chapter 38
As if things weren’t bad enough with Sunny in the mental hospital, I suffered yet another loss the winter of my freshman year at Bakersfield Junior College. That year, just as she had done when she first arrived in Bakersfield, Yvonne summoned all the Y teen girls downtown for an important meeting. The air was filled with electricity as we all waited anxiously to hear what she had to say.
“I asked you all here to announce that I will be leaving the Y and Bakersfield,” Yvonne announced first thing.
There was an audible gasp in the room. For the first time in my life, I understood what people meant when they say, “My heart sank.” I felt like my heart retreated deep inside me—so deep that it would never be found again.
“I’ll be moving to LA to be the director of the YWCA in Pasadena,” she explained. “I’ve loved being your Y director and I’ll be sad to leave. I will miss you all . . .” She continued speaking, but I could hardly hear her anymore. I was far away. Along with my heart, the rest of me had retreated.
I felt utterly abandoned. Yvonne meant so much to me. She had listened to me when I needed to talk about my mother, and she’d been there for me when I found out Sunny had been hospitalized. And though I’d feared the worst after drinking at her apartment, she hadn’t seemed to hold it against me; she’d continued to be her usual friendly, albeit demanding, self.
To me, Yvonne represented hope and the ability to create change. During her time with us, she had galvanized the girls in the clubs to reach out to our community to help those less fortunate, she had increased the popularity of the Y clubs, and she’d helped girls like me to feel empowered and respect ourselves.
She was the most accomplished person I’d met so far in my life. At twenty-seven, she had graduated with a master’s degree in social work and been hired as program director of first one YWCA and now a larger one in a big city. She was the first person I ever knew who was a visionary. She had many creative ideas and was able to get other people to climb on board with her plans in order to bring them to fruition. She was the one who’d had the idea to open a teen nightclub for the kids in Bakersfield in order to get them off the streets. She’d had us put on the musical South Pacific to raise money for needy families in Bakersfield. And she’d brought all the Y teen clubs together for weekend retreats where black, Latino, and white kids all danced, played, and sang together. Before that, everyone had stayed on their own side of the tracks—literally—and had little or no exposure to other races, cultures, and ways of life.
Yvonne was also the first person that I consciously viewed as a role model. I wanted to be just like her, to be just as accomplished and to inspire people the way she did.
So for me, losing Yvonne was not just a personal loss; it represented a different kind of loss as well—a loss of hope. I tried not to allow her leaving to affect me in that way. I tried to stay inspired by what she’d accomplished. But without her presence, it was difficult. It just felt like one more in a series of losses— losses that I felt were taking pieces of me away.
Sunny was in the state hospital for about three months when a visiting psychiatrist re-evaluated her and determined that she wasn’t schizophrenic after all. As Sunny’s mother explained it, he said she had been re-traumatized when her psychiatrist called in the second therapist. Being in a room with two men must have triggered memories of her gang rape. They gave her further treatment and then released her to the care of her psychiatrist in Bakersfield.
Sunny had dodged a bullet. When she got home, she told me that, had the visiting psychiatrist not agreed to see her, she would most certainly still be in the state hospital, probably indefinitely.
I was so happy to see her home. But things were different between us now. She was distant and uninterested in talking about her experience in the hospital. In fact, she didn’t seem interested in talking about anything regarding her feelings. The sad truth was that the Sunny I had felt so close to, the Sunny who had seemed to be a soul mate, was no longer available to me and probably was no longer available even to herself.
Somehow, she got hooked up with some new friends who introduced her to skydiving, which was right up her alley. This way, she could be reckless and risk her life as often as she wanted.
She took me with her one day when she jumped from a plane. I watched anxiously from the ground as she floated back down to earth. She had taken lessons and tried to get me to do the same, explaining how safe it was, what you needed to do to land safely, and what equipment you needed, but I wasn’t having any of it. It was too scary for me. Besides, it was expensive, and I was saving money for books for my second year of college.
Sunny had decided not to go back to college and I guess she started spending most of her time with her new friends because she didn’t call me very often and she always seemed to be too busy to get together. Then one day, about a month after she was released from the hospital, she called to tell me she was moving to LA. We didn’t even have a chance to see each other before she left. She promised to keep in touch.
I felt hurt about
