Page 24 of Jason
“Oh.Pomona,” she said with a flick of her wrist.Her life was definitely not as interesting as his had been.
“Pomona.Where is that?”
“It’s a Los Angeles suburb.There’s not much going on there, to be honest.”That was an understatement.
“Okay,” he said, and picked up his glass of whisky.“Tell me.”
Honestly, Mallory felt that her parents were topics that were better left in a closet somewhere.They were children of the seventies.Products, her dad had once said, of the California hippie culture.They’d met at a pollution protest.Their marriage was not a legal one—they’d written their own vows and said them to each other under a Joshua tree.In the picture, her dad had worn his hair in a ponytail, and her mother’s hair had hung long and free and untrimmed.They’d never changed their look—they still wore their hair in that way, except that her dad’s ponytail was silver now, and her mother’s hair was frizzy and streaked with gray.But at least she’d stopped wearing the flower crowns somewhere along the way.
Her parents were hard to explain.“My family is different,” she said.
“Well thanks, but that is really vague.Everyone’s family is different.”
“Okay.My parents were hippies when they met.Last of a dying breed.”Another clap of thunder overhead caused her to pick up her glass and sip more.“They went with the live-and-let-live theory of parenting.”
Jason gave her a funny smile.“What does that mean?”
“It means that there were no rules and no boundaries.”Her parents had been social warriors all of her life, tackling the issues of the day and dragging their children along.They’d tried to instill into their large brood the need to have every person’s voice heard.“You don’t know how lucky you are to live in a country where you have the rightto protest!”Mallory’s father used to say, pounding the table with his fist to punctuate his passion for free speech or the injustices in the world.
For the first eleven years of her life, Mallory and her siblings had lived like forest sprites, flitting through life without any guidance whatsoever other than to look out for one another.Their task, their parents had explained, was to experience life as it came to them—not have experience dictated to them.That meant it they wanted to eat through a box of Count Chocula in one sitting, so be it—they would pay the consequences later when their bodies rebelled.If it meant walking out the door and racing across a busy thoroughfare to check out a dog behind a fence, they should do that, too.If they got hit by a car, they would remember to look both ways.If they didn’t want to practice reading or writing, no problem—the desire would come soon enough, so their parents’ thinking went.“You can’t force a round peg into a square hole,” her father would say.
Mallory had believed the entire world lived the same as they did,free to be you and me,so to speak,in a small, three-bedroom house.They ate ramen with ketchup when the rent was late.They read by candle when the lights were turned off.They built small campfires and slept in tents when they were evicted.
“Sounds kind of cool,” Jason ventured.
“Not so much.Kids need boundaries and rules.Mom and Dad treated us like experiments.”
“Weird thing to say, but I am intrigued,” Jason said with a laugh.“Like how?”
“We were a merry band of Pippy Longstockings, to be honest.We were homeschooled, which, in practice, meant that on the days we wanted to learn something, we could.On the days we didn’t feel like it, we didn’t.You can imagine how often we didn’t feel like it.We had no boundaries, we were free to come and go as we liked.We had no televisions, only books.”
It felt so strange to be talking about this now.That life had been so long ago, and she’d changed so much.She recognized that her life had made her who she was today, and without that life, she probably wouldn’t be as driven as she was now.She didn’t like to recall it.People could be so judgmental.
“But you went to college,” Jason said.
“I did.I really wanted to go.”Her siblings hadn’t gone, even with her begging them to apply themselves, to go to school, to have a better life than the one they’d had growing up.Today, Meghan was an accounting clerk at an electrical company.Edison was seriously overweight, no thanks to the Count Chocula habit he still had, and was a maintenance worker at a local elementary school.Nadia was married with four kids and pregnant with her fifth.And Jet?Mallory’s oldest brother was eighteen when he headed out to join the Navy against his parents’ wishes.“You’re feeding a war machine, Jet,” his father had pleaded with him.“We’ve taught you to love peace.”
“The pay is pretty good, Dad, and I’ll get to go on a ship,” Jet had said.And off he’d gone, disappearing into the world.They heard from him from time to time, but mostly, Jet had left that life behind.
“So you just decided to go to college?”Jason asked.
“In a way, yeah,” she said.
“Tell me,” he said, and he seemed genuinely interested.
“You don’t know what it’s like, to brought up like that.We were unkempt and uneducated.We all wore our hair long, like our parents.We looked like swamp creatures, too, because we only bathed when we wanted to.We dressed in hand-me-down clothes my parents picked up at local church bazaars and garage sales.We were required to volunteer two hours a week at the local soup kitchen and then had to spend so many weekends protesting inequalities with all these other, like-minded people.”
“Ah,” Jason said.
“But one thing they did was take us to the library every week.I suspect because it had air-conditioning, but still.We went every week.That’s where I discovered television and movies.On Saturdays, they had cartoons in one room.And you could rent movies.By the time I was eleven, my parents finally had to face the fact that at least one of them needed a job, because feeding five kids and two dogs was too much for them to handle.My dad took a job in Los Angeles, which was quite the commute.My mom took a job in a grocery store.And we all went to school for the first time.But that’s where I found my people.My organized, ambitious people.”
“Okay, I’m starting to form a picture,” Jason said, smiling.
“All that time, not five blocks from my house, was this amazing world of schedules and organization and boundaries.”She laughed.“There was none of the “find your own boundaries” there, because the boundaries were clearly demarcated.”She’d learned of all the myriad possibilities of adult occupations, whereas before, she assumed the world of jobs existed around cashiers and delivery vans or no job at all, like her parents.There were three-ring binders with brightly colored tabs, and that one could sort out her entire life into one of them.More, if she liked.
“Let me guess—you were the teacher’s pet.”
“And straight-A student,” Mallory said proudly.“I really loved hearing about my potential.Oh, and I could hang out after school and watch movies in my history teacher’s class.I think he knew I was struggling to keep my foot in that world, you know?”
