Chapter 4: Coming of Age
Chapter Four Coming of Age
Sierra peers up at me from beneath the rolled-back brim of her very feminine lavendar velour hat. My first and only granddaughter is almost two years old, dynamic and sturdy, and if I could spare her anything the transition from all that is the best of childhood to all that is the worst of adolescence would be it.
Always tall, I grew taller than my mother and my head bobbled hugely above my shoulders with thick unruly hair just like hers. (To this day, I'm always startled - as though I've never seen it before - at how big my head is. I've never worn hats for this reason, except once to a funeral.) I looked dazed a lot because my vision was imperfect. The day I got my first pair of glasses my mother and I went to see the movie, Little Women, and I realized on some instinctive level that this was the real world - this technicolor extravaganza - and I'd best make a decision whether I wanted to stay in it. Like my favorite kingdom, the Land of Oz, it was only technicolor as long as you lingered there. Once you returned to Kansas, it was just plain two-dimensional in shades of black and white. I saw the beauty of it better, but the bleak reality of dirt and frowns and disenchantment was even more discernible. Did I want to scrutinize the effects of teenage hormones on my skin? Did I want to know how drab it all could be? Did I really want to register the subtle expressions of those who might ignore or dislike me? It became a lifelong shock I've elected to avoid to this day, wearing glasses only when absolutely necessary to see for distance or in the dark.
At least a year later than the other grade school girls, I passed into physical womanhood. It was common in those times to leave information about these things up to chance and peers, and so it was for me. Whether it was anxiety or something genetic, I suffered terribly during menstruation from cramps and nausea, crawling from my bed to the bathroom to throw up, until I reached my mid 20's and my first pregnancy.
The hormone changes also brought first love, first romance, first connection with boys as tentative men, their muscles bulking up, their chins darkening with new beards, their quick glances. The country is a fertile place for such imaginings with very black nights and long silences, intense scents and visual pleasures. Country boys grow into responsibility early by necessity, instinctively gearing towards the family they must create to sustain the farms.
My two-room country schoolhouse was replaced by a new one-story brick building with two grades to a room. In the girls' bathroom there I first heard about menstruation. In the boiler room I received my first kiss in the grip of a boy who kissed every girl in school. I had a best friend who was as tall as I. Rosalie was a true farm girl. She had a high-school age brother who was in love with a prom queen. He was a prom king. They were royalty from an older age than we could imagine. We hid in a closet to scout their behavior, trying to learn the rules.
At twelve years old, I graduated from elementary school and was appointed salutatorian for the ceremonies. My father was devastated that I hadn't won valedictorian status and wrote my speech for me. He included verses from a song made popular by Frank Sinatra in that decade and considered by my parents a political anthem, "The House I Live In." It was fitting. I can remember the melody, the sound, so well: "The place I live in, the road, the house, the room, the pavement of the highway or a garden all in bloom..." It was a song about tolerance and peace. While I was writing this chapter I discovered a footnote to this incident: the song was written by Abel Meeropol, the man who took in the children of the Rosenbergs after their parents had been executed. At any rate, Annabelle Edwards, whose father was the School Board Chairman and owner of the town's only meat packing plant, was valedictorian instead of me. She was an odd sort, too.
House I Live In Lyrics:
Writer(s): robinson/allen
What is america to me
A name, a map, or a flag I see
A certain word, democracy
What is america to me
The house I live in
A plot of earth, a street
The grocer and the butcher
Or the people that I meet
The children in the playground
The faces that I see
All races and religions
That¹s america to me
The place I work in
The worker by my side
The little town the city
Where my people lived and died
The howdy and the handshake
The air of feeling free
And the right to speak your mind out
That¹s america to me
The things I see about me
The big things and the small
That little corner newsstand
Or the house a mile tall
The wedding and the churchyard
The laughter and the tears
And the dream that¹s been a growing
For more than two hundred years
The town I live in
The street, the house, the room
The pavement of the city
Or the garden all in bloom
The church the school the clubhouse
The millions lights I see
But especially the people
- yes especially the people
That¹s america to me
The next step was ninth grade at junior high in town, four miles from home, a huge building full of cement floors and different levels and noise. Sometimes still I have a dream from these times about missing my way to the classroom and arriving too late. My classes were Algebra, Latin, Art, Music, Physical Education and English that first year, and I did well. By now, I had been taking piano lessons and would continue for 13 years in all. (Lately, I've been thinking that I would like to play again - just for myself, no recitals, no slippery fingers, no expectations, just a nocturne waiting to be heard once more.)
My parents engineered my transition to town society. In the summers, it was common for youngsters to work in the fields outside of town picking beans, strawberries and other crops. Most of these jobs required stooping labor and paid minimal wages. My father decided that he could hire some of the girls from town during the hot days of June, July and August and pay them higher wages than they could earn elsewhere. It became quite a coveted job and, working alongside them, I could in this way get to know better the handful of popular girls who might smooth my way in the halls of school the following years. My parents also arranged parties in our corn warehouse every Wednesday night where invited youngsters would come to do the bunny hop and play games. There in the dusty wooden rooms we circled and swept each other awkwardly round and round. How they must have loved me then, my parents, to plan and prepare and even mingle with this group of teenaged hormone factories. Their plan worked to some extent and eased my entry into the new school environment. The girls who were given the summer jobs on our farm were some of the most popular girls in school and probably because of this I was invited into certain clubs.
At 14, in the summer of my sophomore year, I began to date a boy a year older than I, who would become my first - and only - husband four years later. Our first date was a double date out of town to a swimming pool that had a giant slide. Making a great first impression, I climbed the ladder to the top of the slide where I cowered for half an hour before climbing back down the ladder. From a solid town family, his father being a very successful attorney, he had aspirations to go on to college and the intelligence to succeed when he got there. Tall, gangly, awkward, good, he fell in love with me with no idea how far we would be from our hometown when I abandoned him after ten years of journeying together. He wasn't the football captain or the softball hero, but he was on the basketball team and he was well-liked. I wore his class ring, as well as saddle oxfords, pleated plaid skirts, blouses with dickie collars, and a short bob.
It was the '50s, and I went to school in a different part of town from junior high, in an even bigger newer building. We girls all resembled Olivia Newton-John in Grease. We sat on hard bleachers wearing royal blue uniforms with a big gold bulldog dead center and waved pompoms, having no idea what the plans were out there on the field of dreams. We danced in formal gowns at proms and bent backward over young men's arms until our permed hair almost touched the floor.
Today I don't know what has become of a single person with whom I spent all those long days, except for my young husband. He is now in a neighboring state and married to a woman from France whom he met in Russia, and he is very successful in his field. I am absolutely sure I was not meant to remain with him, that I was meant to travel the road that I have - yet sometimes I wonder what came over, up, out of me to take me so far away from the original course.
Sierra turns and makes her passage down the hall and out of sight. She gets to be a toddler first, and then a grade school child, before she runs this shining, sweating, flowering gauntlet from childhood into youth. When that time does come, may the watchmen be busy elsewhere and she sail smoothly through...
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I live in my southern window, dragging robes of pollen up and down the stairs behind the glass, breaking flowers into round rings, setting purple children back in rafters. While I sleep, I dream of waking.
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