“Forget disco balls. Forget bell-bottoms. Forget lava lamps and mood rings and pet rocks.”
For Jeremy Hilary Jones, the ’70s were all about survival.
Appalachian settings … fractured families … vulnerable children … Ursula Major is a quirky family saga in the vein of a reminiscence about a bullied youth struggling to keep his younger sister safe while their parents’ marriage disintegrates.
“Take good care of your sister.” This is the refrain Jeremy repeatedly hears growing up in a family of four in a small town on the Ohio River beginning in 1974, when Ursula—nicknamed “Ursie,” his parents’ Little Bear cub—is born. But his father abandons the family for salmon fishing in Alaska, and his mother turns to a snake-handling religious sect for spiritual comfort. From here, brother and sister navigate a series of challenges that culminate in the ’80s with a brutal assault that bonds the siblings in a quest for revenge.
But psychological counseling has convinced Jeremy that his memory about this incident is faulty if not fabricated. As the grown-up version of Jeremy contemplates reality versus imagination, he can only wonder: “What matters more: objective truth or the relationships that endure, forged by trauma?”
“Forget disco balls. Forget bell-bottoms. Forget lava lamps and mood rings and pet rocks.”
For Jeremy Hilary Jones, the ’70s were all about survival.
Appalachian settings … fractured families … vulnerable children … Ursula Major is a quirky family saga in the vein of a reminiscence about a bullied youth struggling to keep his younger sister safe while their parents’ marriage disintegrates.
“Take good care of your sister.” This is the refrain Jeremy repeatedly hears growing up in a family of four in a small town on the Ohio River beginning in 1974, when Ursula—nicknamed “Ursie,” his parents’ Little Bear cub—is born. But his father abandons the family for salmon fishing in Alaska, and his mother turns to a snake-handling religious sect for spiritual comfort. From here, brother and sister navigate a series of challenges that culminate in the ’80s with a brutal assault that bonds the siblings in a quest for revenge.
But psychological counseling has convinced Jeremy that his memory about this incident is faulty if not fabricated. As the grown-up version of Jeremy contemplates reality versus imagination, he can only wonder: “What matters more: objective truth or the relationships that endure, forged by trauma?”
My sister was born in the back of a bus. At least, this is how I remember it. She was already a minor celebrity at birth. My mother, too, from the moment of delivery. We only had the one car, which my father used for work, so we resorted to taking the bus to run errands. Our town was big enough to maintain an old clunker of a converted school bus, a skoolie that prowled its route like a restless elephant in a zoo, just not a hospital with a maternity ward.
We were coming home from a trip to the Salvation Army when her water broke suddenly. Very suddenly. I heard a sound like a popgun shooting its cork (muted backfiring of the exhaust?), then a gush of water like a urinal flushing (slow hiss of the airbrakes?). My mother stood up and looked down between her legs. I looked down, too. There was a puddle of water on the floor.
“Mama?” I cried, feeling afraid and embarrassed. She was wearing a dress, and I thought she had peed her underpants.
“Oh, dear God,” she announced, “my water just broke!”
The bus driver took charge of getting us to the nearest city with an ER in record time, but Ursula popped out just as we arrived. It was a momentous event. Where was I? Still in my seat, trying to puzzle out how water, which I knew to be a liquid, was capable of breakage, which I knew to be a property of solids.
Over the previous nine months, my parents had been gradually preparing me for the arrival of a baby by asking me variations of a single theme: How would I feel being a big brother?
The year was 1974. I was four years old. I didn’t have too many thoughts about the matter. I suppose I thought it would be fine as long as I wouldn’t have to share my toys.
And now, here she was already.
My mother lay in the aisle with her legs raised. I could never look at her face again without picturing it as it appeared in the compressed intensity of those several moments. It all happened very quickly. I sat quietly. I don’t think I looked at my mother for long. A single glance had been enough.
Disembarking the bus, I became somewhat of an afterthought as I followed along, shepherded to the emergency room by someone’s guiding hand, presumably the bus driver’s.
At some point, my father showed up from his job behind the seafood counter of a local supermarket wearing an apron smeared with fish guts and smelling like a giant carp. I never wanted to go fishing after that. I didn’t let him hug me for weeks.
“Jeremy Hilary Jones, you have a new baby sister,” he said, sitting next to me in the lobby. He often enjoyed calling me by my full name—first, middle, last—and I admit, there is something rhythmical in the way the names all blend together. He was tall and thin. His face was sallow. He tended to have a slant-eyed look, as though he was always trying to figure out a new angle on life.
“I saw,” I told him, “I already saw,” although I hadn’t—not really.
And here is another memory that isn’t so much false as misguided. At the time, with the blood all over my father’s apron, I developed the impression he had single-handedly delivered my baby sister from the bowels of my mother. Of course, I wouldn’t have known about the intricacies of female anatomy that had made a C-section necessary. But the connection between the blood on my father’s apron and what I found out later was an emergency operation to save my sister’s life imprinted itself on my mind. The umbilical cord, it turned out, had become wrapped around her neck, causing distress. There had been only minutes to spare. Later, in the postpartum room that she shared with a distraught woman and her bawling newborn, my mother showed me the incision, a vertical rift descending from a point below her belly button, like the slash of a scimitar held together with a railroad track of stitches—a mixed metaphor, if ever there was one.
“Oh, I do hope the scar tissue goes away,” she would sigh. “They’ve ruined me forever with this crazy stunt they had to pull just to get your sister out.”
Somehow, though, I sensed she was pleased with this outward sign of a difficult birth, maybe by the way she held my hand after the stitches were removed and had me trace the visible portion of the scar over and over with my forefinger, as though to make it deeper, the way I might dig a small trench in the wet sand of a rain-soaked sandbox.
And so I have two memories, as though superimposed on each other: the one a distinct vision of my sister being born on a bus, the other of my being told of an operation called a Cesarean section to save her. Had my sister been born twice? Had they put her back inside my mother just so they could cut her back out again? Or had there been two sisters, twins, only one of which survived?
In any case, they had already named her Ursula by the time she was born—“Ursie” for short. Like a constellation, she was to become my mother and father’s “Little Bear,” Ursa Minor, home to Polaris, the fixed star in the heavens about which all of the other constellations revolve. Although too little to know the names of stars, I already formed a presentiment that Ursie was to become the focal point of my parents’ attention.
My father brought me back to the room where my mother was nursing my sister. After I inspected the red, tiny, wrinkled organism that was supposed to be my new sibling, I picked up a magazine that was lying around. I remember the advertisement for Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion on the back cover. It was the middle of March in Ohio—in fact, the very Ides, Ursie’s birthday and Julius Caesar’s death-day occurring on the same date.
My mother took it as a bad omen. My father didn’t believe in them—omens, that is—and told her so.
“Maybe when your mother is better, we’ll take a vacation,” my father said, looking over my shoulder at the beautiful tan model stretched out on a beach. The thought of a vacation seemed to intrigue him as an alternative to late nights staying up with a baby.
I’ve been told that the giving-birth-on-the-bus part of this story didn’t actually happen the way I remember it. This all came out in a therapist’s office after hours of idle chitchat about being and nothingness. And then, somewhere in there, I began to realize that many of my memories from this period are manufactured. I had—and have—a difficult time separating what’s real from what’s not so real. At least, this is what my therapist has told me, and I’ve come to believe her. This episode falls into the latter category. For proof, my therapist, an earnest young intern fresh out of her master’s degree program, produced an archived news article from the Marietta Times that she located through a remote library search on her phone.
It’s true my mother’s water broke while we sat side by side on the bus. And it’s true she pulled the cord for the next stop. Instead of getting off, she calmly informed the bus driver of the situation, and after ejecting all nonessential passengers, of whom there were two, the driver veered off course to deliver us to the closest hospital, which happened to be a forty-five minute drive upstream along the Ohio River to Marietta Memorial. Apparently, she did lie down in the aisle, but it wasn’t to give birth, only to shift her body into a more comfortable position as she went into labor. Once we arrived, medics quickly wheeled my mother to the emergency-room entrance.
So much for facts. In my memory, I recall news reporters with microphones and the bright lights of cameras chasing my mother like a mob of hyenas.
But my therapist has cast doubt on this recollection as well. Granted, the article, “Woman in Labor Rushed to Hospital by Bus,” made front-page news of the local paper, but there were no accompanying photographs of the bus’s arrival, and all quotes—of bus driver and mother and attending doctor—were reported after the fact. If the incident had been broadcast on local TV news stations, the video footage was probably lost to history.
“Too bad this all happened in an era before smart phones,” my therapist observed. “You would have gone viral.”
In my mind’s eye, though, my mother and I were celebrities. We were stars.
Jeremy Jones grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a small town on the banks of the Ohio River, with his mother, his younger sister, the eponymous Ursula, and sometimes his father. As an adult, he recounts stories from his childhood to his therapist, but as they become more outlandish and the inconsistencies mount up, we, and the therapist, are left with questions. Are these just the natural confusions and conflations of fifty-year-old memories, or something more? Just how unreliable a narrator is Jeremy, anyway?
Conklin’s is a persuasive voice and Jeremy’s tales have an almost hypnotic quality, immersing the reader in the details of his lost childhood, from slinkies to squirt guns. While this makes the novel very readable, it does become apparent that this is a series of connected stories rather than one overall narrative. The stories all have their own charms, and some incidents and objects introduced in the earlier ones do pay off later on, but I did begin to find that I was starting each one hoping that this would be where the main plot would kick in, and that I was disappointed when it didn’t.
As Jeremy’s inconsistencies move from remembering Post-its from before they were invented to more fundamental inaccuracies, we might suspect that his stories may be hiding a darker reality. The version he tells his therapist is not exactly rosy, but broadly, everything works out sort-of all right. But what if those sort-of all right resolutions were Jeremy’s invention? What sort of trauma might have driven him to seek therapy in the first place?
The way that the therapist points out Jeremy’s apparent departures from the truth invites the reader to ask these questions, but we don’t get to find out if we’re right or not. Adult Jeremy decides that he has had enough of his therapist’s nit-picking, and that his memories are more important than accuracy. This is fair enough on a psychological level, but for this reader at least, it was frustrating not to see the apparent discrepancy between fiction and reality realised. This is a good novel, but I feel that inside it there is a great one, lurking behind the text, not quite being let out.
Note: Since I wrote this review, the author has made some small but significant amendments to the text which do address many of the more critical comments I made. I'm happy to say that this is now much closer to the great novel I felt was in there. It's highly recommended.