Noticing Others

Chapter 5

            Second grade is a blur, probably because the teacher was a perfect replica of  The
Wicked Witch of the West. And not only did she put a spell on the classroom, she oversaw the lunch room on certain days too.  One day, as I headed down the hallway to lunch, I smelled my greatest fear—the stringy, slimy, stewed tomato and brown rice casserole that made me gag.  This posed a dilemma.  I couldn’t get to recess without cleaning my plate, and I couldn’t dispose of it in the garbage either.  I had to figure out a way to get rid of the dreaded food.  An nifty plot began to take shape in my mind.  I’d eat the fruit and bread, and put the offending food in my mouth but not swallow, then spit it out in the girls’ room when I had safely negotiated the exit.  

            I began to get nervous as I listened to the many chattering voices next to me.  I waited until the Wicked Witch’s back was turned so I could execute my plan.  I had to wait longer than usual because she-with-hair-pulled-severely-back, sent her beady eyes roaming the room looking for the least mischief.  The lunch room began to empty.  If I didn’t hurry, I couldn’t get away with it.  The Witch turned her back, and I stuffed my cheeks with the hated casserole.  My plate clean, I headed for the counter to turn in my dirty dishes, not realizing I looked like a healthy chipmunk.  I pushed my empty plate and utensils through to the other side.  When I turned around, I collided with HER.  In a voice not unlike my father’s, she commanded me to swallow. I froze.  I melted into a puddle of dread, chocking the miserable mess down and bolting for the door.  Outside, I found some friends playing jacks, and I calmed myself down taking the ball in my hand for a turn. Play is always a good remedy for distress.

            School itself, the studies, the spelling bees, this rule and that, were just things I had to put up with, a kind of doing one’s duty to society.  Then a special day would break up the repetitiveness.  I loved Valentine’s Day in third grade because we got to make our own post office box for incoming valentines.  We’d decorate shoe boxes with red crepe paper and white school paste, cut-outs and decorations of paper lace and ribbon, then cut a slit in the top with our name.  On that day of pink and redness, of little candy hearts with “so fine”, “all mine”, written on them, we’d go around to the other boxes and leave a valentine.  I thought everybody gave everybody one, but when Andy, a kind of bumbling, awkward kid who flunked third grade the year before, got only three, my heart started to bleed.  I had a special feeling for him because the year before, when I was sitting behind him in the bus on the way home, he’d stuck his arm out a window as we came to a stop sign that snapped his arm back.  He was in a cast forever…well, almost.

            This began an inner knowing to pray for others.  There’d be that inner tug of sadness and wanting to make it all better.  To stop the hurting.  I often prayed following Sunday School. After we rode our bikes home, there were the funny papers to read.  I’d lie on the floor, head in my hands, the big pages opened so I could read my favorite strips, like “Nancy,” my namesake.  Other family members were doing what they liked best, and the great, shiny radio console, at least as tall as me, would be tuned to the opera or the news.  No TV’s, cell phones, video games or e-readers in those days.  Some days I heard bad news, like the year the snow was so deep in the Sierra’s the six miles of snow sheds that protected the Central-Pacific’s tracks fell in and trapped the passengers.  Here came that inner tug of sadness and alarm, and there in my cocoon, I’d ask God to help.  On a different Sunday the news portrayed the disaster of a little girl who fell into a well and it was taking a long time to get her out.  I felt her aloneness, her pain, the dark creeping into my bones imagining myself in a similar mess.  The tug.  More prayers. I felt a connection to the Creative Mystery, and it drew me into my own private inner sanctum to plead the causes of others.

            Then in third grade I got myself in a real jam. School budgets were still recovering from the war years in 1950, and students received one pencil with eraser about every six weeks when reports cards came out. Wanting to please the teacher, I kept my papers neat, my answers legible, but to do this I had to use up my eraser. I tried to erase a mistake with the worn eraser, but the metal edges that held it in place tore a hole instead.  This meant getting a failing grade, and my stomach knotted up and my breathing almost stopped.  My mother was training me as a perfectionist. I felt like I had to do something risky, if only to be able to get a new pencil.  I conceived of what would be seen as an evil plot.

            The way I saw it was that if I got rid of my eraser-less pencil, Mrs. Roberts, our teacher, would give me a new one.  I wrapped up my old pencil and all other stubs of pencils in my desk in a piece of scratch paper and placed the bundle in the wastebasket by the teacher’s desk.  Then off to recess I went without a care.

            When we were all back in the classroom, my mouth dropped open; one of the boys in the class had noticed the bundle which had come loose with the pencils showing. 

“Mrs. Roberts!  Look at this!  Someone’s thrown away their pencils and there’s still enough lead to write!”

“Give that to me!” Mrs. Roberts, commanded.  The boy handed it over.  “Who did this? I want to know right now!” (Big scowl!)

The classroom was silent.  I was a frozen block of ice.

“I’m going to find out who is responsible for this!” the teacher promised.  She went to her desk and grabbed a notepad, tearing off the sheets one by one, glancing up at us every few sheets.  Then going to each person in the front of a row, she handed several sheets to be passed toward the back, “Now the person who did this can simply write their name and “yes” on the paper and that will be that!”  We did as we were told, but I never wrote a thing.

After reviewing her handy work and not finding what was expected, there was more grimacing.  My heart was beating fast, and my hands began to sweat.  There was no way I was going to admit to this act, which in my mind was no crime at all; but only a way to obey instructions to hand in neat papers!  It was the stupid rule that should be on trial, not me; but, having grown up with the maxim that children were to be seen and not heard, it never occurred to me to defend myself.

Finally, “No one is going to be allowed to leave this room until someone admits to this!”

That did it; I was caught now.  The buses wouldn’t wait for the country kids, and my budding morality told me it wasn’t fair for me to keep them when I was the guilty party.  I would have to sacrifice myself.

“Put your heads down on your desk, and the person who did this, put up your hand. This is your last chance!”

I did.  Turbulent feelings of shame, rage, fear, freeze, all the victim feelings I’d been learning at the family dinner table emerged and threatened to swallow me.  The rest of the day is a blank.  One thing I learned—your sins will find you out.

That night at dinner, I was very quiet.  Dad had gotten home late, having stopped at his favorite watering hole after closing the store.  Mom had been waiting, ready to unleash a torrent of disgust at his behavior.  Before he arrived she’d been punctuating the air like hornets hovering over a piece of raw meat, “Where is that man!  He’s probably at the bar!  Why can’t he ever get home on time?”  Now with him finally home, smiling and smelling of beer, she lit into him.

“Don’t you think the rest of us are hungry?  Don’t you care?  Why do you have to go to that bar anyway?”  Her tone of voice said, “You’re disgusting!”  Dad batted her words back to her, “Thoughtless?  You’re the one who can’t ever give me credit for all the work I do around here! I’d call that thoughtless. If you’re so hungry, where’s the dinner? Let’s get this show on the road!”

            I cringed on the inside, making myself small and hopefully unnoticed, hardly daring to breathe as their blaming and shaming grew to a white-hot heat.  Somehow I chocked down some food and left the table as soon as my plate was empty. I sought the refuge of my bedroom and a Nancy Drew mystery.

            After dinner, Mom called me downstairs for the nightly ritual of preparing my hair for school the next day.  Pin curls were the “in thing.”  Mom would comb out a portion of hair, dip her fingers in a bowl of water and wet that hair before wrapping it around her finger, smoothing it to my head, and anchoring it with two bobby pins.  I would turn as she finished each section until my whole head was covered.

            “Quit wiggling! Can’t you sit still?” Every curl was punctuated with some objection, the water from her fingers dripping in my eyes, over my cheeks, down my neck.  My chest got tighter and tighter as I tried to keep my own resentments to myself, not daring to protest lest the exclamations increase.  When I was old enough to take the project on myself, I felt relieved, relieved, but also insecure because I couldn’t do it as well as she did for a while, and there was no one to blame but myself.  I was experiencing the beginning tremors of the pull to be independent and still be protected.

            By the time I was ten years old, home life was becoming more intense.  I was considered old enough to babysit Susan, age 6 and Steven, age 4.  This was particularly necessary on Saturday evenings because the help at The Minden Dry Goods was off for the night, and mom and dad worked from  6 pm to 9 pm together.  They were just two blocks and a phone call away.  My job was to see that my siblings got their Saturday night bath and were ready for bed by the time my parents got home.  My pay for this immense challenge was comic books—Little Lulu (especially the big 25 cents issue with Witch Hazel), all the Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck comics, Andy Panda, Bugs Bunny and others.

            One loathsome Saturday night, neither Susan nor Steven would pay the least attention to my invitations to the bath.  Finally I got so frustrated, feeling caught between what was expected by my parents and what was possible, rage burst out of me, and I began pounding on the backs of my siblings, yelling and screaming for them to get into “that tub!”  Since I was a tiny thing, their reaction to me was the brush off.  I was no more than a pesky mosquito to them.  I knew I’d crossed a line anyway, and even though no parental discipline materialized—the kids never talked—I was forever marked.  I knew myself to be a “wild thing.”

            To my mother’s relief and my dismay, my boy friend, Larry, announced he and his family were moving away.  I was devastated.  On an outing to Wally Hot Springs that night, where our parents took us to wear us out so we would sleep, I floated face down in the pool all evening, weeping, crying my heart break out so no one would hear.  My first lost love.

            But summer vacation cured all ills.  The park in Minden was a block square with lush green lawn and a gazebo-like stage used for announcements on special celebrations like Carson Valley Days.  Every so often it would be flooded to water the lawn, and I and my friends would run through the warm, two-to three inch water, splashing to our hearts delight.  I could feel my smile running across my face, my heart leaping in my chest as I ran and danced and splattered in ecstasy, my girl friends at my side, all of us shouting and racing back and forth.  Only our parents worried about polio which did not yet have a cure.

            On Carson Valley Day, everyone who had a horse, a tractor, certain farm machinery, and every city vehicle would be paraded down the main street in front of The Minden Dry Goods where our family always watched.  My mom’s women’s group, Fortnightly, would dress in crazy outfits and have some kind of float or truck or strange vehicle, and drive wildly, shouting and laughing down the street, breaking out of any traditional role and just being obnoxious in a totally charming way.

            The lunch was amazing in the fifties—tender, pit-cooked beef with home made beans and cottage cheese.  We stood in line forever to get ours, then run home and eat our prize on the front lawn.  I remember the joy of not eating venison and the amazingly delicious taste of beef.  As a hunter, Dad went on several deer hunts a year, and our enormous chest freezer held the bounty.  To him we were the most fortunate of children, to have fresh wild game for dinner every night.  To me it was something to remedy with a healthy dose of my grandfather’s favorite—Heinz Ketchup.  This could be an offense…or not…depending on Dad’s condition when he came home for dinner.

            One night as the shaming and blaming took on a new intensity, I mentally drew an imaginary hood over my head to block it out.  It felt like a battle field with hidden land mines that could go off at any moment.  Mom looked with disgust at my venison, potato and ketchup concoction. “Do you have to make us all sick with that mess?”  Dad reached over and thonked me on the head with his thumb and middle finger, brows furrowed and teeth clenched in annoyance.  Oh! Oh! Tears coming!

            I jumped up and rushed out to my room.  There I found peace, quiet and buried myself in a new Nancy Drew mystery.  Nobody followed.  Nobody insisted I return to the table.  I didn’t care that I was still hungry, even if it wasn’t my favorite dinner.  “I’ll never do that to my children.”  Today I often bite my tongue rather than say something I’ll regret, but now and then I can’t help acting out the same way my parents did.  Creative Love isn’t finished with me yet.