Pretty in Plaid: A Life, A Witch, and a Wardrobe

by Jen Lancaster

  FYI? My father is a liar.26 And the Cow Town public librarian is less than helpful when I request she find me a book on how I might go about suing my parents for breach of contract.

  Today’s the first day of school in Cow Town. I haven’t really met any kids in my new neighborhood yet because as soon as we moved in, I came down with pneumonia and had to spend a week in the hospital. 27 After I was released, I was stuck on bed rest for quite a while. Were we still living in civilization, after I recovered I’d have had plenty of time to invite neighbor kids over to enjoy my new pool because I wouldn’t have to start school until next month. But because this system’s calendar is based on the planting season—hi, is it 1870 all of a sudden?—I’m stuck beginning classes in early August.

  Back in Bergenfield, the first day of school is a huge deal and all the kids break out their very best bits of back-to-school wear. The girls wear pretty wrap skirts and flowered sundresses and the boys don khakis and oxfords. Things get more casual later in the week, but the first few days are all about putting on a show.

  I decide to make my Northwest Elementary School debut in a longish plaid skirt and matching shawl that our old neighbor Mrs. Schneider sent me when she heard I was in the hospital. I’m pairing it with a creamy ruffled blouse and, of course, my clogs. I try to convince my mom to let me borrow a pair of her nylons, but she’s not having it, so I just wear regular knee-highs.

  My house is close to the end of the bus route, so when it stops to get me almost all the seats are full of kids from neighboring farms. Just like one of those E. F. Hutton commercials, the second I step on the bus and attempt to find a place, all conversation stops and everyone stares at me. Sure, it’s nice to be noticed, but not like this. No one speaks to me. They just stare. Jaws hang slack. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear dueling banjos at this point.28

  School is five miles away in the middle of a soybean field and I count seven different kinds of livestock en route.29 The school bus is a virtual oven and I can feel a bead of sweat roll between my shoulder blades, so I stuff the shawl in my book bag. The heat magnifies every odor and there’s a sickly-sweet smell coming from the floor. I try to open a window but the dirty kid next to me tells me I’m not allowed to touch them while the bus is in motion. Sure. Great. I’ll just breathe through my shawl, shall I?

  My mom registered me last week, so I know where I’m supposed to go. I make my way to the sixth-grade classroom and take a seat. All the desks in the back are full, so I wind up in the front row. When the bell rings, my new teacher Mr. Hauenstein welcomes us to sixth grade and mentions he sees new faces and he asks me to introduce myself to the class first.

  I stand up and turn around, assessing the students for the first time, and I realize I’m the only person not in jeans or some variety of T-shirt. A few of the kids are even wearing their barn boots because they came to school directly after feeding their livestock. Guess that explains why the bus smelled like poop.

  The kids in the class look me up and down. I shift in my clogs, adjust my shawl, and begin. “Hi, I’m Jennifah Lancastah and we just moved heah from Bergenfield, New Jersey, which is right outsiddah New Yawk City.”

  A few giggles erupt in the back of the room.

  Did I just say something funny? I turn to Mr. Hauenstein for guidance and he encourages me to tell the class more about myself.

  “Um, I’ve been a Girl Scout for a coupla yeahs and I also usta play violin in the orchestrah.” The tittering gets louder and I see kids using their hands to cover their mouths. “My ballet teachah was a membah of a real New Yawk ballet company and took the train from the city fuh class every week. Right befowah we moved, we wah gettin ready to do powint wahk in toe shoes.”

  I fear I may be losing the room for some reason. Then it occurs to me there are no orchestras or principal dancers with the American Ballet Theatre here in Cow Town and I’ve got to do something quick to be more relatable. I decide to end my introduction with the statement I’m sure will turn all these farm kids toward my side. “And I like hawses!”

  What feels like several years later, the laughter in the room finally stops. Red-faced and shaking, I take my seat. As I do, I hear a kid in the back row mumble, “Hey, New Joisey, nice clawwwwghs,” and then the giggling starts again.

  Yeah?

  We’ll see how funny these clogs are when I use them to kick you in the jimmies at recess.

  I manage to make it through the first week of school without stomping on anyone’s spleen, but not without effort. There’s another new kid in my class, too. My dad brought his dad out here from Boston to help run his distribution center. The other new kid also has an accent, and every time he speaks he gets the same treatment as I do. How is his saying “idear” instead of “idea” any more weird than when local kids talk about the “crick” that runs behind their houses or how George “Warshington” was our first president?

  Regardless, I’ve been studying the newscasters on the Fort Wayne 21 Alive! ABC affiliate and trying to make myself sound like them. Yes, I’d like to stand out, but for cool stuff like my shoes and not because of how I sound. I’m finding if I try really hard and pay attention to every word that comes out of my mouth, I can approximate the regional dialect. I look forward to it coming naturally someday.

  I’ve joined the Cow Town chapter of the Girl Scouts and I’m surprised by how unpopular the organization is. In New Jersey, there were a ton of troops and I had my choice. Pretty much if I want to be a Scout here, there’s only one option. Point? I plan to practice my new and improved non-accent this evening at my meeting when I pledge to “help people at all (and not awuall) times.”

  After trading in my shirts and clogs for jeans and T-shirts, I’ve pretty much stayed under the radar here until this morning. Since it’s meeting day, I wore my full uniform. I expected classmates to crow over my now legitimately earned badges and to admire the jaunty tilt of my beret, but instead they just laughed again. Apparently the only thing less cool than joining a Girl Scout troop is actually wearing the uniform. And yet no one makes a peep when kids crowd on the bus wearing their 4-H30 regalia, which . . . pfft! They don’t even have sashes!

  My mom drops me off at our meeting place, which is an empty activity room in the elementary school. Not only do we not have access to a kitchen or a stage like we did in New Jersey, we don’t even have tables or chairs! We’re forced to sit on the cold tile floor and the rivets from my clogs dig into the sides of my feet when I cross my legs.

  Mrs. Bissell, our new neighbor up the street, welcomes me to the troop and asks what kind of stuff we used to do in New Jersey.

  “Oh, boy, we did so much neat stuff!” I exclaim. “We’d go camping—sometimes we’d stay in regular tents on the ground, sometimes in those permanent tents with wooden floors in real campgrounds, a few times we stayed in big lodges, and we slept in a dorm when we went to Washington. We also took a lot of day trips and went ice skating in Rockefeller Plaza in New York and we saw the Rockettes perform and one time we even toured a Mc-Donald’s and afterward they gave us all the free cheeseburgahs we could eat! So whadda youse guys do heah?”31

  Mrs. Bissell seems to have lost the color in her skin while I’m recounting all of my adventures. She looks around at the suddenly expectant faces of all the other Girl Scouts in the room. After a long pause, she clears her throat and finally says, “Well, tonight we’re making hand-sewn wallets.”

  Wallets.

  Of course we’re making wallets. And this troop doesn’t do refreshments so we’re not even having Hawaiian Punch.

  I am seriously going to die in this town.

  I hope someone remembers to bury me in my clogs.

  A Series of Unfortunate (Pant) Events

  (Bloomingdale’s Underwear)

  This is not a vacation.

  I am supposed to be on Mackinac Island in Michigan right now riding around in carriages and eating candy. I am not supposed to be wedged into the overstuffed backseat of an Olds-mob
ile for the fourteenth consecutive hour. Nor am I supposed to be wrestling with my brother over who can catch and eat the fruit flies flitting around back here since they’re our only source of sustenance.

  My father’s been going on and on about Mackinac Island ever since we moved to Indiana and he’s been looking forward to this trip for a year. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Michigan because I prefer the ocean to some random lake, no matter how “great” everyone says it is. The second Dad told me tourists get around the island on bikes and horses, I was intrigued. And the minute he talked about it having the most homemade fudge shops per capita, I was sold, as was my brother. Say Yes to Michigan, as the state’s ad campaign implored? Our pleasure!

  The only person not excited about our pending vacation was my mother. She didn’t want to go to Michigan; she wanted to go back to Boston and see her family. However, my father was resolute, saying he didn’t want to spend his entire vacation in the car. (The more likely excuse is he can’t stand most of her relatives.32)

  When the Michigan plans were finalized, there was much yelling and stomping of feet and slamming of doors, and no, not by those of us awed by promises of fresh fudge.

  Last night, Dad rounded up all our alarm clocks, saying we wouldn’t need them. He woke us up after what seemed like an hour in bed and Todd and I staggered into our shared bath, brushing teeth and washing faces in our dual matching avocado green sinks, feet squashing into the shaggy gold carpeting.33

  I was still bleary as I ate my banana and wheat toast and was surprised to see how dark it is at seven a.m. Dad told me that because he lets me sleep in until the ungodly hour of eight a.m. during the summer, I’ve never noticed this. As Todd and I shuffled our groggy selves into the backseat, loaded up with pillows and blankets, we learned the truth when Dad flipped on the radio. It was actually four a.m. Todd and I both laughed that Dad fooled us, but my mother just seethed because she wasn’t let in on the plan. Um . . . wanna bet that was intentional, Mrs. Half an Hour Late for Everything?

  Dad told us it would be about a six-hour drive and Todd and I high-fived each other in anticipation. My brother and I put our differences aside every time we go on vacation. More often than not, these little road trips start to take on the feeling of a hostage situation due to the lack of access to food, water, and toilet facilities—Dad believes rest stops are for amateurs—and also because of the hostility emanating from the front seat. My mother never wants to drive, contenting herself with misreading maps and providing constructive criticism on all the ways my father could improve his performance on the road. On trips like this, often all Todd and I have is each other, and so we assume a truce.

  I spent the first few hours in the car daydreaming about all the fudge I’d buy—rocky road and chocolate chip and vanilla and butter pecan. I imagined rolling it on my tongue, the piece getting all smooth and melted, eventually leaving nothing but the crunchy nuts. If I’m really lucky, they’ll have peanut butter fudge like our next-door neighbor makes me every time I shovel her driveway without asking. There’s something about the combination of salty and sweet that’s so very, very right.

  After I mentally exhausted my taste buds, I started dreaming about all the horses I’d see up there. Shortly after we moved to Indiana my allergies got worse—apparently living in the middle of a cornfield is problematic—and I had to go through a battery of tests. I learned that I’m desperately allergic to pollen and mold and dust mites, and somewhat to cats, dogs, and horses. I get weekly shots and I have no problems around our dog or our neighbors’ cats, but my mom decided she’d keep me safe by not allowing me to take riding lessons. But if there are horses all over this island, she can’t keep me from hugging at least one of them!

  The miles were rolling by and my dad decided to play Frank Sinatra on his snappy new cassette player because we all like him, but when my mom insisted on harmonizing, he snapped Frank out of the stereo and turned on talk radio.

  Drive, drive, drive. I caught a nap and when I woke up I was taken aback by how little the scenery had changed. I guess I thought northern Michigan would be more woody, more picturesque . . . more hills, more moose, perhaps a black bear or two? Instead, it looked flat and open and dull. Honestly, it reminded me of Ohio. Also? It had been six hours—weren’t we there yet?

  When I started seeing signs for Scranton, Pennsylvania, ten hours into the trip, I began to suspect something had gone awry. And getting stuck in traffic outside of Albany, New York, was also a clue that we may have veered from our intended path.

  My mother launched into such hysterics when she saw the Michigan, Stay Left; East Coast, Veer Right road sign that my father apparently decided he’d rather drive seventeen hours straight34 than listen to her wailing for the next four days while the rest of us tried to Say Yes to Michigan. So she’s the one who throws a fit, yet I’m the one who suddenly loses fudge and horses? I’m sorry; was divorce not an option?

  Presently we’re in Connecticut, mired in some heavy Friday night traffic, only made worse by construction. My dad intends to push on through so we haven’t had anything to eat since brunch. We were allowed five minutes to attend to any biological needs when we got gas four hours ago and now I’m cursing myself for not spending my fudge money on vending machine fare. My mother has a few sticky prunes in her bag—most likely the origin of the fruit flies—but I suspect I’ll never be that hungry.

  Our intended destination is my grandparents’ house in the Boston suburbs, but the traffic is too snarled. We move something like twenty feet in an hour. Eventually my father gives up and heads toward my Auntie Virginia’s house not far from where we’re stuck. I’m delighted with this development. Not only do Auntie Virginia and Uncle Kelly have a springboard on their pool, but they have HBO! As soon as we moved from Jersey, we lost access to cable service. Because we live in a subdivision in the middle of the sticks, we’re told it will be years before we get cable.35

  If I can be honest without sounding like the worst grandkid ever? I really hate staying with my Noni and Grampa. Don’t get me wrong—I adore hearing my Noni’s stories about a very stupid little Sicilian boy named Giovah who’s always doing wacky stuff. Like there’s the one when his mom tells him to not stop watching the door when he has to babysit his little brother? So he simply takes the door off its hinges and brings it with him to go out and play, leaving his brother alone to drown in the tub. And then there’s the one where Giovah’s parents commit a crime and Giovah sees it. He may be slow but he’s honest, so his parents hatch a plot to make him look crazy by throwing dried fruit off the roof. That way, if the polizia interrogate him, he’ll say, “Yes, they did it the day it rained figs and raisins.”

  I assume these are parables, but I’m never quite sure what lessons I’m supposed to take from them.

  As for my grampa, he’s gruff but sweet, and if I’m well behaved I get to go to his shoe repair store and try on all the unclaimed footwear.36 I don’t ever get to keep them, even though some of these things have been there since the fifties when he opened the store. I suspect no one’s coming back to claim their old saddle shoes.

  So, spending time with my grandparents? Yes, absolutely! Just please not in their enormously creepy, dirty house.

  All my aunties have tried to make the house less creepy and dirty, but my grandmother violently refuses their help. I’m told Noni is very stubborn about her home because she was born and raised in poverty on the other side of the world. Then she got to America only to live through the Depression. She married my grampa, who had a compulsive gambling habit until he joined Gamblers Anonymous a few years ago.

  Suffice it to say she’s beyond thrifty. Even though she lives a few miles from downtown Boston, she’s converted her whole side yard into a vegetable garden, much to the neighbors’ dismay. (According to the neighborhood association, it’s fine for her to have a few tomatoes and maybe some basil. They’re less forgiving when she plants a quarter acre of corn all the way up to the sidewalk.)

 
; Noni won’t throw anything away, either. Ever. Her basement is so full of weird old stuff that I’m afraid to go down there.37 In her kitchen alone, there’s one useless dryer and two hulking, dead refrigerators.

  They’ve been there my entire life.

  There’s a third refrigerator in the back of the pantry that they can actually use, but it was made before the advent of freezer technology. So if we ever go out for ice cream with them, we have to eat it all because we can’t save it. Although once someone forgot and put a pint in the fridge anyway. I substituted the melted vanilla for milk the next morning on my Kix cereal and it was a little bowl of heaven.

  Even though they live in a huge house, there’s only one bathroom and it is scary. There’s a wobbly, chipped claw-foot tub in the middle of the room and they keep a bucket behind the toilet because it runs all the time. Their mean Rottweiler-Lab mix Edwina uses it as a water bowl.

  Once my Noni decided she’d redo the walls because she found a bucket of paint on the street. While hard at work, she accidentally slopped a little white on the red-and-black-checked floor tiles. Instead of wiping it off, she decided to make the rest of the floor match, so it looks like a bag of cotton balls spilled. It’s weird.

  The worst part of the bathroom situation is that everyone goes in and out of there while other people are using it and this is very wrong. My dad and I are the only ones who not only shut but also lock the door when we’re in there.

  When we stay at the house, I’m assigned to sleep in the airless back bedroom, which gives me asthma attacks because Noni won’t throw out her old horsehair mattresses. How is it not okay for me to ride a pony for half an hour, but to spare my grandmother’s feelings I must sleep on a bed that’s so full of old horsehair and dust mites that it’s been responsible for me having to go to the emergency room twice?