“It’s a beautiful family drawing, Jeffrey,” she said, her voice soft and comforting.
He tried to give it to her, but she declined as always. “It belongs on your refrigerator, for your family to see.”
She was right, of course. Miss Reed was always right. She knew everything, he figured, or just about everything. So he took it home. Instead of presenting it to his mother so that she could toss it on the table on top of his other work, he found a piece of tape and put the drawing on the refrigerator himself. He stood in the kitchen and looked at it. After a few seconds, he realized that he’d started to cry and he didn’t know why. The picture made him happy when he looked at it, but it made him sad, too. That was confusing. He wasn’t sure what to think about it, but he didn’t know who to ask. His mother would probably slap him and tell him to ‘button it up’ or ‘zip it.’
He left the picture up. Maybe it would make his mother happy. Maybe she would agree with Miss Reed that it belonged up there.
By dinnertime, his mother discovered it. She ripped it from the refrigerator and shoved it into his face. She screeched about how he’d drawn her, asking him if he thought she was really that evil. She asked him if he wanted her to die and called him an ungrateful bastard. He thought the ‘pain you’ve caused me’ speech was coming, but then she veered into a series of insults against his daddy. She called him names he’d never heard and didn’t understand, but he could tell all of them were bad.
He stood in the kitchen, shocked at her rage. Inside, all the happiness that had come from drawing the picture seeped away and that part of him filled with more of the same sadness.
Near the end of her tirade, she tore the drawing into strips. She forced him to put the paper into his mouth and chew it up. He cried and begged her, but she slapped him hard and pressed forward. He chewed on the paper, his mouth quickly drying. He feared that she would make him swallow it. He knew that he’d choke to death on the huge wad in his mouth. Instead, she directed him to spit it into the garbage, take another strip and chew some more. They stood in the kitchen for fifteen long minutes while he chewed up and spat his entire drawing into the garbage can.
“That’s your goddamn family,” she snarled at him, pointing at the clumps of chewed up paper.
He didn’t understand exactly, but somehow he knew she was right.
When Kindergarten ended, he remembered how sad he was. He cried and clung to Miss Reed’s leg on the final day. He wanted to ask her to be his mommy instead of his mother, but even back then he knew that wasn’t the way the world worked, so he didn’t bother to ask. He just cried and hung on until she gently pried his fingers away.
“You’ll have lots of fun in first grade, Jeffrey,” she told him, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “You’re a nice boy and everyone will love you, just like we all did here in this class.”
He believed her, and that represented the first real betrayal besides his mother that he could remember in his life.
The lie hadn’t been immediately apparent. First grade had been all right at first, even though the elementary school was much bigger than where he’d gone to kindergarten. He got lost on the first day, but a nice woman almost as pretty as Miss Reed found him wandering and took him to his class.
He soon discovered that there were no naps or any snacks. There was recess, which somewhat made up for it, but not completely. And the boys and girls in his class seemed to like him. Some of them, at least. But then he discovered that there were second-graders, third-graders and fourth-graders at the school, too. Some of them liked to pick on the younger kids.
The fourth-graders were the worst. They pushed him down. They took his milk money away. When it was his turn to play four-square, they made him go to the back of the line. Sometimes, they pretended to be nice and let him play dodge ball, then all of them hurled the red rubber balls at him at the same time. Once, the force of Hugh Jessup’s throw knocked his head backward and into the wall. He fell to the ground, dazed. Black walls rushed in from the edges of his vision, collapsing toward his center. He may have passed out – he couldn’t remember. He remembered that no one noticed, though. The fourth-graders who’d thrown the balls (except for Hugh Jessup – he was a third grader who was big and so they let him play, too) scattered. The foursquare games, basketball, tetherball and tag all continued around him while he sat against the red brick wall, blinking. His head throbbed and when he reached back, he felt something warm and sticky. He looked down at his fingers and saw blood. The sight scared him at first, but what he worried about even more was everyone knowing. Everyone laughing. So he wiped the blood behind the knee of his Toughskin jeans and sat still, collecting his senses.
When the bell rang, he went inside and told no one. He sat in class and pretended everything was fine. Then, just five minutes into class, Laurie Phillips, who sat right behind him, yelled out, “Ewwww, gross!” and pointed at the back of his head. Everyone turned to stare at him. The kids behind him followed Laurie’s finger and made disgusted sounds themselves. Kids to the side leaned backward and tried to get a look at it.
All of this attracted the attention of Mrs. Piper, his new teacher. She stalked to his seat, turned his head and gasped. Then she yelled at him and sent him to the school nurse. He felt every eye in the room upon him as he rose from his seat and slunk out of the classroom.
The nurse cleaned him up, dabbing gently at the back of his head with a washcloth. She told him it was only a small cut and wouldn’t need any stitches. Heads bleed, she said. She was nice, he decided. Maybe there were only so many nice people in the world. Maybe that was it. Then she called his mother and he decided that nice people didn’t know everything. When she asked him how it happened, he briefly considered telling her. He knew instinctively, though, that the worst thing in the schoolyard world was a tattletale. He knew she couldn’t save him from the fourth-graders and if they knew he’d tattled, then things would get worse. So he told her he tripped. He wasn’t sure if she believed him, but she didn’t ask any more questions.
When his mother saw it, she flew into a rage. At first, he thought she was angry at him, the way she snatched his hand and dragged him out of the apartment. But as she stalked down the street, jerking him along behind her, he realized they were going back to the school.
Once there, she found her way through the mostly empty building to the office. The principal was still at his desk doing paperwork. His mother barged into the principal’s office, screaming and pointing at the cut on the back of his head. She hollered about things he didn’t understand like “improper supervision” and “negligence.” She threatened to “sue the whole goddamn city.”
Jeffrey watched her in amazement as she railed against the principal, who sat stiffly in his chair, absorbing the verbal barrage. He realized that, despite the fact that he didn’t understand half of what she was saying and that she used some bad words and that he could smell the strong wash of special stuff coming off of her while she yelled, she was sticking up for him.
She was defending him.
And it felt good.
The principal waited until her ranting tapered off, then apologized. He said that the school’s insurance would pay for any medical costs. He said he would have a meeting with all the teachers about playground safety. He offered to give them a ride home.
His mother stared back at the principal, showing no reaction to any of his entreaties. Finally, she raised her finger in the air and waggled it at him.
“My son gets hurt again, mister, and I will
own
this school!” Then she took him by the hand and strode out of the office without a backward glance.
On the way home, he positively floated along the sidewalk, his feet barely touching the ground. His mother grumbled about the conversation she’d just had with the principal, her head lowered toward the ground. When they got home, she poured a second glass of the special stuff, even though she still had one that was half-full next to her chair in the living room. After a long drink, she sat down at the kitchen table and wept.
Jeffrey hadn’t seen her cry for as long as he could remember. He stood off at first, unsure what to do. Eventually, though, he was drawn to comfort her. He reached out with his small hand and touched her shoulder.
She looked up, saw him and opened her arms.
Gratefully, he fell into them. She pulled him tight to her bosom, sobbing.
“It’s just you and me, Jeffie,” she said between sobs. “You and me against the world.”
He stayed against her chest, hugging her for as long as she allowed it. Then, like a light switch had been flicked, she stood abruptly, shrugged him off and went to the bathroom. He sat down in her seat, feeling the warmth from her body fade. When she returned, her mouth was a hard line again.
“Don’t make me come bail you out of trouble like that again,” she told him, waggling her finger at him in the same way she’d done in the principal’s office. “Stop making problems for me. Don’t I have it hard enough already?”
“Yes, Mother,” he said. He felt tears welling up, but fought them down. His mother’s tender moments were few and far between and she didn’t put up with any bawl babies outside of those special times.
Strangely, the worst thing about first grade was that they all called him Jeffie again. No one called him Jeffrey, not even Mrs. Piper. She didn’t pay particular attention to him, either. She was stingy with the smiley faces and gold stars, too, though she was pretty free with the red ones. He didn’t like the red ones so much, but a star was a star. Still, he didn’t offer any of his drawings to her and she didn’t tell him that they were worthy of the refrigerator at his home.
He made it through the school year somehow. He dealt with the nicknames of Jeffie Booger Eater (because he’d picked his nose one time and someone saw him, then told everyone that he’d picked his nose and eaten it, which was a lie but everyone believed it anyway so the name stuck) and Jeffie the Queer (which he didn’t understand except that it came from the fourth graders and was really bad). He just kept thinking about summertime and his birthday and how someday his daddy was coming home to fix things.
At the end of the year, he didn’t hug Mrs. Piper and he didn’t cry. Summer came and it was better than school, even though his mother drank her special stuff most of the day every day. Sometimes she went to the park, though, and let him play on the bars there. Those days were the best, even though it was usually overcast and cool.
His birthday came (including his single gift of clothes from his mother) and before he knew it, it was time for school again.
Second grade was much worse than first grade.
Everyone remembered him, for starters. The same old names from first grade popped up again. New ones sprang into being. He learned that ‘queer’ meant a boy who likes boys instead of girls, but it still didn’t make much sense to him. At school, he was starting to dislike boys
and
girls, so he didn’t know if that made him queer or not queer, but it didn’t matter because they stilled called him that name.
On the third day of school, disaster struck at recess. He’d somehow managed to secure one of the swings and even though he knew he had to pee, he didn’t want to give it up. If the fourth-graders realized he’d made it to first in line and was swinging and having fun, someone would do something about it. Maybe even Hugh Jessup, who was a fourth grader now and bigger than any other boy in school. So he held it and he swung and swung, pumping his legs and soaring into the air and back down again. He kept swinging and soaring as the pressure in his bladder grew. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He decided he needed to stop and go to the toilet.
He tried to slow down, but that takes forever on a swing. The urgency from his bladder told him he didn’t have that kind of time. He drug his feet lightly on the dirt patch below the swing, resulting in only a marginal braking. So he tried planting his feet more firmly instead. That resulted in his shoes catching the soft dirt, digging in and yanking him from the swing. He went tumbling from the swing, rolling into a heap on the grass several yards in front of the swing set. The force of his landing jolted him enough that he let loose of his bladder, accidentally wetting his pants.
A crowd surrounded him. At first, there was mild concern that he was hurt. That seemed to quickly fade into curiosity about any injuries he might have incurred. Then someone spotted the giant wet spot on his crotch, pointed and screamed it out for the whole world to know.
After that, all the other kids called him Jeffie Pee-Pee Pants.
His second grade teacher, Miss Guidry, didn’t notice a thing for the last two hours of school, but that didn’t surprise him. She was older than dust. She probably couldn’t even smell any more.
He didn’t tell his mother about the incident, but she figured it out easily enough when he came home reeking of urine. She shrieked at him that he was a disgusting, dirty little boy, that he was just like his father and that he made her sick. She smacked him in the head several times, then hauled him to the bathroom by his hair. In the bathroom, she pushed him roughly into the bathtub and turned on the shower. He yelped at the cold water, but she gave him another smack, so he kept his mouth clamped shut. She never adjusted the water temperature, letting the ice cold water rain down on him as he sat huddled in the bottom of the tub, shivering. After what seemed like hours, she switched off the water and asked him if he learned his lesson.
“Yes, Mother,” he answered, because he knew it was the right thing to say. He didn’t know what the lesson was supposed to be, other than don’t pee your pants at school, but it was too late for that lesson to do him any good.
Still, maybe his daddy knew the answers to that, too. Maybe he could help him. Tell him how to deal with the third and fourth-graders (and, truth be told, most of the second-graders, too and a few of the first-graders) that made school so miserable. His daddy could teach him how to fight. He was in the Navy and that was like the Army and everyone knew that soldiers knew how to fight. Heck, that was their
job
.