What Girls Learn

by Karin Cook

  The bulk of my cluster—that’s what they called them in this school, I realized—maybe even half the class, were Catholic. Susie, Christy, and Jill attended church together. They were planning to be confirmed the following spring.

  During speed reading Susie told me that Samantha was Jewish. She said it nonchalantly, without whispering. “Her grandmother came here from Russia.”

  I’d never met someone Jewish before, not that I knew of anyway. But I pretended it was old hat. “She’s Jewish?” I asked, trying to be just as casual as Susie had been. But my question must have come out wrong because she looked surprised and narrowed her eyes at me. I could feel my face flush and I began sweating under my layers. I should have kept quiet.

  When Ms. Zimmerman asked the class what they knew about Georgia all anyone could talk about was that Jimmy Carter had farmed peanuts. And that his daughter, Amy, was caught picking her nose and was pictured that way on the front page of the newspaper. I had heard Mama talk about what Northerners thought of the South. She said it went back to slavery and the Civil War, old stereotypes about ignorance and prejudice. But she believed that Jimmy Carter being in the White House had changed everything. “He has shown the world that a Southern man can lead with fairness and intelligence,” she told me. But by now I had read enough history to know that the Civil War had more to do with hate and selfishness than ignorance. But nobody would talk to me about how stereotypes still existed, especially not Mama.

  Ms. Zimmerman called the class to order and announced Dictionary Time. She handed out one dictionary per table and told us each to look up a word that had been on our minds. We were to say the word, read the definition, and tell why we had chosen that particular word. I decided to look up stereotype. When she got to me, I said the word, read all three of the definitions out loud and told the class that I never knew that the word came from a mold or cast used for type.

  I think Ms. Zimmerman was worried that I had already had a bad experience, because she cut Dictionary Time short to give a little speech about appreciating our differences. “Sometimes it takes a while to get to know what is underneath the surface,” she said. “Everyone is special, everyone has some qualities that make her or him unique.” She seemed prepared to leave it at that and then out of nowhere announced that she had an idea; it had just come to her, she said. For our homework, she wanted us each to write a conceited poem.

  “Like bragging?” Jill Switt asked.

  “Not really,” Ms. Zimmerman said. “Conceited is an exaggerated opinion of one’s self. Now I know that no one in this class is a bragger, but I want you to pretend, play up everything about yourself that’s good. The more conceited the poem, the higher the grade you’ll get.”

  This struck me as odd. In Atlanta we made grades, not got them. The way Ms. Zimmerman said it sounded as if she handed out grades like gifts. The room erupted in a low murmur of nervous laughter and accusations. Who was the biggest bragger? Who would get the best grade?

  On my way to lunch Ms. Zimmerman stopped me and asked if everything was going all right. I told her that it was. But deep down I was feeling worried about lunch. Mama had made me bologna with lemon pepper on an onion roll. My bag was light brown with a waxy finish. Everyone else seemed to be buying the cafeteria food.

  As it turned out, before I even had time to open my lunch, Jill Switt took me table to table to introduce me. “Talk Southern,” she demanded. I tried to tell her that I didn’t really have an accent, not compared to most of the friends I’d had in Atlanta.

  “You’ll make more friends if you exaggerate,” she whispered to me in front of a whole table of our classmates.

  “What do you want me to say?” I asked, half hiding my mouth behind my hand.

  “Anything,” she said. “Just talk.”

  “I really don’t know what to say.”

  “Introduce yourself,” Jill coached, leaning toward me and moving my hand away from my face.

  I said my name, my lips burning and cracking. No one seemed impressed.

  “Say something your mother says,” Jill suggested. She acted as if she had as much at stake as I did.

  I thought hard, trying to come up with something that would sound the way she wanted it to. I had already noticed little things. Northerners stood on line instead of in, said take instead of carry, referred to Cokes as sodas. And there was the most recent difference I’d noticed between getting and making grades. I could see that Jill was frustrated; she took deep, huffy breaths, crossed and recrossed her arms.

  “Your grandmother?” she coaxed, “she must say something Southern.”

  The only thing I could remember was that when Grandma Burbank was alive she called a bowel movement a duke. Every time Elizabeth and I came and went she’d ask, “Did ya take a duke?” I didn’t think I could say that out loud.

  Then, something lunch-related came to mind. I remembered a fight that Mama had had with Grandma when I was in the fourth grade. Grandma was angry that Mama had let me buy my lunch instead of take it. She said that cafeteria food wasn’t worth a hill of beans. I remembered this because it happened not long before Grandma and Grandpa died in the car accident and Mama was angry at herself because that fight was the last real conversation she’d had with her mother. After that, Mama always made our lunches.

  “Cafeteria food isn’t worth a hill of beans,” I said at last.

  Jill smiled, almost gloating. The other kids at the table seemed impressed. “Wicked accent,” one boy said. “Cool,” said another. “Decent.”

  “School lunches aren’t that bad,” Susie Rhombus added, betrayed. It turned out that her mother was a lunch lady, pink-smocked with a hairnet and plastic gloves. She was the one to serve the popular cinnamon rolls. Still, Susie never acknowledged her.

  During recess, Samantha Shaptaw came up behind me. “You shouldn’t let Jill do that to you,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Treat you like a puppet.”

  • • •

  Elizabeth’s first homework assignment was to make a family tree. When I told her that I had to write a conceited poem, she was jealous.

  “You’re so lucky,” she said. “I hate all this family crap.”

  I would have offered to switch with her, but knew better than to enter into a bargain around schoolwork. Elizabeth liked to wait until the last minute, always scrambling in a panic and getting Mama to do it for her.

  Nick seemed to think that helping with homework was the best way for him to get involved. He offered to work with me because he thought Mama might be more useful to Elizabeth creating the family tree.

  “I don’t really need help,” I told Mama.

  “Can’t you pretend, just this once,” she said wrinkling her forehead, her eyes pleading.

  So I pretended to need help with rhyming, allowing Nick to find matching words for all of my end words. If I had been doing it on my own, I would have gone down each letter of the alphabet in my head, imagining new words with the same sounds. But it was different with Nick. He had a pocket rhyming dictionary from which he read off lists and lists of similar sounding words, until he struck upon one of interest. This meant that I had to construct a thought from the chosen word rather than finding the right word to complete my thought. It felt backwards.

  I ended up writing about myself as a friend.

  All the letters I would send, to every need I would attend, when down and out, my hand I would lend, my time I would spend, trying never to offend, in every way, my heart I would extend, to be the very best kind of friend.

  It wasn’t really conceited, but I figured it was safe. Other girls would write about being beautiful and smart and rich, winning gymnastic meets, being in the ballet, even the Olympics. The boys would be star athletes, big and strong and muscular. They’d win Nobel prizes, cure diseases, and discover planets. It would be more acceptable for them to admit their strengths.

  Nick drove me to the stationery store to get a plastic report cover. I picked ou
t a green spine to hold it in place. He bought another one in red and showed me how to lay my poem in the Xerox machine to get an extra copy. He wanted to hang it on the refrigerator.

  Elizabeth’s family tree would take longer to finish, there were missing branches and dates. Above our names, Mama penciled in the date of her divorce from our father, two years after I was born. Elizabeth had been only a year old.

  “Do I have to write this in, Mama?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Always remember that you … both you girls, were conceived in love. Your father and I became incompatible over time, but you were the two most wanted children in the world. Don’t you forget that.”

  Elizabeth didn’t look convinced. She narrowed her eyes at Mama. I could tell that she was worried about appearances. She told us about some girl in her class who’d boasted that she had French royalty in her genealogy. Another had family who had survived the Holocaust.

  I glanced at our tree for something noteworthy. It spooked me to see Grandma and Grandpa’s dates, the same years both in birth and death, like Siamese twins. There were not many living relatives on either side. Mama analyzed the dates, explaining that there had been illnesses and accidents all around. Diphtheria it seemed was common. Or pneumonia. There were female relatives who had died in childbirth.

  “People didn’t used to live as long as they do now,” she said, her finger gliding past as many d’s as b’s, “that was before penicillin and other things.”

  I was interested in the branch of brothers, six in all, who died within months of each other in the same year.

  “That was during the Civil War,” Mama said.

  Elizabeth and I watched Mama, her pencil suspended above the page. Finally, she turned the pencil upside down and rubbed at the date of the divorce with the pink eraser. Then, she drew an extra branch, grafted like a scion for Nick and his ancestors. While she worked, she referred often to a list of names that she’d scratched on the back of an envelope. Elizabeth tensed up, her shoulders high around her ears. She didn’t have to say anything. Mama was making it seem as if Nick was our father.

  When she finished, she ran her hand across the page, her fingers spreading wide over all the names. She stopped and pointed to Nick’s grandfather. “He was some kind of civic leader,” she said, “a congressman or something. You should ask Nick to tell you about him.”

  Elizabeth thrived on making friends—loud, opinionated girls with colored fur lining on their hoods. They took her flexi-sledding and built ice forts. Soon she could skate backward on Breyer’s Pond. Within a month, Elizabeth was talking back and walking tough. She shed her bookbag and held her notebooks under her arm. They were training her to be the tallest girl on the bus.

  I found myself eavesdropping on Elizabeth’s phone conversations, reading through the slips of papers tucked into her books to look for notes from her new friends, watching for pointers. She’d been accepted so easily, trading clothes and throwing back handsprings in gym. She had one of those memories made for dance steps, titles of songs and where movie stars were born. It was the kind of memory that made it possible to try out for drill team and school plays. The kind that made you popular.

  I chose Samantha Shaptaw to be my friend and waited for her to choose me. She wrote about being a genius in her conceited poem, using only two- and three-syllable words.

  I am a genius. I can perform arithmetic without an abacus. Study philosophy and religion even a teacher can’t discuss. So productive, many people assume I exhibit the appendages of an octopus …

  She came in second. The first-place winner was a boy who promised to be president. We each had to read our poem out loud and then display it at the back of the room. After I read mine, Samantha passed me a note, giving me another word that rhymed with friend. It said, Do you want to know who I would recommend as a friend?

  The first time Samantha came over she was wearing jeans with patches and a fringe jacket. She twisted a bandanna around her head and let her hair, which she kept up in a ponytail for school, hang down below her shoulders. I could tell that she was impressed with my bookshelf. She slid each book out from its slot and put it back in place. She walked around my room, eyes everywhere, picking up the individual pieces of my desk set, turning them in her hand, and putting them down. I showed her where I kept the keys to the top drawer. I hadn’t noticed until then that my pillow case didn’t match my sheets.

  “Were you popular in your old school?” she asked.

  I shrugged. I hadn’t stayed in one school long enough to say for sure.

  “Do you have a best friend?”

  “Not really,” I said and then thought about Tess Callahan from Atlanta.

  Tess was an only child who, lonely and lingering, was always watching me and Elizabeth, following us around to catch a glimpse of sisterhood, eyes wide with envy. And sometimes judgment. I could tell when she thought I was being ungrateful or selfish. She was often disappointed by our bickering and her looks of disapproval were enough to send Elizabeth and me home to fight in private. The day before we moved, she told me that she liked to pretend that I was her sister, too. We wrapped an old dish in a dust rag and broke it over a pointed rock. We pulled a rugged piece across the tops of our hands until they bled, and tied ourselves together with a rope made of onion grass. We stayed like that—promising to write, not to change, not to tell—for ten minutes. “Sisters,” she whispered as we untied the grass and put wet leaves over the cuts.

  “Actually, yes,” I said, not wanting to appear needy. “I do have a best friend.”

  Samantha sat down next to me on the bed and crossed her legs Buddha-style, with her feet resting on top of her knees. Her eyes were bright, a greenish blue. She probably used an aqua Magic Marker for the eyes on her self-portrait in art. “You can’t have a best friend long distance,” she said.

  “We’re blood sisters,” I revealed, hoping to impress her with my loyalty.

  “But you have a sister already.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t choose her.”

  Samantha got up and looked out my window. The snow had melted, leaving the trees and yard dull. The lot outside TransAlt was tarred with bits of glass that were shining in the afternoon light. From Elizabeth’s room came the sounds of Rod Stewart’s new record.

  “What’s it like?” Samantha asked.

  “What?”

  “You know—your sister. Your real sister, I mean.”

  I hesitated, thinking again of Tess. Girls without sisters always thought it was better than it really was. Samantha had brothers who tortured her with pranks. They hung her stuffed animals from trees and unlatched the rabbit cage. In school, they ignored her.

  “Mainly we fight,” I said.

  Samantha grew quiet. At the other end of the hall, I could hear the familiar sound of Elizabeth’s steps as she practiced dancing in front of her mirror. Samantha reached out to touch the faint scar on the back of my hand.

  “You’re lucky,” she said, finally.

  CURRENT EVENTS

  When it came time for my next homework assignment, I made sure not to tell anyone at home. Ms. Zimmerman asked that we clip a week’s worth of articles about a topic of our choosing and write an essay that discussed our views of that topic. Every night, I sneaked the newspaper up to my room and returned it to the stack before morning, hoping that Nick wouldn’t notice the neat holes I’d made. I knew he meant well, but accepting his help was like cheating. He would have taken my project on in earnest, combing through the papers, marking articles with sprawling asterisks in red pen. I had always done everything on my own; that wasn’t going to change now. My last Georgia report card called me “an independent worker.”

  But it wasn’t long before I was discovered. I had clipped articles about wildlife and endangered species and in the process cut through a story about the president that Nick had wanted to reread. At breakfast one morning, he held the paper up between us and looked at me with raised eyebrows through a big rectangular space.
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br />   “Tilden, what have you been working on?” he asked. From that angle, his nose was the same size as Jimmy Carter’s whole head.

  “Nothing, really.”

  “Then I guess you don’t need my help.”

  I shook my head.

  “Well,” he said, shifting his weight and clearing his throat, “if you’re doing some current events, feel free to look through that stack of magazines. There might be some recent Time magazine articles, stuff a newspaper doesn’t explore in depth.”

  I could tell that he was hurt, but didn’t know what to do. Mama gave me a sideways look when she delivered my toast. Even Elizabeth treated me as if I had done something wrong. It was the quietest breakfast ever.

  When we had finished eating, Nick pushed back his stool and stood behind me. “You’ve given me an idea,” he said. He tore out a local article about the school board and stuck it on the refrigerator. “There’s no reason we can’t have a little current events here at home.”

  From that day on, Nick couldn’t seem to keep from clipping pieces of the paper. He took this new enthusiasm to work with him, implementing an incentive strategy at TransAlt. He thought the drivers could do with some reading. That way they would be able to make conversation with the passengers. Nothing lofty, he just wanted them to keep up with the news. Those people who didn’t have time to read the paper might appreciate a little update. The drivers could come in early, if they wanted, bring their coffee. Nick would make sure to have lots of material on hand. He ordered extra papers.

  There was some initial grumbling and confusion. The drivers didn’t think this ought to be part of the job. After all, some of them had been dropouts, had avoided homework. Others read the paper on their own and didn’t see the point in discussing it. But Nick stayed firm. Mama said he had never gotten the education he wanted; he went to work early, building a business. He told her it was his civic responsibility.

  “It’ll probably help your tips,” he suggested to the drivers.