In ninth grade, no one cared about what anybody’d done in elementary school. When Frannie Grant, the most popular freshman girl, was browsing with her group just one aisle away from me in Woolworth’s she smiled at me, her famous triangular smile, and I picked up a bouquet of mascaras, black and mink and teal blue, one for each of her friends, and a tray of eleven coordinated eyeshadows, the nearest expensive thing I could grab, and walked out of the store. I put it all into her cupped hands.
“I have more stuff than I need,” I said. “Knock yourselves out.”
Boys looked at me carefully, smashed into me in the halls, but didn’t speak. Rachel Schwartz lent me lunch money and taught me to say “Fuck you” in Hebrew, Arabic, and Swahili. Rachel was the only person worth talking to. When we were in fifth grade and she was the new girl from New York City, she invited me over for three weeks in a row. We played Lawrence of Arabia and terrorized her mother’s elderly dachshund, Schatzie, who had to wear a chiffon scarf around his neck and be the sheik. We played Sailor, and I put on one of her brother’s blue baseball shirts and walked bowlegged around her canopied bed until the big moment, when I undid her bra and laid my head on her soft, custardy breast, making sure my nose and lips didn’t touch her raspberry-pink nipple. Because of her big breasts, Rachel got to be the Lady. A few times, dressed in her father’s black silk kimono, Rachel made me tie her to the metal pipe in their semi-finished basement and light matchbook fires in a circle around her. She swooned neatly, slipping out of the kimono, and I untied her and dragged her over the cork floor to the safety of the laundry room, reviving her with tender pinches and sips of soda. Her head lay back on my arm, and as the Sailor and the Lady we French-kissed, and she tasted like Fresca and the smell of doused matches was in her hair. We read to each other from the Playboy Adviser, whose mascot was a Bunny Tinkerbell with fascinating, garterless black hose pressing into her thighs. Our last Saturday, we pulled her mother’s stockings over our faces and pretended we were robbing a big bank and the loot was her mother’s costume jewelry and all the change in her father’s sock drawer. Rachel didn’t call me the next day and she didn’t call me the next week. I waited and smiled warmly when I saw her at school and still she didn’t call. She walked around the courtyard with Sabra and Julianna Cohen, a twist of arms around waists.
By the next year she’d bounced off the Cohen girls to the most popular socks-matching-sweaters circle, and in eighth grade her picture was in the junior high yearbook eleven times, six times with boys. But in ninth grade, as I was finally figuring out the rules, happily wearing skirts barely covering my underpants and hiphuggers riding just above my pubic bone, she quit horseback riding and modern dance and pep band and got fat and angry and more weird-looking than the rest of us. She wore sunglasses and bunny bedroom slippers and mirror-spotted Indian halters to school. She called to tell me the dachshund had had a heart attack, and then she said “I’m sorry,” and we never got off the phone. We played records into the receivers for each other, and occasionally Rachel played her guitar over the phone. On weekends we answered the personal ads in the The Village Voice and made dates we would never keep with grown men whose desperation and terrifying want could only be managed by ridicule. The more elaborate the date plans, the more specific the costume requests, the harder we laughed when we got off the phone. Given weapons, we would have been snipers.
Most of my teachers liked me, and I didn’t feel too bad about being in Extended Algebra, which took three semesters to do what everyone else did in two. If they had had Super-Extended Algebra, I would have been in that. Mr. Provatella saw that although I grasped the concepts of algebra, I had not learned how to divide and could barely multiply, and while everyone else struggled through endless sheets of equations, he and I talked about infinity and the envelope of time.
Mr. Stone, my English teacher, read poetry to our class and told me I could show him my own poems after school. I sat next to him, smelling his coffee and tobacco and middle-aged-man smell, watching him roll up his sleeves over his wide arms. He tapped a ridged fingernail over each line, circling a misplaced word, running a yellowed fingertip back and forth over a nice phrase.
I wrote poems about loneliness and terrible fires in crowded tenement buildings and poets dying in the Russian snow.
Mr. Stone said, “I know you know about the loneliness, honey,” and he crossed out every other line and made me put away all the poems located in places I’d never been. I brought him three boxes of blue pencils.
Mrs. Hill and I were working our way through Pride and Prejudice and the story of her courtship with Mr. Hill. I gave her a couple of manicures without hurting her too badly and hoped she wouldn’t ask for a pedicure. One afternoon, I found her smiling in her sleep when I walked in, her feet, brown and yellow and bumpy as toads, soaking in warm water and chamomile leaves. I dried her feet and moisturized them and filed down her toenails and painted them Carnaby Crimson.
I had everything I needed.
Peace Like a River
From behind Mr. Stones desk I watched the entire junior high walk by, their faces passing between my pointy toes. I drank Mr. Stones coffee and waited for someone to admire my red cowboy boots propped up on a pile of blue books. I shut the door and read everyone’s grades.
In that little office, with the frosted-glass window facing me and the view of the parking lot behind me, with the dirty metal file cabinets and the film of cigarette ash and dust and the apple cores rotting in Mr. Stone’s wastebasket from Monday to Friday, I felt whole. The dreams other girls tried to make real with boys or clothes or horses were nothing to me. The best dream, the true red heart of my life, was Mr. Stone; Rachel and Mrs. Hill were the ribbon, and books were the lace trim.
When he came in, I was crying.
“Liz, what’s the matter?”
“My father’s moving out.”
My sharply proper mother had loosened the reins on me entirely, distracted by weekly legal encounters over the Chippendale, the Klimt, and the Fiestaware. My father gave me twenty dollars every time he saw me, and offered me all the things he wouldn’t let me eat when I was little. It wasn’t really so bad. It wasn’t tragic.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Stone said.
I think he felt sorry for us all, even for my mother, who never inspired sympathy.
“Maybe things will get a little better now. Maybe you and your mother will fight less and you and your father will spend more time together.”
I didn’t think he really thought that.
“Maybe, maybe not.” I stared at the toes of my boots.
“Maybe not,” Mr. Stone said without smiling. Sometimes he would smile when I was looking away, but when we really looked at each other, I saw the pink rock of his face with grey mossy hair on top and wild, twiggy crescents of eyebrow above his small, slanty blue eyes.
I loved him for not lying to me, but I started crying again, drops falling on my notebook. I hoped he’d give me permission to skip class. I hoped my nose wasn’t running and that I wasn’t ruining Rachel’s mother’s silk shirt.
“Can you go to class? The bell’s ringing.”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
“All right, forget it. Stay here. I’ll write you a pass and you can go later. Whose class are you missing?”