When I was twelve and for many years before and a few after, I attended an all-girls school in New York City that was once known as Miss Hewitt's Classes for Young Ladies. There I learnt rhetoric and Latin, French and literature. I acquired a knowledge of the importance of charity balls and all manner of comportment. And when we arrived at school each day our grooming was looked over and considered; if we were messy or inappropriate -- and there was not much room to be either in our uniforms -- we were sent home.
It would be, in some ways, unfair to lay this story at the feet of Hewitt; any school would have been difficult for me. I was a skinny, weird kid that spoke too fast and prior to seven years of orthadonture possessed teeth you could still see when I closed my mouth. And, of course, I got on with people poorly, usually finding them boring or inexplicable. At five, I had arrived in a land that declared pretty girls were good girls were smart girls, and I had little useful flesh and a mind I would eventually come to understand as being the sort that habitually gets a person into more trouble than it can get them out of.
I fought hard, though. I was always a fighter, in some way; and despite being put in all the slow groups because there was really nothing else to do with a child so audaciously awkward as myself, I was determined to show everyone that I had a mind like they couldn't even imagine. Let's face it, I was already a pretty rabid self-aggrandizer by the time I was six, and that didn't earn me many friends either.
So I did what I could, finishing an entire math workbook in a day and then taking detention for having disobeyed the teacher by not waiting for her instructions to begin. In English classes I made up words and inquired after new ones: The white patch on the chest of certain dogs that makes them charming mutts, what part of the dog is that? It should have a name, I declared. I finally even deigned to work on my penmanship, which as a left-hander was a real nightmare for me, so that I could make my science lab reports a work of pristine and archaic art. And eventually, I got what I wanted, class placements in the A groups, A for accelerated.
I believed, somehow, that there was freedom in duty, and if no one would give an ugly girl duty, I'd just go and make some for myself. It was, in many ways, a cunning plan, one that disturbs me more than a bit now -- I was so heavy hearted, just by nature, that I am not as surprised as I once was that my peers didn't like me and my teachers rarely minded even the most brazen displays of this fact.
There is no such thing as playground bullying in a school like Miss Hew's though, even after a name change. At places like that, girls learn power and status young, and those who come to it with none take it up the quickest, or at least try. So girls whispered and jeered, inquired as to my breeding (they were daughters of the Mayflower), my finances, my health, my parents' professions, and I could not answer them, without my tongue literally tripping over my own teeth which were already yellow then from a disease I would not discover I had for another two decades. I did go to speech therapy then, and did for years, and was rewarded with little bits of sugared cereal each time I said a word correctly; I felt like a pet. Stories like this always come back to dogs.
When I was twelve, and the Cancer Dances (our nickname for charity dances that cost $25 a head, a not insignificant sum for entertainment for a child of my age in the early- to mid- 80s) had started, it quickly became a terribly shameful thing to be home on a Friday or Saturday night. And while my parents always sent me to those dances and I always danced by myself, with boys, with anyone in my vicinity, not just without shame, but with a wild smugness, all weekend nights without a Cancer Dance, I was home. There were no sleepovers or other playdates for me.
Maybe, the girls who called figured I would answer the phone and that like their parents, mine would be out on our glorious town. Maybe they were counting on just the opposite. I am not sure, but it was my father who answered the phone and things in my house were always done a certain way. A call was never given to its intended party, child or adult, until one could announce who the caller was. So when my father asked who was calling, and they refused to divulge their identity, he asked again.
And then they said something to him, the exact words of which I have never known. I suspect they told him at great length I was a cocksucker, because later he said he had never heard such language even from sailors, and my dad cursed a fair amount at home. It remains the only thing I can think of that would have shocked him, indicted me and pleased those brash girls of more than two decades ago.
He did not get off the phone with them quickly, and a great deal was said on both sides. I remember deducing what was going on, another prank phone call, and begging him, in tears, to just get off the phone, to let it go. When he eventually did, and when he was done with his invective regarding the filthy mouths of these children, he asked me what I had ever done to make people treat me this way.
Nothing. Nothing, and I am fairly certainly I actually wailed. But he did not believe me. The next day, he bought an answering machine, and from then on all calls to the house were screeened. Only after the caller identified themselves to the tape would it be permissable for my mother or I to pick up the phone. My father, of course, sometimes broke his own rules.
These days my mother works at a high end jewelry store of international reknown. It's the type of place fairytales are made of, or, at least, the proof of having scored a very respectable marriage, in the most old-fashioned and commoditized sense of the thing. The girls I went to school with are, from time to time, her clients, and sometimes, she calls me up to say she waited on one of them, and how they would note how sorry they were for the way they always treated me -- they were just girls then, they didn't know any better, she tells me they say.
And it is then that I have to explain to my brave, naive, eccentric mother that whether they are liars are not, her forgiveness of them, her civility to them, her willingness to make the sale, appalls me. Don't you understand, I ask, that in their eyes, you are just the help? These apologies are about being magnanimous, not repentant. She tells me she really thinks they're sorry.
And maybe they are, but they don't matter so much anymore. Certainly, these days, I do not live in terror of them. But I do live in terror of them laughing at my mother and her being blind to it. I live in terror of my father, who still wonders what I did to make those girls hate me, and still, twenty-three years later, won't let my mother pick up the phone in her own home. I live in terror of the fact that girls like me, even with fixed teeth, a trained voice, and at least a vague sense of appropriateness, can't ever be forgiven, not by our fathers and, sometimes, not by anyone.
And I live in terror of the possibility that I may be afraid of dogs, which I am, eventhough we owned one when I was a baby, simply because I've always been one too.
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