Well, there were her lips and the way she held them that I found terrifyingly fascinating, and there was her name, which I found deliriously funny. Woodenhead! I had only to say that name to myself, and the giggles would erupt. Woodenhead! The more I said it, the funnier it sounded. At home I said it to Elena, “Woodenhead!” and collapsed into fits of giggling. Elena joined in and both of us chanted, “Woodenhead! Woodenhead!” until Elena remembered she was four years older than I and ought to be more dignified.
All that first week in second grade, every time someone raised a hand and said, “Miss Woodenhead,” I began to snort and sniffle, trying to cover my giggles.
And Miss Woodenhead began to pick me out from the other quieter, less erratic children. “Carol Wolpe, I do not think you’re paying attention.” “Carol, have you done your writing practice?” “Carol Wolpe, are you giggling again?”
Miss Woodenhead’s voice chilled me. It was a cold north wind that might have told the experienced or the wary that a storm was coming. Still in the summer dream of Miss Dooty’s affection, still being the giggle-pot, I was unprepared.
“Miss Woodenhead,” someone said. It was Friday afternoon. It was late. I was restless, dozy, dreamy, sleepy, giggly. I giggled.
“Carol Wolpe. What are you snickering about?”
“Uh, uh, uh,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Uh, uh, nothing.”
“Nothing, Miss Woodenhead.”
“Nothing, Miss Woodenhead,” I parroted, choking back another volcano of giggles at the sound of her name on my lips.
“How does one laugh at nothing, Carol?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, Miss Woodenhead.”
“I don’t know, Miss Woodenhead,” I repeated, the dangerous giggles still foaming at the corners of my mouth. Oh, silly Carol, swallow them back! Press your lips together! Make a mouth like Chelia Wooden-head’s!
“Don’t be smart with me!”
“Smart?” I repeated.
“I do not like children who mock me.”
“Mock you?”
“Like that!”
“Like what?” I said. No longer giggling.
“Carol Wolpe. Come here.”
I rose from my seat. I walked to the front of the room and stood in front of Miss Woodenhead.
“I will tell you once more. I do not like children who mock me.”
My head swung back and forth. “I’m not mocking you.” My heart, like my head, seemed to swing loosely, back and forth inside my chest. “I’m not mocking you,” I bleated.
“Use my name.”
“Miss Woodenhead.”
“Stand up straight! Now tell me—what were you laughing about?”
I no longer knew. Had I been laughing? Nothing seemed at all funny now.
“Speak up,” she ordered.
I stared at her numbly. Speak up about what? I had lost the drift of this dialogue, had forgotten where, or why, it had begun. I was only, finally, aware that I was in dirty, dangerous waters. The rest of the class knew it, too. There was that kind of waiting stillness that comes over kids when one of them is in danger from a teacher. It’s a stillness made up of relief that someone else is the target, uneasiness that at any moment the teacher might shift gears and attack you, and pleasure in watching another lamb being devoured.
Yes, that was exactly the way I felt by then, as if I were being devoured by the luscious lips of Chelia Woodenhead. I couldn’t drag my gaze away from those lips.
“Look at me,” she said. “Look me in the eyes!”
I did, but only for a moment, then my eyes dropped like a plummet to her lips, those lips. I felt compelled to watch them, as you might watch a pair of lunatic dogs, chained, but straining to reach you.
“You are a sneaky, shifty child, Carol Wolpe.” This pronouncement was delivered in the same neutral tone of authority in which she informed us that two times two was four. A fact. A given. A piece of information without which we could not pass through second grade.
“Well?” Miss Woodenhead demanded.
What did she want now? What was I supposed to say? How act? “Yes,” I said, thinking that might be safe.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, Miss Woodenhead,” I quivered.
“Yes, Miss Woodenhead,” she repeated. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know!” And I began to cry. I cried bitterly, without reservation, howls and wails of terror and outrage. There—at that moment—was where my crying career began again. After that, for years, so far as I can remember, I cried at every turn.
Of course, I was doomed in second grade. It was misery. So much misery that, as often as possible, I had a sore throat, a stomachache, a headache, or anything else that, by the grace of God, could make me an invalid for a day or two. And if I was very lucky and had been good (meaning no tears or storms for at least a day), my mother often let me spend those blessed, Woodenheadless days in Elena’s room.
My room was bigger than hers, but hers was special. Tucked under the staircase to the attic, it had a sloping wall covered with faded wallpaper showing tiny ladies in blue ballgowns and tiny gentlemen in little white wigs and black ties dancing about with their hands daintily held in the air. I thought it was the most wonderful wall in the world, and if I stared hard enough at the tiny ladies and the tiny gentlemen, I would hear music and see them dance.
They took only the teeniest, tiniest steps, but they were all smiling and happy, and they said things to each other like, “Isn’t it a dee-lightful day, Mr. Gorham-Atekins?” And “I do believe you are charming my heart, Miss Maxwell-Vandersniff.”
Not only did Elena have Mr. Gorham-Atekins and Miss Maxwell-Vandersniff dancing perpetually on the wonderful sloping wall, but she also had a special window. Like all the other windows in the house, my windows were square, they had two panes of glass, they went up and down and sometimes they broke or cracked. Elena’s window did all those things, too, but besides that it was set into the wall so that, instead of a windowsill, she had a window seat. There was a cushion on the window seat, and to be allowed to sit there, reading, and eating a chocolate bar, on a rainy day was a privilege I rated only slightly below being asked to come into bed with Elena and tell her stories.
I had two basic kinds of stories in my repertoire—ghost stories and love stories. Now this was interesting. I never cried when I told my stories, but Elena nearly always did, usually at the point where I either killed off my character (ghost story), or condemned her to forever roam the world (love story), always just missing her beloved. “Oh, how sad,” Elena would sniffle. But things like that never drew a tear from me.
One year, in fifth grade, we were asked to write a composition on “The Most Wonderful Person I Know.” I sat for five stricken minutes while, all around me, people bent to their papers. Then my hand went up. “Yes, Carol?” “Miss Clements—” My voice quivered, my eyes were wet. “I don’t know who to write about.” “Of course you do,” she said briskly. No, I didn’t. While I could make up stories easily for Elena, inventing fabulous happenings, school was different. School was marks. It meant being judged. It meant that cold snake in the center of my belly that had taken up residence in second grade and never left me. In school I didn’t believe in myself, in what I could do, or that I could do anything praiseworthy. So, usually, I didn’t do much.
My eyes swam. My nose twitched like a rabbit’s. Then my friend, Bernie, poked me. “Write about your sister,” she hissed. What relief. Of course! Elena was “The Most Wonderful Person I Know.” I began, “My sister—” Simply writing those two words made my heart fill like a sponge absorbing water.
“Good for you!” Miss Clements wrote on my paper. “Why can’t you always do work like this? Reminds me of your sister.” All through grade school, junior high, and into high school, every teacher I had, had been Elena’s teacher four years previously. And had not forgotten her.
“Wolpe?” the teacher would
say on the first day. “Related to Elena Wolpe?”
“Elena’s my sister.”
A nod, a smile, sometimes a congratulatory “Oh, very good, very good.” After a while, I realized the teachers were congratulating themselves: they thought they were going to be lucky enough to have another Elena Wolpe in their classrooms. Instead, they got me.
I always started out the school year meaning to be like Elena, tearless, cooperative, smart, willing, and pleasant, but, somehow, before long, things became hopelessly fouled up. My teachers shook their heads. No Elena Wolpe, just another problem student.
“If only you’d try harder,” Mr. Rideau, my eighth-grade history teacher, said to me once when I handed in a paper two weeks late.
“Yes,” I said, my eyes filling, “I will.”
“But you told me the same thing weeks ago,” he pointed out.
“I’ll try,” I said, blinking hard. Oh, please don’t let me cry, I prayed. Please. “I’m sure I’ll do better, Mr. Rideau.” I fled before my traitorous tear ducts betrayed me again.
All my promises were given in utter sincerity. It was just that things happened. They happened to me, I felt, just as tears happened to me. I meant to do my work on time. I always meant to. I wrote down all the assignments and took the books home, but then, somehow, it was so hard to just sit down and do the work. Instead I’d roam around the house, playing with poor old Max (who was now half-blind), or I’d read for a while (always promising myself that at the end of this chapter I’d do my homework), or go into Elena’s room for a chat with Mr. Goreham-Atekins and Miss Maxwell-Vandersniff.
That year—I was fourteen—Elena’s life changed. She fell in love with Mark Feingold. Mark was in college on a basketball scholarship, he was an A student, he was tall and adorable with dark hair and a sweet, shy smile. He was, if anything, a male Elena. I immediately fell passionately in love with him.
Hopeless, of course. He brought me a gift. Crayons. Crayons for a fourteen-year-old! I was hot with despair. Those crayons—I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away—but I seemed to read my future in them. I’d never find someone like Mark. Who would ever take me seriously? Who would ever want me, an endlessly leaking faucet?
Walking home one day, I heard, ahead of me, two girls discussing a third girl. They agreed that everyone liked this other girl. They did, too, but why? What was her magic? How did she attract and keep so many friends?
“She’s so pretty,” said one.
“Yes, but it’s not that. Kathi is prettier. No, it’s because she’s nice to everyone.”
“And not in a phony way.”
“She always acts glad to see you.”
“Yes, and not stuck up about how pretty she is and how much everyone likes her.”
I knew it was Elena they were talking about. I rushed up. “Are you talking about Elena Wolpe?” They looked at me coolly. Who was this grungy little eavesdropper? “That’s my sister.” Now they looked at me again, differently. This is Elena Wolpe’s sister? Elena, the beautiful and fair and good? They smiled cynically.
“She is too my sister,” I shouted, and to my horror—but not surprise—my throat swelled, my eyes overflowed, and then I was crying in public. How I hated my tears! Despised them! Prayed to God night after night to make me a miracle, dry up my tears, turn me into a calm, tearless, radiant person like Elena.
I began to keep a calendar. For every day that passed tearless I crayoned in a large gold star. For every other day, an even larger, midnight blue, upside-down T. But it was my worst time of all. Worse, even, than second grade and Chelia Woodenhead. I could not get out of my head how perfect Elena was and how unperfect, flawed, and hopeless I was. I was miserable and so I cried. I cried rivers, lakes, oceans. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I’d think of Elena and Mark and cry. And in the morning, looking at my swollen eyes, it was all I could do not to cry again.
I wanted to stop crying. I not only hated my tears, I even hated anyone else’s tears. In the movies if I saw a character crying on screen, while others around me sniffled sympathetically, I was overcome with disgust. I couldn’t bear to read a crying scene in a book. I’d throw it across the room and refuse to read another page. But after only two months I tore up the calendar, sick of crayoning in only upside-down Ts.
I tore each page of my calendar in half and then in half again, and then into confetti and threw it all over the floor. My mother passed my room. “What in the world—?”
“Never mind! Leave me alone!” My mother sighed and withdrew.
Then Elena came, carrying Max. “Carol, couldn’t you be nicer to Mom?”
I tore up June. Bits of paper floated everywhere, settling on my bed, drifting into sneakers, mingling with the dust on shelves.
“What are you tearing up?” Elena said.
“You,” I said, laughing maniacally so I wouldn’t cry. “I’m tearing you up, Elena!” And I ripped July crosswise and then in half again and once more, and began on August. When I was done destroying the calendar, I broke every crayon into bits, and then threw myself across the confetti-covered bed and cried. I cried because I’d torn up my calendar, which I had really liked, cried because I had demolished Mark’s gift, and cried because no one understood me. (Topping the list of people who didn’t understand me was me.) And finally, of course, I cried because I was crying.
And I was so tired of my crying. So bored with my crying. Why couldn’t I stop? I began howling like a dog.
“What’s the matter?” Elena said, looking in again.
“Nothing,” I howled. “Shut your face!”
She sat on the bed next to me. “Are you in pain? Are you sick?”
“Nooooo!”
“Carol, Carol …”
“I want to stop crying,” I bawled miserably.
“Well, then,” Elena said in my ear, “stop.”
The logic of it! I sat up as if someone had whispered the secret of the universe. I shook my head like a dog, like Max when flies bothered him. If you don’t want to cry, don’t cry. Stop. It was such a revelation. It was as if, up until that instant, I had been living in a world where such thoughts were as unreal, as powerless, as Miss Maxwell-Vandersniff and Mr. Goreham-Atekins. They had to go on dancing eternally. And I had to go on crying.
I got up, looked in the mirror at my swollen eyes and dripping nose, and thought, What if I never cried again? It scared the hell out of me. What would I do instead? Pick my nose? Bang my head against the wall? Anything, I thought, just stop crying. And I remembered the five-mile cross-country run for the Children’s Fund last year. The final mile had been torture. I had cried the whole mile, gasping for air, pushing one leaden leg before the other, but full of a stiff, sickening pride. I would not give up. I would not stop. I would go over the finish line, running. And I had. Now I felt the same sickening pride entering me. I’ll never cry again. I will not. I have stopped crying.
A few weeks later at dinner, my father said, “I think the faucet has stopped dripping.” I went on eating. Better not to talk about my tears or lack of tears. Better to just keep running that race. I did not cry for days, for weeks, for a whole month. Stars, stars, stars.
Then came the day when Elena and Mark told us they were going to get married. Everyone was hugging everyone else. Everyone was laughing and beaming and smiling. I, too, but it was my wide-eyed, wild-eyed grin against tears. I wanted to cry! Oh, for a good, long, satisfying sob. Oh, to throw myself across my bed and howl. Howl for the sheer luxury of it. Could one little crying session hurt that much?
I ran to my room. I threw myself across the bed. I pounded my fists into the mattress. I sniffled and choked. I was on the verge of tears, the way someone desperate might be on the edge of a cliff, ready to throw herself over. Why not crash? Did it matter? Who would care?
I would. I sat up, grinding fists into my eyes. Oh, no, you don’t. No-you-don’t-Carol-Wolpe-Ex-Crier-Champion-of-the-World. And I didn’t.
The wedding was set for June, afte
r Elena graduated. No big affair, just the family on both sides and some friends. Mark and Elena were writing their own vows and the ceremony would be held in our backyard. For weeks, nothing but the wedding was talked about in our house. “She is glowing,” my mother said to a friend. “She is absolutely glowing.”
But the night before the ceremony, I heard Elena crying in her room. Elena crying? Was it some weird trick of my mind? Now that I wasn’t crying, Elena was? I knocked on her door. “Elena? It’s me. Can I come in?”
“Yes.” Muffled.
She was sitting up straight in her maple rocker, rocking and weeping. Sympathetic prickles began in my eyes.
“Elena?” I said. “Elena, what’s the matter?”
“Oh, Carol!” She held out her arms and I fell down on my knees and hugged her. We stayed like that for a while, hugging and rocking, Elena weeping, crying as I had never heard her crying, and me trying like the devil to stay on the tearless wagon.
How scary it was to see Elena cry. I knew it had to be for some awful, secret, shocking reason. Was she dying of leukemia? I looked at her golden face, beautiful even covered with tears. No, she was healthier than all of us. Then had she discovered she didn’t, after all, love Mark? For one instant I prepared to step into the breach. (Mark, will you marry me?) But then I thought of something even worse and nearly impossible to believe: Mark had changed his mind about marrying Elena. What else could possibly have brought on such torrents of tears?
“Oh, Elena,” I moaned, hugging her tighter.
“Carol, Carol—I’m—so—scared,” she said.
“You’ll find someone else,” I said.
She stared at me and wiped her nose on a corner of her shirt. Elena, wiping her nose on her shirt? That was the sort of thing Carol did.
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