19751977
LITTLE MISS DANGEROUS
CHAPTER ONE
This was the only way I could have been considered in fashion: by accident.
I had no memory of growing. In those final weeks of the school year, when the weather warmed enough for skirts again, I pulled on what had fit fine in the last push of a sticky September. But now, teachers stopped me in the hall and ordered me to press my fingertips to my thighs, reminded me I was breaking the rules.
I spent the summer skulking around shaded rooms or hunched over books, trying to force myself back down to where the normal girls were. I slouched at the dinner table and shuffled the plates to the kitchen, listing to the side like a woman five times my age. Alone in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom, I confronted the truth: I was a freak. Once, I could stand on the edge of the carpet and see the whole of me. Now in that same spot, I was cut off at the neck. No longer a person. How could I be real without a head or face. This was the first lesson that my body was an uncontrollable thing. It existed apart from me and I watched it with as much wonder and horror as I would a movie.
As our annual trip to New York City for my back-to-school clothes drew closer, I knew I wouldn't be able to hide this development from my mother much longer. I thought about begging her to let me go to Gimbels or Sears by myself, knowing that the answer would be no, knowing that my display of feeling on the subject would be more likely to attract her attention than push it away.
Before I was ever forced to straighten the full length of my legs in front of my mother in the dressing room, though, I was taken to the doctor for my annual physical. The nurse measured me, then the doctor looked at what she wrote down and measured me himself. He said it out loud. "Five feet, ten inches tall. My goodness, that's off the charts for a thirteen-year-old girl."
He told my mother to tell me to stop slouching, while I sat on the examining table, a collection of too-long limbs folded upon themselves. She stared at me for days after, like I'd gone and grown to spite her. No one in her family was tall. And then we made it worse by going to New York.
There was a second reason I dreaded the back-to-school shopping trip. My mother had grown up with money, had grown up believing that the city was the only place to purchase anything of value. No discount bins, no sales, just rich wools and tweeds, smart suits and hats. Buy quality and have it forever. Make regular excursions so everyone knew you could buy quality and have it forever whenever you wanted. She did this with her own mother as a girl and as an adult and continued with me as a habit.
What I did in this house was watch and listen. My mother was not particularly interested in making room for me in between social events. My father either, but he wasn't the one at home during the day. There was also the fact that my parents never should have been married at all, a drunken truth hurled by my mother at a dinner party I was brought to in Florida when I should have been in school.
I had turned this over and over in my child mind until I found the proof in a slim leather photo album. My mother had been married before, a nineteen-year-old World War II bride of the kind of society boy she was fated to be paired off with, the kind of society boy who was supposed to do his duty overseas because he was a red-blooded American, dammit, and return home safely to the waiting arms of his wife and the GI bill and a Chevrolet, not get shot down over the Pacific. My father came along after, a safe bet in the fog of grief, flat-footed and turned down for service, handsome and employed, though not from old money. But, from what I pieced together from hissed conversations overheard at holiday gatherings and second-cousin christenings, postwar life brought prosperity and babies to my mother's friends and her dissatisfaction crept in. She pushed my father toward bolder ambitions, a bigger house, a better neighborhood.
They'd long become accustomed to childlessness when I made my surprise entrance, perhaps preferred it, after all. Sometimes I would look through my father's old issues of Life and Newsweek and consider: they lived through the Great Depression, wars, the Red Scare, radio giving way to television. Sometimes they appeared startled by me, by my wants, by the world I required them to engage with. I was from another time. I should have been born during the baby boom like their friends' children. Perhaps then they would have known what to do.
Or maybe that was the convenient way to explain away the feeling that came every time I heard my mother call me dull. Perhaps if I knew how to be more exciting, there would have been room. It's not that they did anything to me, a fact that cut both ways.
