On a February day in 1962 Mr. Walls, the impassive principal of my elementary school, squeezed his bulk behind a table in my grade two classroom to conduct his twice-a-year report card review. One by one he called us to the back of the room, where he expressed the level of his dissatisfaction with our academic progress and behaviour, ending with a letter-grade assessment of our potential. Wayne Plimmer got the usual thumbs-down for creating comedic mayhem, and Karen Swidinski and I got the nod for our reading and writing skills. We were H-potential students, said Mr. Walls, who gave us a rusty smile and bumped us into grade three.
Skipping a year of school seemed like a great idea, and neither of us minded getting a reputation upgrade to smarty-pants. But while the most obvious downside of ‘acceleration’ – being thrust into an older group – was immediately evident, it wasn’t until September of 1968 that the full impact hit home. On the first day of grade ten I was still thirteen, a shy stick of a girl nearly two years younger than the oldest of her cohort.
My self-view wobbled between the smug superiority of a smart aleck and the pathological self-doubt of an introverted misfit. Were it not for my one friend Karen, I would have been utterly alone, and I doubt I would have survived as well. Whatever confidence she might have lacked, she had way more than I did, which may have had something do to with her olive-skinned prettiness and a visible bust. Along with her blue-eyed older sister, a spectacular blonde who hung out with us when nobody was looking, she saved me from total social oblivion.
~
Despite the promise of my early years, I was an academic disappointment. The missing portion of elementary school would have been useful to complete the installation of my arithmetic skills, but the real problem was that having been told I was smart, I thought that was all there was to it.
At the first parent-brother-teacher interviews that year, everyone agreed that what I lacked was the will to apply myself. My brother came up with a motivational plan, and a few days later handed me a big sheet of poster board on which he had drawn an elaborate sort of board game, with squares to be filled in with various colours after I’d completed an assignment or studied for an hour. The idea was that once I’d done everything I was supposed to over the course of the next three months, the filled-in squares would reveal a hidden pattern.
It felt pretty nice to have some direction, and the fluttering of hope that I could once again be the student everyone expected me to be kept me motivated for a while. (Mr. Walls, the dour principal, had ultimately regretted his decision to accelerate me, and at my grade seven report card review, flattened me with the announcement that official assessment of my aptitude had slipped to an A-). Here was a way to jettison the embarrassment of my downgraded status. Maybe I’d finally have the nerve to turn my marked exam papers face-up instead of just peeking under the corners.
Things went well for a week or two, even bringing in a 70 on a physics quiz, but the novelty of studying wore off pretty fast. One evening, after I went to my room to do some math homework, I looked at the chart and thought about cheating. The more I thought about it, the more irresistible the idea became. Rationalizing that I would never actually do the work anyway, I filled in a couple of un-merited squares, then a few more. Then I couldn’t stop and pretty soon the letters of the mystery word began to appear. I might not have felt so awful had it not been so ironic. When all the squares were filled with their appropriate colours, the red ones spelled out:
SUCCESS!
~
Phys Ed, my favourite class (no homework) might have been an ordeal had my mother not been perceptive enough to get me my first bra before the school year started. Although one side was stuffed with Kleenex, what bothered me most about being in a change room with noticeably more mature girls was that I had no pimples. The chit-chat about boyfriends, drugs and bitchy mothers wasn’t anything I could relate to, but commiserating about zits might have been within my range, if I had had any. But like everything else hormonal, my acne arrived too late – not until just before grad year pictures.
My height, with which I had a love-hate relationship, was an advantage in the gym and got me picked for volleyball and track-and-field teams. Basketball was a dud. Putting a big ball in a little hoop needed more hand-eye coordination than my 2-D vision – the lasting result of surgically repaired crossed eyes – could muster.
At the beginning of grade ten I was 5’8”, and pretty much eye-to-eye with Alan McGinnis, not that I ever got close enough to be sure. The fact that he was kind enough to include me in a few conversations during health class was enough to propel me into a state of agony that I was sure was love, but I was too shy to do anything about it. Feminism hadn’t really caught on in Calgary yet, and the only chance I had to reveal my interest in him was to ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance in February.
The months dragged by. My parents took to measuring me weekly, so astonishing was my growth spurt. I grew past my mother, both my older brothers and by Christmas was closing in on my dad. Eye-balling Alan McGinnis in the hallway, I figured he must be growing too, but by the time the holidays were over I had to accept that there was no way he was ever going to catch up. On Sadie Hawkins Day I was 6’2” and Alan went to the dance with Cathy Seward.
The length of my legs created other problems. Not only was I the fourth-tallest in the whole school (the other three were all on the football team) but when the school board finally ceded to the times and changed the student dress code to allow blue jeans, I faced further marginalization. Girl ‘s jeans didn’t come in a 36” inseam, and guy’s jeans were just not cool. Of all the unfairness to date, this was the hardest to take. I wanted jeans more than anything in the world – more than my teachers’ approval, a boyfriend or an unlimited allowance – and my genes were against it. But I wasn’t in Home Ec for nothing. After undoing the side-seams from hem to knee and inserting a triangle of blue fabric, straight legs turned into bell-bottoms, and the same fabric added four inches to the hem. (There is no photographic evidence of my sartorial hipness).
~
I got through the Shakespeare section in English class with some help from daydreams and a fixation on Ms. Wright’s hair. Her centre-parted, back-combed, pony-tailed ‘do was just like Ali McGraw’s in Love Story, and it was fabulous, the sort of coif that breathed glamour and sophistication. I coveted her coif, and was sure that if I looked a bit more like her I’d have my pick of boyfriends, despite my height. In fact, the feelings I had about Ms. Wright’s hair were not unlike those I had previously held for the person of Alan MacGinnes, whose tender attention to Cathy was inescapable every afternoon when he walked her home. I don’t know what was harder to take – that they held hands, or that she lived at the end of my block and he lived several miles in the opposite direction.
~
Having never overcome my arithmetical handicap, I was still counting on my fingers in grade eleven and not prepared to like algebra very much. But I hadn’t factored in Mr. Rogers. It’s hard to say whether it was the plaid flares, the beard or the Irish setter he sometimes brought to school that did it, but I do remember that when he arrived one morning in a turquoise MGB, I really, really wanted to know enough about irrational numbers to be able to stick up my hand with some answers. I don’t think he even noticed me (even though I was all over Fred the dog) until the day I turned up in my latest Home Ec project, a black rayon jumpsuit. I like to think that Mr. Roger’s double-take was entirely complimentary. In any case, it marked the first time that I had had such a visible reaction from a member of the opposite sex.
I didn’t do well in math despite my desire for his approval, overwhelmed as it was by my disinclination to study. (After three failed attempts to pass grade twelve math at night school, I finally succeeded in first-year university, giving me enough confidence to simultaneously enrol in two – two! – pure math courses and a computer programming class. I was then dating a post-graduate theoretical physicist and quite possibly felt like I had something to prove, which I couldn’t, in the end).
~
Karen had a family life I envied. She and her siblings spent every summer at the lake, had a finished basement with a pool table, and a mother who let the oldest girl drive her ‘65 Mustang. Sometimes she and Karen were allowed to take it to school, picking me up on the way, and the biggest thrill was parallel parking right out front just as the bell rang. The car was a standard, shifter on the wheel, and I couldn’t get over how blasé Karen’s sister seemed to be about being able to drive such a thing. I sat in the back seat and watched her change gears with the same envy I’d had for Ms. Wright’s ponytail.
It was my father’s rule that none of his children could have the use of the family car, except in the most exceptional circumstances, but his fatal error was to teach me enough about the mechanics of clutch and gearshift that I could drive the car from the sidewalk into the garage, a matter of some twenty feet. It was only a small step from occasionally parking the car to taking it around the block at lunchtime while Mom and Dad were at work. Sans licence, of course. From there I advanced to touring the neighbourhood, and finally, brazenly, taking my brother’s Austin Healy halfway to Banff one afternoon. After supper he said he was off to see a friend, and as I watched from the kitchen window he drove away, getting only halfway to the stop sign when the car balked and died. He got out and jiggled something under the jump seats – the fuel line, I later found out – while I watched, aghast at how close I had come to being caught out. It was the end of my joyriding career.
~
I volunteered in the library at noon hour but hated shelving books - Dewey decimals were too much like arithmetic. The best part of being in the library – apart from all those books – was that it wasn’t the cafeteria, where people like me and Lorraine P. sat in the DMZ. Lorraine was, well, different -looking – a short, squat girl whose white-blonde hair never seemed to get any longer. I was pretty sure it was a wig, and I’d heard whispers that she had some kind of mild Down’s syndrome. She was, I figured, a few rungs below me on the status ladder but I resented the fact that it didn’t seem to bother her. I wasn’t sure she even realized it. She had friends, and she laughed a lot, and it bugged me that she could be happier in her apartness than I was.
~
English was my best subject. I liked to write and was proud of the fact that I could produce a first essay draft that was more polished than everybody else’s final one. I loved everything about language – except for Shakespeare’s version of it – and relished the challenge of learning grammar and syntax and verb conjugations in French. On the days that I wasn’t in the library at lunch hour, I’d be in the French language lab, aping the accent of Madame Thibaut, dreaming of being in Paris alone, walking the streets in a trench coat and black beret. (On my first trip to the City of Light, I heard my name called at the Louvre – it was Helen Edie, my arch-rival for the title of Tallest Junior-High Girl).
Social Studies was made bearable by the geography section and the boy in front of me, who told me everything he knew about ten-speed racing bikes. Chemistry and biology had no such compensation, and I failed both, despite an eleventh-hour resolve to memorize the periodic table. Having good marks in French made up for the fact that I only got 48% on the math final, and I managed to matriculate due to a loophole that gave me credit for extra-curricular music studies. All those years of practicing piano saved me from the humiliation of having to find something else to do on the afternoon of the diploma ceremony.
For some, the graduation dance is the peak experience of their high school years, but for me it ended up being all about the diploma. In the audience were my parents, (‘Stand up straight’, whispered Dad), my brother (‘Mr. Success’) and a ridiculously good-looking university student four years my senior who was my brand-new boyfriend. As I walked across the stage to accept my diploma, he stood up and yelled ‘Way to go, Deb!’ , although I later found out it was actually my brother who did it, and then felt bad all over again for not appreciating how much he wanted me to succeed.
And although I had acquired a boyfriend in the nick of time, he didn’t know how much I wanted to go to the dance, and I couldn’t tell him. On the evening of May 28, 1971 I was home alone while the music played and everyone danced, and Don Mauro got behind the wheel of his car, drunk, and never came home again.
~
A few years later, prodded by the nostalgia that surfaces after the awfulness of high school has faded, I tracked down Mr. Rogers at his new school. He was awfully pleased to see me, which was flattering and kind of exciting, especially when he asked me to take him for a ride on my motorcycle. We zoomed past the old school, the helmet-less Mr. R (‘call me Jack’) beating an enthusiastic tattoo on my knees and shouting ‘Isn’t this fun?’ above the din of seven hundred and fifty CCs. A few weeks later we met for drinks, but when he invited me to his cabin in the woods for the weekend, I got cold feet. Not only did he not want to bring his wife along, but Fred the dog was long dead and the MG had been sold. The last time I saw him was at the twenty-year reunion, and it was hard to imagine him ever having worn plaid flare pants.
~
The boyfriend made up for not taking me to the dance by convincing me to play hooky and hitch-hike up to the mountains for the day. I was deliriously in love and ready for anything, but he was too gallant to take advantage of a sixteen-year-old who didn’t, as he saw it, have any idea of what she was getting into. I don’t remember the disappointment any more, but think of that day as being the high note – the end of high school and the beginning of real life – when I started to realize that there were possibilities ahead far more interesting than anything I had imagined.
All credit for this post is due to Jocelyn of O Mighty Crisis, who threatened to give me a zero if I didn’t hand something in by Friday.