Probably this wasn’t all she did, but it’s all she’s telling about. As an afterthought she mentions that she failed her year. “I was too young for it,” she says. This sounds like something she’s been told by other people, her mother most likely. “I was only twelve. They shouldn’t have skipped me.”
Now she’s thirteen. I am twelve. I too have been skipped. I begin to wonder if I’ll end up the same way she has, drawing penises on bats, failing my year.
Chapter 39
The school we go to is called Burnham High School. It’s recently built, oblong in shape, flat-roofed, undecorated, unrevealing, sort of like a factory. It’s the latest thing in modern architecture. Inside, it has long corridors with mottled floors of something that looks like granite but is not. The yellowish walls are lined with dark-green lockers, and there’s an auditorium and a P.A. system. Every morning we have announcements over the P.A. system. First we have a Bible reading and prayers. I bow my head during the prayers but I refuse to pray, though I don’t know why I do this. After the prayers the principal tells us of coming events, and he also warns us to pick up our chewing gum wrappers and not to moon around in the halls like old married couples. His name is Mr. MacLeod, although everyone calls him Chrome Dome behind his back because he’s bald on top; and he’s a Scot by affiliation. Burnham High has a school plaid, a school crest with a thistle and a couple of those Scottish knives they stick in their socks, and a Gaelic motto. The plaid, the crest, the motto, and the school colors all belong to Mr. MacLeod’s personal clan.
In the front hall, alongside the Queen, hangs a portrait of Dame Flora MacLeod with her two bagpipe-playing grandsons, posed outside Dunvegan Castle. We are encouraged to think of this castle as our ancestral home, and of Dame Flora as our spiritual leader. In choir we learn “The Skye Boat Song,”
about Bonnie Prince Charlie escaping the genocidal English. We learn “Scots Wha‘ Hae,” and a poem about a mouse, which causes some snickering as it contains the word breast. I think all this Scottishness is normal for high schools, never having gone to one before; and even the several Armenians, Greeks, and Chinese in our school lose the edges of their differences, immersed as we all are in a mist of plaid. I don’t know many people at this school and neither does Cordelia. In my graduating class from public school there were only eight people, and in Cordelia’s there were four. So it’s a school full of strangers. In addition to that, we’re in different homerooms, so we don’t even have each other to rely on. Everyone in my homeroom is bigger than I am. This is to be expected, because everyone is also older. The girls have breasts and a drowsy, powdery, hot-day smell; the skin of their faces is slippery-looking, slick with oily juice. I’m wary of them and dislike the changing room where we have to put on the blue cotton bloomer-bottomed gym suits with our names embroidered on the pockets. In there I feel skinnier than ever; when I catch sight of myself in the mirror I can see the ribs below my collarbone. During volleyball games, these other girls lollop and thunder around me, their voices outsized and raucous, their new, extra flesh wobbling. I take care to keep out of their way, simply because they are bigger and might knock me over. But I’m not really afraid of them. In a way I despise them, because they are so much like Carol Campbell, squealing and flinging themselves around.
Among the boys there are a few pipsqueaks whose voices have not yet changed, but many of the boys are gigantic. Some are fifteen, almost sixteen. They have hair that’s long at the sides and greased back into ducktails, and they shave. Some of them look as if they shave a lot. They sit at the back of the room and stick their long legs out into the aisle. They’ve already failed a grade, at least once; they’ve given up and been given up on, and they’re doing time until they can leave. Although they call remarks at other girls in the halls and make kissing sounds at them, or dangle around their lockers, they pay no attention at all to me. To them I’m just a child.
But I don’t feel younger than these people. In some ways I feel older. In our Health book there’s a chapter on teenage emotions. According to this book, I’m supposed to be caught in a whirlwind of teenage emotions, laughing one minute, crying the next, zooming around on a roller coaster, which is their term. However, this description does not apply to me. I am calm; I regard the antics of my fellow students, who act like the textbook, with a combination of scientific curiosity and almost matronly indulgence. When Cordelia says, “Don’t you think he’s a dreamboat?” I have a hard time understanding what she means. Occasionally I do cry for no reason, as it says you’re supposed to. But I can’t believe in my own sadness, I can’t take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.
At lunchtime I sit with Cordelia in the cafeteria, which is pale-colored, with long whitish tables. We eat the lunches that have been sweltering in our school lockers all morning and which taste faintly of gym shoes, and drink chocolate milk through straws, and make what we consider to be witty, sarcastic remarks to each other, about the other kids at the school, about the teachers. Cordelia has been to high school for a year already and knows how to do this. She wears the collar of her blouse turned up and affects a derisive laugh. “He’s a pill,” she says; or, “What a creep.” These are words that apply only to boys. Girls can be tough, stuck-up or cheap, mousy or boy-crazy; or they can be brains and sucks and brownnosers, like boys, if they are thought to study too much. But they can’t be pills and creeps. I like the word pill. I think it refers to the little balls of wool that form on sweaters. Boys who are pills have sweaters like that. I take care to pick all such woolen balls off of my own sweaters. Cordelia collects glossy photos of movie stars and singers, which she sends away for, finding the addresses of the fan clubs in movie magazines that advertise Frederick‘s of Hollywood peekaboo lingerie at the back, and chocolate-flavored tablets you chew to lose weight. She thumbtacks the photos to the bulletin board over her desk and Scotch tapes them to the walls of her room. Whenever I’m in there I feel as if there’s a crowd watching me, their glossy black-and-white eyes following me around the room. Some of these pictures have signatures on them, and we examine them under the light to see if the pen has dented the paper. If not, they’re only printed on. Cordelia likes June Allyson, but she also likes Frank Sinatra and Betty Hutton. Burt Lancaster is the sexiest, according to Cordelia. On the way home from school we go to the record store and try out 78 records in the tiny cork-lined booth. Sometimes Cordelia will buy a record with her allowance, which is larger than mine, but most of the time she just tries them out. She expects me to roll my eyes in ecstasy, the way she does; she expects me to groan. She knows the rituals, she knows how we’re supposed to be behaving, now that we’re in high school. But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can’t do them without feeling I’m acting.
We take the records back to Cordelia’s house and put them on the record player in the living room, and turn up the sound. Frank Sinatra appears, a disembodied voice, sliding around on the tune like someone slipping on a muddy sidewalk. He slithers up to a note, hits it, flails, recovers, oozes in the direction of another note.
“Don’t you just love the way he does that?” says Cordelia. She flings herself onto the chesterfield, legs across the arm, head hanging upside-down. She’s eating a doughnut covered with powdered sugar; the sugar has come off on her nose. “I feel as if he’s right here, running his hand up and down my spine.”