A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (9 page)

“Channe didn’t say a terrible thing to me today. We didn’t have a fight since we came here from Paris,” he said.

My father’s mouth twitched into a peculiar smile. He must have known that Billy was lying, but the fact that he was sticking up for me must have meant more to him than the fact that I’d broken the iron rule.

“All right,” he said, beginning to turn away.

“But Mary-Ellen came to me and told me she overheard—” Mr. Smith began in a peeved tone.

“Mary-Ellen must’ve not heard right,” Billy said flatly.

Mary-Ellen’s eyes flashed lightning bolts at us. She was shaking with humiliation and fury.

“Little brats,” she hissed. “God, do I hate brats.”

The Smith girls did not turn out badly at all but I still don’t like them. Close to twenty years have passed since that summer, and Cassandra is one of the most successful women I know. She makes over $300,000 a year as a stockbroker on Wall Street. She is not married. Mary-Ellen is still fat, much fatter, in fact, and is in Vienna training to become an opera singer. People who have heard her sing say she has a strong voice. Gillis, the Princess Child, is still a princess child. She married a very rich and very old film producer and lives in Beverly Hills with his two daughters who are at least five years her senior. Fortunately, none of the Smith girls are readers of fiction, or it would never have occurred to me to write this story.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Riding home on the public bus on the first Friday of the first week of 7
^ème
, fifth grade, I came to a stupefying realization: There wasn’t a teacher in the school or a student in my class who liked me.

It was a long bus ride home; usually Candida came to get me in the car but today she had an appointment with people from the government about her working papers, and my mother had an important tea. I was relieved to be alone, and sat on the quiet, not-so-crowded bus, pondering my realization for a long time.

It had been apparent since the first day of school that my reputation among the teachers had preceded me. But I asked myself, was I really all that bad? All that much worse than anybody else?

I figured I’d made one huge mistake with a teacher, and that had been in last year’s history class.

We were studying ancient Greece for half the year. I already knew more than anybody about ancient Greece because the previous summer my father had taken the family to a tiny, hot Greek island. Since there was nothing to do on the island at night, he had read us the entire
Iliad
and
Odyssey
during the two-and-a-half-month vacation.

It seemed incredible and wonderful to me that my brother and I could understand every word our father read out of the huge, leather-bound book he’d brought from Paris. One night I peeked over his shoulder as he was reading and saw that the words he said weren’t always the ones written down. I remembered seeing, for example, “Exclaimed Ulysses” when he read “Ulysses cried out.”

I became so enthralled by the gods and heroes that I wrote my favorite ones letters. My father ceremoniously burned the notes on a small pyre on the beach, to ensure that the messages would reach their destination.

“Dere Athena,” I wrote, “I am youre friend. I am so happie you like the Greeks and not the Trojans. Please send me a signe—Channe Willis.”

Or, “Dere Achilles, My daddie says demi-gods are not imortelle but I am writing you any way. Will you merry me if I die and go to Hadies?—Channe Willis.”

Last year’s history teacher had been very young and nervous, and boring. She had red hair tied in a large knot at the back of her head and a face so pale she almost disappeared when she stood against the white wall. Her voice was flat and quiet, even when she described battles. Then one day she made a terrible mistake while drawing the battle of Troy on the blackboard with colored chalk. She said that Athena whisked Paris away and saved his life as Agamemnon was about to slaughter him in front of the gates of Troy.

“It wasn’t Athena,” I yelled out, “it was Aphrodite!” The teacher turned as red as her chignon and mumbled, “
Et bien
,
Mademoiselle
, maybe you would like to instruct the class, since you obviously find me unfit for the task.”

I felt terrible and wanted to apologize (even though I was right), but it was too late. After that I tried to be polite and apply myself, but between us it was war.

When I discussed this with my father, he explained that not all grown-ups behaved like grown-ups. The bigger you got, he said, the bigger your ego got.

“Try to be nice to her,” he suggested, “let her feel she knows more than you.”

But the teacher continued to give me five out of tens on all my tests and projects no matter how hard I tried.

So—this year they had been ready for me—they chided me for my big, bad mouth, my bossiness, my pushiness, and my flirtatious nature (no one knew the extent of my flirtatious nature, thank God). In the last two years I had convinced every cute boy in my grade to show me their thing behind a park bench during recreation.

My mind drifted to the question of their thing for a moment. The American boys’ all looked like a little pale mushroom, while the French boys’ looked like a garlic clove before you peeled it. For a while I’d believed that it had to do with where you were born (my brother was born in France and had a garlic clove, whereas my father was born in America and had a mushroom). But then I discovered one American boy born in America who had a garlic clove instead of a mushroom, and my theory was shattered. I still contemplated asking my father to explain, but hadn’t quite figured out how to ask him so that it wouldn’t sound like I’d seen more than two.

My thoughts went back to my teachers and to the nasty underhanded comments they had been throwing in my direction since the first day of school: “Apparently your vacation hasn’t calmed you down;” or, “Always as disruptive, I see.” My new math teacher even said, “You aren’t stupid—why do you insist on pretending you are?”

How did they know if I was stupid or not?

It wasn’t fair. They never picked on the other dummies in the same way.

In math, certainly, I really was stupid. Even the most simple problems baffled me, and then last year they’d made things impossible by introducing division. Feeling frustrated and victimized, I’d given up listening to the teacher and taken to tickling my best friend Sally Sutherland, who sat next to me. In my lassitude I also wrote love notes in French to Paul Frankel, a boy with fantastically dark eyes who happened to sit at the next desk. “Paul, if you kiss me after class, I will give you my Pez candies,” I would write. He always wanted to know what Disney character I had as my Pez container and what flavor Pez I’d brought that day. He’d promise to kiss me in writing, I’d pass him my Pezes under the desk, and then afterward, in the hallway, sometimes he’d kiss me and sometimes he’d yank up my skirt.

I thought about Sally, how good she was. She never wrote notes to boys, always did her homework, and no one ever yanked up her skirt. My heart constricted painfully. It was a feeling of longing mingled with acute jealousy. This year I was in the dummy class 7
ème
C, while Sally had stayed in 7
ème
A. Finally free of me, she was making a whole new batch of friends. I had never realized how much I depended on her, my quiet, funny, good-natured, sensible friend—or that she was my
only
friend—because it hadn’t mattered up until now. The whole thing made me want to cry.

Sitting alone on the bus, I realized that although I hated the school and it hated me, I was used to it and was too much of a coward to change. I’d heard that in a French lycée, the teachers had a right to beat you, and you couldn’t go to the bathroom during class. And there wouldn’t be any Americans. But then in a strictly American school like the one my brother went to there would be no French kids, and I would seem so French that the other kids would hate me anyway.

No, the École Internationale Bilingue was the only school for me because almost all the kids were some kind of half-and-half. In that sense, I was no weirder than others.

By the end of that first week in 7
ème
C, I’d found that everyone had settled into distinct groups, and I was clearly being excluded, along with Frédérique Charpentier and Francis Fortescue, who were the weirdest kids I’d ever seen in my life.