All the Difference

by Patricia Horvath

  But I knew they were right. Without vexation, another word for conflict, there’s no story. I’d held back for so long, erased so many years. Difficult as it might prove, maybe writing would be a way to reclaim them. The next day I began.

  Tests

  I’m straddling my red Schwinn bike, from which the training wheels have been removed. My mother holds onto the fender, steadying me. For nearly an hour I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to balance. I am eight years old, past when the training wheels should have come off. Younger kids, my six-year-old brother among them, are already whizzing around our cul-de-sac. Chipper keeps circling by on his orange two-wheeler with the banana seat. He’s gone from taunting me to shouting encouragement, realizing, I suppose, that something just isn’t right. Ready? my mother says, Keep peddling! She lets go. For two, three seconds I manage to stay aloft, then the bike wobbles and I skid on the asphalt, skinning my hands and knees. I struggle to my feet, and this time I do not pick up my bike. Let it stay there, let it rust. I go inside, find a book. I will try again, try all summer, before giving up entirely.

  In elementary school I quickly learned that what matters occurs outside the classroom. On blacktops and playing fields, alliances formed. The race really went to the swift—and social prominence too. But I got tangled in jump ropes, couldn’t hit a ball, ran races too slowly (my right foot heading in a different direction altogether from the rest of my body). Sports were an impossibility; I didn’t even like to watch. Unless the game was basketball, where my height was an asset, I resigned myself to being last picked—the scrub choice. I was shy, uncoordinated, a socially awkward girl voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by sixth grade classmates who, like me, had little notion of adult success. I told myself being last didn’t matter. Eventually we’d return to the classroom where the team captain could barely stutter his way through a paragraph and the blacktop queen would flub the spelling bee. After school, though, no one rushed outside to play Spelling Bee.

  The difference between my own shortcomings and those of my classmates seemed to me largely a matter of exposure. If someone flunked a test, that was between her and the teacher. No one posted the scores. But my lack of coordination was on display every single day. I felt this distinction keenly, never more so than during the annual Presidential Fitness Test.

  This was actually a series of tests—chin-ups, push-ups, high jumps, sprints—most of which I failed. Each year I knew I was going to fail; my classmates knew it too. What I resented was the prominence accorded the tests—the theatrics of them, the applause for high scorers, the exhortations of our gym teacher with her stopwatch and bully’s whistle, her back slaps and admonishments. Don’t be a baby! Toughen up! Her formula was simple: tough kids aced the test; babies flunked.

  I panted through races where I came in last. I clung to the chin-up bar, trembling, unable to hoist myself level. I toppled sideways trying to do cartwheels and forward rolls. And for what? At the time Lyndon Johnson was President, then Richard Nixon. I couldn’t picture either of them—the jowly cowboy, the shifty-eyed man with the raised shoulders—mastering even a single cartwheel, let alone the entire test. Yet each had become the most powerful man on earth. How much did fitness really matter?

  The kids who could chin themselves repeatedly, hit homers, and run fast—where were they running to? Every night on CBS Walter Cronkite intoned the number of dead. Those who could not touch their toes or who were smart enough (and fortunate enough) to get into college were spared. The “tough kids,” blacktop bullies, had no use for books. They excelled at all things physical, and this was their time. But who, I wondered, would applaud these high scorers once they’d grown up?

  Books

  They did not fail me. They opened new worlds and kept the existing one at bay. Books were my fortress; I could hole up inside of them. Better than that, they were portable. I brought books everywhere: summer camp, Sunday drives, errands with my mother, even the bathroom.

  I read the usual suspects: Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Black Beauty, Louisa May Alcott (whose Little Women made me cry, but whose Little Men I finished only from a sense of duty). I read indiscriminately. Dickens of course and Aesop and the My Book House series from my mother’s childhood with their elongated yellow and black illustrations of fairies and elves. But also Archie comic books, Bazooka Joe bubble gum wrappers, my grandparents’ Reader’s Digest, (“I Am Joe’s Kidney,” “Grizzly Bear Attack: Drama in Real Life”) and an entire gothic series about a family named Falcon that lived under a curse borne down generations by its female members, who were moody, beautiful, and extravagantly wicked. Weekends, summers, school vacations, I stayed in my room reading. If I were being punished, my mother would send me to Chipper’s room, where the only things to read were a children’s encyclopedia set, some Mad magazines, and a book about football. I read those, too.

  My favorite book was D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Every week during fourth grade I checked it out of the school library except for one brief period when the librarian made me stop, insisting that I needed to give the other kids a chance to read it. For weeks the book stayed on the shelf, out of bounds, until, sick of my pestering, the librarian relented.

  I loved the Greek gods. Their violence and glamour and pure weirdness topped anything in the Bible or on TV. They rode dolphins, wore winged sandals, turned themselves into animals. I lived in a world of banal heroes: flying, punching comic book figures with their masks and capes—Batman, Superman, Spiderman—boy heroes like Underdog with his simpering girlfriend, Sweet Polly Purebred; sports heroes who made my father jump up screaming from the couch during weekend games. On sitcoms there were heroines: genies and witches who yearned to be housewives. So what if Jeannie and Samantha had magic powers when all they wanted—all women were supposed to want—was to wash dishes and make beds?

  The Greek goddesses, though, had no desire to stay on Mount Olympus baking pies. My favorite was Athena. Goddess of wisdom and the arts, she’d sprung fully formed from Zeus’s head. No one told her what to do and no one dared mock her. Just look at what she’d done to poor Arachne, shrunken to a spider for disparaging the gods. Yet Athena was not casually cruel like Artemis, nor jealous like Hera, and she certainly didn’t lose her head over men the way Aphrodite did. Not only that, she carried an owl on her shoulder and wore a breastplate made from Medusa’s severed head. I wanted to be just like her. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths said she had gray eyes; mine were blue-gray, close enough. I pretended our cat was an owl and tried to balance her on my shoulder, which didn’t really work. I wore belts with giant buckles, imagining they were the Medusa head. One cross word, one dirty look, and I would turn my tormentor into stone.

  Reading whetted my appetite. The more I read, the hungrier for words I became. In books, too, I found an inherent sense of justice, the triumph of the downcast. Andersen’s duckling may have been ugly, Oliver Twist abandoned, Jo March eccentric and poor, yet somehow they prevailed. The scorned, the deformed, the misunderstood, I rooted for them all. And, inevitably, I began to wonder about their creators. Someone had crafted each book I read, crafting in the process a writer’s life. Eventually it occurred to me that this making of books was a serious thing, a way of reshaping the world.

  I began to write as randomly as I read: journals, lyrics, odes to nature, fairy tales, stories about girls overcoming all types of adversity. Aside from school assignments, I kept my writing to myself, suspecting, perhaps rightly, the perplexity it would cause my family. No one I knew wrote; why on earth would they? The adults I saw did serious, practical work. The women taught school or worked in beauty salons or as secretaries. The men had more exciting options. My father, who worked as a private detective, kept a gun in a shoebox on his bedroom closet shelf. I’d discovered it while rummaging through my mother’s dresses and wigs. I imagined car chases, shoot outs with bad guys, all kinds of glamorous things to write about. The gun scared me, and I never told anyone I’d found it. But when I a
sked my mother in a roundabout way what, exactly, my father did for a living, I was disappointed to learn it had nothing to do with chasing bad guys and instead involved something called “insurance fraud” and (I later learned) the occasional wandering spouse. It was impossible to imagine the adults I knew hiding in some attic like Jo March or Hans Christian Andersen, chomping on apples and thinking about things. Besides, there were hardly any books in our home. True, my grandmother made weekly trips to the library, mostly for mysteries, and, true again, my mother’s parents had a huge stack of Reader’s Digest magazines. But the biggest collections of books in our extended family belonged to me.

  My mother, while proud of my grades, worried about my increasing isolation. She urged me to go outside and make friends the way my brother did. Athletic and affable, Chipper collected friends like I collected, well, books. Nearly every week he’d come home from school with some new classmate. They’d ride bikes, make cardboard forts, shoot marbles, flip baseball cards—none of which interested me. Once in a while, though, because they were younger, I could cajole them into playing some game of my own invention. We’d play Circe and I’d turn them into swine. Or Dream Game, in which I’d have everyone pretend to sleep while I acted out my dreams of the previous night. These games never lasted long. My brother and his friends got tired of being transformed into livestock or having to snore on command. Your sister’s games, they complained, are really stupid.

  One afternoon, fed up with the way I “moped around the house,” my mother made me call up a girl who lived two streets away. Squat and loud, a nose picker who never read anything at all, the girl repulsed me. Do it! my mother said, holding out the receiver. Do it or you can spend the entire week in your brother’s room. I’d already read everything in there including the baseball cards. So I caved. The neighborhood girl and I spent a desultory hour or two playing Barbies until I managed to fob her off on Chipper, who was always happy to have another kid around. Then I snuck off to my room to read.

  Silence

  All the students in Mrs. Satler’s classroom, even the tough kids, knew to keep out of her way.

  On my first day in this new school I was assigned the last seat in a row of alphabetized fifth-graders, one of several exactly spaced rows, so different from the “open” classroom I’d attended the previous year. There we’d been encouraged to ask questions and “work at your own pace.” Fridays had been “casual” days; girls could wear pants. Nothing doing in Mrs. Satler’s classroom: Girls, you will be young ladies.

  Earlier that year my father had moved out, the private eye shacking up with his secretary, and we’d gone to live in my grandparents’ house in a new school district. Mrs. Satler emphasized discipline, obedience, conformity. That first day, she read the roster in a voice that belonged to a bird of prey. She called each student by his or her full name—Patricia Lynn Horvath. We do not use nicknames here! On the coldest mornings she kept us outside. We stood shivering in our separate lines, boys and girls, stomping our feet, our faces hidden behind scarves and hoods, our eyes and noses streaming. To the right and left other students greeted their teachers and were let into their warm classrooms. We waited. Eventually Mrs. Satler would come to the door.

  Good morning class, she’d recite flatly.

  We looked at her. What kind of day would it be?

  Good morning, Mrs. Satler, we’d reply loudly, in unison, cold air in our throats.

  What? I can’t hear you!

  GOOD MORNING, MRS. SATLER!

  Is that the best you can do? In that case, you can all stay out there and freeze! And she would slam the door.

  One day she grabbed a boy by the hair and, laughing maniacally, pushed his head into his locker. Another morning she whipped off her wig and waved it at us. April Fools, she screeched. I’m bald! Even the boys quieted, and a girl burst into tears. I knew that at night Mrs. Satler’s human shape fell away and she assumed her true form—the Medusa.

  Mrs. Satler ignored her No Nicknames rule whenever it suited her, which was most days. I was “Sieve Head,” an honorific awarded me the day I forgot some homework assignment. Some kids, mostly boys, she hit with rulers. One or two girls she made pets of, praising their work, letting them erase the board. She was especially partial toward a Scandinavian looking girl named Nelsa who was embarrassed by this and used to tell the other kids, during recess, It’s not my fault, I hate her too. Because she was pretty, and uncomfortable with her status, no one held it against her.

  I pleaded with my mother to let me stay home. I told her about the wig, the locker, the name-calling. She complained to the principal, but so did the other parents, all of them demanding that their child be transferred to the other fifth grade class. Mrs. Satler had us write letters. The theme: Why You Hate Me. We could, she said, remain anonymous. Still, we lied. She read the letters aloud. You’re a nice teacher. We don’t hate you. Sometimes you’re a little mean—here she lowered her glasses—but mostly you are nice. My mother later told me Mrs. Satler submitted these letters to the principal. Whether the ruse worked or whether it was something else, she remained in her job until she elected to retire.

  Sixth grade was no better. Every morning Miss Swenson read to us from Pilgrim’s Progress. The pilgrim wandered a bleak landscape, beset by sin, while we fidgeted, itchy in wool sweaters, the gray sky hard against the window, the language of the story impenetrable. We memorized poems that were never discussed. One by one we stood to recite “O Captain! My Captain!” Walt Whitman, I decided, was a sailor, a famous captain’s son. His father had collapsed on deck (heart attack?) and now he was sad.

  For hours we practiced penmanship, Miss Swenson’s leathery bicep jiggling as she drew cursive letters on the board. She had us copy long passages from our science text: That’ll teach you to be sloppy. I hope you all get writers’ cramp! One of her favorite pedagogical strategies was to pit students against each other. She’d select a piece of work she considered exemplary: a drawing, a story or poem. Look at that shading! Listen, how imaginative! Why can’t the rest of you do that?

  The drawings often belonged to a girl named Joyce, and the writing was usually mine. We’d lower our heads, knowing what was next:

  Now look at this. Someone’s NOT EVEN TRYING!

  Miss Swenson tore drawings in two. Read stories aloud, mistakes and all. Looking back, I believe one of her favorite targets had dyslexia. She’d read his work (“dog” for “God,” “angle” for “angel”) while he sat at his desk, turning red.

  Recess was payback. The kids who were mocked in the classroom vented their frustrations the minute they were let outdoors, insulting those who could not race, jump, or kick, shunning the awkward and slow. Unable to compete, I stayed apart, watching, wishing the teachers would let me read. I did not want to be Miss Swenson’s star pupil, Mrs. Satler’s joke. Hiding in corners, keeping my mouth shut, seemed the safest way of avoiding these twin dragons. If no one noticed me, no one could single me out.

  I’d always been shy in school, but in this new environment I kept a monk’s silence, only speaking—whispering, practically—when spoken to. Sometimes not even then. I waited for the day to wind itself down so I could go home, where I felt safe enough to have a voice. I was hoping teachers and students alike would give up, leave me alone. It almost worked.

  Each week the guidance counselor, a matronly woman, pigeon-breasted in frilly polyester blouses, pulled three girls from our sixth grade class. One of the girls had been kept back at least once and was already growing breasts. Another sat vacantly, twirling her long blonde hair and giggling. Both these girls were frequent victims of Miss Swenson’s ridicule. The third girl was the one who had cried the year before when Mrs. Satler tore off her wig. All three were in the slow reading group. Mid-year the guidance counselor came into our room, the same as always, and went up to Miss Swenson’s desk. She whispered something; Miss Swenson pointed. I slouched in my seat. The guidance counselor beckoned. I pretended not to see. She walked over to my desk and
told me to come with her. From that day on, I was part of her special group of girls.

  At first I thought it was a mistake. These were the slow girls, the ones in remedial reading and math. I was quiet, not stupid. Couldn’t they tell the difference? Furious, I refused to participate. I sat in the circle, but would not open my mouth. I vowed to work harder, get straight A’s, show everyone that I did not belong.

  Earthbound

  Sometime during the spring of sixth grade, the gym teacher sent me home with a note. She’d noticed how off-center I appeared when trying to touch my toes. Perhaps, she wrote, our pediatrician should take a look. A week or two later I stood in the doctor’s office in my underpants, bending over, raising my arms, shifting left and right, while he measured arms and legs, shoulders and hips. I leaned forward, arms dangling, knees straight. Touch your toes, he said. I couldn’t, the only kid in my class unable to do so, but so what? It wasn’t like I couldn’t read. Why, all of a sudden, should this require a doctor’s visit? I was bad at sports, that was all. Soon I’d put on my clothes, take a lollipop from the fishbowl on the receptionist’s desk, and go home. But the doctor asked me to sit down. He told my mother and me that I had scoliosis—a double, S-shaped curvature of the spine—and referred us to an orthopedic clinic at Bridgeport Hospital.

  On our first visit to the clinic I sat in the waiting room, a long corridor with welded-together chairs that faced each other from opposite walls. Many of the patients were young girls like me. Some wore elaborate-looking back braces that made them sit up rigidly, their necks restrained behind stainless steel bars, their chins thrust forward onto plastic podiums. Several wore leg braces; one girl had a prosthetic leg that ended in a clunky brown shoe, like something an old man might wear. A few people seemed normal enough, though God only knew what they (or I) might look like coming out of the doctor’s office. For once not even a book could distract me.