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

! 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 !!Assisi!!!56!