Blue Plate Special (17 page)

To my surprise, Green Meadow accepted me. They gave me a scholarship, and then my mother offered to pay the amount it didn’t cover, about seven hundred dollars for the year; where she got the money, in addition to paying for Susan’s ballet school and boarding, I have no idea. After asking around, I found free room and board with Mary Sterne, one of the high school English teachers, in exchange for doing housework, cooking, and after-school babysitting.

I had presented this plan to my mother as a fait accompli; I had to get out of Dodge, I needed an education, and Green Meadow was infinitely better than Mingus. She had no choice; she let me go. That fall, I flew back to New York and moved in with the Sternes. My mother and Emily stayed in the Talley House, where they would live alone, just the two of them, for the next two years, playing dominoes by the woodstove and reading novels together over their supper.

Green Meadow was another culture shock for me, completely different from Mingus. For the first time in my life, I was in a school where all the kids played instruments, sang choral music, and spoke foreign languages; there was no Spanish class, so I took French my junior year, Italian my senior year. With a few other kids from the Green Meadow Special Chorus, I sang with the local Bach Society, an adult semiprofessional chorus, for two years. We studied each subject intensively in blocks and wrote and illustrated our own textbooks. My entire class had only thirteen kids in it. There were fewer than sixty kids altogether in the high school. Many of the kids had known one another since kindergarten; they weren’t overtly cliquish, but deep and ineradicable lines had been drawn in the sand long before I got there, lines I couldn’t always read. For the first time, I had to work for room and board instead of slouching off to my room after school with my cheese and crackers to read
until dinnertime. Now, I had to make dinner; help the youngest daughter with her homework; clean the house on weekends; and answer to the demands of Mary, my hardworking, stressed-out teacher, who was a stranger and now also my boss.

My math teacher, whose ominously apropos nickname was Tomcat, Tommy for short, lived next door with his wife and three small sons. He was famous for molesting all the teenage girls. He had even gotten one of them pregnant, I heard from several other girls—a girl two years older than I was; she had a secret abortion—and he went right on being a respected community member and teaching math at Green Meadow and molesting every other girl he could get his mitts on. Naturally it didn’t take long for him to suss me out as vulnerable prey: a fatherless girl, far from home. He started coming over and taking me on “walks” after dinner, ostensibly to give me guidance and sympathy because I seemed to be “having a difficult time” but in fact to lead me into the deserted fields and rub his hard-on against me while trapping me in his arms as I struggled to break free. He was short and bald with large, hot, pale blue eyes in a round egglike head, a smooth face, and a big hard belly. He smelled of mint, the most sinister child-molester smell possible. I loathed and feared him, but I couldn’t tell him to go fuck himself: I had lost my nerve. I was frightened of him. I had been able to tell Alec that I couldn’t sleep with him; with Tommy, I felt like paralyzed prey, and, because of my silence, I was therefore complicit somehow, or so he made me feel. I had fallen right into his trap. His rationale for abusing so many girls was that they didn’t tell him not to, and therefore they wanted him to. It never seemed to occur to him that laws protecting minors from predators like him were in place because we were too young and vulnerable to protect ourselves. He didn’t actually rape me, but some of my friends weren’t so lucky.

My grandmother, Ruth Pusch, lived in a tiny apartment near the school and took a sympathetic but distant interest
in my adolescent goings-on, most of which (my smoking and drinking, of course, as well as Tommy’s ongoing molestation of me) she had no clue about. I was close to her in a formal, chipper sort of way—she was highly intelligent and literary, a writer, translator, and prodigious reader, energetic and stoic until she died of the flu at ninety-three with all her faculties intact, bright-eyed, culturally awake, politically aware. She was also impenetrably independent, determinedly stoic—she never admitted any negative feelings, never copped to aches or pains. One didn’t in my family; one carried on cheerfully. I’ve often wondered what lay underneath Ruth’s armor, what loneliness, insecurity, or unfulfilled desires haunted her; I’ve often imagined she was a lot more like me than either of us allowed ourselves to know.

That fall, I turned into someone I didn’t recognize, someone shy and weird and furtive. To comfort myself during that first semester, I gorged on bread and granola and quickly gained about ten pounds. I spent recesses and lunch breaks picking my face and writing in my journal in an empty classroom, adolescent maunderings about loneliness and alienation. I listened to Carole King’s
Tapestry
and Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
over and over and over.

In late December, I flew back to Arizona for Christmas break, feeling determined not to let my mother know that I was unhappy and depressed at Green Meadow. I had to prove that I had made the right decision to leave Jerome, not only out of pride but also because she had been so heartbroken to see me go. I wanted to show her that it was all worth it, the sacrifices we’d both made. I told my family that Green Meadow was an academic and social idyll where I spent the days hanging out with my interesting, cool, smart, close-knit classmates, rehearsing Bach’s St. John Passion and Mozart’s Requiem Mass, giving oral reports on Wordsworth and Thoreau, playing the Brandenburg concerti in chamber orchestra, writing
and illustrating my own main lesson books, and playing right wing on the girls’ lacrosse team—all of which, of course, was true, so I wasn’t lying, but it made me feel lonelier not to be able to confide in my mother and sisters how hard things were for me there.

One day toward the end of that winter break in Jerome, I took a walk through town for some fresh air and exercise. I strode down the mountain, swinging my arms, my face frozen and olive green and broken out in pimples, wearing too-tight jeans and a puffy down coat, my formerly straight, thick hair now cut in a shag and frizzy with an unfortunate perm. I rounded the corner past Main Street onto the series of switchbacks that led down to the gulch. As I approached the end of the first switchback, I glanced up at the house I was walking toward. There, framed in an upstairs window, was Alec Wood. The house he was standing in belonged to Lisa Hatch.

When I waved at him, he just stared at me as if he didn’t know who I was.

“Hi,” I yelled. “It’s Katie Christensen.”

He opened the window a little and flinched in the sudden freezing air.

“Hey, Katie,” he said. I heard disappointment and indifference in his voice and saw myself through his eyes, the way I looked now compared to how I’d looked when we were in Mazatlán less than a year before. We had a stilted, very brief conversation, and then I went on my way, feeling wretched.

Shortly afterward, I broke down and told my mother about Tommy. She was horrified and livid and immediately wrote a letter to the school to report him. She told my grandmother, who said she’d go and talk to the school about it; if she did, it had no effect, because nothing changed. Later that year, when my mother came to visit my grandmother and me in Spring Valley, she called Tommy and asked him to come over to my grandmother’s. He arrived and sat down, and my mother told
him he had to stop molesting me. She was apparently very firm about it and very insistent.

After my mother left, Tommy showed up at the Sternes’ house and came into my bedroom and sat on my bed. I stood with my back against my bureau, my arms folded over my chest, and stared at the floor. He said, “I want to hear it from you. I don’t believe you feel that way.”

I mumbled something, terrified, unable to look at him or tell him to stop.

And he kept taking me for walks.

For the rest of that year, I went deeper and deeper into solitude and loneliness and alienation, writing long journal entries, excelling at schoolwork and choral singing and chamber music and writing, reading novels as fast as I could fly through them, sustained by a lot of alcohol on Friday and Saturday nights at parties in the fields or someone’s house or Hong Fat, our nickname for the empty old green garage on Threefold property where we all hung out. On Sunday mornings, I waitressed, always hungover, at the Threefold guesthouse for pocket money. And I ate and ate and ate.

I glutted myself on carbohydrates and fat: meatball subs on long, soft white rolls dripping with meat juice; entire big bags of Doritos; and calzones, those soft bricks of dough encasing melted, oozing white cheese. And those were just my after-school snacks. (As meager compensation, I took to drinking Tab, the ubiquitous diet soda of the era, but of course it didn’t help.) Soon, not surprisingly, I was not fitting into my jeans anymore. Being sixteen, I squeezed myself in anyway and hoped for the best and looked marshmallow-like.

I was a terrible cook when I moved in with the Sternes and a better one when I left two years later, thanks to my fear of Mary’s disapprobation. She made it clear that she thought I was a lazy, dim-witted layabout who ate too much and did too little to help her. At night, since she usually had to go to
faculty meetings and various activities after school and didn’t get home until fairly late, I cooked dinner for the family. She taught me to make soup from scratch, as well as chili, macaroni and cheese, and lasagna. I ate mounds of all of it and took seconds. And she also taught me how to reuse leftovers; the rest of a ham, for example, could be cubed and turned into risi bisi, a quick, easy Italian children’s dish of ham, peas, and rice. The remnants of a meat loaf and mashed potatoes could be turned into a shepherd’s pie with cut-up vegetables and instant gravy.

She taught me to make the best granola I’ve ever had, with oats, almonds, walnuts, sunflower and sesame seeds, honey, and oil from the local co-op, baked at a very low temperature for a long time until it was crunchy and deep with caramelized flavor. I covered it in whole milk and couldn’t stop eating it. Mary groused at me frequently about hogging all the granola, but it was more than my self-control could handle; the kitchen was right outside my bedroom door, and the granola was right on the counter in a big jar. She also bought loaves of big, soft, wheaty bread that I paved thickly with cream cheese and slathered with strawberry jam or toasted and ate with mayonnaise and sliced Muenster cheese or with a dense layer of peanut butter with honey drizzled on top. I didn’t see how I was supposed to resist any of it.

I ate anything, including, after my waitressing shifts on Sundays, the coarse, damp zucchini bread that issued forth from the guesthouse kitchen as dessert. This stuff was wretchedly wholesome, granular with whole-wheat flour and sweaty with oil. Flecks of grated zucchini crisscrossed each piece like the thick cloth ribbons we used to make pot holders with at day camp. I didn’t care; I ate it anyway. I missed my mother.

But I was mortified when Mary patted me on the butt one day as I was loading the dishwasher and told me that I was putting on weight. I decided then and there to go on a diet. I minimized my breakfast: one piece of toast in the morning with a
little butter. For lunch, every single day, I had a large, unpeeled carrot dipped in salad dressing and a grapefruit, which I peeled and ate section by section as slowly as I could to make it last. At dinner, I had a small portion of whatever the main course was, plenty of salad or vegetables, and no seconds and no dessert. I was stringent about it; once I’d decided to do this, I never deviated from my new regime: no more granola, no more lavish cream cheese sandwiches or calzones after school, no more zucchini bread at the guesthouse on weekends.

I was surprised to find that this strategy worked; I hadn’t expected it to. I hadn’t ever realized before that there was a correlation between what I ate and how I felt or looked.

I ate my carrot and grapefruit lunches in the guesthouse dining room, where I had access to salad dressing. Most of the other kids in my class went up to the Barn for subs and Cokes or ate bagged lunches they brought from home, downstairs in the high school common room, draped on the couches and chairs, sitting on stools around the counter. My diet made me antisocial and shy; I was obsessive about it. It was a private ritual, ascetic. At lunch hour, I went along the wooded path across the brook, up the steps, and into the simple dining room, where I ate alone amid a smattering of eurythmy students and teachers.

The guesthouse dressing was a simple vinaigrette: olive oil and vinegar and dried herbs. I poured myself a plastic teacup, filled it a quarter full. Sitting at an unoccupied table, I opened my soft leather sack, which I called Kermit and which came with me everywhere, and took out my lunch and my journal and pen. I made that carrot last as long as I could. The rule was that I could coat it with as much dressing as would adhere to it, but I couldn’t scoop the oily stuff out of the cup with a spoon or drink it, which was what I wanted to do. I craved the oil; the carrot was my means to getting it, and so I dipped it in and swirled it around and quickly scooped it to my mouth and licked off all the dressing I could and took one tiny bite of
carrot. In this way, I managed to ingest enough olive oil every lunch hour to keep me from keeling over during afternoon classes.