Larry and Lenore Bonner were our parents’ best friends. He was an executive at Black & Decker and she worked part-time at the County offices in Towson. They were a few years older than my folks, and their children were several years older than us. Their youngest daughter Shelley, a senior over at Towson High, was a frequent babysitter, but Mrs. Bonner often sat for us.
I continued running every morning, always taking Daisy for a quick run first, and was now doing three laps around the neighborhood. One day I had Dad drive the route with me and we used his odometer to check the distance. Our best guess was that two laps, one small with Daisy, and then one large by myself, worked out to about a mile and a half. By now the cramp in my side was history, and I was able to speed up enough to add in another small lap. Dad noticed this, and he also noticed me lifting the bricks down in the garage, and asked if I wanted a set of real weights for Christmas. I decided some barbells would be a better choice and told him so. He just nodded and said he would think about it.
Hamilton was getting to be quite annoying. He was bitching constantly about everything I did. When I got up early to run, he would complain I was waking him up. I started taking my clothes to the bathroom to dress and he complained about my opening the drawers. I started laying out my clothes at night before I went to bed and he complained about where I left them. He started turning off my alarm clock, so I had to double check it each night, and placed it on the far side of the bed where he couldn’t get at it without going over me. He had a major case of schadenfreude going on; it wasn’t enough to feel good, others had to feel bad.
It really came to a head at dinner on the Saturday night before our meeting with Mrs. Bakkley. Right there at the dinner table, he decided to tattle on me, that I wasn’t sleeping in my pajamas, but in my underwear.
In my humble opinion, pajamas are one of the stupidest inventions ever invented. Really, clothing to sleep in? Mind you, I certainly don’t mind the look when a woman is wearing a pajama top and nothing else, but on guys it just looks dumb. My mother, however, insisted on them. The day I went off to college I started sleeping in my briefs and an undershirt, like normal men do. I’ve never worn pajamas since then, and had no intention of restarting now.
He sat there looking smugly at me as Mom stared at me, horrified. I just looked at him and disgustedly asked, “Why in the world could you possibly care for what I sleep in?”
He smugly replied, “It’s the rules! I bet you get punished now!”
“Christ on a crutch!” I muttered under my breath.
“Carling!” protested Mom. “I heard that.”
“Sorry.”
Hamilton started to laugh, saying I had been cussing but I think Dad had enough out of him. He was told to shut up, or else. Ham looked daggers at me, which I just ignored.
Mom, however, was all worked up about my improper sleeping attire. “Carling, why aren’t you wearing your pajamas to bed at nights?!” she demanded.
“Because I don’t want to wear them.” Simple answer.
“But you are supposed to sleep in pajamas.”
I smiled at that, blandly. “Oh? Do you wear pajamas?” I asked. I already knew the answer to that was a resounding NO! Mom preferred to wear very small and skimpy sleepshirts, although I also suspected Dad preferred her to wear them as well. At 5’10" tall, Mom was slim and very leggy, and a real looker. She was fairly slender, an A cup, but was within five pounds of the day she had married, and that after three children. She was an elegant and good looking woman, and she was very fortunate that my father was 6’1" tall, so she could wear high heels and not be taller than him. In the future she would be considered a MILF or a cougar, but back then she was just a hot mom.
Mom had the decency to blush as she stumbled out, “Uhhhh…”
“Really? I think I know what that means.” I hooked my thumb over at Dad, who was now grinning. “How about Dad? Does he wear pajamas?” I knew the answer to that as well. He wore briefs and an undershirt, too, or at least until Mom got into bed with him. For all of her coldness with Hamilton and me, Mom was decidedly not cold with Dad. The romance was alive and well across the hall.
Mom blushed again.
I looked over at Suzie and grinned. “I hope the pajama police don’t find me! You want some extra pajamas?” They’d look like they were made by Omar the Tentmaker on her.
“Yuck! You’ve worn them!”
“Yeah, they probably have my cooties,” I said, which got a laugh from Dad.
She stuck her tongue out at me, which I returned, and Mom began protesting that as well. It was a lost cause for her. Hamilton tried to protest but Dad shut him down again. I really began to wonder about him. He had some mental health issues on our first go-around; this time looked to be the same, and I wasn’t sure how much I was going to tolerate this time.
That Monday I hung around the library after school until my parents were scheduled to show up. It was always open late for students who needed to do homework. At four I met them in the lobby and we went into the office. Mrs. Bakkley was waiting there with Mr. Butterfield, and another woman I wasn’t sure I knew.
Butterfield pointed at me and asked Mrs. Bakkley, “This is the student you are talking about? Him?” I definitely got a warm and fuzzy feeling.
“Why don’t we all sit down,” she replied. She led the way into a teacher’s conference room. We all took seats around the table.
“This is your meeting,” he replied. “I think it’s a mistake, myself,” he added nastily.
My parents were thoroughly confused now, but getting angry. Mrs. Bakkley took on the lead role. Turning to me, she asked, “Did you explain your plan to your parents?”
“No, I just said the meeting was about taking some advanced classes. Nothing else.”
She nodded and turned to my folks. “Let me start off with an explanation. Last week Carl came to me with the suggestion that he take both Algebra 1 and 2 this year, to, in effect, squeeze two years of math in. When I asked why, his response was that it would allow him to take Geometry next year, which is normally a high school course. That’s why I brought Mrs. Rogers over from Towson High. She is a math teacher there.” Mrs. Rogers said hello.
This was all very confusing to my parents. They tried to ask me what was going on and what I was up to, but they were interrupting each other. Finally Mrs. Bakkley stopped them. “Let me finish. My first reaction was like yours, that this was a crazy idea, but I talked to Carl about it and he seemed sincere. So I made him a bet. I would give him a midterm test for Algebra 1, a test I wouldn’t normally give for another two months. It was a one time deal, take it or leave it. He passes the test and I see what I can do for him. He flunks and he forgets the whole thing.”
She took a deep breath as my parents stared at us. “He got a 97. Half the material on the test I haven’t even covered in class. I think I could have given him the final from the end of the year and he would have passed that as well. I suspect he is a mathematical prodigy of some sort.”
Finally my mother looked at me with something akin to pride. It made me a little disgusted, to be fair about it, that she would only be satisfied if I was some sort of genius. Like I said, great person, crappy parent.
My father eyed me curiously. “So what is your idea here? You want to skip a grade or something? Start high school next year?”
I had anticipated this. I shook my head. “No, not really. If you think I’ve had problems with bullies this year, wait until I’m still thirteen and the smallest kid in the entire high school. No, my thought is to skip some time on the math classes. If I can do geometry next year, I can take some of the other classes early when I get to Towson High.” I named a few of the advanced classes available.