If Loving You Is Wrong (13 page)

“Mary Kay would come home after being two hours late and sit in her car for a half hour and go through mail and papers, and I'd be just sitting there waiting to go home. After the kids were sleeping... I was just sitting there. She would irritate me.”

The lateness was in the coming
and
going. Often, the twins would get an urgent call asking them to hurry over to help get the Letourneaus out the door for church or a party or a family gathering at Grandma Nadine's in Puyallup. The chronic tardiness was as puzzling as it was irritating. It wasn't that Mary Kay and Steve were running late because they'd overslept or had forgotten the time of the event. It seemed like pure disorganization. A gift was being wrapped in one corner by Mary Kay while she was doing her hair; at the same time, one of the little ones was instructed where to hunt for a missing shoe. Steve was helping iron a shirt while making a snack because one of the kids was hungry.

Throughout all of it, Mary Kay remained in charge.

“She was always focused, now you need to do this, I need to do this... She knew what was happening, but things were lost. And everything had to be perfect before she went out. Ironed, clean. Everyone had to be just right,” Amber recalled.

Every once in a while Mary Kay would settle down on the ratty sofa or at the table and talk about her past. Sometimes she pulled out pictures of her family, her parents, and her siblings and compared them to snapshots of her own children. She told the Fish twins that she and her mother weren't close, that her father had run for president, and that “Steven was special because he had a twin in heaven.” She kept a portrait of her parents near her kitchen stove.

She also told the teens next door that she had barely graduated from high school because she was a nonstop party girl. The revelation shocked Amber because it was so different from what she had imagined of Mary Kay's pool-perfect life in California.

She was a cheerleader, a perfect student
...

And though she spoke of her family now and then, Mary Kay rarely spoke about Steve's family—with the exception of his sister, whom she did not like. In fact, she used Stacy as a weapon whenever she and Steve got into an argument. Mary Kay considered Stacy a pleasant enough girl, but not particularly bright.

“If I've ever needed to get at him in a fight,” she told Amber one day, when they were hanging around the condo, “I'd say, 'you're just like Stacy,' and that would really get him.”

It happens in nearly every family and the reasons vary. But Mary Claire was Daddy's little girl and Steven was Mary Kay's pride and joy. Parents and children often pair off and special bonds are formed. In the Letourneau household it was clear to just about everybody that Mary Kay and her daughter didn't get along. They were always at odds. Steven, however, idolized his mother and she idolized him, too.

“Mary Kay and Mary Claire butted heads a lot. Mary Claire was stubborn and she didn't put up with anything. Steven was Mary Kay's prodigy. That kid could do no wrong. Mary Kay wanted him to be the boy genius and worked at it really hard. A lot harder than she worked with Mary Claire,” Amber Fish recalled.

And from where one observer sat, the relationship between mother and son was detrimental to Mary Kay's oldest daughter.

“Mary Claire was most jealous of their relationship, I think that's why she leaned toward Steve so much.”

There were other factors at work, too. Mary Kay wanted her daughter to slim down, though to any observer the little girl looked just fine.

She was a child, for goodness' sake, not a fashion model.

“I know she was very concerned about Mary Claire's weight,” Angie Fish said later. “I remember when we first moved in there and she was three and they were watching what she ate:
'Mary Claire's not allowed to have any cheese.' “

Steven was everything to his mother. Although the twins felt Mary Kay loved all of her children, she was closest to Steven. The Fish girls remembered “Mommy and Steven Days,” when Mary Kay and her son would go out and do things together, while Steve played with Mary Claire. When Steven got a little older, Mary Kay would take him shopping. They'd return from their outings with tired feet and bulging Nordstrom bags.

The twins later talked about the shopping habits of their favorite neighbor.

“She had really expensive tastes—more expensive than anyone I'd ever known—” Amber recalled.

“And that she could not afford,” cut in Angie.

“She was way out of her range,” Amber continued. “She brought home bags and bags from Nordstrom when we knew they could not afford it. Shoes for the kids, a two-hundred-dollar dress for herself.”

Her best friend from her days at Arizona State, Kate Stewart, understood Mary Kay's quandary and her
modus operandi.
So what if she over-shopped? Who didn't max out a credit card from time to time? Kate always considered Mary Kay a “loves life” kind of woman, one who lived each minute to the fullest. She knew what she wanted and went after it with the kind of gusto that few could emulate. And, more than anything, she wanted to be surrounded by people who lived life the same way. That included her friends, her children, and her husband. Mary Kay was a woman who wanted a lot from the world, a woman who
required
a lot out of life. Yet there she was, trapped. Trapped in a dull, mundane existence in a crummy condo in Kent, Washington, with a husband she didn't really love.

Her emotions quietly fraying like blue jeans, Mary Kay deserved more.

BOOK II

Teacher

Mary Letourneau is not only a gift to Shorewood Elementary School, but a gift to the entire Highline School District.

—A teaching colleague quoting the Shorewood principal's last evaluation of the teacher headed for disaster

The school is suffering. The teachers certainly suffered tremendously from this. Teachers walk in those classrooms... [and ask,] “what has this done with my standing in my classroom? Are they [the students] going to worry about me?” It chokes me up to think of the impact on them and the students.

—Gary Roe, grandfather of a Shorewood student

This is not a case questioning our educational system or the delivery of curriculum.

—Mary Kay Letourneau in a press release, November 1997

Before students left, I made sure I gave them a choice of a high-five, handshake, or a hug. H.H.H. I got it from a teacher at Seattle U. and I did it every day with every student since my first second-grade class. It was a way of touching base, ensuring contact.

—Mary Kay Letourneau on a teaching technique, 1999

Chapter 19

IN NEARLY EVERY way, White Center couldn't be farther from Corona del Mar, California.
White Center.
The name is a big joke among Seattlelites who don't live there. Toss a rock, they say, and you couldn't hit a white person if your life depended on it. Nearby Top Hat is another with a moniker that doesn't fit the ambience of the place for which it is named. Those who live there shrug and acknowledge the obvious.

“You'd think a place like Top Hat would be a little classier,” said one resident, aware of the irony.

Though White Center's name is a joke, its nickname is worse. The slogan the chamber of commerce would like to forget is Rat City, from an infestation that local boosters claim has been annihilated, although most know rodents rule the basements and back bedrooms of some of the Seattle area's worst housing. The projects appear tidy and nondescript, and some think they are a cut above some housing in Vili's neighborhood, a world of jacked-up cars, liquor bottles, and water-stained curtains. This is not Compton or Watts, but it is Seattle's version of the 'hood. Rap and hip-hop pulse in headsets and from boom boxes. Country, Top 40 radio,
classical,
be damned.

If other Seattle neighborhoods are more defined by money, cars, and lawn services, White Center is defined by the people and cultures that claim it. Cambodians, Russians, Samoans, and African-Americans run the restaurants, go to the storefront churches, and their children stake out the Taco Time and Dairy Queen on Ambaum Boulevard. When drizzle doesn't send them for cover, some kids hang around the shores of a pond behind Evergreen High School where drug use is so common deals are done in the light of day.

This is the neighborhood of a boy who would be the catalyst for unbelievable change and dire consequences for Mary Kay Letourneau. This is the neighborhood that would become the home of her youngest children.

Enrollment at the Highline School District had declined since the 1970s. After Boeing went nearly bankrupt and laid off most of its workforce (“Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?” read a famous billboard) enrollment dropped from 40,000 to just less than half that in the mid-1990s. Perhaps understandably so, those who were left behind to hold down the fort at Burien and White Center in many cases could not afford to move elsewhere. To the south of the Highline School District boundary in Des Moines and Normandy Park and north to Shorewood and Seahurst, however, are the Gold Coast homes of the more affluent.

“This is the land that time forgot,” said Nick Latham, public relations flack for the district. “Progress jumped over the area and not much has changed.” When the former television reporter first came to work for the district one aspect fascinated him above many others: the people who lived in the area
never
left it. White Center, Burien, Roxbury—whatever the address, it was their town.

“They are living within minutes of one of the most vital, exciting cities in the country, if not the world, and they may never, ever come here. It might as well be New York City. Nothing in Seattle interests them. They do not cross that First Avenue South Bridge.”

In the center of the district is SeaTac International Airport, one of the nation's busiest, and the source of many jobs and, without a doubt, the starting point for nearly all who live in the area. But it is more than that. Ironically, the airport is the area's biggest impediment to communication and traffic. It is also noisy. And as the airport has grown, nearby property values have plummeted and people have departed for quieter environs to the north or east.

For those coming and going, the airport is conveniently located between Seattle and Tacoma. For those who live close by—especially directly in its flight path—it is a disaster. Some schools have been so impacted by the noise that teachers have to stop lessons to wait for passing planes to go by. Families have turned up the volume on their televisions to ear-splitting decibels and learned to live with it.

The Port of Seattle is public enemy number one in those neighborhoods, filled with people who are tired of the promises for noise abatement and the reminder that they “knew what they were getting into when they moved there.” The truth is, many didn't know. Airport traffic has grown steadily over the past quarter century and many of those complaining have been doing so for years.

Nick Latham saw the impact the airport had on the people of the Highline School District. The Port of Seattle, he said, was to blame.

“My allegiance has changed since I took the job down there. So much power. They [the politicians] don't care about the communities, and they don't care about our kids. Should they have to suffer?”

If White Center and the surrounding areas seem a bit hopeless, despite a proliferation of the glitzy-cheap signs of fast food franchises, Burien has retained its small-town feel. It even has a feed store. Like most of suburbia, it isn't a pretty place, but it is home to thousands who sleep there at night and drive to jobs in Seattle or farther out. In her early years at the district, Mary Kay Letourneau did a reverse commute. In the fall of 1989, she came from outside the community to teach second grade in room 20 at Shorewood Elementary. She was admired and loved by nearly everyone in those early years. Her energy was unequaled; her ability to reach into a child's soul to pull out the dreams that she could foster was a gift. There wasn't a parent who didn't want their child in her class; there wasn't a little girl who didn't want to be just like the pretty teacher with the somewhat spiky, gelled hair.
Hip hair.

Patricia Watson was Mary Letourneau's principal for four of the teacher's first five years at Shorewood. She considered Mary Kay to be one of her top teachers, a nurturing presence in the classroom where some students needed that kind of caring in addition to their lessons. Mary was the type of teacher who looked for the best way to reach a student and she would make the effort to find the way.

She was also an excellent mother. Patricia would never forget the day Mary Kay brought her son and daughter to the office to meet her. Mary Kay was so proud of them. And it showed. Steven and Mary Claire were groomed to perfection; shoes shined, hair combed and parted. Over the course of several years, the Letourneau children would frequently come to Shorewood to wait for their mother. Steve would drop them off to be with Mary Kay, and they ended up in the principal's office coloring pictures.