I don’t mean to say that when my parents were home we were cowering in the basement hiding from them. It really wasn’t like that. The best comparison I can make is with other families. I’ve seen normal families. Mom or Dad get home from work or the store or wherever, and the kids show up to say hello and see what they brought back or whatever. We didn’t. We avoided them lest they figure out what we’d done wrong that day and hit us. It was over quickly, but it was never a good thing to be called up to see them. There was never any praise, only punishment. No carrot, only stick.
I skipped dinner that night, which was very unusual. Generally speaking, you ate what Mom put on the table, when she put it on the table. There were no substitutions and no delays. If you didn’t like it, which could happen, you ate it anyway, since the other choice was a beating with the oak paddle. If the meal was toxic radioactive sludge, you ate it. If you didn’t eat it and survived the beating and still wouldn’t eat it, you didn’t get fed until the next day. Surprisingly, my parents let me skip out, even after I told them I would eat something later.
I stayed in my room, thinking about what I was doing and how I would survive the next few years, until Hamilton came upstairs to bed. We had a small room but had managed to cram in two twin size beds and a dresser. By then my stomach was growling and I went downstairs to the kitchen. Everyone else had gone to bed, so I scrounged up a can of soup and opened it and poured it into a pan and set it on the stove.
Mom must have heard me stirring about, because she came downstairs. She found me stirring the soup over the flame and surprised me further by taking a bowl out of the overhead cabinet. “Thank you,” I said.
She looked at me without speaking as I finished stirring my soup. I poured it into the bowl and sat down at the kitchen table to eat. Finally, as she realized I wasn’t going to be the one to speak, she said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you this afternoon about the fighting. I know it wasn’t your fault.”
“Thank you.” Better to keep my words brief and to the point. Obviously she was the one who wanted to speak.
She gave me a strange look. “You’re different somehow. You’re acting… different.”
I set my spoon down and looked at her. “You always tell me to grow up and act my age, but now that I do, you don’t like it. You need to make up your mind, mother.”
Her face clouded up at this. Before this afternoon, I am sure I would have been smacked. Now she controlled herself. “You can’t speak that way to your mother.”
“Mom, I am speaking to you like an adult. You want me to act like an adult. You have said this more than once. If you want me to act like a little kid, just let me know. I have to tell you, it’s awfully confusing.” She just sat there, flummoxed, not knowing what to say to me. My words were making perfect sense, but just weren’t registering. I pushed a little harder. “Mom, I’ll make you a deal. You want me to act like an adult? Fine, I’ll do just that. You just have to treat me like an adult.”
“But you’re not an adult, you’re only a child!” she protested, probably louder than she wanted.
I simply shrugged. “Okay, it’s up to you. I am the one acting like an adult at the moment. I’ll keep acting like a grown up, but don’t be surprised when I let you know I think you’re letting me down.”
She just stared at me and then stood up and went back upstairs. I might as well have been speaking in Chinese for her understanding. I cleaned up and put the dishes in the dishwasher, and then headed upstairs and went to bed.
The next morning I woke up at my normal time, even though I wasn’t going to school. I went down to breakfast, which is basically cereal and juice, and got some Frosted Flakes and OJ. Hamilton ignored me as always, but Suzie noticed my eye. “What happened to you?”
“I got a black eye?”
“How?”
“I got punched in the eye.” I grinned at her and jumped up from the kitchen table. I balled my hands up into fists and waved them around wildly. “How would you like to be a Black Eyed Suzie!?”
In case you don’t know, the Maryland state flower is the Black Eyed Susan, which sounds a lot more exotic than it really is. It’s actually just a daisy with a brown center instead of the normal yellow. It’s a common wildflower all over Maryland. Ever since she’s been old enough to understand, the entire family has been teasing Suzie about giving her black eyes and making her the state flower.
Suzie giggled and squealed and ran back up the stairs. “Mom! Carl’s going to make me a black eyed Suzie!”
I laughed and sat back down to finish my breakfast. A minute later Suzie reappeared and stuck her tongue out at me. I stuck mine out at her, and this was how Mom found us when she came in, sticking our tongues out and making funny faces at each other.
“This is acting like an adult?” she asked me.
I smirked and then made a pointing gesture at Mom to Suzie. She giggled and nodded, and we both turned our faces to Mom and stuck out our tongues. It was too ridiculous. Mom just laughed and then stuck her tongue out back at us, before telling us to finish breakfast. Suzie and Hamilton got bundled out the door to school. Mom went back upstairs to get dressed for work. She worked part time in ladies lingerie at Hutzlers, a Baltimore department store. She had started part time once Suzie started school, and as we got older, she began working more hours, and eventually becoming full time and moving into management. By the time I got out of college, she had become the head of telecommunications for the company, which was an amazing thing, considering she only had a high school diploma. She stayed with them until retiring, just before the company folded and was sold.
I stayed downstairs and found my bookbag in the living room. Mom went off to work and I pulled everything out of the knapsack and spread it around. Wow! I didn’t remember being this sloppy!
El Camino Real, the Spanish book. Five years of Spanish and all I ever learned was ‘Mas cervezas, por favor!’ An algebra book. General science. Nothing on English or Social Studies, so I must have left that in my locker. A three ring binder with all sorts of handouts and crap falling out of it. Thank God I found a copy of my schedule, because after fifty years, I didn’t have a clue where I was supposed to be or who the teachers were.
I lived in a rich suburb in a rich county, and the public school system reflected this. It was your typical big suburban school system. When I got to Towson High it was about 2,200 kids in the top three grades. My graduating class was about 650. You could study almost anything. It was really first rate. It was a massive change when Marilyn and I lived north of the Catskills and raised children. When Alison and Parker graduated together, their class was 29 kids.
Because the school was so big, every seventh grader at Towsontown took a standardized test, a sort of junior SAT test. On the basis of this single test, the remainder of your academic life was laid out in precision detail. The next five years were organized, and attempting to vary your destiny was considered both futile and somewhat subversive.
The top ten percent of all students were the elite, the college prep group. These would become the future masters of the universe. They were destined to go to four year colleges, private colleges, becoming doctors and lawyers and scientists and engineers. They would become the future leaders of America. They were in accelerated classes. While others were taking 8th grade math, they were taking algebra. They were at least one year ahead of the others in taking biology, chemistry, and physics. They took AP advanced classes for college credit. Ten percent of 650 students worked out to roughly two classes of about 30+ students each, and for five years we moved in lockstep together, marching towards the future. I, of course, was a member of this exalted group, on the basis of my phenomenal ability at taking standardized tests, and in no way on the basis of my horrendously average grades.