I hated being a girl. It was what I hated first in the world. “Better get used to it,” Mother always said, giggling as if it was funny, but it wasn’t. When I was little, when I’d say my prayers at night, at the end I’d say, “God bless Mother, Daddy, Donald and Ruthie and everybody else in the whole, wide world including Goober and please let me be a boy when I wake up.” Now, I just said, “And please don’t let there be a war,” because it was too late, I’d already started my periods and sprouted breasts, real ones, not little lumps like everyone else, and I even had to wear a real bra, with wire in it, not a Gro-Cup. It was what I got, I suppose, for wanting to be what I wasn’t.
Ginger Moore thought I should have a sex-change operation. “Maybe you could get Christine Jorgensen’s old thing,” she said and we wondered what happened to it: did he/she keep it in a bottle of formaldehyde, like those pig fetuses at the carnival? Did she keep it in a velvet box on her mantelpiece? Did she have it frozen in case she changed her mind and wanted it back? Or did she just toss it out like a bad memory?
“I don’t want a thing,” I told Ginger, “I just don’t want to be a woman.”
She didn’t get it. If I didn’t want to be a woman, then I had to be a man, and in order to be a man I would need a thing. If I didn’t want a thing, then what did I want?
“I don’t know,” I said and she said I was crazy.
THEY all thought I was crazy. Sometimes I worried that I was, but that was a good sign because real crazy people don’t think they’re crazy, they just think they’re Napoleon.
“It’s a wonder you have any friends,” Mother used to say when I still had some. “You must become a different person when you leave this house. Jekyll and Maggie.”
Actually, I was six different people, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. They already thought I was crazy and they were just looking for an excuse to get rid of me. If I’d told them I had six different parts, plus a part that wasn’t really mine, they’d have packed me off to Lapeer faster than you could say “Nuthouse.”
It wasn’t craziness—The Six Faces of Maggie or anything like that—I didn’t black out and then wake up dancing naked on a pool table in the back room at Lyon’s or anything. I was perfectly aware of all the parts and I knew when they were going to take over: there just wasn’t anything I could do about it. I kind of winced and said, “Uh-oh,” and waited for the you-know-what to hit the fan.
I kept them in an imaginary chest of drawers. The outside was a beautiful lacquered chest with two big doors painted with gold and blue flowers. Behind the doors there were six drawers, where my personalities lived when they weren’t with me.
Maggie was me, the real me, the me only my best friend ever got to know. I didn’t have a drawer, because I was always present, so I guess the chest was me.
Katrina was the part of me who thought she was adopted. She was a little girl, and when I was little, she’d run around the neighborhood telling all the neighbors that she was left on the Pittsfields’ doorstep and her real mother was a Dutch prostitute. “Wouldn’t you like a little girl like me?” I’d ask all our childless neighbors and Mother would have a fit. “A Dutch prostitute!” she’d moan, running upstairs to the strongbox to get my birth certificate in case anybody wanted to check. “Where do you come up with these things?”
I didn’t know. I constantly accused my parents of wishing I’d never been born. “You didn’t want me!” I’d shriek as I ran through the house with Mother chasing behind holding a wooden spoon full of fudge for me to lick, saying, “We did! We did! We tried very hard to get you!” “Ya,” Katrina would shout from the top of the stairs, “and zen vhen you got me you vanted to send me back for a refund!”
Trixie was the name I gave to the mischievous me, the me that was playful and full of life and silliness. Trixie was the one who sang, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” in the McKinley Talent Show and who went to parties dressed in a hula skirt and who would do anything on a dare. She was the one who used to be popular, and one who could mimic anyone and who made Daddy laugh so hard he’d cry when she’d parade around the living room doing Grandmother imitations. Trixie didn’t come out much any more, not since the trouble at school. It was hard being popular when everyone hated you.
The bad one was Margaret, as in “Margaret Sweet Pitts-field.” She was the bully, the mean one, the one who’d smack her friends over the head with a Coke bottle if she didn’t get her own way; the one who plotted and gossiped and said horrible things in the slam books. She was dirty minded and she was the one who always wanted to play sex games with her friends. She even had fits, but they were emotional instead of epileptic. She was the one who made me seem crazy. When Margaret took over, no one could get in, not even me—I’d watch in horror as she went wild, attacking anything or anybody who came near her. “Don’t you touch me!” she’d snarl and that was how I knew she was coming. “Don’t you touch me!” she’d spit, backing up and hissing like a snake. “Don’t you dare touch me!”
Then there was Sarah. What a whiner she was. Boo hoo hoo. She was also the sweet part, the part Mother liked best, but I hated her. She was weak and mealy mouthed and a Good-Do-Bee, like some kind of twelve-year-old Melanie Hamilton. Weakness was to be avoided at all costs, so when I was feeling Sarah-ish, I’d run to the beach faster than a speedboat skimming across the Lake. I’d fly down to the Sisks’ breakwall and climb over and let her have her stupid cry.
She was the good girl, the kind and loving one. She didn’t get much exposure in the real world, but I liked to make up stories about her, little tales of loneliness and longing, with sad endings because no one would come and save her and she didn’t have the strength to save herself. She’d always be left, floating down the Lake on a chunk of ice, or trapped in the woods with the Pervert, and nobody knew what happened to her because nobody really cared.
I only had one male part and that was Cotton Mather Not the real Cotton Mather, just a guy I named that because he was such a Puritan and so righteous. Cotton Mather was in charge of Morality. Since I had none, he was always telling me to tie myself to a chair and throw myself into the Lake to see if I was a witch. “Let your conscience be your guide,” the song says and that’s great if your conscience is Jiminy Cricket, but it’s not so great if it’s some wrathful Puritan who wants to carve a B, for Brat, on your chest.
Cotton Mather said that everything that happened was my fault and that if I had been good, bad things wouldn’t have happened to me. “You deserve it,” he always said. Once, when Cindy was having a luau on the beach and we were all sitting around the bonfire, happily singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” while Cindy tried to play her stupid guitar, he said, “Do the world a favor and throw yourself in.” He was really a pain in the you-know-what.
In the top drawer, there was Peggy. Peggy wasn’t really a part of me, she was just this little girl who hid in my secret chest. She never came out, she just stared at me from the drawer and all I’d ever seen of her was her eyes. I didn’t know who she belonged to. She was somebody else’s kid, who got tossed away and ended up in my drawer. Sometimes, when I was upstairs hiding under the eaves, I’d imagine the chest and open the doors and there she’d be, just those eyes, staring out at me. She was terrified, but I didn’t bother her. I just let her hide in there and I figured some day she’d come out and tell me who she was.
Margaret hated her. Margaret hated everybody, but she especially hated Peggy. Every time her eyes started peeking out, Margaret came rumbling out like a tank. “What a dink!” she’d say in disgust. “What’s her problem?”
I think she was tortured. I think she was tortured as a little girl and had to fly away and ended up in my chest. “What a bunch of baloney,” Margaret said. “It takes years of torture to turn somebody into nothing but a pair of flitty eyes” But no it didn’t. It only took once. It only took once for adults—when Mrs. Greenwell got attacked by a man in the parking lot at Eastland and ended up having to go to a rest
home, nobody said, “What’s her problem? She only got raped once!” “It’s different for kids,” Margaret insisted, “they don’t remember.” But yes they did. Peggy did. And I felt sorry for her, having to live in somebody else’s life.
It was kind of a strain, having all those different parts, all clamoring to be dominant. Of course none of them got along and as soon as one gained control, the rest would start screeching and yelling and making an uproar, all except Sarah, who just wrung her hands and cried. There was never a moment for me, Maggie, to rest, to get away from them, except when I was at the beach or in the Sisks’ shrine. No matter what I did, I made one of them unhappy and I always had to hear about it.
I told Miss Dickerson, the social worker I had to see after the trouble, about Margaret and Cotton Mather, but not about the others. She thought it was all very interesting—her eyes got all bright, as if she were thinking, I’ve got a live one here! But I assured her that I wasn’t one of those split-personality people. It wasn’t as if I’d show up for breakfast and say, “Hi! I’m Cotton Mather. Got any gruel?”
When I told her that, she nodded and said, “Um hmmm,” and made a couple of notes in her book. “And when did you first meet Cotton Mather?” she asked, trying to sound indifferent, but I knew she couldn’t wait to get out of the room and put it all on her tape recorder.
“I didn’t meet him,” I told her. “He’s always been there. I just started calling him “Cotton Mather” when I read about the Puritan and he seemed a lot like that part of me that was always nagging and saying, “Bad, bad, bad, if you weren’t so bad nothing bad would happen to you.’ ”
“Did something bad happen to you?” she had wanted to know but I wasn’t falling for that.
“Getting into trouble is bad,” I offered and she thought about it for a while. I hated it when she was silent, when she sat there like a stone, trying to make me squirm, giving me the Silent Treatment, trying to make me beg for attention. I wouldn’t do it; I’d die before I’d break the silence, I’d let the voices inside tear me to pieces before I’d give in.
“Do you think that what happened with Mr. Howard was something that just happened to you?” she finally asked and I wished I were a witch, so I could zap her into a slimy snail and toss her out the window into the flower bed, where Mr. Peabody could smush her with his hoe when he weeded the garden.
I knew what she was after. She wanted me to admit that it was all my fault, that I had made it happen. That I made it all up and that there was never any danger, that I was evil, just an evil girl trying to ruin a nice man’s career, that I was like those horrible, lying girls in The Children’s Hour, who accuse the teachers of being queer. She wanted me to tell her that he didn’t do anything to me so she could exonerate him and warn all the other teachers about me. She’d go to some teacher meeting and stand up on a platform and say, “Watch out for that wacko Maggie Pittsfield. She’s evil and she’s out to destroy teachers!” They were always on the lookout for that sort of thing, and I decided Miss Dickerson was just pretending to be kind so she could trick me into confiding in her. When I trusted her she’d run out of the room screaming, “Liar! Pervert! Lock her up!”
But she didn’t say anything. She just sat there, watching me with that calm, soft, wet-eyed face of hers, and I decided I hated her. I hated her and her so-called sympathy. It was her job to get me to talk and if being gentle didn’t work, they’d send for some fat Russian woman who would shine lights in my face and poke me with electric sticks and fill me full of truth serum. “Confess!” she’d shout, smacking me over the head with her electric pointer. “You made it all up!”
“What happened with Mr. Howard?” Miss Dickerson asked, still gently, and I wanted to scream. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to lie any more; the lie itself was unimportant and since they hadn’t seen fit to chop Mr. Howard into a million pieces and feed him to the seagulls, the lie was beside the point. But I couldn’t tell the truth—the truth was much worse than the lie. To say that he pushed me was nothing. Teachers pushed and smacked and slapped kids every day. Tom Ditwell had lumps like sand dunes on his knuckles from getting smacked so much with a ruler. Of course, he got most of his lumps at Catholic school, and maybe that was why his parents took him out and put him into public school, where it was supposed to be against the law to beat up pupils. But the law didn’t stop anyone from whacking some bad kid, and usually nobody said anything, figuring they’d deserved it anyway and why go home and complain about getting punished only to get smacked again when your parents found out what you’d done?
Miss Dickerson just kept sitting there patiently, making me crazy. If I were her, I’d be shaking me and shouting, “Answer me, you little brat!” It made me uncomfortable, sitting there in silence, it made me want to start running around the room and pulling all the first-aid supplies from the cabinet, to hurl bandages against the walls and smash aspirin bottles on the floor. It was probably part of the game—if she could make me nervous enough with her silence, I’d have to break it by saying something and whatever I said, no matter how innocent, could be used as evidence against me.
I worried what they’d do if Miss Dickerson said I was crazy. Could they lock me up in the loony bin, with all those long-haired shrieking women in straitjackets? I’d seen The Snake Pit, I knew what insane asylums were like. I kept thinking about the scene where Olivia de Havilland is trying to get away from someone and she ends up locked in with the real berserkos, and they’re all grabbing at her and shouting and tearing at her like witches, as if they wanted to pull her apart and eat her up. It was horrifying, worse than Reform School, where the worst thing that could happen was the tough girls from Detroit would beat you up and turn you into a Greaser.
ALL that was during the regular school year, when I had to see Miss Dickerson three times a week. Now that I was in summer school, I only had to see her once a week and it was actually a relief to get out of Mr. Blake’s class for an hour every Friday, even if it meant having my insides probed by a head-shrinker.
I hated summer school. It was boring. All we had to do was write one paper, the paper I was supposed to be working on. The Detroit News did an article on heroes: they asked a bunch of famous people to write about their heroes and Mr. Blake thought that would be a good idea for us, too, especially since most of us were in summer school for being bad or stupid and maybe if we had a hero, someone to look up to, we would be better. I thought it was dumb; as if Irma Gibbons, who was the only person I had ever met in my whole life who really was stupid, wrote a paper on Einstein she’d turn into a genius. Baloney.
I didn’t have a hero. The famous people in the article chose presidents and baseball players and generals, for the most part, although one writer guy chose Spinoza and Confucius. I thought it would be fun to choose someone Mr. Blake had never heard of, to go through the encyclopedia and find some Greek guy to be my hero, but that was the kind of thinking that always got me into trouble. I needed a normal hero.
Most of the boys were doing President Kennedy, while Emily Potter, the only other girl besides me and Irma, was doing Jackie. My parents would have killed me if I had a hero who was a Democrat, so that scratched Eleanor Roosevelt, who I liked because she was smart and out in the world and not at all afraid to say what she thought. And she was ugly. She was ugly but that didn’t stop her, she didn’t go hide in a corner so her looks wouldn’t offend anyone.
I wanted to choose a woman, but I couldn’t think of one I wanted to pattern my life on. Most of the women heroes I could think of were nurses or saints or actresses, none of which I wanted to be. I thought about Margaret Mead, because I liked the idea of studying cultures, of seeing how other people lived and thought and behaved. But I knew I could never go live in a tent in the jungle, no matter how curious I was.
In the article, there was only one woman hero mentioned and she was just some opera singer’s crippled sister, who was nice and happy and brave despite the fact that she was in constant pain. She did
n’t really do anything, she just endured. Mr. Blake said that was an example of unsung heroism and suggested we look around in our own lives for unsung heroes. When I mentioned that at dinner, everyone looked at me hopefully and I wished I had never opened my big mouth. For weeks, they kept reminding me of what martyrs they were.
“The meek shall inherit the earth,” Mother kept sighing, but I didn’t think she believed that any more than I did. It was just something they put in the Bible to help people live with their misery. And even if it were true, it wouldn’t last long—the meek would inherit the earth and the first thing they’d do was get even with all the people who’d mistreated them. Maybe this was the world they’d inherited; maybe Mother had been Catherine the Great and Grandmother had been some peasant she’d run over in her troika and now Grandmother was paying her back.
It was bad of me to not want an unsung hero, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want a hero who sat around smiling even though her limbs were dropping off one by one. “Oh, that’s all right, don’t mind me,” she’d say and kind of groan softly while she leaned over to pick up the toe that had just plopped on the floor. I wanted my hero to be huge, there, out in the world, somebody everybody knew, somebody solid, sung, shouted, not some unsung saint who hobbled through life being an inspiration.
Grandmother was probably right. I probably was the most ungrateful girl in the world. The way Grandmother talked, you’d have thought I went around torturing people and setting cats on fire, like that creep Marvin Peabody. It was true that I was bad, but only because I didn’t want to be good enough. I wanted to be good for all the wrong reasons—so I wouldn’t get punished or so I’d get an A in Citizenship, not so I could run around healing lepers or building houses in jungles or devoting my life to Christ or being nice all the time and never saying what was real and true just because it might be upsetting. “You’re heartless,” Mother always said. “An iceberg,” Grandmother said, “just waiting for the Titanic.”
NOT THE END OF THE WORLD Page 2