“Excuse me, would it be okay if I came out with you guys? I don’t have a buddy.”
The first girl turned to her friend and frowned. “What did it say?”
The other girl shrugged.
“It can’t come with us.”
With that, they walked away.
This might explain why when Rebecca asked if there was anyone who wanted to spend their lunch hour helping her clean the classroom (unsurprisingly, she was also fixated upon keeping an immaculate work space), I alone raised my hand. Not that I had a better option. Lunchtime meant sitting alone in the cafeteria or taking my lunch to some corner of the school where I wouldn’t be seen.
Cleaning up Rebecca’s classroom turned into a regular job. I would spend fifteen to twenty minutes putting things away and sweeping, and then sit down at a desk and eat my lunch. Not a word was exchanged with Rebecca. But she seemed to tolerate having me there, and I liked the idea of having a place to go.
Not once during that year did anyone else join Rebecca for lunch, nor did she ever leave the classroom. Rebecca seemed unbothered by the fact that the only one in the school who wanted to hang out with her was me.
One day, Rebecca informed me that she would not be in class the next couple days. I worried that she had been fired.
A day or two later, I met my mother in a coffee shop after school. She slid a picture across the table. It was a photograph of President Obama in the White House. He was in deep conversation with someone with whom he was obviously friendly. Rebecca.
WINTER VALLEY
ONCE A YEAR my elementary school treated its fifth-grade students to two or three days in the countryside. Kids could hike or swim in a lake or just wander around. In the evening, everyone gathered wood and built fires. The place we went was Winter Valley. Everyone looked forward to it, especially me.
Unpopular kids tell themselves that if they have a chance to get out of school and be with kids in a different setting, it will be easier to make friends. Winter Valley was perfect for this: there were plenty of group activities, and the kids slept together in log cabins.
My class trip to Winter Valley was scheduled for February. Though I didn’t much like the cold, I was thrilled. It was all I could think about. I read about the trees and animals that I would see, how to build a fire and make friendship bracelets. I had been collecting magazines on “country living” for years, hoping that one day my parents would move us to a woodsy place.
—
I had asked my parents to come on the trip as the chaperones, but that was never going to happen. My father, though still young, gave the convincing appearance of having been around for a couple of centuries, and on the rare occasion that he left his armchair, could be found at the nearest café. My mother had also refused. Her idea of traveling was to places like Tashkent or Bamako, not Winter Valley with a group of kids.
My mom packed me a bag full of my favorite clothing, all of which could have doubled as maternity wear. As I boarded the bus, full of expectation and clothed in T.J.Maxx’s finest, my parents waved good-bye to me from the street.
On the bus sat my classmates, a couple teachers from the school, and Doris’s mom, our chaperone.
As soon as we left the parking lot, the kids started singing “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry. As I joined them, something came out of my mouth along with the notes and words.
As an infant, I had suffered from motion sickness. For this reason, when Mom and I traveled, she would make a point of avoiding buses, boats, and long car rides. So careful was she that I’d forgotten that I even had the problem.
What this meant was that in addition to my voice that morning I was able to contribute to the song the masticated contents of my last meal. I spent the rest of the trip with my head in a plastic bag.
—
As soon as we arrived at Winter Valley, I raced off in search of a bathroom.
When I returned to the bus, my classmates were gone. I waited, but the gentlemen who I had assumed had been assigned to carry my bags to the cabin did not appear. Full of the camping spirit, I took hold of my new pink Hannah Montana bag and, with the assistance of a previously unknown strength, rolled it up the hill to Chief True Eagle Cabin, my assigned residence.
Inside, I was greeted by Doris’s mom. She walked me to the one unoccupied bed at the very back of the room. It was the only single bed in a room full of bunks.
Where, I wondered, were the reading chairs, duvets, and hand-painted wallpapers that I’d seen in the country living magazines?
There were only gray walls, metal bunk beds, and a muddied beige carpet. Doris’s mom sensed my disappointment.
“For your information,” she lectured, “Chief True Eagle was not interested in trivial things.”
“Could you find me a chief who was?”
“Here is your bed,” replied Doris’s mom, and then she turned to leave.
I interrupted her departure.
“Excuse me. Do you smell something?”
Doris’s mom sniffed. An expression of disgust flooded her face.
After the deafening sound of a certain bathroom appliance, one of my classmates emerged from a door not two feet from my bed. I realized then why my bed had remained unoccupied.
Did I mention that it was snowing? It was the type of snowfall dense enough to make snowmen or throw snowballs. This snow overwhelmed the cabins, trees, and everything beyond until nothing was visible.
Snow like this hadn’t been seen at Winter Valley for over a decade. So amazing was it that the staff of the camp, after a dinnertime discussion with the parents and teachers, decided that the next day we would all go snowshoeing on a nearby mountain. Everyone was excited.
—
At exactly eight o’clock the next morning, we gathered at the edge of the camp. The sky was clear.
Together, we moved toward the mountain, and as we climbed, the counselors gave us a history of the area. Trees and animals and birds were discussed. I felt connected to our group, marching in the same direction, toward the same adventure.
After an hour or two of walking, we reached the point at which we could go no farther. The snow was too deep.
The people I knew in New York were not exactly the snowshoeing sort and I was at a loss as to what to do. On top of this, I was clumsy.
I drifted behind.
When the distance between me and the group was so great that I could no longer see them, I became nervous. Before I could call out, I began to fall forward.
My head screwed into the snow. The cold shocked me. After a minute or two, a horned animal, possibly a unicorn, galloped toward me. I was in a tapestry—ladies and knights floating in the distance as the beast made its way to my side.
Suddenly I was being hoisted from the snow, the steamy breath of the unicorn warming my face. My eyes began to clear.
It was Doris’s mom.
Witnessing my fall, she had come snowshoeing down the hill. Not all that good in snowshoes herself, she jerked back and forth, waving her poles in the air above her head.
But I was not in a position to say anything unkind about Doris’s mom. She was more fretful about her child than most of the parents at school, but she was one of the few willing to come with us to Winter Valley and the only parent willing to face the mountain beside us.
Having lifted me out of the snow, Doris’s mom turned to lead us back up the hill, but upon taking her first step, she lurched up and over her own snowshoes. As soon as she hit the snow, she began to somersault. There was no one below to stop her tumbling, so I watched as she, a groaning, growing orb of whiteness, disappeared down the hill.
Where she ended up, I do not know. But it took an hour for the instructors to find her.
By the time I returned to the camp, everyone was convinced that I was responsible for whatever had happened to Doris’s mom. There wa
s even a rumor that I’d pushed her. For the remaining days at Winter Valley, no one spoke to me; I was not included in group activities; and at the meals, I sat alone.
Just before we returned to New York, word came back to us that Doris’s mom was alive and conscious but had broken a number of bones and would be in the hospital for a couple weeks. I could not have felt worse about this.
Despite my efforts to move forward, to find friends, to be appreciated in some way, I was back at that pool party, the baby throwing me off balance, the look on the faces of the others. My life was folding back on itself.
—
In school the following Monday, it was clear that my place was fixed: I would, for the rest of my life, be known as the least popular kid in the elementary school. Before Winter Valley, I had comforted myself with the thought that there was time for things to change. Now it was too close to graduation. Doris’s mom was still in the hospital, and she was not getting out any time soon. In fact, the doctors were now saying that she would need another operation.
One morning, my mother sent me to school with a nicely wrapped package for Doris’s mother. When I handed it to Doris, I assured her that her mom was going to love the gift, though I had not bothered to ask my mother what was inside.
Because I’d delivered the gift on the very day that Doris’s mom was scheduled for her second operation, Doris was able to unwrap it for her as soon as she awoke. So after a day of having titanium rods inserted into her arm, Doris’s mom opened her eyes to a wicker basket filled with hand creams, each with a cheery message from my mother.
“Having trouble with your cuticles? Try this.”
When my father, never wanting to upset my mother, had told her the Winter Valley story, he poured a little too much fabric softener into it, so that she had entirely the wrong idea about what had happened to Doris’s mom.
The unexpected, but welcome, effect of this was that I was given a brief rest from people disliking me, as teachers, parents, and even some students came to believe that my unfortunate personality was less my doing than the weedy outgrowth of a deranged couple.
THE TRAITOR
THE HOTEL WAS close enough to my elementary school that I could walk home. Most of the other kids lived farther away and took the public bus. Every day, Mother would meet me at the school, and often we would stop for tea on our way home.
As a result of the bonding I had witnessed on the bus ride to Winter Valley (a bonding I was excluded from by nausea), I became convinced that if I commuted with my classmates, they would eventually come to accept me. At the very least, I would get an idea of what they liked to talk about, and that would help me socialize. After lengthy negotiations, my parents agreed to buy me a Metrocard for the NYC bus. My mother worried about this because she thought the bus was dangerous, even though many of my classmates took it as well.
For the first few trips, everything went as I hoped. Though no one spoke to me, I was able to overhear what the other kids were saying, and in a notebook, I would write down the names of the singers, television shows, and computer games they mentioned.
It was not very long into this new routine that I noticed some girls gathering at the back of the bus, laughing. I didn’t pay much attention until one day when the bus was very crowded, and I ended up in one of the back seats. It was then that I saw why they were laughing.
A woman in torn blue-and-yellow checkered overalls, no helmet, with paint splattered across her hands and face was cycling madly, dangerously, in back of the bus.
My mom.
Still very concerned about me, she had decided that if she couldn’t walk me home, she would secretly follow me, pedaling after the bus until I reached the hotel. Her outfit was what she wore when she was in her art studio.
Once Mom gave up modeling, she was happy to never worry again about what she looked like when she appeared in public; so it was not unusual for her to go around in her shredded overalls, paint on her face, hair a mess.
Even this, to my amazement and envy, did not affect her beauty. But it made for an odd sight, and I stopped taking the bus.
—
For the few days I was on the bus, my classmates talked mostly about middle school—a concern we all shared because our elementary school ended after fifth grade.
We were required to list five different public schools (in any borough) in order of preference. Some of the schools asked for interviews and supplementary material. Our choices were then fed into a citywide computer program where schools would process our answers. If a student didn’t get into their first choice, the computer would shuffle down their list of schools until there was a match.
Parents, school counselors, and teachers were obsessed with the selection process. Parents would spend months looking at schools, reading through pages of catalogues and “inside” guides, and forcing their children to endure endless interviews. Worst of all, we would have to go through it again when we applied to high school. This was how the New York public school system worked, and it was brutal.
If we did not get accepted into the handful of superior middle schools, we would not, when it came time to apply to high school, matriculate into the two or three superior high schools—which meant that we were doomed for college, and thus for life. It was that competitive. Or so everyone thought.
While we skidded down the middle school abyss, a small number of parents received an e-mail from our teacher, Rebecca.
She explained to these parents that their son or daughter was very smart, brilliant even, and that she (Rebecca) wanted to make certain their child got into a top middle school. Having worked in the school system for many years, Rebecca knew teachers and admissions officers at middle schools across the city and was therefore in a position, she assured the parents, to be very useful.
There were two conditions: the parents whom Rebecca contacted were not allowed to tell anyone that Rebecca was helping them, and they were never to speak to Rebecca about this other than through e-mails.
The parents, of course, agreed.
With that, Rebecca began a lengthy e-mail exchange with these lucky parents in which she described the schools she felt were right for their kids and then set out a strategy for getting them in. Rebecca explained to them that there were a handful of middle schools, all outside the borough of Manhattan, which were little known to the public but full of exceptional teachers.
More important, each of these middle schools boasted exceptional records of getting their students into the best high schools. At these places Rebecca knew someone who could make certain that the child was admitted.
In exchange for Rebecca’s help, the parents became slaves to Rebecca: she would send them e-mails demanding that they make cupcakes and drop them off by the end of the day or leave their offices to return a library book that their kid had borrowed from the school.
When I finally heard about this through the grapevine of elementary school gossips, I was very, very upset. My parents were not included in Rebecca’s little group, which meant that she didn’t care about me.
I already knew that I was not an especially pretty girl (I related more to the “before” people in self-help ads than the “afters”) and that I wasn’t all that likable and that some of my interests (Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde) were different from those of other students. But I knew that when I worked hard, I could usually do as well as the others in my class.
But apparently not, for Rebecca—with whom I had come to identify and whom I considered a friend—had clearly ditched me. I’d been betrayed and didn’t know what to do about it.
The sadness inside me was not budging, no matter how hard I pushed at it or how many times I cried.
With Rebecca having abandoned me, the whole thing with Doris’s mom, and no one at the school ever wanting to be anywhere near me, I was friendless. I didn’t care about playdates or birthday parties or sleepovers—those wer
e out of the question; I just wanted someone to talk to me—a “How are you?” “Pleasant day, isn’t it?” would have been nice. But it wasn’t going to happen.
I needed a plan.
Once or twice a year, Luca (our neighbor at the hotel) would throw a costume party. There were always thirty or forty people dressed as kings, queens, gangsters and starlets, long-dead painters, poets, and cartoon characters.
Girls in my school liked to get dressed up, so why not plan a princess party? I asked my mom about it, and she thought it was a great idea.
We came up with the idea of the Princess Banquet.
Half a dozen girls received handwritten invitations to meet me at the Chelsea Hotel on a certain date and time.
On the night of the party, I stood outside the hotel in my Belle costume, waiting for the princesses to arrive. The girls showed up on time, all in costume, and I escorted them through the lobby.
I pointed out the sculpture of the obese pink woman swinging above our heads, her plump legs dangling.
The princesses stared.
Beneath the Pink Lady were the Crafties. They were, as usual, arguing. I called out to them.
“These are the princesses I was telling you about!”
Mr. Crafty stood up.
“I hope you princesses have a fucking good time.”
It was one of the nicest things I’d ever heard him say.
I led the girls to the elevator. As the door opened and a crowd rushed out, I explained to the princesses that Stanley, the manager, must be out for dinner. The girls shuffled inside.
The elevator doors opened on the second floor.
A woman in a motorized wheelchair entered. Dressed in black, hunched over, her stringy black and white hair covered all but her toothless scowl. She pushed herself into the pack of princesses.
“BACK, MIDGETS!”
I turned to the girls and made my most polite introduction.
“Smiley, Princesses. Princesses, Smiley. My mom says Smiley is one of the best artists ever.”
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