by Byrne, Leigh
Mama drove my brothers to school, leaving me to ride the bus with a bunch of people I didn’t know. She saw to it that I wore the ugly clown coat out the door, but as soon as I got out of her sight, I took it off and stuffed it into my book satchel.
Approaching the bus stop, a cloud of dread hovered over me. I knew getting on the bus was not going to be a good experience. It was inevitable I would stand out as the new kid. A given I would draw attention wearing the low-hanging, short pants and hideous men’s boots. And a guarantee somebody was going to laugh at me. But I had no way of knowing I was going to be the only white kid on the bus as well.
It started with one stifled giggle. Then some kid in the back hollered out, “Look at those high waters!”
A few more giggles erupted. They kept multiplying, rapidly, and getting stronger, each one feeding off the others before it, until the whole bus roared. I pretended I didn’t know what they were laughing about, and kept my head down as I hurried to find a seat. Uniontown, Kentucky, was a small, coal-mining town of hardworking churchgoers. It seemed as though all of them knew one another, bound together in some way, whether by blood or through singing together in the church choir.
The people of Uniontown were wary of newcomers. They had become comfortable with the sameness of their cozy world, and anything different scared them. Even if I had dressed normal, been normal, the folks there probably still would not have accepted me, because I hadn’t been born there. To them I was, and to a certain extent would always be, considered an outsider.
Uniontown Middle School, like any other school, had its popular crowd, the cheerleaders and football players, and kids with rich parents. Nice clothes, with brand names like Izod and Aigner, were mandatory to get into this group. If you didn’t have a brass A or an alligator somewhere on you at least three days out of a week, you had no chance of being one of them. The kids in the popular crowd didn’t come anywhere near me, but they stared as I passed by them, and sometimes there were whispers.
Most of the kids in school were from blue-collar families. Their fathers worked in the mines, like their fathers before them had. Within this group were all kinds of kids, including nerds and rebels—the wild ones who smoked and wore leather jackets. The kids in this group were too busy struggling with their own problems and insecurities to judge me. They were distantly polite.
Those remaining were the outcasts—the poor, the ugly, the ones with skin conditions, cold sores, and bad teeth. They had been pushed from the other groups, so they clung together, forming a group of their own. They accepted me because they recognized me as one of them. I was at ease around the outcasts, particularly the ones who wore ragged clothes, and I felt a kinship with the kids who were overweight, or had kinky hair and acne.
Although I was able to blend in with this group, I never could bond with any single one of them the way I had bonded with Kat. I was too afraid to try again to make a true friend, too afraid I would fail to pass beyond the soundness of the wall that isolated me from the ordinary world.
Every morning, on my way to the bus stop, I took off the clown coat and stuffed it into my book satchel so nobody would see me with it on. But one day it was so cold out, I absolutely had to wear it, or freeze to death.
I stepped onto the bus prepared for the worst, and that’s exactly what I got. The combination of the clown collar, the short pants, and the oversized boots was too much for a busload of kids to handle. The laughter started the instant they saw me.
Looking around at all the gaping mouths and bobbing heads, I wanted to turn and run back out, but the bus doors clamped shut behind me.
Then a girl with caramel-colored skin and soulful brown eyes sprang from her seat. “Ya’ll hush!” she yelled. “Maybe her mama and daddy can’t afford no better.” She tugged at my arm, directing me to the seat beside her.
She told me her name was Vanessa. I recognized her as one of the popular girls in school, a cheerleader. “Don’t pay no mind to them,” she said, smiling, her teeth as straight and perfect as the keys on Grandma Storm’s piano. “They’re just being silly; you look fine.”
I was nothing to her, a stranger, the new kid, a weird one at that, and yet she had without reluctance stood up for me like I was her sister. What she had done both moved and mystified me at once. I did not know how to aptly express my gratefulness. I thanked her again, and again, but it didn’t seem like nearly enough.
From that day on, every morning and every afternoon, Vanessa saved me a seat beside her on the school bus. As long as I sat with her, the other kids didn’t make fun of me as much. Like a lost puppy, I attached myself to her, and when she got off at her stop, I wanted to follow her home.
43
After we moved to Kentucky, there were only a couple of instances like the one with the bracelet when Mama lost her temper, and attacked me violently. Every now and then, she slapped me in the face or kicked me when she walked by, but nothing like when I was younger. Instead, she got her gratification, her need to punish me, from causing me to be humiliated in front of my peers and attempting to inflict emotional pain with her words of belittlement. But it seemed like no matter what she did, she simply could not get satisfied in her efforts.
The next idea she came up with was to stop letting me shampoo my hair. After only a few days of skipping shampoos, because my hair was naturally oily anyway, it became plastered to my head. After a week it hung in heavy clumps around my neck.
To me this was the worse humiliation tactic of all. I could take the clown coat off as soon as I got to school, and when I sat at my desk, I was not so self-conscious about the pants, but there was no way at all to conceal my head from the other kids.
“That girl’s hair is so greasy, you could fry an egg in it,” a boy who sat behind me in my first period class said.
The girl who sat directly across from him commented, “I thought it was wet, like maybe she took a shower right before she came to school.”
“No it’s not wet, because I’ve got sixth period with her, and it’s still like that,” said the boy.
“Why doesn’t she wash her hair?” the girl asked. “Is she too poor to afford shampoo?”
“Either that, or she’s not right in the head. She never talks to anybody, keeps to herself all the time.”
“Wonder if she even takes a bath?”
“I don’t know, and I’m not going to get close enough to her to find out.”
For a while, after hearing what the other kids thought of me, I sank into despair and spent many nights in bed, pining over my unfortunate life. After about two weeks of this, I realized my self-pity wasn’t helping matters at all, and my hair was only getting greasier. I came to the conclusion that I needed to take action to solve my problem, because things were not going to get better on their own.
Instead of whining, I spent my nights wracking my brain for a solution, until I came up with a plan I thought I could pull off. I was going to wash my hair under the outside water faucet one morning before getting on the school bus. Mama usually let me leave about ten minutes before the bus came, and I figured that would give me just enough time to do it if I moved fast.
First I needed to steal some soap from the bathroom at home. But something so risky called for careful consideration and timing, as Mama continued to keep close supervision over me. In order to get my hands on a bar of soap, I had to slip out of my room during the night while she was sleeping.
The bathroom had only one bar of soap out for the family to use. I knew I couldn’t take that one because she would miss it, and I always got blamed for everything that went missing around the house. I would take a new one from the bathroom cabinet; it would be less likely she would notice it was gone.
After I got the soap, I decided to put my plan into action the following morning. It was exceptionally cold out, but I didn’t let the weather deter me. I couldn’t take another day of hearing the whispers and seeing disgust on the faces of the kids at school.
As soon as I got
out the door on my way to catch the bus, without a minute to waste, I reached into my book satchel for the soap I had stolen from the bathroom the night before, and then ran around the side of the house to the backyard.
The instant I got to the faucet, I tossed my books on the ground, dropped to my knees, and turned it on. I stuck one of my hands under the water first to check the temperature. It was cold all right, but I was too fired up to appreciate just how cold, and my time was limited, so I didn’t have long to ponder the issue.
Taking in a deep breath and holding it, I put my hair under the running water long enough to get it wet. Immediately I felt my scalp go numb, and then my hands. I took the bar of soap, and rubbed it against my hair, vigorously, to work up lather. I rubbed and rubbed, but the soap just slid around on my head.
Off in the distance, I heard the school bus breaks screech when it stopped to turn off the highway into staff housing.
I knew it meant I didn’t have much time left to make it to the bus stop. Panic surged through my chest at the thought of missing the bus and having to stay out in the cold all day. I put down the bar of soap and stuck my head under the water again to rinse my hair.
When I heard the bus getting closer, I shut off the water, shoved the soap back into my book satchel, and took off running full speed to the bus stop. When I was almost there, I reached up and tried to comb my hair out with my fingers. It was stiff on top because I hadn’t rinsed out all of the soap, and worse yet, it was crunchy on the ends where it had started to freeze.
As soon as I got on the bus, a girl hollered out, “High Waters!” It had become my nickname. “What did you do to your hair?” she asked. “Did you fall in the water you were wading in?”
Everyone busted out laughing, including the driver. With a hand that felt like a baseball glove, I patted clumsily at my head, trying to smooth out the pieces of my hair that were sticking up on top. “I was running late this morning,” I said. “I just got out of the shower.”
I searched for Vanessa’s kind face, and when I spotted it, I made my way to her and sat down in the seat she had saved for me. She had to turn toward the window to keep me from seeing that she was trying not to laugh.
Vanessa didn’t ask me why my hair was wet and soapy that morning, just as she had never asked me about the strange way I dressed. She didn’t ask because she thought she already knew the answer. She thought it was because my family was poor. And I didn’t tell her any different.
“You would be so pretty if you put on makeup and wore something stylish,” she said. “Do you want to come over to my house sometime? I’ll lend you some of my clothes, and show you how to put on mascara and eye shadow.”
Of course I couldn’t take her up on her offer, but her generosity alone touched a tender place inside of me that had only been touched once before.
Vanessa was the one person in Uniontown I knew I could trust with my secret, but I could not gather the courage to tell her. After what had happened with Kat, and the fiasco with Social Services, all the disappointment and humiliation, I figured there was no use. Besides, with both my parents against me, I didn’t stand a chance anyway, and would only end up making a fool of myself again. So I trudged on from day to day, wearing my protective armor, trying to salvage the traces of my dignity that remained, doing the best I could with what I had available to me. But inside I could feel my breaking point was getting nearer.
At home Mama had begun withholding food again. Some nights she didn’t feed me supper, and she often forgot to give me lunch money. Whenever I got the chance, I stole a handful of loose change from Daddy’s nightstand and used it to buy lunch. On the days I didn’t have money I went to the cafeteria anyway and walked from table to table, shamelessly bumming food from kids I had never met.
This went on for a few months, until one day help fell from the sky like a heavenly gift. On the way to one of my classes, I passed the lunchroom and noticed something posted on the door. I stopped to read: “Wanted: Student Cafeteria Workers. Payment Is Free Lunch.” I went right in and applied.
Most kids had no need to work in the lunchroom. The poor ones got their lunch for free anyway, so I got the job because no one else was interested.
The lunchroom work was easy. All I had to do was transfer the food from the pots to the serving pans, and then help with the dishes. Not only did I get to eat free for doing this, but I could also have as much as I wanted. The ladies who worked in the cafeteria were amazed by the amount of food I could put away. They didn’t know I was trying to store up enough to last through the night, in case Mama didn’t feed me supper.
After stuffing myself with food every day, in a matter of months, my weight went from a puny one hundred pounds, to about one hundred and forty. My clothes started busting at the seams. Three rolls of fat formed on my stomach, and my thighs rubbed together when I walked.
44
Finally Daddy located a house to suit Mama, and we were able to move out of the modular home in staff housing.
Our new house had two roomy stories and a basement, much bigger than our place on Maplewood Drive. Nick was thrilled because he had been promised a room of his own when we moved. But because there were only three bedrooms, Jimmy D. and Ryan would still have to share one. My room was to be downstairs under the stairway in an area formerly used for storage.
It was an older house, built in the early 1900s. Mama’s massive Victorian furniture fell gracefully into place in the grand formal living room, with its twelve-foot ceiling and crystal chandelier. All the original woodwork remained intact, as did many of the original light fixtures.
Although the new house was large enough for our family, and it did have its antiquated charm, hardly anything had been done in the way of renovating. “There are plenty of things here to keep you busy this summer, Weasel,” Mama said.
First she wanted all the baseboards, door facings, and the molding around the windows to be hand-sanded down to reveal the grain of the original wood. Then I would strip the French doors leading from the living room into the dining area. The hardwood floors throughout the house, which had been heavily shellacked over the years, would be next.
While I did the work, she continued to monitor my every move, even to the point of sacrificing her own privacy and free time. She either sat right under me, or came in to check on me every few minutes.
We had been in the new house only a few weeks when it occurred to her that in such a big space, she wouldn’t be able to watch me like she wanted to during the night. Her master bedroom was upstairs, and my room was downstairs, too far away from hers for her comfort, and worst of all, right across from the kitchen. She was afraid I might sneak out at night while everyone was sleeping and steal their food, like I had before. And she was right.
She had to come up with a way to somehow keep me in my room, which meant she had to figure out how to lock my door from the outside. In search of a lock, she went to the local hardware store and came across the kind normally used on the inside of front doors to keep intruders out of houses. She bought one in the heavy-duty size, complete with a chain and built-in buzzer, designed to go off if the door attached to it was opened more than a few inches.
That night after supper, Daddy got out his tools and mounted the lock on the outside of the door to my room under the stairs. Then they opened the door over and over to see if the chain was sturdy enough, and the buzzer worked properly. As a final test, Mama went upstairs to her bedroom, and Daddy set off the buzzer so she could be sure it was loud enough to hear if I tried to escape during the night.
My afternoons and weekends were spent working on the house. At night I was locked in my room under the stairs, where I ate my meals, when I got them, did my homework, and spent the rest of the time reading books, until Mama made me turn out the light.
My new room was compact. At the most it measured six feet by eight, barely enough space for my bed to fit in. I was always bumping my head on the ceiling that slanted with the stairs above it, a
nd the closet had a three-foot-tall door that I had to stoop down to get into. It was stuffy too, because there were no windows or vents to circulate the air. The only light source was a bare bulb in the center of the room, and when it was turned off, it was dark, even during the day. At night it was black upon black.
Despite its oddities I grew to love my room under the stairs. It became a tiny haven for me, a space where I could get away from Mama’s anger, and the ridicule I suffered at school. I would rather have been alone in my room than anywhere else.
The only problem I dealt with was where to go to the bathroom. During the week I became good at retaining my bowels at night until I could use the restrooms at school the next day. Usually I could hold it on the weekends too, but there were a couple of instances when I had to go bad, so I did, on some notebook paper. I wrapped it in several more sheets of paper, and stuck it in my book satchel until Monday morning, and then tossed it in a Dumpster on my way to the bus stop.
My main problem was with peeing. Mama usually came and let me out to go once right before bedtime. But she often got busy and forgot. Once, when I had to go, I went into the short closet, squatted near the back, and went right on the floor. The pee soaked into the old, porous wooden planks and disappeared, and I thought no one was the wiser. But what I didn’t know was the pee was not disappearing at all, but seeping through the floor to the ceiling below, the area between the back door and the entrance to the basement.
It took Mama a while, but she finally figured out where all the yellow stains on the ceiling of the landing were coming from. She was infuriated. She knew she had to come up with some other way for me to go to the bathroom, or I would keep peeing in the closet and staining the ceiling.
So back to the hardware store she went. She returned with a metal bucket for me to keep in my room to use as a toilet. When she gave it to me, she made it clear that it was to be used only for peeing.
