Mommie Dearest

by Christina Crawford

  Besides being co-educational, which was a radical departure, Chadwick also prided itself on being one of the finest preparatory schools in the Western United States. All of its graduates went on to college and many of them were admitted to the hallowed universities of the eastern establishment.

  Commander took charge of the financial and disciplinary aspects of the school. Mrs. Chadwick supervised the curriculum and believed that anyone could achieve anything if they worked hard enough. She had great faith.

  In 1950 Chadwick was a country school. There was not only lots of space but also a working farm on the school property. The fields grew hay and some wheat and the farm raised chickens, pigs and rabbits for the dining room. There were also stables, corrals and a pasture for the horses. Not much of Palos Verdes had been developed yet and there were wonderful wide-open places to ride. As the months went by my life seemed continually better. Of course there were rules and minor differences with classmates and the fact that mother still wouldn’t let me have any bras even though I was now more developed than most of the girls wearing them, but I liked the school and the people very much.

  I had only gotten in any real trouble once and even that wasn’t too bad.

  Somehow a group of us had gotten the idea that it would be funny to spike the punch at our class Christmas party. One of the girls on our committee was not a boarding student and we managed to sneak some whiskey into all the coke bottles and carefully reseal them so it didn’t look as though anything had happened. We studiously figured a way to mark several “clean” bottles for our teacher, but during the excitement of the party, someone screwed up and we were caught.

  It was a terrible moment when we were all called into Mrs. Chadwick’s office. She had a way of looking at you that made you feel worse than whatever the actual punishment was going to be. Somehow you felt as though you’d betrayed the ultimate trust she put in each child under her care and it would have been a lot better to just have someone yell at you rather than have to look at the disappointment on Mrs. Chadwick’s face.

  After we’d all told our version of the story and vowed we’d never even think of participating in such a travesty again, we were given demerits and a sound lecture on the responsible behavior expected of each student in the Chadwick School. We were all very ashamed of ourselves for bringing such a disgrace on the school and in truth, I don’t think anyone in the room ever forgot the lesson.

  However, in the early spring of 1951 when I was eleven and a half years old, an event occurred that would change my life forever. It was one of those definitive experiences that binds everything together and yet rips the fabric of your emotional life into shreds so small you wonder if you’ll ever be able to piece it all together again. It’s one of those times that afterwards become a reference point in your life and you think of things in terms of before and afterwards. For me and my young years, it was like a dying and fighting your way back out of the grave.

  It’s hard to go back all those years and look clearly at something that took place such a long time ago. The only memories are of pain and the only landmarks are events still so crystal clear that they almost stand alone like Dali figures on an otherwise empty canvas.

  I had been listening to the stories of some of the older girls at night in the dorm. In between the whispers and the giggles and the long silences I had begun to put together the excitingly romantic story of one girl’s adventures with the guy who was in charge of running the stables. He was a student on a scholarship and spent most of his time outside of classes up at the stables taking care of the horses. I vaguely knew who he was but it didn’t matter because the stories were better I’m sure than the boy himself. As the weeks wore on I became totally captivated by veiled references to what went on at the stables and the flushed, happy look on the face of the girl who told the stories.

  I secretly decided to see for myself what all the excitement was about. The only place I had a chance to see the boy in question was during art class. The boys took shop in the room right next to the art class and I managed to slip him a note without anyone else seeing me. After an exchange of several notes, it was decided that we would meet Friday night while the basketball game was going on. I would sign out of the dorm to watch the game and since the basketball court was right next to the stables, it wouldn’t be too hard to slip away unnoticed for a little while and still get back to the dorm by sign-in time.

  There were several days to go until Friday and I thought about meeting him a lot. It was sort of like my own adventure, my own secret. I’d never really even talked to this boy because he was about 16 and much too old for me, but he was good looking and tall and kind of looked like a cowboy. Ever since I had been a little girl, cowboys were my heroes. After I saw the play Annie Get Your Gun in New York, I’d wanted to be a cowboy. Then I discovered that little girls weren’t supposed to want to be cowboys and so now, even though I knew I wanted to be an actress when I grew up, cowboys were still my heroes. I loved cowboy movies and I loved riding horses. For me, then, it was all a perfect combination even though I didn’t know the specific boy at all. I’d never even spoken to him face to face. We had only exchanged looks and notes before Friday night.

  Before the basketball game I took particular care with my shower and washed my hair until it squeaked clean. Even though I had to be cautious not to look like I was getting dressed specially, I did my best to look pretty without the help of makeup. My jeans weren’t wrinkled and my shirt was pressed. I borrowed a bra from one of the other girls so that I wouldn’t seem like the kid I was if he touched me and with my heart beating a mile a minute, I signed out after dinner for the basketball game. I could hardly act natural during the first half of the game. I tried to cheer for the boys I knew and it sounded hollow and false. I thought that at any minute someone would ask me what was the matter with me and the whole adventure would come to a screeching halt, but nothing of the sort happened and in fact no one paid particular attention to the cleanly scrubbed eleven and a half year old sitting on one of the back benches. At half time, when everyone else went to the bathroom, I left the court and disappeared into the darkness at one turn in the path. From there it was just a matter of making my way carefully through the bushes around to the back of the stables. Since no one rode at night, there was only one light on in the tack room at the far end of the row of stalls. The rest of the stable area was in darkness.

  There was only a small sliver of a moon and I could barely see where I was going. Finally, after what seemed like an hour but was in reality probably only five minutes, I found my way along the back of the stalls to the corner of the tack room. The night sounds were all around me and crickets interspersed with the sound of horses moving in their stalls.

  Carefully I crept around the protective edge of the board walls and past the big stack of hay bales. I stood in silence for a moment looking at the tall dark-haired boy I had planned to meet here.

  Though I didn’t say anything, he must have sensed me standing there in the half light that spilled past the door of the back room because he turned to face me. I could still hear the sound of my own heart beating, half in anticipation and half in fear. I thought that he was better looking than I’d remembered him in the woodworking ship and also seemed taller, nearly six feet. He walked toward me and smiled. I didn’t move.

  When he was standing next to me in the semi-darkness, he took my hand. He wasn’t exactly handsome but I liked the looks of him and sort of quivered when he touched me. “Let’s go over here”, he said, and lead me quietly to one of the empty stalls.

  Inside the stall it was even darker than in the pale moonlight. There was the smell of fresh hay and old wood, of leather and horses. These were all happy smells for me, familiar smells of days spent riding with my braids flapping behind me and a sense of freedom as the horses galloped through the countryside.

  He kneeled down on the hay and drew me to him. I was glad it was so dark because I felt very awkward and embarrassed. He was gen
tle and easy and I started to relax when he kissed me. I lay back on the soft crinkly hay and heard it rustle beneath me as we moved.

  He was so warm and the sensation of his hand on my body so comforting that I didn’t even realize that he’s unbuttoned my shirt and unfastened my borrowed bra until it was already done. I struggled a little bit but as he continued to kiss me I sort of felt like I was melting. He had slipped his jacket underneath me and I never felt the hay as my jeans slipped down below my knees. I wasn’t really thinking about anything just sort of floating around the feeling of him touching me and talking to me very softly.

  The stab of pain that shot through me like a rocket nearly made me scream. My whole body contracted with that pain and involuntarily I started crying. He slapped his hand over my mouth so that no sound actually escaped and the pain disappeared as quickly as it had occurred. He lay on top of me now and held me very tightly.

  I was scared and felt like I’d been hurt but I didn’t quite know how. He dried my few tears with his hands and continued to kiss me gently. “You’ve never done this before, have you?” he asked. I shook my head, no. “How old are you?” he whispered. “Almost twelve”, I replied. He let out a low whistle between his teeth and said, “I thought you were closer to fourteen.” I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, but I did have a strange sense that somehow I was a disappointment, though he was being very kind about it. Then he said, “Let me tell you something and try to remember this as you’re growing up. Don’t let just anybody do it … you choose who you want and be careful.” I nodded my head in agreement and then he helped me get dressed.

  He kissed me once more when we were standing in the doorway to the stall. Without saying any more I walked away into the darkness.

  That would have been the end of it I guess except that I told one of the girls and he must have told a couple of this friends and by Sunday afternoon I was summoned into Mrs. Chadwick’s office. Later that same day they had a doctor examine me and his verdict was that I was still a virgin despite any rumors contrary.

  However, those rumors had spread so fast that the school was faced with a potential scandal. Finally, my mother had been called and she of course was horrified. After a tear-stained meeting between the three of us during which mother called me a common whore, Mrs. Chadwick told me to go back to the dorm and take a long hot bath. They would decide what was to be done and she would call me back to her office after the decision had been made.

  Walking despondently back to the dorm my head was filled with a dozen thoughts at once and they tended to collide with one another so that it was impossible to sort them out. First of all I was scared to death. Secondly I was extremely embarrassed by all the personal questions I found difficult to answer. And, third I kept wondering … if nothing has really happened to me then what is all the upset about? The doctor said nothing happened, which I kind of already knew, so why was everyone so angry?

  My mother’s reaction had hurt me very much. Somehow I thought she’d understand a little better. Mrs. Chadwick had her school to think about. She’d always been very nice to me and I was sorry to see her upset. Up until now everyone had thought of me as just a little girl and I think that’s what really shocked them the most about the whole situation.

  But nobody seemed to really care about me and how I felt or if I was scared and confused, which I certainly was. I hadn’t really started out to do anything so terrible. I don’t know how to explain it but it was like I was looking for something. Something special that I’d seen on the faces of the older girls when they were confiding their secrets with one another. A look, and an excitement, a belonging … love … I don’t really know. One thing is certain: never in a million years would I have done any of it had I known that this was going to be the result.

  But what I couldn’t figure out was why I was getting in so much trouble for something they knew hadn’t even happened. Those older girls never had anything happen to them.

  I took a bath as Mrs. Chadwick had instructed me to do and tried not to think about it too much.

  However, the next afternoon, I was back in the office. This time there was just Mrs. Chadwick and myself. I got scared all over again sitting there waiting for her to begin speaking. I tried not to start crying and it took all my will power to hold back the tears. I sat with my hands clenched in my lap and a stinging lump in my throat.

  Finally, Mrs. Chadwick started speaking to me and her voice sounded shaky and strained. She told me that she was very sorry that this incident had happened … that it was very serious … and that I was going to face a very difficult time in the days ahead because of it. They had decided to let me stay in school because I was so young and could not be blamed for the entire thing. However, the boy was going to be expelled and I was not to see or speak to him again. In addition, I was going to have to be punished. I was not going to be allowed to go home for some time, nor was I allowed to go on the school’s mid-semester ski trip. The final punishment was one hundred hours of hard work. This work was going to be assigned at a rate of one hour per school day, six hours on Saturday and six hours on each day of the two-week mid-semester vacation until such time as the entire one hundred hours had been completed. During the time that I was working off my punishment, I was allowed no privileges. That meant I was not allowed off the school premises to go shopping or riding, that during normal on-campus weekends I was not allowed to go to the school movies or dances.

  As the litany of my punishment droned on, I sat dully staring at Mrs. Chadwick. I couldn’t believe my ears. Until that moment I don’t think I fully realized that what I’d done, or tried to do, or not done according to the doctor, was so terrible. I honestly didn’t think I was capable of doing anything that bad.

  I left the office and walked like a ghost back to the dorm. The bleakness of my future had been graphically spelled out for me and my shoulders could almost feel the physical burden of it.

  So that was it: no privileges and one hundred hours of hard work. I fleetingly wondered if it wouldn’t have been a lot easier just to be expelled and get the agony over with, but then I forgot about that when the image of my mother’s wrath appeared before me. She hadn’t even asked me if I was all right. I probably couldn’t have answered anyway. I had a miserable habit of not being able to say a word when I was put on the spot. All my thoughts became a hopeless jumble at those times and I couldn’t seem to get them sorted out into words. My standard answer was “I don’t know” and in part that was the truth. So it probably wouldn’t have mattered if she’d asked me.

  Somehow I got through the next week. I knew that a lot of people knew because I saw them staring at me and if I’d look at them they’d quickly turn away. But mostly everybody just left me alone … I felt badly for the boy too. He left school very quickly and I only saw him once by accident. We didn’t say anything even though I wanted to tell him I was really sorry. He didn’t look like he hated me, just bewildered by the circumstances.

  During the vacation I worked six hours a day, every day but Sunday. I pulled weeds and washed windows. I cleaned out classrooms and washed cars. I dusted every book in the library and scrubbed down all the tables and chairs in the dining room. I had mopped and polished half the school it seemed and still at the end of the vacation I had over 25 hours of work left to do.

  At first I hated the work but gradually I got used to it. No one bothered me much and I was left alone most of the time. I ate my meals just outside the kitchen in one little corner of the porch. John, the cook, was a kindly, gruff man who was always very good to me. He’d think up little goodies to give me which brightened my day a lot and I’d look forward to his brusque greeting and twinkling eyes.

  When school started again it was a different story. By then the rumor had turned into a full-fledged story and it seemed that everyone had heard it. Some of the girls decided not to be friends with me when there was anyone else around and some of the guys made snide remarks and rude jokes at my expense.

>   For the next few weeks it seemed that I was constantly on the verge of tears. At night I would cry silently into my pillow so my roommate wouldn’t be able to add to the rumors. During the day I did my best to get through classes and keep my studies in order. In fact it was during this time that I really began to pour my energy into my schoolwork. It was the one avenue left open to me and the only source of my rewards. Getting “A” meant that everything was not a total loss and I could still be good at something. So my grades were astonishingly good through an otherwise miserable time.

  Not all my friends turned their backs on me. classmates who had known me better were still at least polite to me. But there were two friends in particular with whom I became a lot closer. One was Jane Davis who turned out to be a sort of buoyant free spirit with a wonderful sense of the absurd and the other was Hoagy Carmichael. Hoagy was a true character. Because he was always overweight he had years of experience dealing with unkind jokes and constant needling. It was Hoagy who began to teach me to let most of it roll off me and not pay any attention to it … even to act as though I hadn’t heard it. It was also Hoagy who, through a series of verbal sparing matches, taught me to be quicker with a sharp reply. Even though Hoagy was always the class clown and the life of any party, everyone knew that if they were going to start in on Hoagy they’d better be prepared to get some of it back in lightning quick zingers that Hoagy became sort of famous for. Hoagy had come from a very difficult home and he understood without too many stories exchanged between us what I had gone through. It was a relief not to have to explain everything and still have someone else understand. I think that was the basis of our friendship starting in seventh grade and lasting for many years. Hoagy sort of let me hang around with him and I could be in a group of kids with him and not be the center of attention, because he usually was. In return, I would help him with his schoolwork. Hoagy was smart but he got bored with the routine of homework and since it was easy for me, I was more than delighted to help in any way I could. In fact, because I was so good in school a lot of the kids would ask me to help them and I found that it was one way to get friends. It was a purely selfish exchange, I guess, but it was better than being alone.