“You elbowed me on purpose! That’s not fair!”
“Life’s not like that.”
In Daytona Beach, another nine-year-old girl, this one named Teresa, sat in her classroom drawing airplanes. It was the first day of the new school year.
“And what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Fireman.” “Football player.” “Nurse.” “Mommy.”
“Teresa, what do you want to be?”
Teresa looked up from her planes. “A pilot.”
“You mean a stewardess.”
“I don’t want to be no stewardess.”
“I don’t want to be a stewardess,” said the teacher.
“Me neither,” said Teresa.
“No, I mean you used a double negative.”
“I’ll be a stewardess,” said a boy named Billy, whom the teachers were already concerned about.
“Boys can’t be stewardesses, and girls can’t be pilots.”
“I’m going to be one,” said Teresa, coloring in the airplane and nodding with conviction.
“But you can’t, dear.”
It came out of the blue. Teresa threw all her crayons on the floor and ripped up her picture and knocked over her desk. The teacher tried to calm her, but Teresa spit at her. She was still stomping and crying when they led her to the principal’s office.
Compared with Teresa, Samantha was living a fairy tale. Teresa’s mother and stepfather were called in for a conference, and they decided to put her in a special school. Nobody could understand it. Teresa had been such a marvelous child the previous school year, before the incest had started that summer.
“Do you have any idea what might be causing this?”
“Not a clue,” said her stepdad.
They tested for dyslexia, tried some autism drugs, sent her to camp, where a counselor fondled her. Funny, but she was only getting worse.
Teresa began smoking when she was twelve and drinking at thirteen. Her stepfather was out of the picture now, and her mother blamed Teresa for the breakup. He left them with a pile of bills and without warning. Teresa’s mom took up a minimum-wage job and sudden fits of hysterical crying. Teresa became fat.
She stayed away from the house as much as possible, becoming what you’d call a loner, hanging out next to the airport and watching the planes land, cutting herself with razor blades.
Nobody saw the warning signs because her grades had rocketed to straight A’s. Everything had to be exactly right, and once it was, it wasn’t good enough for Teresa, who worked some more.
Teresa didn’t become promiscuous, but she wasn’t frugal either. She was more or less desensitized, losing her virginity at fifteen to a boy who was also a virgin, behind a movie house, in a defining moment that was memorable for its clumsiness.
“Is this it?” Teresa asked herself, although the boy seemed to be having an out-of-body experience: “I can’t feel my legs!”
“Do you want to stop?”
“No!”
Meanwhile, an undersized child named Paige was growing up in Okeechobee, near the lake. She didn’t speak much.
Paige kept bringing home stray and injured animals.
Her mother had died from postdelivery infections that would mean a seven-figure malpractice verdict today. Her father was killed by a drunk driver when she was two. She lived with her grandparents. They were nice, but man, were they old. They took lots of naps and didn’t have any idea what Paige was talking about half the time. But Paige rarely spoke as it was, and nobody seemed bothered by the arrangement.
Her grandparents were understanding enough with the little birds and frogs, which she kept in boxes on the porch, but a dog or cat was out of the question, because they had heard something on Paul Harvey about germs. Paige loved her grandparents, who weren’t permissive as much as just plain tired. By the time she was nine, they were going to bed before she was, and Paige stayed up late watching Laugh-In and Carson.
Children are natural explorers, and they’re influenced by the media material they discover around the house. Paige grew up in a museum. What were these records? Guy Lombardo and Mario Lanza? There was also about nine hundred pounds of old Reader’s Digests and a few stacks of Life that her grandparents wouldn’t throw out. They never threw anything out. It had something to do with the Depression.
They left Paige to the orphaned and wounded animals in her room, which was crowded with fish tanks and terrariums and plastic turtle ponds and hamster wheels and a maze of interconnecting gerbil tubes that ran all over the place like berserk plumbing.
When Paige was fifteen, her grandparents died within a month of each other, and Paige was passed around the family, attending four different high schools in four years, and she started talking even less. There are many roles in a high schooclass="underline" star quarterback, prom queen, class clown, brain, stoner. Paige was an extra.
Maria’s parents would have loved Paige.
Maria learned to talk early, and she never stopped.
“What’s this?” “What’s that?” “Why is that?” “Can I have one of those? What is it?” “You know what I think?…”
It accounted for her parents’ permanent expression of having teeth cleaned.
Maria demonstrated at age four her talent for mismatching clothes. “Can I dress myself?” “I want to dress myself.” “I’m going to dress myself now.” She ran into her bedroom and came out in a raincoat and bikini bottom. “I’m ready to go to school now.”
Maria had lots and lots of accidents, big scary-looking tumbles, skinned knees, twisted ankles — her parents awakened every other night by a loud thump, Maria falling out of bed in her sleep again, then yelling down the hall, “I’m okay!”
They thought she might need glasses, but the tests came back twenty-twenty. The spills seemed to bother Maria less than her parents, who would jump out of their chairs on the porch and grab their hearts before Maria dusted herself off and guaranteed nothing was broken. It finally dawned on them that Maria never cried, no matter what, going over the handlebars of her bike, popping right up, “I’m okay!” Jumping back on the bike and taking off again into the side of a parked van. “I’m okay again!”
Maria seemed to have a high threshold for pain, and she could definitely take a punch, which were administered by boys everywhere. Ooomph, the wind leaving her. “I’m okay!”
Maria’s true passion lay in the arts. Maria was a frustrated painter, a frustrated musician and a hopeless romantic. She tried oils, pencils, watercolors, all to no avail. That hemisphere just wasn’t firing. Same problem with music, made that much more glaring by her fondness for the tuba. She was an open book, all things to all people, wanting to be liked and trying to become whatever you wanted, except quiet. She dated a lot, but was saving herself for marriage. Trying to at least. But boys will be boys, and there were lots of struggles in backseats of cars outside dances and burger joints, a car door finally popping open and the other students seeing Maria tumble out of the car with a broken bra strap. “I’m okay!”
You couldn’t help but like her. And hate her. She was the kind of gentle person who made you feel horribly guilty every time you lost patience with her. She made the other members of the pep club suicidal. Then there was the cheerleading squad, where her natural zest won her the top position on the human pyramid — each game the parents pointing in alarm, “Jesus, did you see the fall that girl just took?”
“I sure hope she’s okay.”
“She said she was.”
Rebecca had talent coming out her ears. Her first teachers couldn’t believe it. They quickly took her off finger paints and gave her oils and acrylics. Everything was a photograph. Same with music. She skipped reading sheets and mastered the scales by ear — piano, flute, guitar.