next day, I surreptitiously placed them in the recycling bin of the Baptist minister who lived across the street. There they sat, right on top of the plastic and cardboard, in full view of the neighborhood’s morning dog walkers. I often wonder what made me do that. Was he trying to change any gossip that might come out about an innocent victim, or was this a passive-aggressive attempt to fool righteous adulthood? To this day, I’m still not sure.
Four years later, looking back on the horizon of my high school years and looking forward to the college experience, I was filled with anxiety and anticipation. I decided that in order to prepare for the next phase of my life, I needed to stand squarely in the face of the challenge. It was time to get rid of this load, to free myself from this involuntary and extremely heavy load. But by doing so, would he let him rest or give him immortality? Is my telling of this story now responsible, cathartic, or both? That is my secret, not one that I have been forced to carry, but one that I have created of my own free will.