Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 62

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PAMELA LANGLEY

JAGGED LITTLE SUMMER
My brother calls me saying my father gave him a tattered box with
instructions for us to figure out who got which contents. I drive an hour through a
gauntlet of jammed freeways to meet him at his home. He pours me a glass of
wine, and uncaps a bottled beer from which he takes swigs as we dump the
innards of the box onto his dining room table. They turn out to be pictures and
mementoes of our family unit, right up until the summer of 1995 when it all
splintered. Together we sift through the thin papers of our history. I lift a glossy
black and white and see my parents still beautiful, unscathed. In a faded
Kodachrome, they seem wrecked—my mother’s eyes narrowed with resentment,
my dad leaning away from her looking at something just past her. In a family
portrait we are all stiff as papier-mâché.
The summer before I got married, my dad left my mother, his wife of more
than thirty years, for a bleached-blonde pet sitter he’d met at a bowling alley.
Until I heard about the scandal, I was unaware that my father bowled. All that
tumultuous summer the saga played out: Dad leaving and returning, Mom
shattering and regrouping, my brother and I, adults yet again trying to navigate
their perpetual dysfunction.
Juxtaposing my parents’ rupture was my own personal upswing. I felt
valued at my job, rented a cottage on a storybook street in Pasadena, California,
and was newly-engaged and in love. Contrasting my parents’ acrimony, I had a
new normal—happiness.
This was the same summer that Alanis Morisette’s “You Oughta Know”
pummeled the airwaves, demonstrating that women were as capable of
aggressive backlash as men. The former child star had a cupcake smile, and cagefighting lyrics. I bought Jagged Little Pill and howled along with her as I drove,
exorcising the angst of my accumulated knowledge of relationships. Alanis was

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