What I Wanted, What I Got

The popular girl at my elementary school—let’s call her Denise—was not blond like Barbie but pretty in a conventional manner I envied. She had brown hair, skin that tanned easily, and a confident personality. In a town of loggers, hippies, and students, Denise’s father was a doctor. Although her family was probably just comfortably middle class, they seemed, in contrast to the rest of us, fabulously and deliriously wealthy. Almost everyone at school was on the free-lunch program, as my brother and I were. Many kids lived in modest and identical units of university-subsidized student housing. Denise’s family was out on a foothill in a large, modern ranch house. Her mother, a housewife, dropped her off at school in a Mercedes.

Kids in Eugene had paper routes, or collected bottles and cans for the deposit refunds. The year I turned eight, I worked, through a school apprenticeship program, at a bakery. Like my brother, who two years later worked at a restaurant managed by a friend of our mother’s, I was compensated with food because paying us money would have been illegal. Denise got an allowance and seemingly whatever she asked for. She wore new jeans often. I still remember the brand: they were called Luv-its. I once asked her where she’d got her new Luv-its, which had red satin hearts sewn on the back pockets. “You can’t afford them,” she said. The thing about bullying is that the bully typically has no memory of it later, while the wounded party never forgets. Denise told other kids that there was nothing to eat at our house, if you went there to play after school. This was true, unless you were in the mood for bread with corn syrup slathered on it. She said that my brother and I didn’t bathe regularly. Also true, but hey, Denise, you know what? I still don’t like to get wet. An obsession with cleanliness was one of the things my proud mother relegated to middle-class anxiety. People who had nice stuff, full fridges, showered daily—that was common, which we were not.

My brother and I were generally allowed one new pair of shoes a year, purchased in late summer before school began—inexpensive sneakers, such as Jox by Thom McAn, or irregular samples of familiar brands from the discount-shoe outlet, pairs of Nikes or Adidases that had some factory defect. My brother could not make it an entire year without developing holes in the soles of his tennis shoes. When he complained of wet feet—this was Oregon, where it rained a lot—he was given a product called Shoe Goo and told to patch his shoes to make them last. He was not happy about getting Shoe Goo instead of shoes, which were always a source of friction at our house. That we grew out of them was treated almost like a kind of youthful defiance, obnoxious and inconsiderate. Wearing them out was even worse. A memory that I still, churlishly, can’t quite get over involves my desire for clogs the summer before fourth grade. It was the late seventies, and clogs were madly popular. Every girl in my elementary school wanted them. My mother found a lime-green pair at Goodwill and brought them home. I was terribly disappointed. Clogs were supposed to be earth-toned. Denise’s were the shiny rich brown of horse chestnuts, with a leather braid over the instep. Maybe we can try to dye these, my mother said. I abandoned them to our rotted back porch, where banana slugs roamed.

Later that year, after seeing the film “American Graffiti,” I decided that I wanted to be “fifties.” I rolled up my pants to simulate pedal pushers and wore them that way to school. “Why are your pants rolled up like that?” a girl asked me. I said it was fifties style. “No, it’s not,” she replied. Everyone made fun of me—this was the unpleasant spring of fourth grade, when Denise got a group of girls to pick on me as their extracurricular—but I continued to try to be fifties. My mother told me about “pin curls” as a fifties thing, and I used crisscrossed bobby pins to hold my wetted hair in place and slept like that. I was trying to get my hair to look like Candy Clark’s in “American Graffiti,” poofy and playful. The effect was disastrous, my hair crimped weirdly, with sections shooting out in different directions like the discordant notes of an orchestra tuning up. I later bought pink sponge rollers at Woolworth’s and slept in those, unconcerned about them pressing into my scalp because the discomfort would be worth it; the rollers themselves even looked fifties. The results were no better than before. I went to school with crazy hair. “You keep trying that even though it never works,” a member of the Denise gang said to me.

Our school play that year, just my luck, was “Bye Bye Birdie,” a musical about an Elvis-like singer who is drafted into the Army. My mother sewed me a ruffled skirt with a floral pattern, probably from fabric she’d scrounged up for free somewhere, and an acetate-and-voile “crinoline” to go under it. I finally felt fifties, even though I was given no lines in the play. I was just background and chorus. Denise, a talented singer and dancer, was a lead. At our dress rehearsal, the other girls said that only poodle skirts like the ones their mothers had sewn them were fifties, and that mine wasn’t right. I felt sad for my skirt, and for my mother, who had put so much effort into making it. But, by that time, I had learned the “Bye Bye Birdie” songs, and I didn’t think the play was so great, not like “American Graffiti,” which contained a world I would willingly seek out. I would find that good-looking hoodlum with the yellow Deuce Coupe, whose name was John, and who rolled his pack of cigarettes in his T-shirt sleeve. I would find a way to live in his reality, where he and people like him floated on attitude, with cars that had the power to back it up. In the meantime, I rolled a box of raisins from the school cafeteria into my T-shirt sleeve, as if they were Marlboro Reds. I played my cassette of the “American Graffiti” soundtrack over and over, especially the song “Runaway.” When Del Shannon sang in his tortured, smoky voice that he was “a-walkin’ in the rain,” I, too, was a-walkin’ in the rain. I was walking toward my future, toward my plan to become a moody teen-ager.

At the end of fourth grade, after several weeks of Denise and her gang following me around at school, imitating my requests that they leave me alone, I lunged at her. We tumbled into a fight, mostly scratching and pulling hair. We attended an alternative public school with a radical hippie pedagogy, where I was “tried by a jury of my peers,” and suspended for a week, because I’d taken the first swing. When I returned to school, something had burned away. Denise, with a fingernail-shaped gouge under one eye, approached me in the hall and was nice.

That summer, she and I went down to the Willamette River, where older kids hung out, and swam through the rapids under the bridge, something I was forbidden to do but did anyway. We pretended to smoke with safety matches, the long ones used for lighting a pilot, and then graduated to trying actual cigarettes, Kools, which I purchased from a machine in the Atrium shopping complex downtown; we took puffs without inhaling and decided they were gross. I was about to turn ten. Whenever the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman,” from the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, came on the radio, I was enraptured. I’d seen the movie with my brother. It was rated R, and so my mother, giving in to my brother’s pleading, had pretended to come with us, bought three tickets, but then left us to watch it by ourselves. There was a rape scene and a rumble scene, both of which terribly upset me, but still I wanted to be “more than a woman,” like in the song, or at least an almost-woman—anything but what I was, a mere kid. I owned a curling iron and feathered my hair. I wanted makeup, but wasn’t yet allowed to wear it. I clip-clopped around the house in my mother’s chipped old Dr. Scholl’s, thinking they sounded like high heels. I longed for real high heels and became obsessed with a pair I’d seen on display at Burch’s Shoes.