I started out as nothing if not precocious; when my older brother and sister went off to school, I insisted on going too. I was two years old. There were nine years between me and my brother, and nearly twelve between me and my sister, and while my brother found me interesting enough to have my crib put into his room so he could care for me through my infancy and toddler years, my sister was not thrilled at my arrival. Once it was time for me to move into a regular bed, I moved into her room, forcing her to get all of her homework done before my early bedtime and taking away any sense of privacy. On days when they were at school and I was not, I preferred to stay in my brother’s room, with his record player and his records, rocking out to the Beatles, mellowing out to Simon and Garfunkel, enjoying Foreigner and Generation X (leaving me with a lasting love for Billy Idol at which my friends often roll their eyes), and listening to all the old 45’s my mother and her siblings had collected as teens. But by fall of 1978, I’d had enough sitting around at home, or being carted around to do errands. I was going to school, dammit, and nothing was going to stop me.
The school agreed to take me as long as I was no longer in diapers, and that wasn’t an issue, so off I went, three days a week. To my overwhelming happiness, my best friend since birth, Chace, was in my class-our mothers knew one another through our grandparents, and we were both the youngest children in families with significantly older siblings. Chace was always fun. More outgoing than I, she organized elaborate “girl games” of “house” and so forth, but was also up for hide-and-seek and tag. She was also funny, and able to make light of nearly anything. Once when we were banging away on my family’s piano, which I’m sure was a delight to whoever was responsible for watching us, I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn’t whistle. She could whistle, and everyone in my family had tried teaching me, but with no luck. Suddenly, the piano bench accidentally tipped back and I slipped off, landing on my back and knocking the air out of me, making a sound that sounded startlingly like a whistle. Chace stared, then burst out laughing before I could cry.
“See?” she said. “You CAN whistle!”
Which, of course, started me laughing instead of crying.
She also had a talent for getting into trouble that, though it ended up with her getting a smack on the behind, kept us both in stitches. Her mother and mine would jog around the park in front of my house, and Chace and I would sit on the rails of the bridge that crossed the creek in the middle of the park, swinging our legs. Inevitably, one of Chace’s sandals would fly off and land in the mucky creek, much to our hilarity. Accepted as an accident at first, after the fifth time, there was hell to pay, but it was worth it all the way, and though we haven’t got a lot in common as adults, we both remember how funny “the shoe incident” was.
But after the first year of preschool, Chace moved up and I stayed behind because my parents didn’t want me a year ahead in school. It was a real bummer seeing my best friend but not sharing a class with her. I was not a kid who made friends particularly easily–I remember an Anna and a Beth, but only because my parents took a picture of the three of us on the playground. Primarily, I remember playing with boys. I liked stuffed animals, but dolls weren’t my favorite. I was a tiny, fragile little thing–skinny as a rail and, in pictures, I look like a bag of bones. My mother had to wrestle me to the ground to get me into a dress and shoes were a neverending battle. I hated patent leather, sandals were never comfortable, and I never got cool sneakers. I used to long to shop at Buster Browns, where at least there were some options, but with my skinny feet, my mother was insistent that Stride Rite was the only choice for me. I make it a point to this day to buy only shoes that I think are cool–I never got over the stigma of unfashionable footwear.
Still, boys didn’t notice bad shoes as much, as long as you could keep up with their play. My fairly frequent companions through my second year of three-year-old preschool and four-year-old preschool were a solemn little boy named John and a rough-n-tumble boy named Scotty, and we had some good times. John had a pool at his house, which was very cool, and Scott had an older brother who boxed, which meant fun with boxing gloves at his house. Happy times for a tomboy, though heaven knows what my teachers thought. Still, the pre-kindergarten years passed easily, and in pictures I mostly appear bright-eyed and smiling. I don’t know whether I was a super-popular kid, but I wasn’t an outcast, and I often spent time at my older sister’s private all-girls’ school, where my mother was part-time admissions counselor, and where I was adored by students and staff, who often let me sit in on classes. It drove my sister nuts when she would try to escape to the Senior lounge, only to find me holding court with her friends. It was a foregone conclusion in my mind that when I was old enough, I would enter the school, riding high.
When I wasn’t at my school or hers, I was home with Bessie, who was rather grandly called our “maid”. This was, after all, the South in the mid-Seventies–I’m not sure what role Bessie would fill now in the household, but these days surely no one but the very wealthy has “maids”. Bessie was a firecracker, but she loved me more than life itself. She was completely illiterate, and, despite being in her late seventies, would show up for work in mini-skirts and stiletto heels until my mother asked if Bessie would like her to purchase some uniforms, which was very well received. Bessie would come on the bus, change into her uniform, work, and change back into her get-up for the trip home. She also used snuff and, to my memory, chewing tobacco. I only remember this detail because she could stand on the back stairs and spit while supervising my play. She was with us from the time I was a baby until we moved to Pennsylvania, when I was six, and my mother has told me Bessie wanted to come along, but my father put his foot down–she bossed him abominably and he couldn’t stand the idea of having her in the house 24/7. Many days, my mother would come home to find me in cornrows with my nails painted noxious colors, watching the soaps with Bessie. Once she took me on the city bus, to Mom’s horror–I don’t remember where we went, but it was an adventure. And once she made me eat a dog biscuit, mistaking it for a vitamin. Since she was unable to read, and the biscuits were small and shaped like people (garbage men, mailmen, etc.), she mistook it for a Flintstones, and while I tried to explain it was something I was going to give to our dachshund, Hilde, she refused to believe it. I had to sit at the kitchen table til I’d eaten it. Other than looking after me, Bessie cleaned, perhaps cooked, and looked after the house. But she made sure, every day she was with me, that I knew I was her pride and joy.
Posted on March 24, 2007