A third grade girl struggles to fit into elementary school culture while hiding from the world that her mentally ill mother rarely leaves the house. This piece is a chapter of a memoir I am currently writing, based on the complexities of growing up with a mother struggling with mental illness.
Kim’s white high heels were at least two sizes too big for my eight-year-old feet. I stood in front of the full length mirror, examining the gaps at the backs of my heels. Yep. Too big. Maybe some walking practice would help. After about fifteen minutes of strutting around my bedroom, I was able to keep them on my feet without plunging headfirst into the yellow shag carpeting. Had Kim been home to witness the runway show, she would have flipped. Her new shoes, purchased for Easter and her middle school band and chorus concerts, were off limits to me, her sticky younger sister. I don’t see why, I thought, as I pulled on her new pink and white Madonna tee-shirt, the Material Girl’s hair outlined with silver glitter. It’s not like I would wear her shoes out of the house.
Oh. Wow. I could totally wear these to school today. A glance at the clock told me it was 10:03 a.m. Earlier, I had moaned to my mother that I was too sick to go to school, and she’d groaned her consent from underneath a scratchy wool blanket the color of rust. Mom spent way more time in bed than most mothers. Though I didn’t fully get why, it was clear that she was sick in a “different” way. She sometimes used phrases like “manic-depression” and “anxiety” to explain how she felt, but the words were as mysterious to me as she was. What worked in my favor, however, was that she didn’t get out of bed before noon on some days. Avoiding boring old school had become a cinch. But now, twirling in front of the mirror in “my” new outfit, hitting the third grade didn’t seem so dull. I could always catch The Price Is Right tomorrow.
I considered the shoes. My big toe and its sidekick—alien toe, my brother Eric called it, as it was longer than the big toe—both peeked out happily through the a thick, white leather strap. A white bow smiled up from the perfect white strap. In the midst of our jumble of a house, the shoes were perfect. Clean. Unblemished.
Our house was always a mess. While the folks across town had cleaning ladies, we…didn’t. Between my mother’s mental illness and my father’s job in New York City, they weren’t the best housekeepers. In short, she was too tired and he was too busy. The poor crib wasn’t even nice enough to make “before” on one of those home makeover programs. The problem with the house wasn’t just that things were antiquated or dirty or broken or cluttered. The problem was that all of those things were happening at the same time.
So when you had a new pair of shoes, like Kim had, you wanted them to stay pristine forever, kind of like a beacon of cleanliness and purity in the midst of dog hair and peeling wallpaper and distressed mothers and fathers.
But I took them anyway.
Within ten minutes, I was pedaling up Chesapeake Avenue, Kim’s heels catching in the pedals of my yellow and white banana seat bike. Few cars were parked in the driveways of the cape cods and split levels that ruled the neighborhood, and the streets were as still and grey as a cemetery. Everyone else was where they were supposed to be on that weekday morning.
I pedaled along, my bike happily plunking on and off grey stone curbs. From my outfit to the pink lip gloss I had swiped onto my lips, I was ready to rock. Suddenly, the March wind stole through Kim’s tee-shirt, breaking up the party. I looked down at my arm, where goose bumps neatly punctuated my freckles. I should have grabbed a jacket. I had been so pleased with my ensemble that I hadn’t even considered outerwear. Madonna never wore a spring jacket onstage.
In the distance, the verdant soccer fields of Knollwood School greeted me in all their dewy glory. I excitedly pedaled up the concrete path to the bike rack, crashing my ride next to Jennifer Kaplan’s as usual. Once old banana was locked up, I strode toward the school with the confidence of a corporate worker who’d taken the morning off, wandering into the office a few hours late.
Slup. What the? Slup Slup slup. I looked down. Great. Kim’s heels were sinking into the mud as I walked across the grass, brown quickly replacing white with every step. A wave of fear came over me. I looked back at the bike rack, realizing I could forget this whole idea, speed home, and still finish out the morning with Bob Barker.
No.
Madonna never ran off the stage before the set was finished.
By the time I settled into school and avoided the curious looks of my classmates, it was time for recess. I looked around for Jennifer Kaplan, the Beavis to my Butthead, to confirm our recess itinerary. Maybe some swings, followed by a little monkey bars? I caught sight of the back of her dark blond French braid, following Rachel Edelstein and Heather Hunt out the classroom door. Weird.
Jennifer and I were friends with Rachel and Heather, though I always felt like they were from another planet. Rachel and Heather always sat in the front row, their Trapper Keepers perfectly organized with completed homework. Teachers were in love with these two. Their brown-bagged lunches were neatly labeled with “Rachel E” or “HH,” the tops of the bags folded down in precision, packed with, like, multiple food groups and CapriSun. Heather’s hair looked different every day. Her mother really knocked herself out, combing and parting and braiding and the whole nine, coming up with new ways to arrange her Girl Scout’s hair and always color-coordinating Heather’s silk scrunchies with Heather’s outfit du jour.
Because I was in charge of my own food and grooming, let’s just say that those departments proved dicey for me at times. Between my mother not feeling well most of the time and my older brother and sister kept busy by all things high school and junior high, I was on my own, and sometimes got a little too inventive. One day in the third grade, tired of dragging myself to the water fountain at lunch time, I actually swiped an empty Molson Golden from the counter where my parents stored recycled goods. I peeled off the label, rinsed the sucker out, and filled it with orange juice. Good as gold. When I ferreted the bottle out at lunch time, a curly-headed lunch aide had yelled at me, even after I swore that I wasn’t an alcoholic and that my dad refused to spend money on drink boxes. Something about commercialism and excessive packaging, I implored.
After that note home, Dad bought me a reusable water bottle the next day, words like “yuppies” and “capitalism” skidding over his bottom teeth. It must have been hard being a hippie during the 1980s.
But anyway, on Madonna Day, it looked like Jennifer was ditching me for the Wonderbread crowd. Not one to be ditched, I followed the trio out to the school playground, where a game of hopscotch was in full swing. A cold wind whipped across the blacktop as Jennifer jumped across three spaces on one foot, her hands in the pockets of her purple fleece hoodie. Teeth chattering, I looked down at Kim’s heels and suddenly felt as garish as a fist fight in church. Everyone else on the playground was running around in sneakers and coats. Why had I worn this stupid outfit again?
As Rachel tossed her pebble, clapping as it landed neatly inside a chalk-lined box, the curly-headed aide who had called me out on the beer bottle blew her whistle from across the blacktop. Everyone turned around to see who had committed the latest offense.
She was heading for me.
She blew her whistle again. Oh God. Oh S-word.
“HEY!” She screeched. “HEY YOU!” Heather, Rachel, and Jennifer pretended they didn’t know me.
“Uh…yes?” I eyed my bike at the rack, about a hundred meters away. I could outrun this broad even in my too-big heels, I thought.
“WHERE IS YOUR COAT?” The aide screamed. Her mousy frizz, cut into a mullet, didn’t move even as she thundered across the blacktop.
I stared at Jennifer’s hopscotch stone and shrugged like a kicked dog.
This woman was nowhere near done. “WHERE IS YOUR COAT?” She repeated. A circle of kids was beginning to form. “YOUR PARENTS LET YOU OUT OF THE HOUSE WITHOUT A COAT? YOUR MOTHER DOESN’T CARE IF YOU CATCH COLD?”
Clearly this lady had skipped Child Psychology in her quest to become a lunchtime aide. My lower lip began to tremble, but I bit it back and stared at her. I was not about to break my “no crying in school” policy for someone with a perm.
“DON’T YOU TALK?” She was really starting to lose it. “WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?”
“Hey, what is going on here?” A male voice broke in, interrupting the banshee’s rant. Oh God. It was Mr. Scanlon, who had been Kim’s sixth grade teacher two years prior. He wasn’t any nicer than Curly here, from what I’d heard. He had once called our house, complaining that Kim looked out the window during history lessons. Dad tried to make a joke about kids and windows, but before long was speaking into the phone in a tight voice, telling Mr. Scanlon that he’d rather raise a dreamer than a disciple before slamming the phone down.
And now, minutes after the hopscotch incident, I was sitting in Mr. Scanlon’s classroom, unsure whether I was being punished or being saved from imminent pneumonia. Kim’s shoes weren’t looking so hot. They stared up at me accusingly. “What do you want from me?” I asked them. “I’m only eight.”
Curly was stationed outside the classroom door, angrily guarding her convict. I heard Mr. Scanlon come back down the hall, returning from the men’s room I suppose, and they spoke to each other in hushed whispers.
Mr. Scanlon marched into the room and made a beeline for where I sat. He was clearly not psyched about wasting his lunch hour on me and my desire to play dress up in public. I really didn’t blame him. Halloween had long passed.
“OK, little Miss. Enough of this.” He ran his hand over the widening part in his hair. “Didn’t Mrs. Clifford speak to you about your ensemble when you got to school this morning?” Mrs. Clifford was my teacher, a woman who looked and acted well past retirement age. She was a bit of a loose cannon, Clifford, but had taken to ignoring me lately, a vast improvement over some of her previous tirades. It probably wasn’t her fault that she wasn’t as into me as the kids who were easy to like, the Rachels and the Heathers of the world. I was absent sometimes for no apparent reason. I forgot my homework frequently. The inside of my desk was about as organized as my snarled hair. Clifford had told me earlier in the month, a look of resignation on her face, that the only thing I had to do in life was die. I think I had forgotten my Lewis and Clark review questions or something.
I pretended to be really interested in twisting one of my blond curls around two fingers. “No. Mrs. Clifford didn’t say anything.”
Curly shifted her weight from one double-Velcro Reebok to the other and broke into our tête-à-tête. “HOW DID YOUR MOTHER LET YOU OUT OF THE HOUSE LIKE THAT?”
This woman had no clue of what an “indoor voice” was. Rather than voice this observation, I just shook my head. The truth was that my mother would not have let me out of the house “like this” had she been up and about, but I was too terrified to say as much. It’s too bad my parents didn’t just stick a note to my forehead, explaining me to people: “Please excuse my outfit, ma’am, but my mother has a mental illness that I don’t even know the name of, and can’t always care for me properly. Sometimes she hits a downward spiral and doesn’t get out of bed for days. Plus my dad works in the city, and the poor man leaves too early in the morning to be of assistance to my morning routine. But let me assure you that they are loving parents who are doing the best they can with an unpleasant situation, and would definitely oppose my lack of a coat and suitable footwear today.”
But I wore no such note, so I stood there like a dummy.
Mr. Scanlon, clearly disgusted by my silence, snipped, “Well, you can go outside for the rest of recess. You wore the clothing; you can be cold in the clothing.” He and Curly ushered me outside, where I stood for the next ten minutes and silently watched Jennifer, Heather, and Rachel jump through their game of hopscotch, their sneakered feet hitting the pavement with as much force as my humiliation.