I think what fretted us kids more was her control over the use of the bathroom. Classes for kids that age usually had their own restrooms in the back (at least we did). It was a very big deal to raise your hand and ask to go. Maybe some kids did have some problems this way—and I can see how a teacher might not want the constant interruption of kid after kid getting up when a lesson was under way. Part of school at that age is just implanting a sense of routine and knowing when, like recess, to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Mauer didn’t seem to feel that any time was appropriate and I think outright enjoyed watching us clamp our legs together. On more than a couple of occasions, accidents happened—and the humiliated culprit would have to clean up the mess in front of everyone. This did attract some parental concern—once. Belinda Thornwall (who was probably the most confident girl in the class) had been the unfortunate. Her parents made some inquiry into the incident—which I suspect Mrs. Mauer took grave exception to. The next afternoon, Belinda was asked to stay after class. There were no more parental intrusions after that.
I didn’t have any mishaps with bodily functions. My problems with Mrs. Mauer were of a subtler and more sinister kind. At first they seemed harmless. I was even kind of proud. I was asked to go up to the board more often than any other child. And she’d always make a point of emphasizing my name, as if I’d just arrived in class that day. Gradually, the other kids began to pick up on this, over-pronouncing my name on the playground as a kind of taunt. It grew more and more irritating. One day I had to stay up at the board for what seemed like an eternity. Having all those eyes on me for so long made me feel like an animal in the zoo. I started to get flustered and began getting the answers wrong. The faces before me snickered and leered. I felt my face flush and thought I might cry. I wanted desperately to sit down. It was then that Mrs. Mauer began to actually make fun of me in front of the whole class. I sensed there was something wrong with this behavior, but I was too off-balance to bring my feelings into focus. I was afraid that my growing discomfort could escalate into the wide, black fear that would embarrass me utterly in plain sight of all.
So began a very disconcerting pattern of alternatingly being the teacher’s pet and feeling like her whipping boy—without any understanding of what lay behind it. At first, when I told my parents what was happening, I don’t think they grasped the seriousness of the situation. I didn’t either, actually, and I was uncomfortable about sounding afraid, so I glossed over some of the important details. Not until she started insisting I stay after class almost each day did the relationship begin moving into shadowy terrain that would have a dramatic impact on me and reach a point that couldn’t be ignored.
I remember very clearly the first afternoon she called me Donald. At first I thought I hadn’t heard her right—or that she was confused—there wasn’t any Donald in our class. But she repeated it and then a few moments later, she asked me directly, in a soft, wheedling sort of voice that brought barbs of sweat to my neck, “You don’t mind me calling you Donald when no one else is around, do you?”
I, of course, did mind, although I didn’t like it when she used my right name, either. And I very much didn’t like her reminder of “no one else being around.” It wasn’t entirely true, of course, but she was canny enough to make it truer than I liked. She was beginning to not just worry me but to outright scare me. My digestion was affected. I was restless and troubled at night. During the day, my stomach always seemed to be churning with acid, my palms moist. I couldn’t work out why I was being targeted or what I should do about it—and of course, the moment I showed any sign of panic, she’d instantly change mood and tactic and I’d once again be the hero of the class. Every day was a roller coaster ride. By now all of the other kids had picked up on how I was being treated, but perhaps because they didn’t understand what was going on any better than I did, instead of taking my side and supporting me against her, they of course, being kids, just turned on me further. I started getting called a fairy by some of the other boys, which wounded me. I didn’t comprehend what a fairy was, really—and yet I sort of did. Words that older kids used had started slipping in. It was part of the whole wind of the world my parents (at least my mother) wanted to keep out.
But if I’ve created the impression that Mrs. Mauer was only a harridan, I must add that she knew kids and was a skillful manipulator when it came to pleasing them as well as bullying. She knew what kinds of candy I liked (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups). She gave me a gyroscope. She had a clever way of playing to both my weaknesses and my strengths—and my greatest weakness was my private sense of my own strangeness. While I felt unfairly singled out, I also felt that in some secret way I deserved it. There was about our relationship an emerging unnatural intimacy that while alien, also seemed familiar to me, even though I couldn’t say how.
Because the world seemed alive to me at every level, the Other World always peeking through, I was slow to pick up on a more obvious reason behind her behavior—the mundane and also random fact that out of all the boys in our class, I just happened to look the most like her dead son Donald. I remember the falling-through-the-floor feeling I had the day she brought in his photograph, and the resemblance clicked. Just like Snip.
He’d been hit by a car when he was about my age. How long ago that was she didn’t say—or rather, she couldn’t keep her story straight. Sometimes it was ten years ago. Other times her voice would get dreamy and her eyes would fog over and it was “last week.” Believe it or not, I actually felt sorry for her—and she played on that too. So, when she brought in some of his old clothes for me to try on, the ghastly inappropriateness of the proceedings didn’t worry me as much as it should have. Very gradually she’d drawn me into her delusion and I was finding it harder to get out.
I’ve since come to see that this is precisely how a certain kind of psychosis operates. The aggressor is adept at hiding aggression—especially from people outside the victim relationship. (Mrs. Mauer very cleverly managed to keep other teachers and staff away any time I was alone with her, and had set up an accepted scenario with the other students whereby I was both star pupil and class scapegoat.) Meanwhile the victim is made to feel more and more like an accomplice—and in fact partially becomes one. As the situation advances, it becomes harder for the victim to escape control. There’s an underlying, destabilizing sense of shame and guilt (which makes the victim more vulnerable). It becomes ever more difficult to seek outside assistance, because the problem has been going on for a while—and the victim worries that the predator will be able to fool other people too well, so his story won’t be believed. As long as the predator can keep the camouflage in place, the victim feels helpless, short of an overt confrontation, and this is of course the core fear that set the whole relationship in motion in the first place.
In the end, fear is the ultimate weapon. Once someone is afraid of you, you have them—and you can make them weaker still by making them grateful for your apparent kindness at strategic times. I did as Mrs. Mauer asked and tried on her dead son’s clothes. After school, when the terrible bells in the hall were silent, I let her call me Donald. If I had to do a BM, she inspected my bottom to make sure I’d properly wiped myself. In return I was given candy Lucky Strike cigarettes, jelly bears, milk chocolate Liberty Bells, and plastic skulls full of fruit juice. Better still, she’d bring in marbles and an old skeleton key—then more exotic, magical things for my collection—things maybe Donald had owned . . . a midget Bible, the “size of a postage stamp,” a U.S. Baby Tank . . . X-Ray Glasses, a mystic gypsy charm, serpent’s eggs, sneezing powder and invisible ink, and something called the Little Giant—as the box said, “It’s a microscope, an opera glass, a burning lens, a reading glass, a telescope, a compass, a pocket mirror all in one!” All of these treasures I kept safely hidden at home, like my fears. For it was fear that she was the best at—and in this campaign she and Donald had a formidable ally.
At the start of the year, the one bright, endearing presence in the classroom
was a silly-looking but practical arithmetic aid that Miss Roscoe, the loopy art teacher, had made (she was a bit of an old beatnik). He was called the Counting King, a big plywood cartoon with red and gold robes, a goofy lopsided crown and a huge smile on his face. He had a tripod easel stand behind him to keep him propped up—and he came with a bunch of little blackbirds that you could attach to his arms as a means of learning about numbers (1’s and 10’s). We all liked the blackbirds.
Then one night, several classrooms got broken into (probably by some older kids), and the Counting King, along with Crack, the flag and the clock, were all taken. The King was eventually found but his arms had been broken off and his blackbirds were gone. We were all quite happy that Crack had disappeared, but sorry to have lost the King.
Well, two weeks later (which seemed a bizarre eternity to me), this cheerful guardian was replaced by an industrially made variation dubbed the Counting Clown. No doubt the manufacturers of this specimen were attempting to do exactly what Miss Roscoe had done—but despite the fun-sounding name—they couldn’t have missed their mark more completely. The Counting Clown was made of a thin sheet of sharp white metal mounted on a rotating arm like a weathervane. They hadn’t bothered to paint him, so he was pure silhouette, and being white gave him an odd blankness, like a hole cut into space. Where the King had had a funny crown, the Clown had a weird hat, somewhere between a derby and a top hat—with jagged suggestions of his hair shooting out from underneath—and what were supposed to be big floppy shoes. His head was turned in profile so you could see the line of the ball on his nose, but the angle had a kind of contorted look to it, as if his neck had been twisted. We all know that clowns can have a dark aspect at the best of times. But unpainted and seen only as an outline, this fellow was more threatening still—especially since he didn’t come with fingers. Instead of the King’s blackbirds, the counting function was achieved by attaching clothespins for his digits. He was thus often missing fingers, and when all were in position, he looked positively maniacal.
Mrs. Mauer wasn’t immune to the anxiety this effigy created in us, and she was especially sensitive to how it upset me. So, whenever I didn’t do a good-enough job cleaning the erasers—whenever I didn’t stand up straight enough in her son’s clothes, she’d say, “The Counting Clown doesn’t always stay still in the classroom. At night he comes to life and he might come looking for you. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”
This was too much. I began having nightmares, not only about Donald, but about the Counting Clown. I could see and hear it creaking after me . . . standing in the streetlight shadows in front of our house, waiting for me . . . calling to me in its faceless, clothespin-fingered voice. The presence of Donald, Mrs. Mauer’s car-mangled dead son, and the Counting Clown took root in my dreams. I became withdrawn and different at home in ways I couldn’t control. One night at dinner when my mother was there (she often wasn’t because of work), I blurted out that Mrs. Mauer wanted to take me away on a weekend trip to visit some of our old relatives. My mother dropped her fork and said, “Whose relatives?”
To her credit, she barged into principal Mrs. Day’s office, the next morning. (I strangely have no recollection of my father’s involvement with the issue whatsoever—a theme that would repeat.) Mom was late for work at her own school and furious. The whole thing came out then.
Actually, the whole thing didn’t come out, because there were still elements of my relationship with Mrs. Mauer that I didn’t understand fully enough to explain or, where I did, felt willing to repeat. All that was needed was a mention of her dead son’s clothes and the wanting to take me away for a weekend, and ever-practical Principal Day stepped in. Fast.
What happened to Mrs. Mauer I don’t know. There were rumors that some men came for her that afternoon. Like Ichabod Crane, she was never seen again, and Mrs. Day personally took over the running of our class for the rest of the year. Still, the Counting Clown remained in position, and in my dreams he’d walk stiffly down the streets at night, a harbinger of darkness. And Donald? Dead boys aren’t so easily evaded.
“Why do you always check the sheets before you climb into bed?” my sister asked one night.
I thought it best not to tell her I was looking for the blood.
I’D SHOW THEM ALL
I had to have a secret thought for every day and I’d whisper certain words and phrases over and over to myself. I always had to have a pencil or a pen or something in my hand and I’d trace figure eights in the air very fast, or I’d pretend the pen was a runner sprinting down the football field.
There were endless sporting highlights—scorching the hundred-meter dash in the Olympics, scoring thousands of touchdowns, smashing a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth in the tie-breaker game of the World Series, hitting a twenty-five-foot jump shot at the buzzer to win the NBA finals, slamming consecutive ace serves at Wimbledon. Knockout punches and board-splitting karate chops.
I had this ongoing fantasy that I was going to disappear into some magical world like Narnia or Middle Earth, or aliens from another galaxy were going to take me away. I’d be gone for only an hour of Earth time but I’d have lived and learned for centuries. I’d come back and I’d have read every book.
I made lists of all the subjects I was going to devour, the words I’d learn, the places I’d travel to. I’d have secret weapons the aliens gave me, or things I stole, like Jack nabbing the goose from the giant and racing down the beanstalk. I’d be able to shrink bullies with an evil glance and put them inside rat cages where they’d learn their lesson and beg to be released. I was always giving interviews in my head and writing down the names of the outfielders and investigative reporters I was going to be when I finished flying twin-engine Otters into blizzards, discovering lost cities, occasionally racing stock cars and becoming the world’s foremost authority on the criminal mind.
JUMP WITH ME
The highlight of my partnership with my sister, driven by our enslaved devotion to Van Cheese, was Halloween (one of the loveliest smells I know is that first stringy spoonful of moist pumpkin seed goop coming out of a jack-o’-lantern and being dumped onto newspaper). Brainstorming about costumes would begin as early as August, with my sister aiming to have drawings and a review of logistics well in hand come Labor Day. In successive years we dominated the school parade awards for best costumes, appearing as court jesters, robots, and alternative superheroes like Rat Man and the Bee. Aunt Mabo was called in as master seamstress. Mom and Gaja assisted with makeup. We had quite a bit of involvement with pipe cleaners, spray paint, cardboard boxes and old bedsheets.
My sister broke new ground with our final joint appearance (and it was a very sad night the last time we went out trick-or-treating together; many things would never be the same). We went as germs. Yep. Like bacteria. It was a stroke of brilliance. She got the idea from some little cartoon drawings in the World Book—but it was very lateral for the time and made all the pirates and fairy princesses seem obvious and bland. We painted white sheets with disgusting colors and sewed paper cones suggesting spikes of ugly hairs to them—along with squiggles of wire. It was messy and genuinely scary, but playful too. Everyone was quite surprised and the refrain of the evening sums up what many people thought of her then: “Now where does she get her ideas?”
She had a special genius for covert operations. When the McMurtrys, a prunish older couple down the street, stiffed her for payment in a peanut brittle fund-raising drive, we vowed massive retaliation. The McMurtrys hated Halloween and would do anything to be away from the house on that night, except they were stingy. So my sister, with some old stationery and my mother’s typewriter, agonizingly crafted a plausible enough letter informing the M’s that they had won a “Special Halloween Weekend” package at a motel down in Carmel, with a FREE all-you-can-eat buffet and early check-in. She included a little map of the area our mother had saved—and a branded complimentary chocolate—and sent the envelope to them special delivery to get a
round the postmark problem.
Then to my astonishment, she actually pulled off a confirmation phone call to them with a suspiciously well-disguised voice. She was a terrier for detail. Halloween was on a Friday that year, and sure enough, the McMurtrys loaded up in the late morning to get down for “early check-in.” We, meanwhile, had skipped school, which was a sacrifice, as I (gone solo now) was defending champion in the costume parade and a shoe-in to retain the title. But we had other things on our minds—like breaking in to the McMurtrys and decorating for the huge Haunted House Halloween Party, to which every kid we knew, even those we hated (especially those we hated), were invited. We’d made flyers and gotten them printed using our slush fund. Friends were passing them out at school. We posted some in the library and the post office. If our victims hadn’t fallen for it, I don’t know what we would’ve done, but my sister had a cool head when it came to these types of things—and had the smarts to take the phone off the hook. The McMurtrys had a lot of parents fooled about their hatred of kids, so most people didn’t question it. Some did call, though, we found out later, and when they got a busy signal, they just thought, “Oh, well, there are probably a lot of people wondering about the party.”
But here’s the reason why, even at twelve, my sister could’ve run the CIA. In case any parents physically stopped by the house to check things out, we’d coerced a friend of our dad’s and his girlfriend, who we had some dirt on, to drift around the house with sheets over their heads, acting like ghosts. Everyone thought they were the McMurtrys. (Access to the McMurtrys’ liquor cabinet greatly assisted with this crucial element, we later found out.) Late that afternoon, when some pressure was applied, and all through evening, when the goblins and Tin Men started showing up, if anyone asked, “Where are the McMurtrys?” my sister and I would just say, “Oh, they’re ghosts . . . haunting the house.”
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