As disappointed as I was to find that I was an ineffective actress, I was elated to see how many kids showed up to my party! Granted, the guys were all there because Alyssa invited them and she had big boobs, and the girls were all there because Alyssa was indirectly popular because of her boobs. I didn’t care. My friend cared about me enough to throw me a surprise birthday and people actually came. No longer would I be forced to hang out with six-year-old tomboys whose parents disapproved of me. My weekends would now be spent gallivanting around town with fun kids my age rather than babysitting big-mouthed twins and rewatching Look Who’s Talking. Eighth grade was going to be so much better than seventh grade after all!
When I opened my gifts, I was shocked by how many kids gave me cold, hard cash. Twenty-dollar bills were shoved into free blank greeting cards from the ASPCA mailings. A few kids even had their moms write me a personal check. Imagine that! A check just for being born. At home I had to weed the front walkway to earn an Andrew Jackson. It was the closest I would ever come to that mythical Bat Mitzvah/confirmation money I had been so jealous of the legitimately Jewish and Catholic kids getting. This party was my time to get in on the money everyone else my age seemed to be getting after they read some religious speech. I was even luckier—I would still get the money ($250 total!) without ever setting foot in CCD or Hebrew school. Wow.
After the party, I thought about my options for my money. I could save it, toward a car or computer, but that would be boring. Besides, my parents didn’t know about the money because Alyssa hadn’t told them about the party. She got the feeling my parents didn’t like her, which was kind of true—Alyssa gave off a confident vibe that lots of people, including my mom, interpreted as sluttiness. Alyssa was completely boy crazy, and the boys were crazy for her. What my mom didn’t realize was that I wasn’t participating in Alyssa’s escapades. I was just tagging along, occasionally being forced to make small talk with a cute guy’s less attractive friend while Alyssa made out with the hot guy on the other side of the sofa. But nonetheless, my mom worried that my hanging out with Alyssa would lead to me doing slutty things. What my mom didn’t consider was that the only guys interested in me at this point were dirty and gross, albeit with keen musical ability, and even they were barely interested. The guy who had given me all the rock T-shirts seemed to have moved on, sensing I wasn’t game. I had learned from ’80s movies that playing hard to get was the best way to keep a guy’s attention, but I guess it wasn’t fair if you were keeping his interest for self-esteem purposes, not because you returned his feelings. He probably figured, “If this chick, who has no other viable options, isn’t biting, I’ll take my T-shirts elsewhere.” I hope he did. Living vicariously through Alyssa’s actions was much more my style.
I decided that my mom and dad didn’t need to know about the party, and they didn’t need to know about the money. Therefore I would have total freedom to do exactly what I wanted to do with it. The possibilities for $250 were endless.
I also decided that I would spend my unexpected windfall by going to the mall and buying absolutely everything I desired. I loved how on the old episodes of Wheel of Fortune the winners of each round could go shopping in the Wheel of Fortune rooms and buy whatever they wanted. Even though people were forced to buy cat plaques and vertical blinds in order to use up their money, I still found it exciting to be able to buy anything I desired. This is a similar feeling to the way I felt the few times my mom dragged me to the dollar store at Christmastime for wrapping paper. In Dollar Dreams, I couldn’t help but think, Wow, Margot. You really can afford whatever you want in here.
So, when I got dropped off at the mall with Alyssa, I had an incredible rush of adrenaline. This was the Freehold Raceway Mall, the newest mall in the area. It had a lot of clout because it was in Bruce Springsteen territory, which gave it slightly more class than the Bon Jovi territory fifteen minutes away that I was used to. The people there were less likely to get in fistfights over a Black Friday Nintendo special, and walking among them made me want to rise up to their level of class. We entered a boutique and I pulled a bunch of items off the racks without looking at the price tags first and truly felt like a rock star. The shopping mall was limited in its ’70s-rocker-clothing selection, but I found a bunch of impractical items to suit my needs. Poet’s blouses, chiffon shirts, purple pants. I could afford it all. Shopping with money had exceeded my expectations. I felt like the youngest contestant ever on Supermarket Sweep. As I took my loot home, I was really excited to debut my new looks at school the next week, especially because ever since the surprise party I thought I might be teetering on being almost popular.
Sunday night I planned out my outfit for Monday. I would wear a bright orange spandex unitard paired with a mustard/orange/hot-pink zip-up shirt strongly resembling a wet suit. Why hadn’t I ever worn this color combo before? The hot pink really brought out the rosy hue of my pale skin. I loved how the unitard clung to my lanky frame, giving me an androgynous look, as the skintight nature of the outfit really accentuated my lack of cleavage. I would look just like a freckled David Bowie. This outfit was going to be the start of my new social standing.
As usual, my parents had left for work by the time I caught the bus to school. There was no time to get a second opinion on my ensemble, not that I would have asked for it, since it was clearly the most fantabulous outfit ever known to man. I could even get double use out of my new orange unitard if I wore it to modern dance class. This was money well spent. I walked proudly into school strutting my stuff as I imagined David Bowie did when he first took the stage as Ziggy Stardust. If people were going to stare at me for being a head above all, at least now I was giving them something to stare at. For once, I welcomed the feeling of all eyes on me. I was ready for my new, happier, more fashion-forward life. New look, new year, new me.
I strolled down the east wing, towering over everyone as usual, but this time I stood up straight and with confidence. Everyone looked at me and whispered, and I imagined they were all talking about “New Margot.” Suddenly I felt a clammy hand aggressively grab me by the arm. “Come with me,” said my petite gym teacher sternly.
“What did I do?” I asked, genuinely confused. I had recently seen a special on PBS about the assassination of JFK and was fascinated by Lee Harvey Oswald’s famous claim, “I’m a patsy.” Watching him say this to the camera was invigorating, as I wondered if perhaps he was a patsy and more was afoot at the grassy knoll. I also (dare I admit this?) found and still find Lee Harvey Oswald to be kind of cute, so I was inclined to believe his claim of being a patsy. That being said, as this nag of a woman grabbed my arm, I hoped my call of “What did I do?” was played as effectively as my man Oswald’s performance had been.
“You know what you did,” said this tiny shrew of a woman.
Nice. This was getting dramatic! But then this frail woman whose ass I could definitely kick publicly dragged me to the principal’s office in front of all my peers. I had hated this gym teacher ever since she wore her high school cheerleading outfit to school last Halloween and did nothing but loudly brag all day about how it “still fits.” She had curly gray hair shaped like a dirty poodle’s and was the same size I was in about third grade.
She told me to “sit tight” as she walked into the principal’s private office. A minute later I was invited in. The principal, a dowdy woman who always looked as if she were pregnant but never was, terrified me. My gym teacher pled her case. “This outfit belongs in a nightclub, not at school. She’ll be a distraction in class to the other students.”
I found this statement ridiculous. As if students wouldn’t be able to do their algebra equations because I made controversial fashion choices.
The dowdy principal looked at me and said, “Stand up.”
Nervously, I stood my long body up and tried to salvage what little pride I had left. I tried to stand up straight, thinking about how proud my mom would be of me that I was finally displaying good posture. My mom always blamed La
verne as a bad influence on my spinal alignment. It felt as if it took three days for these two old biddies to make a decision about whether or not my ensemble was too wild for a public regional middle school in central New Jersey.
“You can’t wear this to school. I agree. You are way too distracting.”
Come on! They were actually saying that there was no way any students could possibly concentrate as long as I rocked this look. This was ridiculous. The drama of getting pulled into the principal’s office (and missing first period social studies) was fun at first, but now things were getting real. What was wrong with these women? I had seen girls come to school in midriff tops paired with hideous oversized jeans à la Kris Kross and no one called them “distracting.” I had seen guys “busting the sag” so low on their jeans that the entire backside of their underwear was showing and the principal glided right past them. In comparison, my outfit was quite tame. My risky fashion statement was just more noticeable because I towered over almost every person in the school. I couldn’t slip through the cracks like those petite crop-topped girls in my homeroom. No way I was going to take this lying down. “So, my outfit is more distracting than Teresa Carimonico’s pregnant belly?” I asked, using a tone I knew was going to get me in deeper. But I had a moral stand to take and, by God, I was going to take it.
The gym teacher gave the principal a look as if to say We got her. Self-expression will remain illegal in school. Book her.
“Call your mother. You’re going home,” said the principal.
What? What? I never in a million years thought that the bizarre response to my risky new look would be so extreme. And I didn’t even get to claim that I was a rebel, a member of the noble youth, speaking out for justice against the establishment, because they didn’t suspend me. No. I was officially being sent home “unfashionable.”
The gym teacher went back to work, teaching pimple-faced kids to square dance, and I was left alone with the principal who dug in my file for my mother’s contact information.
“She’s at work and so is my dad,” I said, hoping to get out of this one. “My dad works in the city, it’s too far for him to come. And my mom is a teacher; she can’t come to the phone. She can’t leave her classroom.”
“Well, we’ll just have to call her then and make her leave, won’t we? Next time think about that before you leave the house like this. What did your mother think of this outfit?”
“She didn’t see it, she was at work. But I’m sure she would love it.” Even though I had been bickering nonstop over nonsense with my mother in the past few months, I knew when it came to the big stuff she would be on my side. No one was going to tell her that her daughter was too weird-looking to be in school. I pled my case again. “She’s a teacher at a school forty minutes away. You won’t get her on the phone.”
“Well then, we’ll just have her paged.”
The principal dialed my mother’s school and asked for her snidely, staring at me the whole time with the same look Jessica Rosenstein gave me before my ill-fated fashion intervention in seventh grade. She flipped through my file, disappointed to find nothing else on me, as the receptionist explained my mother was working and could not be disturbed.
“Well, this is an emergency situation. I am the principal of her daughter’s school,” she said, giving me another look to say See! See how much power I have? See what you’ve done?
The principal waited as the receptionist paged my mother, then waited for my mother to get coverage for her class, then waited for her to make the trek to the other end of the school to answer the phone. At least ten minutes passed as she sat on hold, angrily shuffling papers to make herself look more important.
“Mrs. Leitman,” said the principal, sneering at me to show she was winning, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come get your daughter from school today. She is wearing an ensemble inappropriate for a learning environment . . . Yes, she is fully covered . . . No, there are no curse words on her clothes . . . It looks like she’s wearing some sort of leotard.”
“Unitard!” I called out, correcting her ignorant mistake.
“Unitard. She belongs in a disco. A nightclub. A rock concert. Not school.”
“So what?” I thought I heard my mother say. Her voice was getting progressively louder on the other end.
“So what? She cannot possibly stay here dressed like this.”
“She’s a free spirit!” screamed my mom. I heard her loud and clear that time.
“Mrs. Leitman, I repeat, this is not optional. You must come pick up your daughter at once.”
I heard rumblings of my mother screaming things like “coverage” and “substitute” and “not using up vacation days for this crap.”
Then the principal stood awkwardly repeating, “Hello? Mrs. Leitman? Hello?”
My mom had hung up on this wretch of a woman.
Badass.
“You know,” I said, “she has to get a substitute teacher for the rest of the day, and drive forty minutes to come get me now.”
“Well, then maybe she’ll learn to pay closer attention to her daughter’s choices from this point forward,” she retorted.
This really got me going. She was attacking my mother’s parenting! “It’s called being a working mom. You work. Do you have kids?” I subtly glanced at her bulging, faux-pregnant gut, knowing full well that she did not have any children.
“That’s none of your business. You can wait out there until your mother comes. And when she gets here, send her my way.” She opened the door to her private office and shuffled me out.
I sat there in my unitard waiting for over an hour in silence for my mom to save me. When she finally arrived, it was a grand entrance.
“Mom!” I called, and jumped up out of my seat to greet her.
She looked at my outfit and said with rage, “You look fine.”
“Mrs. Leitman, can you please sign your daughter out right here,” said the receptionist, passing over a clipboard and a Bic ballpoint pen.
“I have my own pen,” said my mother with a scowl, as she took out a keenly polished sterling silver Cartier pen my grandmother had gotten with her employee discount. She angrily signed her name with perfect penmanship and slid the clipboard over to the receptionist staring at her with a look that screamed Don’t fuck with me.
“Let’s go,” she said, and gestured for me to get up.
“Mom, the principal wants to talk to you,” I said meekly, feeling as though even relaying this message was accepting defeat.
“No thank you,” she said, throwing her JanSport purse over her shoulder and guiding me out the door.
And on that note we busted out. Two tall ladies walking arm in arm, feeling stronger than ever. Once we got into the car my mom gloated, “I’m not speaking with that woman. I won’t give that bitch the satisfaction.”
As we stayed home watching The Price Is Right together I had a feeling the bickering was going to ease up between us. She even let me keep my unitard on all day. My mom had never had my back more.
CHAPTER 10:
A Dangerous Camper
As eighth grade continued, word spread about me being sent home “weird.” There wasn’t much hope that things would improve. I had basically peaked at the surprise party in October, and my social status had tumbled downhill from there. Bored and anxious, I begged my mom to send me to a performing arts high school in Red Bank, a few towns over, where I was positive I would fit in. The high school allowed you to pick a major from the most awesome subjects ever: creative writing, dance, drama, vocal performance, photography—all the stuff my heroes excelled in. I imagined it as a land of freakishly tall girls who had a flair for the arts, like Theodosia from my modern dance class. People seemed cooler in Red Bank, as if they wrote Beat poetry and talked about “society.” I had purchased all my vintage dresses for the seven Bar/Bat Mitzvahs I had gone to that year in Red Bank. I would go into Backwards Glances on Broad Street and stare at all the vintage clothes while waiting
for my mom to pick me up from dance class. She was always late and blaming my father for it. “Well, I would have been here ten minutes earlier but you know, your father.” My father what? She was always vague enough for me to ask no questions. What my mom didn’t know was I liked the extra time I had alone after dance class. Looking at Pucci prints and leisure suits, I would dream of what it would have been like to be alive at a time where bright orange unitards were celebrated rather than oppressed.
I slipped hints here and there about how much I wanted to go to school in the cool town. “You know, I could just go straight to dance class from school if I went to the Arts Academy. Wouldn’t that make your life easier?”
“It’s no trouble for me to drive you. The only reason I’m ever late is your father,” my mom would respond, not picking up on the hint.
I also tried a more practical approach. “You know, Mom, the sooner I get training, the sooner I can start making money for the family.”
“Make money doing what?” she asked, her ears perking up.
“I don’t know . . . recording my first album? Designing my first fashion line?”
“Margot, you’re scared to sing in public, and you refuse to learn how to sew. Have you noticed I’ve stopped offering you sewing lessons? I’ve given up. But you are welcome to get a job when you start high school. I’m sure there are plenty of local businesses that would welcome a hard worker like you.”
Ugh. Making clown sundaes at Friendly’s was hardly the career path I was hoping for.
When the end of the school year approached and it came time to actually enroll in the cool school, my mother told me that she was sorry, but it was just not possible for me to go. There was simply no way to get me there every day. I was too young to drive and had two working parents. I figured as much. My brother was going off to college at an out-of-state school and there was no money to spare. She reminded me that the public regional high school was free and just a two-minute walk away. It’s true that the public regional high school was just behind my house, but to get there you had to traverse a path populated by broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, and high school delinquents (a.k.a. scuzzes) who hung out there before, after, and during school. Deeper in the woods, just off the path, girls with low self-esteem gave blow jobs and hand jobs to popular boys like Chad Decker.
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