It must have seemed strange to the other adults that the small me had such flawless manners. Those manners were flawless because I understood one simple fact: they were essential to my happiness. If I were to break down and have tantrums, my mother would have to leave me at home, and I didn’t want that to happen.
I loved spending time with my clever, pretty mother. She treated me with respect, and she shared her life and her friends with me. When I asked her questions, she took them seriously and did her best to explain. As little notice as the rest of my family took of my existence, it was worth hours of silence to have the chance to go places with her.
My mother spent hours each week with her closest friends. Unused to children, those friends treated me like an odd but surprisingly thoughtful little adult. They greeted me fondly and made me feel at home. I identified with them more and more as I grew past my toddler years, and although I couldn’t understand much of what they talked about, the images my imagination showed me while they held their scholarly discussions were absolutely enthralling.
By the time I was five, I was listening avidly to everything the grownups said, and I stored up questions to ask my mother on the way home. I could read the emotions of adults as they turned from earnest argument to angry sarcasm, and I could follow the details of their complex debates. Needless to say, my vocabulary skills were off the chart.
It seemed to me by this time as if I had been born understanding how adults thought. It was understanding children that I had trouble with. Their silly dramatics often surprised and baffled me. They didn’t understand my big words, so I couldn’t have meaningful conversations with them, and they changed from hot to cold in a flash. My best friend in the morning might be swearing she’d never speak to me again by noon, and then the next morning, she’d want to be friends again.
Adult friends didn’t do that sort of thing. They were loyal. They could be trusted.
As first grade crept by, I learned how to get along with my peers. I had a boyfriend and a group of friendly classmates who listened to my ideas about what game to play next. I grew to love recess in first grade. I ran and shouted and skipped rope and had a great time.
Nevertheless, the people who really mattered to me were the people I had grown up with. My mother’s close friends meant more to me than the other members of my own family did. They had been a constant presence in my life, and they noticed my ups and downs. They asked how I was doing, and they listened to my sober explanations of my childish adventures.
I felt sure that these were people who really loved me.
Then, when I was in second grade, my mother went through a religious conversion of sorts, and she and her closest friends had a falling-out. From one day to the next, those friends were gone from my life.
And my strange little world blew apart.
Like any happy child, I had taken love for granted. But now, as I kept my vigil by the front window and waited in vain for the phone or the doorbell to ring, I finally faced the new truth of my blown-up world: these people my mother and I loved must never have loved us back. Her bright conversation and my perfect manners had been for nothing.
Thrown back into my family again, I realized once more just how unimportant I was. My middle-school brothers didn’t even remember how to play. They certainly had nothing in common with me.
Drawing from old habits, I would bring a stack of books into the hall and sit quietly outside their door for hours, but this time, I could feel that I wasn’t included. Busy as always, the other members of the household stepped over me or around me. I was the afterthought of the family, ignored and unneeded.
My proud, well-mannered heart broke into pieces, but no one seemed to notice. God himself seemed to have other things to do. At school, I stopped playing games on the playground. I stopped doing much of anything. It didn’t matter anymore what I did.
The only thing I knew how to do anymore was what I had always done: sit quietly and amuse myself. So I withdrew. My days dragged. My life was empty.
My only emotion, other than misery, was a strong feeling of protection toward my pretty mother. I was sure that she needed an ally. Her friends had broken with her, and she was plainly hurting over it.That’s how my mother got used to talking to me about her interests and concerns and I got used to asking her helpful questions. It didn’t occur to either of us that I was only eight or nine and lacked an adult’s understanding. My mother had always treated me like an adult, and I valued that respect from her. Besides, I had lost the trick of being a child.
One day, my mother confided to me that the miniskirts in fashion back then worried her. She thought we women should wear more modest clothing, so she had decided that she was going to wear nothing but long dresses. I knew that my father didn’t like to see her in clothes like that. He could be sarcastic and hurtful. I couldn’t let my idealistic mother take that plunge alone, so I told her I wanted to do what she was doing.
That’s how I ended up wearing dresses down to my ankles—for four long ghastly years.
Being nine at the start of it all, I didn’t have any idea what I was getting myself into. My busy mother, occupied with her college classes and her research, didn’t have time to find flattering styles for me, and it wasn’t as if we had a lot to choose from anyway. Most of the long dresses I wore came from Goodwill, the relics of long-outdated fashions. Some were adult clothes, altered to fit me. That spelled the end of running and jumping on the playground, even if I still had the heart to try it.
As I walked through stores or down hallways in those unusual clothes, I could feel the eyes of strangers assessing me. I could look in the mirror and see for myself how freakish and ugly I looked. My school days became a special kind of martyrdom. There was nowhere I could let down my guard and just be a child.
It was official: I was the Weirdest Kid in School.
I think there may have been abortive attempts to bully me back then. I was too deep into depression to pay much attention. The bullying didn’t work because bullies assume that there are things they can take away from a victim—things like acceptance, comfort, and safety.
Me, I wanted nothing from my schoolyard peers, and they soon learned that there was nothing for them to take. I didn’t change expression even when they socked me in the stomach, and that seemed to frighten them. Their other weapon, the playground insult, didn’t work on me, either. Their insults were so sadly juvenile, so badly stated. With a professor’s vocabulary stored away in my brain, I already knew what I was.
I was a changeling child, old and shriveled up before my time. I was unlovely. I was unloved.
Meanwhile, my vivacious mother had moved on. She had found new enthusiasms and new friends. Once again, she spent long hours with other adults, engrossed in conversation. But now, more often than not, I stayed in my room.
This time, I knew better than to take these new friends of hers into my heart. Instead, I let them take her away from me. But it wasn’t easy to watch my one ally pass beyond my reach. While she chatted, I grieved. I grew even more bitter.
“Why didn’t you have more children?” I asked her one evening. “Why couldn’t it have been like my brothers, two of us? Why couldn’t I have had a sister?”
“You did have a sister,” she replied absently, grading papers. (She was always grading papers.) “You had a sister, but I lost the baby. She died a few months before you came along.”
My hungry imagination burst into life at this unexpected news. It blossomed into splendid, colorful images of the good times my sister and I would have shared. We would have slept in bunk beds in the same room. We would have stood up for each other. We would have swapped clothing and stories and held late-night whispered confidences in the dark.
I wouldn’t have been so lost if my sister had been there. I wouldn’t have been so . . . ugly.
“Oh!” I cried. “If only she had lived!”
My mother laughed. “Silly! If she had lived, then you wouldn’t be here.”
&nb
sp; I know I was old enough to understand what my mother was telling me, that there weren’t enough months for both of those pregnancies to occur. Certainly, that was the conclusion an adult would draw from that statement, and my mother thought of me as an adult.
But I wasn’t an adult. I was still a child, and I felt as shocked as if she had slapped me across the face. My absentminded mother had done what the bullies couldn’t do. She had taken something away from me.
I tried to withstand the rush of painful thoughts, but they crashed over me in a wave. There wasn’t room here for two giggling, gossiping girls. This family had no time for two small children. Let’s face it: my sister had chosen the better option. I was in the way, and I had been in the way ever since the day I was born.
In silence, I crept from the room. I was right: I was unlovely and unloved. And later, I dreamed that my busy mother, tired of being interrupted at her work, told a group of soldiers to machine-gun me to death so she wouldn’t have to answer any more questions.
Stories were what patched me up and put me back together over time. Unable to bear the friendship of real children, I made friends with the children in books. Most readers know Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff as a surly, savage man, but he was the boy I played with in the pages of Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff was a strong-willed, proud, neglected child who, like me, couldn’t be bullied. No matter how hard he was beaten, he never cried. I learned not to cry either.
A better companion, perhaps, was Sara Crewe, the Little Princess. She, too, had worked hard on her perfect manners, manners that weren’t just a surface polish but a philosophy of life. She, too, had been abandoned by careless adults, but she had refused to let that change her. She had maintained her poise and self-control even when she was wearing rags. I learned from Sara Crewe to hold my head up, and I held on to my manners, too. They became an important tool to help me navigate a hostile world.
Time itself did its work in helping me heal. Gradually, the depression began to lift.
As the outside world came back into focus, I discovered other school-yard misfits waiting for me, other oddly gifted, oddly burdened children. Several of these became friends. One of them still is. She’s my oldest and dearest friend.
While our classmates skipped rope or tossed balls around us, this friend and I held deep philosophical discussions. We confessed our loneliness to one another, along with our bitter belief that this world had no room for people like us. As the years passed, we learned we could go to one another whenever life threatened to break us down. We didn’t have to be alone anymore with those overwhelming feelings of sadness. We gave each other a safe place to cry.
Little by little, after much absorbed study, I mastered the trick of sounding like my peers. I learned from snide comments not to wear the same clothes too often, to pluck my bushy eyebrows, and to use concealer on my broken-out face. I even found ways to keep my unruly hair under control.
At the start of eighth grade, my mother came to me and said she thought that clothing styles had improved and that maybe we should try wearing regular dresses again. That’s how I ceased to look like a freak. Perhaps my mother had been watching me struggle through middle school with my burdens and felt pity for what she saw.
I don’t know. I didn’t ask.
By this time, it was too late for her or anyone else to try to soften my outlook. This once-happy child had been a miserable freak too long. I had long ago fallen into the habit of blaming my busy mother for my freakishness and depression. I was sure I was the only person in the entire world who cared about what happened to me.
For the rest of my teenage years, I looked more or less normal, but that hard shell remained. I was cruel to my mother. I manipulated her shamelessly for the things I wanted. Meanwhile, she stayed gentle and respectful toward me, even when I made her cry.
I don’t think she ever realized what had gone wrong.
Only when I began to take on the responsibilities of an adult myself did I understand the difficulties my mother had faced as a scholar and career woman before the days of convenience foods and after-school programs. By this time, I had learned to be grateful to my mother for sharing her love of books and learning with me, and I looked back on my teenage behavior with shame. Once again, my mother and I became close friends.
But experiences like mine leave scars.
To this day, I have to fight against a carefulness inside myself, a scrupulous attention to emotional detail. Underneath any warmth and spontaneity I feel is a nearly impenetrable layer of watchful reserve. Past my wholehearted love of life, family, and friends is a part of my heart that I still struggle to unlock. And sometimes in the mirror, peeping out of my comfortable, middle-aged face, I still meet the wary eyes of that changeling child.
That’s why the chatter of my daughters’ young voices, tumbling over one another, whether in argument or in play, was the most precious sound that I could ever hear. I would stop to listen, and the happy clamor was like a beacon of light that shone deep inside me, all the way to where that lonely, lost little child hid.
They’ll never have to go through what you went through, I would tell myself. They’ll never have to find out what happens when the whole world blows apart. They’ll never have to go through the pain of finding all the pieces and putting them back together again the way you did. And I would feel relief—blessed relief and happiness, all the way through my scarred and damaged soul.
But I was wrong.
CHAPTER TWO
I could feel my daughters’ eyes on me as I hung up the phone. I looked up. Anxious eyes.
“Who was that?” Valerie wanted to know.
“That,” I said, “is the headmistress of a girls’ boarding school near Cologne.” I paused. “She’s a nun.”
Valerie and Elena exchanged glances. Fourteen-year-old Valerie had shot up several inches the year before, and she was now taller than I was. Twelve-year-old Elena looked to her to lead in times of stress. Elena was looking to her now.
“Whatever, we can talk about the nun later,” Valerie said. “But I heard our names in there. What’s that about?”
“Sister learned about you American girls working so hard on your German. So she called to invite you to visit her school for two weeks as a kind of cultural exchange.”
“Two weeks!” said Valerie. “In a foreign school. In a foreign language. With a bunch of foreign girls.”
“Yep,” I said. “Starting next week.”
“You’re kidding!” she said. And then, when I didn’t respond, “Come on, Mom. Please tell us you’re kidding!”
Almost exactly one year before this conversation, Joe had come home from work, very excited. “The boss wants me to take a job in Germany,” he said. “But it won’t be forever. These Air Force jobs overseas are only for about five years. It seems like a lot of hassle, but it would be great to be able to fool around in Europe. What do you think I should tell him?”
“Yes. Yes!” was my answer. “Let’s go!” So we had moved to Germany. We had said good-bye to friends the girls had known all their lives, rented out our house in Texas, packed up our belongings, shipped our car, put our family and dog and cat onto a plane, and landed ourselves in the middle of Europe.
The girls had been pretty happy about it—until now.
I had been teaching Valerie and Elena German at home. We had spent hours poring over foreign comic books together, with extra-sharp pencils and dictionaries close at hand. In the evening, after Joe got home for the day, the four of us had worked through dozens of language tapes together. We had made friends who spoke no English, we had shopped in foreign stores, and we attended a German-language church every Sunday. All that effort had paid off handsomely in this generous invitation.
Two weeks of language immersion! I couldn’t have been more thrilled. I had attended intensive language courses myself in the past, so I knew what that kind of exposure could mean for my daughters’ comfort in this new language. They would return with more confidence,
as well as the skills they needed to start meeting their peers out in the community. It was like jumping into a pool: a shock at first, but the quickest way to start swimming.
Valerie and Elena weren’t thrilled at all. In fact, they were horrified. But in the end, they both agreed to go.
Joe and I drove our girls to the school, a two-and-a-half-hour trip on highways winding through bright green fields and dark pine forests. We found the school in a tiny village at the top of a high hill, at the end of a steep one-lane street, where an old convent had been converted into a dormitory for one hundred and twenty girls. The rich, lively voice I had heard on the phone belonged to a tall nun in long black robes. Sister greeted us in her office, where an enormous fuzzy cat snoozed on her desk, stretched on his back with all four paws in the air.
Next, Sister and her head housemother took us on a tour of the school, talking in a halting mix of English and German. Curious girls stared at us from doorways and windows. Valerie and Elena stared back.
Then it was time to say good-bye.
Valerie and Elena were too stiff to hug me. They looked as if they might pass out. I felt butterflies in my stomach as we pulled away and the housemother herded them off to their rooms.
“Do you think we did the right thing?” I worried to Joe on the way home.
“I think it’s cool,” Joe said.
The next morning, I occupied myself with punitive busywork. I sorted laundry, filed papers, balanced accounts, and tried not to think about what might be happening. But—what had I done? My poor children must be terrified!
That day, my overactive imagination outdid itself. It played me endless disastrous vignettes: Elena, cornered by a gang of vicious schoolgirls. Valerie, weeping in a bare little room. Over and over, it played me hysterical phone calls: Valerie had left the property and was walking home, all two hundred and fifty kilometers’ worth of highway. Elena had locked herself in a closet. Valerie had fainted. Elena wouldn’t stop crying.
Hope and Other Luxuries Page 3