When I was nine or so, my parents took my brother Billy and me to visit Washington, D.C. We stood at the White House gate and took the obligatory awkward family photo: I was wearing a pink T-shirt with a Smurfette iron-on. I squinted, gap toothed and pleased, at the camera. Billy was reluctantly standing a bit too far from me, his arms behind him, gripping the gate. His lack of proximity to me—suggesting irritation—appears to be the only thing he could control that hot summer day. We followed our parents around in the July haze from monument to monument, pestering them with our endless squabbles, my perpetual whining and tattling. There is no parent stipend for taking your kids out for a bonding weekend, but looking back, I give Mom and Dad credit for bearing our bickering by alternating two methodologies: stoically ignoring us, but occasionally smacking us.
As we both gazed thoughtfully at the White House lawn with our cheeks stuffed with Tootsie Pops, I told my brother that President Reagan waved to me from the window. It was a falsehood so outrageous that no one bothered to pay much attention to it when I said it. But it irked Billy so much he had to give pause. “You lie all the time. You are such a liar.”
I don’t remember if I actually started crying, but I might have produced some tears. It simply tore me up, for some reason, that he didn’t believe me. Why couldn’t Ronald Reagan be working at his desk and look out the window and see me and give me a little encouraging wave? It seemed utterly logical to me. Of course, the idea violated every law of reason and physics (even if we could see through a White House window from so far away, Ronald Reagan was likely too busy to hang out around the perimeters of his house, waving to children).
In response to our little fight, my mother stood close to my brother, gripping him by the shoulders. She said something like, “Why don’t you just believe her? If she says she saw Ronald Reagan wave to her, you should believe her!” She was very upset with him. I guess she wanted him to learn to humor me because that’s how kids are: they shape the world according to their own desires, no matter how nonsensical. My dad is getting me a horse. The guy at the mall says I could be a model. Bruce Springsteen is coming to my school because I wrote him a letter. That sort of thing. Not really lies, because when I said them, some part of me believed it possible. The reality of a kid’s life is sometimes not that interesting. If I look closely enough, I might remember painful things: even going back and re-constructing them seems difficult. I’m prone to dipping those images with the careful glitter of my adult logic: well, all kids at that age feel ugly. I know that now. Or, it wasn’t really that bad. I got over it.
What am I hiding from?
I’m starting to think that everything that ever upset me in my life has to do with my ego. The incident at the White House—so minor, I’m sure my brother doesn’t remember it at all—is a typical annoying-kid story. But at the heart of the story is the kid who insists she’s right when she’s wrong, the kid who sulks and cries. Unlike my brother who readily forgives and moves on with his life (and to the next squabble, always threatening in the distance), I held grudges. Isn’t this thing I’m writing now some form of a grudge?
I still won’t forgive the kid in seventh grade who taunted me on the Matawan school bus. I can tell you his name. I can recount what he wore, what he said. I can hear his voice, lilting like a demonic elf from the parallel boy-universe. Right now, he’s probably a normal, nice enough family guy with a few kids and a mortgage in West Long Branch. But still, I hate that guy! In Hoboken in the early 00’s, he wanted to buy me a drink at the Cadillac Bar. He was filled with tipsy nostalgia for the good ol’ days. Instead of burying the hatchet, I was pleased to coldly decline. In my short little dress and with an artificial, flippant martini haze, I fancied myself a hot little number: the nerdy girl who’s now the most coveted prize in the room (well, something cute anyway). As if he’d remember that day on the bus! What an amazing conversation we might have had if I hadn’t been obsessed with that grudge.
Or what about the kid in the hallway who saw me passing between classes in fourth grade? She said loudly, “is that a boy or a girl?” And some kids started pointing and laughing. At the time I had a very short haircut I hated. I offset the bad haircut by wearing a trucker’s hat and baggy T-shirts and shorts; I was experimenting with a form of androgyny I thought might protect me from ridicule. Something like, if I look like a boy anyway from the neck up, I should just throw in the towel and be mostly boy. But I remember thinking, I’m wearing pierced earrings. My socks are pink. I’m clearly not a boy. She’s just being a jerk.
A few years later in middle school I saw that same girl at a school dance standing by herself. She was waiting for friends who hadn’t come yet. I, however, was with a large group of friends (middle school was a good time for me. I was quite popular for about six months. You know—the perm. I rocked Debbie Gibson ripped jeans and a black hat). She had the most appalling look of anxiety on her face. If I were an adult in that light-pulsing gymnasium seeing her, I might shake my head in sympathy, for the dreadful insecurity of the age. How at any moment, your social circle could collapse all around you. You could end up alone and humiliated as fast as the dee-jay changes records.
But the middle school girl in me still thinks, serves that little runt right! I hope she’s in therapy right now expressing the suppressed horror of junior high rejection and how that’s why she ended up getting herpes as an adult.
(Even as I typed that, I felt sort of awful. But then again, what balm for childhood grief than the bloodless immaturity of mocking italics?)
One of my students jokingly said to me yesterday, I think you became a teacher because you want revenge on all the girls who were mean to you.
I was sort of intrigued and horrified. I said, gosh, I hope not.
But you still hold grudges, said one girl who was a bit too smart, who was afraid to see herself end up like me. Holding grudges.
But then I told the class: I think I became a teacher to tell you that’s it all going to be okay. Look at me! I think I’m actually fine.
And we all smiled at each other, shaking our heads. And when I looked at their unreadable faces, their complicated little faces, I really was.
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