Archive for the “disappointment” Category

by Tanya Foubert
Junior high school

It’s the mid 80’s.  I’m 10 and in 7th grade.

I’m a loner and have been since nursery school. Even the idea of having a friend is completely foreign to me. My class is the amalgamation of the “smart” kids of the entire school district and we are all attending an full-time, every day “enrichment” program. It is 1.5 hours away by bus, meaning I leave home at 7:05am, well before sunrise for much of the school year. I am 2 years younger than all of my classmates. My entire wardobe consists of jewel-toned jogging suits and I am crowned with a bright red afro (thanks to an unfortunate haircut). I obsessively listen to the other kids but when I try to act social with them, even they can tell I’m mimicing. They think I’m a freak.  In a classroom full of kids that were supposed to be like me… I’m still a freak.

I discover that I really enjoy working with my hands when we start taking wood shop. I’ve begged to be allowed to take weekly wood shop class with the boys, because my other choices are home economics and art, and I already know how to bake, use a sewing machine and have no artistic skill whatsoever. Reluctantly, the teacher grants me permission to join the class when my homeroom teacher intervenes on my behalf. I am delighted.

Wood shop is apparently a proving ground for the budding adolescent male, where the jocks suddenly are on equal academic footing with the nerds.  The teacher belongs to the jock group, I can tell by the way he stands and who he jokes with, but beyond that classification the social nuances are lost on me.  For once I’m so different I’m left completely alone… a girl isn’t worth the time of the jocks or the nerds.

We do different projects to learn to use the different tools, moving from hand tools to power tools and then onto the machines, giant sanders, saws, lathes. My success is mediocre, but I don’t care! It’s new and I love the smells and sounds and solitude of the projects. After a few weeks, the teacher tells us to prepare on graph paper a design to cut out on the jigsaw. Something with some curves and some straight edges, and he’ll approve the designs before we’re allowed to copy it onto a piece of wood.  I spend the next week tracing and retracing the same design… a musical 1/8th note, where the note is a heart shape. I plan to carefully sand it and colour several different samples of the design for myself, trying to decide on what colour will look nicest hanging on my bedroom wall.  I painstakingly draw more than a dozen of them, trying to get the
perfect balance of heart-to-stem, the heart shape proportional and not to fat, not to thin, the stem not so thick as to throw off the balance of the picture, the tail on the eighth note gracefully curved and angled.

Finally, the morning of the class arrives and I eagerly wait my turn, to have my design approved so I can pick out a piece of pine from the scrap bin and start work. I watch while the teacher nods and smiles at the jock’s designs, and sighs but approves the nerd’s designs. I present my own coloured master plan, on graph paper as specified, and wait.

The teacher frowns. His eyes narrow. I don’t know how to read it yet.  Angrily, he gestures towards the drawing. “What is this supposed to be?”

“A love note!” I say proudly. I feel it is both clever and cute and am eager to learn how to use the jigsaw.

His face clenches, he crumples it up and tosses it in the waste-paper basket, tells me to sit at my desk. I’m too confused to cry while he steps into the next room, the art room, and speaks to the teacher briefly. I am shortly steered by the shoulder into art class, where I spend the remaining 6 weeks of the semester making a coil pot out of clay, my cheeks burning with shame because I still don’t know what I’ve done wrong.

The incident was never mentioned again.

By Lisa Lucke
Age 9 at the time 

Mrs. Winton had barely finished forming the phrases “school assembly” and “music recital,” and my nine-year old heart was already pounding. I tracked her every move as she made it clear that “yes, families were invited.” This meant that I would actually be up on the stage, violin nestled under my chin, and my hand carefully sliding the thin bow over the taut strings, just the way Mrs. Winton had taught me to do. I’d only been playing for a few months, like everyone else in the 4^th grade with their chosen instruments, but I was absolutely sure of my abilities. Every Wednesday afternoon, instead of going to last recess, I walked to the cafeteria for music. I was proud of myself, and most of all, I felt important.

At the sound of the 3 p.m. bell, I ran the two blocks to my house, where I found my father mowing the lawn. “Dad!” I shouted over the grinding noise of the push mower. “We’re having a recital in two weeks and guess what?” My dad rotated the mower at the end of the long row and managed a breathy response.

“What?”

“Family gets to come and it’s in front of the whole school and it’s at night!”

“That’s great Ellen. Go call Mom and tell her the good news.”

The days flew by, filled with extra practices after school, and rehearsals that folded in every detail, from where we would sit and who we’d sit next to, to reminders about how to dress. One by one, Mrs. Winton fine tuned our weaknesses with gentle admonishments, as if we ourselves were the instruments and she the player. Finally, at the end of two weeks, we were ready. I couldn’t believe that this unlikely instrument, the third I’d tried in as many years, the one my mom said was my great-grandmother’s passion, would be the one to propel me into the spotlight, and out of ordinary.

I had decided the same thing about the accordion two years before, in second grade. Mr. Carlotti, a seemingly ancient man, found my two best friends first. They were sisters, and lived just a couple doors down from me. One Saturday morning, the seemingly ancient man trod door to door in our neighborhood, looking for prospective students. Chrissie and Debbie’s mom said yes, and before he had even left their porch, the girls sprinted down the sidewalk, past the cranky neighbor’s house that separated us, and flew up my porch steps. I opened the door to their frantic chattering that I must get my mom to say yes to accordion lessons, though just what an accordion was I didn’t exactly know. When Mr. Carlotti reached my door, after old Mrs. Tadblink shooed him away, the polite gentleman in the dark brown suit got lucky again.

The three of us, Mr. Carlotti’s only students, wedged into his tiny office in the basement of the public library each Saturday morning. We had exactly four lessons before what I now realize was Mr. Carlotti’s likely overdue passing. I wasn’t so much sad for poor old Mr. Carlotti as I was for me. I wanted to get good at something, and the accordion was different, so different than any other instrument most kids played. For me, different meant special, and special meant better.

I tried again the following year, in third grade. I took piano lessons from a spinster living across town in an aging Victorian with a slobbering, monster of a dog who rested his mouth, complete with gloppy tennis ball, between my knees as I played. Miss Ricky hugged me the first time I entered her house, and every time after that. She hugged me goodbye, too. She may have even hugged me after each song – I just remember her thin, yet surprisingly strong arms squeezing my shoulders in a lovely vice-grip, and her nervous, happy voice prattling all the time. Miss Ricky’s corrections came in the same tone as praise: soft and encouraging. She ended each lesson by playing anything I wanted, and without exception, I chose one of Joplin’s rags. I loved to watch Miss Ricky’s bony shoulders and arms and fingers vibrate up and down and that silly look on her face that resembled a smile but may have just been the natural slope of her wrinkled, oval face. I also remember that she seemed to be somewhere else – somewhere I wanted to be, without even knowing why.

For three months I played at Miss Ricky’s house, which ended up being the problem. My parents decided that without a piano of our own at home to practice on, I was not making any real progress, and therefore, lessons were pointless. The decision took me totally by surprise, and of course, I disagreed. In my mind, and definitely in Miss Ricky’s, I was doing just fine. Besides that, I enjoyed the lessons, which were more like a trip to a carnival than work, and most of all, Miss Ricky needed me. Why else would she insist on showing off the endless upstairs rooms of her house each week after our lesson ended, and keep introducing me to the relatives who stared out at her antics from behind dusty glass? How could I make my parents understand that progress really wasn’t important to me, but spending time with Miss Ricky was? I couldn’t, so I quit the lessons and reluctantly said goodbye to Miss Ricky.

Now, just one year later, under the direction of Mrs. Winton, I would reveal my musical talents to the world with the violin.

At 6 p.m. promptly, on a Friday evening in late October, Mrs. Winton took center stage, in front of the heavy, velvet stage drapes and welcomed the assembled parents, relatives and teachers to the 4th Grade Fall Music Recital. Behind the curtain, my classmates and I sat in our assigned seats – I near the end of the third row, between two other violin playing 4th graders. I knew I’d be able to catch a glimpse of my parents between pieces, and I was already imagining how proud they’d look. I wiped my hands on my jumpsuit and tried to stay calm. At 6:03 p.m., the curtains parted a crack and Mrs. Winton slipped back through, looking us over for the last time. As she quickly made her way toward the wings, we made eye contact, and she stopped just long enough to whisper one, simple sentence in my ear that remains with me to this day, 33 years later:

“Ellen, I want you to pretend to be playing.”

With that, the curtain rose.

Suzanne LaFetra

Age 12 at the time

Jorge strummed his blonde wood guitar in the hotel patio. He swaggered right up to the table where I sat crunching a taquito de pollo drizzled with cream, flanked by my parents. I leaned toward him, his tight silver-spangled pants and mustard-colored mariachi suit bright in the Mexican sun. He looked me straight in the face, and launched into a song that seemed to be breaking his heart. Yo soy un hombre sincero…

I was twelve, and enchanted. It was Holy Week in Puerta Vallarta. California was still groggy from winter, but Mexico was wide awake, fragrant and rioting in color. Scarlet and magenta bougainvillea comingled, dripping over gleaming black balconies of twisted iron. Thick white-washed walls hid interior courtyards, filled with cooing birds and cooling palms.

I watched bright parachutes soar over the Pacific. I ate clams for the first time and crunchy curls of fried cheese dipped in smoky salsa. I devoured Gone With The Wind, perched poolside in a black bikini, legs slick with baby oil.

Back home, the foxiest boy in the 6th grade was Tim Morelli. If I did the right thing, acted the right way, maybe he would invite me to his fort, clasp his St. Christopher medal around my throat, ask me to go steady. A couple of weeks before our trip, Tim invited me to meet him after school at the bluffs, a hideout under the eucalyptus trees. I pushed my bike up the craggy, crusty hill and waited in the shade under tangy leaves, my heart thumping. When he arrived, Tim jammed his grimy hand into my underpants and wormed it around. I squeezed my eyes shut, lips pressed together. The going steady would come next. A ring, maybe. I waited. Footsteps crunched through the leaves and he pulled out his hand. His two friends, Wally and Dave elbowed each other, and Tim grinned.

I pedaled my lime green Schwinn home as fast as I could, thighs on fire, tears streaming into my ears. No medal, no gentle kiss. After that, Wally and Dave regularly ambushed me in the janitor’s closet. They wrestled me to the ground, then groped and grabbed at me. “Gusto,” they shrieked, mimicking a popular beer ad, and twisted the tender tips of my breasts. “Go for the gusto!” Each time, my nipples were purple for days.

But in Mexico, there were wide grins, low bows, a door swept open. And what does the señorita desire this evening? While Jorge strummed, I sipped my virgin strawberry daiquiri and imagined his mouth clamped over mine, what it might feel like to have that black mustache prickle my lips.

I was safe, high on my vacationer pedestal, a moat of chlorinated water, Hawaiian Tropic Cocoa Butter and my mother’s close eye keeping me from harm.

At home, though, the border between child and woman was dangerous. On weekends at my dad’s house, my older step-brother regularly terrorized me in the middle of the night, fondling my breasts with his dry hands, jacking off in the dark while I scrunched into a ball. Another guy started out as a babysitter, and we jumped Parcheesi pieces around a board, but after dark, the game changed; a slobbery kiss, a teenage hand cold on my belly, reaching, pushing.

“Don’t tell,” they all said, and I was ashamed, so I kept quiet. I figured I deserved it; that’s what happens to girls with breasts already as big as their mother’s, who dream of kissing mustached mouths, who are desperate to wear Tim Morelli’s cheap ring.

The lipglossy clear-eyed girls in magazines, the Susan Deys and Marsha Bradys swung their hair and grinned. They didn’t look scared. They wore gleaming white swim suits, slim bodies just right; no scraggly wiry hairs sprouting, no purple stretch marks, no Oxy 10 in their medicine cabinets, no worn copies of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret under their pillows. They were cool, possessed, sure, un-slouching, un-needing. Unlike me.

A couple of months before our trip to Mexico, I discovered a saddle-colored stain in my underwear. I was the first girl in the class to get my period, but I had seen the film strips, I knew that it was just men-stroo-ay-shun. I snuck into my mom’s bathroom and pushed in a tampon. It felt foreign inside me, uncomfortable; I didn’t feel like horseback riding or swimming, like the smiling Kathy Rigby had promised in the TV ads.

That afternoon, I hid in my room, record player blaring, furious at my body’s betrayal. I knew what was lurking across the border; more bruised nipples and slimy tongues, more grabbing and jerking.

My mom came in, asked how my day was, and the tears dripped off my jawline.

“Oh, honey, whatever it is, we can fix it,” she kept saying, stroking my hair.

“You can’t,” I cried, hanging my head. “Nobody can.”

After a few minutes, she spied my balled-up underpants in the corner and understood. She straightened me up, looked into my face, gently. “You’re becoming a woman.”

On our last day in Mexico, Jorge again came to our table. He sang a lovely lilting song, closing his eyes, chin tilted skyward during the best parts. “In your mouth, you will carry the flavor of me…” Then he took off his hat, and asked my parents’ permission to leave a small gift. “So that you have warm memories of my country,” he said in perfect English. It was a cheap, too-big necklace, a slab of marbled stone hanging from a cord. I was awed. It was the same mustard color of his mariachi uniform.

A tiny ballerina danced every time I cracked my jewelry box open to look at Jorge’s gift. I fingered the cool stone cradled in red velvet. But I never wore the necklace, didn’t want to feel the weight of it around my neck, the press of stone between my breasts. I just liked knowing it was there, waiting for me.