Looking Back (6 page)

But though the educational jargon changed, the school’s basic attitude remained constant. Anything too different (too bad or too exceptional), anything that meant making another column in the record book, was frowned upon. A lone recorder, in a field of squeaking flutophones, a reader of Dickens, while the class was laboring page by page (out loud, pace set by the slowest oral readers) with the adventures of the Marshall family and their dog Ranger, a ten-page story when the teacher had asked for a two-pager—they all met with suspicion. Getting straight A’s was fine with the school as long as one pursued the steady, earnest, unspectacular course. But to complete a piece of work well, without having followed the prescribed steps—that seemed a threat to the school, proof that we could progress without it. Vanity rears its head everywhere, even in the classroom, but surely extra guards against it should be put up there. I remember an English teacher who wouldn’t grant me an A until second term, an indication, for whoever cared about that sort of thing, that under her tutelage I had
improved.
Every composition was supposed to have evolved from three progressively refined rough drafts. I moved in just the opposite direction for the school’s benefit: I wrote my “final drafts” the first time around, then deliberately aged them a bit with earnest-looking smudges and erasures.

Kids who have gone through elementary school at the bottom of their class might argue here that it
was
the smart ones who got special attention—independent study groups, free time to spend acting in plays and writing novels (we were always starting autobiographies) and researching “Special Reports”—all the things that kept our groups self-perpetuating, with the children lucky enough to start out on top forever in the teachers’ good graces, and those who didn’t start there always drilling on decimals and workbook extra-work pages. But Oyster River was an exemplary democratic school and showed exemplary concern for slow students—the underachievers—and virtuously left the quick and bright to swim for themselves, or tread water endlessly.

It always seemed to me as a Group One member, that there was little individual chance to shine. It was as if the school had just discovered the division of labor concept, and oh, how we divided it. Book reports, math problems, maps for history and even art projects—we did them all in committee. Once we were supposed to write a short story that way, pooling our resources of Descriptive Adjectives and Figures of Speech to come up with an adventure that read like one of those typing-book sentences (“A quick brown fox …”), where every letter of the alphabet is represented. Our group drawings had the look of movie magazine composites that show the ideal star, with Paul Newman’s eyes, Brando’s lips, Steve McQueen’s hair. Most people loved group work—the kids because working together meant not working very hard, tossing your penny in the till and leaving it for someone else to count, the teachers because committee projects prepared us for community work, (getting along with the group, leadership abilities …) and, more important, I think, to some of them, they required a lot less marking time than individual projects did. The finished product didn’t matter so much—in fact, anything too unusual seemed only to rock our jointly rowed canoe.

The school day was for me, and for most of us, I think, a mixture of humiliation and boredom. Teachers would use their students for the entertainment of the class. Within the first few days of the new term, someone quickly becomes the class jester, someone is the class genius, the “brain” who, the teacher, with doubtful modesty, reminds us often, probably has a much higher IQ than she. Some student is the troublemaker black sheep (the one who always makes her sigh), the one who will be singled out as the culprit when the whole class seems like a stock exchange of note passing, while all the others stare at him, looking shocked.

Although their existence is denied now, in this modern, psychologically enlightened age, teachers’ pets are still very much around, sometimes in the form of the girl with super-neat penmanship and Breck-clean hair, sometimes in the person of the dependable Brain, who always gets called on when the superintendent is visiting the class. Teachers, I came to see, could be intimidated by a class, coerced or conned into liking the students who were popular among the kids, and it was hard not to miss, too, that many teachers were not above using unpopular students to gain acceptance with the majority. They had an instinct, teachers did, for who was well-liked and who wasn’t; they learned all the right nicknames and turned away, when they could, if one of their favorites was doing the kind of thing that brought a 3 in conduct. We saw it all, like underlings watching the graft operations of ambitious politicians, powerless to do anything about it.

That was what made us most vulnerable: our powerlessness. Kids don’t generally speak up or argue their case. No one is a child long enough, I suppose, or articulate enough, while he is one, to become a spokesman for his very real, and often oppressed, minority group. And then when we outgrow childhood, we no longer care, and feel, in fact, that if
we
went through it all, so should the next generation. Children are
expected
to be adversaries of school and teachers, so often, in the choosing up of sides, parents will side with the school. Nobody expects children to like school; therefore it’s no surprise when they don’t. What should be a surprise is that they dislike it for many good reasons.

It would be inaccurate to say I hated school. I had a good time sometimes, usually when I was liked, and therefore on top. And with all the other clean-haired girls who had neat penmanship and did their homework, I took advantage of my situation. When I was on the other side of the teacher’s favor though, I realized that my sun-basking days had always depended on there being someone in the shade. That was the system—climbing up on one another’s heads, putting someone down so one’s own stature could be elevated. Elementary school was a club that not only reinforced the class system but created it—a system in which the stutterer and the boy who can’t hit a baseball start out, and remain, right at the bottom, a system where being in the middle—not too high or low—is best of all.

I had imagined, innocently, on my first day of school, that once the kids saw how smart I was, they’d all be my friends. I see similar hopes on the faces I watch heading to the front every September—all the loved children, tops in their parents’ eyes, off to be “re-evaluated” in a world where only one of thirty can be favorite, each child unaware, still, that he is not the only person in the universe, and about to discover that the best means of survival is to blend in (adapting to the group, it’s called), to go from being one to being one in a crowd of many, many others.

F
OURTH GRADE WAS THE
year of rationality, the calm before the storm. Boys still had cooties and dolls still tempted us. That was the year when I got my first Barbie. Perhaps they were produced earlier, but they didn’t reach New Hampshire till late that fall, and the stores were always sold out. So at the close of our doll-playing careers there was a sudden dramatic switch in scale from lumpy, round-bellied Betsy Wetsys and stiff-legged little-girl dolls to slim curvy Barbie, just eleven inches tall, with a huge, expensive wardrobe that included a filmy black negligee, and a mouth that made her look as if she’d just swallowed a lemon. Barbie wasn’t just a toy, but a way of living that moved us suddenly from tea parties to dates with Ken at the soda shoppe. Our short careers with Barbie, before junior high sent her to the attic, built up our expectations for teen-age life before we had developed the sophistication to go along with them. Children today are accustomed to having a tantalizing youth culture all around them. (They play with Barbie in the nursery school.) For us, it broke like a cloudburst, without preparation. Caught in the deluge, we were torn—wanting to run for shelter but tempted, also, to sing in the rain.

W
HEN WE WERE IN
fifth grade, the girls in Mrs. Herrick’s class were called aside and told that we were going to see a very lovely movie just for us, all about growing up. They gave us invitations to take home for our mothers so they could see the movie too, but I, like almost everybody else, disposed of mine long before I reached home, unspeakably embarrassed (because I knew, of course, what was coming—they’d been showing this movie for years), and the last thing I wanted was to sit through it with my mother, to let her know I knew, to see her seeing me. The boys pestered us, of course, and wanted to know what was going on; they were to spend that hour playing basketball and figured we must be cooking up some kind of party for them. A few of the worldlier ones were silent and understanding-looking (they had older sisters, and knew something about the Trials of Being a Woman) and one or two said, “I bet it’s about Kotex”—they didn’t quite know what it was, but they knew there was some kind of machine in the girls’ room and they saw the ads in magazines and everybody knew the story of Tom Callahan, who, when his mother sent him to buy paper plates and napkins, came back with the wrong kind and said, “Feminine napkins, masculine napkins—what difference does it make?”

Some of the girls took all the questions from the boys in stride and said, “Get lost,” or “Go blow.” I wasn’t really shy, and not a blusher, certainly, but this seemed too sensitive an area for casualness. Telling dirty jokes was one thing, but taking sex seriously (and not, as we usually did, giggling over its ickyness and groaning “Grossness
plus
”)
—
that was harder. Four-letter words and slang I could pronounce with no trouble, but the official terms, the ones printed in the little pink booklet they gave us to take home, in preparation for the
Now That You’re a Woman
film, words like that (and
woman
was one) caught in my throat. Becky and Carol and I looked in the dictionary for “menstruate” and “penis.” Not for definitions, just to see the unspeakable in print.
The Old Man and the Sea
shocked and thrilled us because Hemingway had written for all to see—even teachers—
urinate.
(Worse still, he spoke of urinating over the side of a boat “OOOhooh,” we giggled, making faces, “gro-oos.”)

The school nurse came to our classroom the day of the big movie to guide us through The Experience and answer questions afterward. (Who on earth would want or dare to ask a question?) A few mothers came too, and sat beside their daughters, who tried hard to ignore them. Our mothers, that year, were in the category of our going to the bathroom. Everybody knew we
did
(just as they knew we had mothers) but we tried to disavow any knowledge of those facts whenever possible. (That year I gave up drinking water during school because asking the teacher for a bathroom pass seemed just about unthinkable. That long walk up to her desk, with all eyes on me. Then down the hall and into the pink ammonia-smelling room marked Girls, with dirty pictures—done by girls, I wondered, or by infiltrating boys, and if they’d come in once, why not again?—and then those little cubicles with the doors that rarely stayed shut, unless you held them closed with your foot or went with a friend to stand guard, who’d hear you, then, and know that, just like everybody else, you
did it
too. Finally, to enter the classroom again, seeing everyone—especially the boys—look up. Knowing where you’d been, having imagined you there, most likely—just as, when they went, you imagined them, step by step, and tried to guess exactly when they’d reappear. Now he’s flushing the toilet … now he’s zipping up his fly … now he’s washing up—or
did
boys wash?—and, if not—My
God,
you’d held their hands in gym class, doing foxtrot.)

Mrs. Logan, the nurse who came to speak to our class, was the same one who delivered me when I was born (an additional shame—she’d seen me naked). She introduced the film and talked very softly, as if someone had just died, about “something very beautiful and exciting” that was going to happen in our bodies. Then she turned out the lights. It was an animated film made by Walt Disney, with characters who had familiar Cinderella lips and Bambi eyes. But this time Disney was animating ovaries and uteruses, cute little eggs and wiggly sperm that looked like tadpoles. Worse than anything else about the whole humiliating event (it seemed so public, with nothing left to private discovery) was the fact that the film was made by Disney, joy of my childhood, who now escorted me out from the gilded carriage to be met by sperm-faced ushers at the door of this unpleasant new pumpkin.

Clearly not all the girls felt as I did. Some were full of questions when the movie finished, many of them the show-offy, asked-for-the-sake-of-asking kinds of questions whose answers could be of interest only to the asker, and probably not even to her. (Like the kids who, as late as twelfth grade, would hold up college boards by asking, “What do I put in the blank where it says ‘middle name’—I don’t have one.”) My sense of delicacy about the subject was certainly extreme. But it seems to me, even now, unfair to put some kinds of young girls through the type of cheery, gung-ho, isn’t-this-fun facts of life talk that they gave us at school. It wasn’t the facts I objected to—sex education I certainly applaud. It was words like “special” and “cherish” and “miracle” and “gift,” the notion of Woman’s Secret Burden, with connotations of brave, silent suffering (the boys would never know what we went through—for them; we’d let them think they were the tough ones)—that’s what I detested, and why I entered adolescence with some amount of anguish. The boys were almost encouraged to be goofy and playful, happy-go-lucky, while we got left with being Women, suddenly matronly, with images of cramps and making up excuses not to swim—all that ahead of us, our sexuality something to be concealed, while boys could flaunt theirs on their chests and chins. (They brandished their razors, we hid ours.) I knew a girl whose mother said she couldn’t shave her legs till she was fourteen—while, at twelve, she badly needed to, and had to pluck her legs, like eyebrows, in a closet.

And then there were bras, and the dilemma—when to buy one, what kind, when to wear it and with Kleenex stuffed inside or not. Some girls really needed them by junior high, and a few needed, but didn’t wear them, and came to crossing their arms or bundling up in thick cardigans even in June. Others who didn’t need bras wore them anyway—flat strips of nylon stretched across flat chests, worn for the telltale outline they made under jerseys, not so much in the front, but in the back, and for those occasions during dances when a boy would rub his hand across your back and feel delicious pity at what you went through (Burden of Womanhood again), all of which made you, in your slavery, wonderfully feminine and—key word—
vulnerable.
By our day, the bra had come full circle, from object of necessity to be concealed as best one could to unnecessary object of fashion to be displayed, where, as with make-up the idea was to let people know you were wearing it, but just barely—making it look as if you really didn’t want people to see.