Not that Notebook...
There were minor signs, smaller indications that things might be unstable in our home -- although my maturity at 13, great as it was, wasn't honed enough to recognize it so broadly -- that should have signalled an adult in my general vicinity that rescue would have been in order.
When I was in middle school, I began to falter; I'd been advanced a grade, from 4th to 5th, only to have my mother (again: No Expert On Nothing) decide at the end of that first 5th-grade year that I would not advance to 6th but stay and repeat the 5th: I was not mature enough to handle the social climate of middle school. During my second 5th grade year, I recall wondering if the 6th graders down the street got to watch the hostages freed from Iran in January of 1981 from their classrooms or if there might have been an actual assembly, complete with explanations of "why," which weren't given to 5th graders, which I was not in my head or my heart. Just a month previously, I'd found myself unexpectedly affected by the death of John Lennon; not having been a huge Beatles fan (nor do I come from a "Beatles family," if you will) and knowing little or nothing about the man, I was particularly struck by the international sorrow resonating from every television and radio I passed for at least a month, at which time the event was overshadowed by the Reagan inauguration and the consequent release of the 52 remaining hostages. It was during this two-month period that I became socially conscious and understood that my insular existence was, in fact, just that.
So, middle school: I couldn't have cared less about my studies, I was in and out of the guidance office so many times a month that I think the guy started rolling his eyes when I'd walk in the room. As I stated before, I would beg him not to call my mother; I would cry and recall for him the beatings I'd gotten in the previous days and weeks, at the time mostly related to schoolwork but he'd just sigh and pick up the phone. Whether he thought I was lying, whether he just didn't care, I remember also feeling marginalized for the first time: Here I was, a poor girl living in an upper-middle class town that offerred charity Section-8 to keep up appearances but simply let us live there -- as we were. The charity ran out with the real estate: Nobody actually cared, which seems melodramatic in statement but was obviously the true case as I never saw a social worker, I was never given an empathetic shoulder or ear, I was merely given a notebook that I was to have signed by my teachers at the end of each class, stating that I'd completed that days' assignments -- the notebook remained empty, I kept hanging out in the guidance office, and the beatings continued.
The only other person I knew with a notebook was Harry; he was full of anger, wore his hair in a blonde buzz cut and came from an educated, European-style family where bathing was apparently optional because I remember him smelling, um, ripe a good deal of the time...his parents were older -- like, in their 60s older -- and he was a much-younger-than-his-siblings accident that was left frequently unattended by a mother who loved him but who had clearly not planned to raise another child through retirement. As a result, he was much different than the rest of the nuclear, cookie-cutter suitors that hormonally present themselves around 13: He wore the same Combat Rock t-shirt at least three times a week, he wrote Springsteen lyrics all over his blue canvas binder, his name was Harry, for crying out loud (think: All Jason, all the time, 1982ish), and he had a notebook that was as blank and pure as my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment