SOCIALIZATION AND IDENTITY

Below you find a text that is related to the theme Socialization and identity. You’re supposed to study the text carefully and then make an oral presentation. In the presentation you can deal with the text separately and with the way( s) it may be related to the theme. You can choose one or two passages of text for reading aloud.

ISOLATION  By  Lucy Hayden Ancram

In this text, which is a true story from America, the narrator tells us about an episode in her family’s life after her mother’s death.

 A week after my mother's body was cremated, my father borrowed an Econoline van from someone and piled us into it. We sat in cheap beach chairs in the back drinking beer, which spilled off when he took the corners too fast. He drove us out to a place called West Meadow Beach on Long Island's North Fork. The bungalow had been lent to us out of pity. My mother had just been murdered, and my father had been left alone with six teenage children.

. Our summer house was on the Atlantic, in Neponsit, a small town in Queens, and we loved it there. But that place was now contaminated by death. My mother had been strangled in her bedroom there one night late in June. We couldn't have stayed in that house even if we had wanted to. People kept driving by and pointing, and the police had messed it up with their coffee cups and fingerprint stuff.

The stranger's bungalow was on Long Island Sound. There were no waves or pebbles in the sand, and tame, civilized things kept floating by, rocking silently in the water. I was eighteen. Sarah, the youngest, was twelve. Gaby, the oldest, was twenty. Blaise was sixteen, Mark was fourteen, and Heather was thirteen. My father was fifty-one. He had no comfort to offer us, so he gave us isolation instead.

Before West Meadow Beach, we had been a fairly happy, drug-riddled bunch of sniping American kids. We shared our pot but not our favorite clothes; we hated each other's music but loved each other's friends. That all changed when we found ourselves in that house, bound together by cynicism, depression, and alcohol.

Everything inside the bungalow was cold and clammy. There was an unfamiliar cheerfulness to it with toys and floral cushions lit by bright, unshielded bulbs and hurricane lamps. We all shared a sensitivity to light, having been brought up in a dark house and the dark houses of our grandmothers. We sat with the lights out, in the glow of our cigarettes. My father had brought along plenty of booze, every kind of liquor in the book, as well as several cartons of cigarettes, but hardly any food. That was how we inaugurated our tradition of drunken familial empathy.

The drinking didn't make a difference, but it was something to do, something that felt like progress. Nobody had much to say. So we sat on the stranger's wicker furniture and drank very strong drinks: gin and tonic, vodka and grape soda, rum and anything. Somewhere outside, the neighbors were happy. It was around the Fourth of July and they were having parties.

The next day, we parked ourselves at the back of the beach, sprawled out in lounge chairs behind the dunes and grass with our long hair and long legs and burning Marlboros in the sun. To anyone else, we would have looked bored, but we were actually deep in thought. Deep in thought. The Sound was like a big, dull swimming pool. We started drinking first thing, which seemed like a good idea. Nobody went swimming. We had a canoe, which had fallen off the van in the middle of a road on the way out, nearly killing the guy behind us.

That had been one of the high points of the trip. After a few drinks, Heather and Sarah and Dad took the canoe out to the sandbar, and Dad pulled them along, leaning into the breeze like a giant, gray-haired Goliath. The water made his gray chest hair all bedraggled, and his loose shorts clung to his skinny butt. He pulled the canoe with pain all over his face, as though it were a penance. The girls sat in the canoe, silently holding their highballs and staring at my father's back.

We continued like that through the hot, sunny days and long, strange nights. On the fourth day, my cousin came to check on us and spend a few days in the sun. She was loud and talkative and moved through us like a walking television that's been left on and that you don't want to watch. She said she thought that maybe my father shouldn't let the little girls drink. We laughed at that, and then we were very quiet and some of us started to cry. She left the next day. That was in 1980, twenty years ago. I find that hard to believe, because I know that all of us are still there, floating and rocking back and forth, letting the time pass as we wait for things to get better. (Lucy Hayden Ancram, New York. Paul Auster: True Tales of American Life. Faber and Faber 2001.)