Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (15 page)

I glanced back to find the diver and her friends, who surprised me by shouting, “I-wean! I-wean!” Were they imitating a mentally retarded person? That was going too far.

I held onto the banister and waited for them to pass, never imagining that this was a calculated assault, until two girls looped their arms into each of mine to rip me from the banister. My only thought was to get back to that banister, so that I could stay upright and keep my legs and skirt intact. “Let’s help you down,” they said, in a mock-helpful tone. I felt a shove at my back from the diver, followed by a thrust from the two girls at my sides who held my arms. These sent me airborne over the last half of the staircase. I might have screamed, but I wasn’t sure if others would find this behavior atrocious, and I could not find my voice. To me, the only thing worse than what was happening would have been for someone to witness it.

I hit the landing hands first—a hardwired instinct accrued from a lifetime of falls. The sting in my palms was nothing compared to the ache in my wrists that followed. The pain would linger but not so long as these questions: How many times have I fallen? How many falls are ahead of me? Have I ever been pushed before? Was I pushed? What would people think of
me
, if they knew?

On the landing I shook my head, as if that would make them stop. Their laughter escalated to hysteria. “Let me help you up,” said the leader. The incongruity of her false voice would haunt me as well. Scorn was one thing, but this falsity only underscored the layers of insult: superiority and hatred. Why now? We were in our last days of school.

They swooped down to lift me up again by the arms, brushing me off as if to be my caretakers; then they dragged me down the second staircase, tossing me again midway and chasing after me. I was in a kind of shock. By the time they dragged me down to the last one, I was only worrying about my skirt flying up.

“What’s wrong?” said the leader. “Can’t keep up?”

How many summers had I studied her at our swim club? I’d looked up from my towel to find her adjusting the diving board with her foot. Her eyes shone bright blue above the water. I marveled at her poise before the spring and at the verve in her twists and tucks. Courage was what I was known for, but I knew something about verve. For years I’d performed ballet in my head, and I’d fantasize that, given legs for only one hour, I might have lured Nureyev from Fonteyn. In my head, I was that good. When I studied this girl’s dives, I felt those twists and tucks and flips in my own muscles. Why would
she
hate
me
?

Finally, I crashed onto the landing at the door. My legs absorbed the hit, and after the slam I felt a vibratory sensation, a sting that radiated from outside into my core. By the time I looked up, the girls had scattered. Through the open doors, I saw the diver turn back to wave. Even then I marveled at how she could run backward. “Stuck up!” she yelled, swiveling into a graceful turn before they took off. The doors closed, and I might have fainted but I was still in shock.

For a second I was relieved. Then, as it became clear what had happened, I pulled myself up and became frantic that someone might find me in this state. My books were missing. I’d dropped them on the stairs. I climbed up to the first flight and found them in their strap, nice and neat. Thank you, Sister Luke. And just after that it seemed important to touch my cheek, which I found hot but dry. This allowed me my one moment of pride. I hadn’t cried in front of anyone.

The tears came as I walked home, slow at first then hysterical when I reached the top of the overpass, where the sound was drowned out by the traffic below and no one could see me. I wiped my face against the shoulder of my short-sleeved blouse. Down on the sidewalk again, I turned away from the street, hoping no one I knew would drive past.

I didn’t tell anyone about the girls throwing me down the staircase because I was afraid of what my family would say:
Why
would girls do that? Are
you
sure? Did anyone
see
it? I was beginning to meet tragedy with numbness. A few months later I would face an enormous loss: my beloved Grandpa would die, my strongest advocate within the family. Yet I could hardly manage a tear.

CHAPTER 12

How to Build an Empire

I
loved everything about high school, beginning with the fact that it was across town. Never again would I have to climb the steps to the overpass. Now I had a carpool. The nuns in my high school valued sisterhood over rivalry. I decided that if I stuck close to them, no one would hurt me.

In Sister Anne Marie’s Western civilization class, historical figures became everyday people, so that one day we were dining with La Famiglia de Medici, another we stood on the sidelines at a soiree with Richelieu. A handsome middle-aged woman who might have been Italian or French herself, Sister Anne Marie cut a commanding figure in her shortened black habit. This cardinal was in, she’d whisper, that one out. Who would wear the papal crown of glory? She taught us the dance of power and opened our eyes to the beauty that might come of its by-products, art and architecture—Rococo and Baroque, words that made my mouth water—only to shine the spotlight on the diabolical acts that built those empires.

Sister Anne Marie worked us hard, and the best antidote to her class was the choral room, where Sister Jude actually bounced on every syllable: “fringe on the top ... (clip clop).” Gone were the power-parable slideshows of my elementary education. Gone were the days of blind reverence for athletics. This was a school where humanities thrived: French and literature, art history, glee club!

On a fall morning, as I scrambled to make it to class, the bell sounded, and there were just two of us girls left in the freshman locker hall. I hustled while the other girl whistled, taking her time. Her name was Phoebe. She had rosy cheeks, impish eyes, and a tumble of dark curls. She barely combed her hair, let alone styled it, and to me she was the prettiest girl in our class. Based on my eighth-grade experience with the popular girls, it made me nervous to find myself alone with her. Maybe she had a posse lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce, but she didn’t seem invested enough in popularity to organize a mob. While most girls at this school wore shiny penny loafers, Phoebe wore high-tops with holes in them. While others tucked pens in their blazer pockets, Phoebe tucked a box of Marlboro Reds. She was in my English class, and when the word “insouciance” appeared on our vocabulary list I read the definition and looked right at Phoebe.

Finally ready for class, I slammed my locker shut and found my sister Liz at my back. “Give me that, Looney,” she said, grabbing my purse. According to Liz, it was my job to ask Dad for lunch money. She fished out my wallet and found it empty.

“I told you, I didn’t have time this morning,” I said, and she slapped me. “Get up earlier,” she said, and after tossing my wallet, she left for class.

At first the slap did not even register. I had grown accustomed to the notion that Liz was supposed to reset my clock with a periodic flick of the wrist. My lofty ambitions for leadership in this high school dissipated in a cloud of dust. I might as well have been using talcum powder to launch a cannon. Would the new girl, Phoebe, take this as her cue? Was I never to be anything more than an easy target? At Saint Vivian I’d always looked to the new girls, those who lived outside my neighborhood, for friendship. They seemed to view me differently from the girls I’d known since early childhood. Perhaps it was because they had not known me as a “squiddler,” but they viewed me as their equal. Finally I got up the nerve to face my new classmate, and as I turned I saw Phoebe’s narrowed eyes tracking Liz down the hall.

“Bitch!” she said to Liz’s back. I almost dropped to my knees. She was defending me. “You don’t have to take that,” she said to me.

“You must not have an older sister.”

Phoebe shook her head, dismissing my comment. “What’s your real name?” she asked.

I sighed and admitted in a whisper, “Eileen.”

“Huh?” said Phoebe.

“I lean!”

“Oh,” she said apologetically. Already it felt as if she knew more about me than I knew myself. “‘Looney’s not so bad,” she said. “Where you headed, Looney? We’re too late for class. Wanna catch a smoke instead?”

Part of our school’s progressive identity was its smoking patio. It was the seventies, and while women were celebrating the right to vote or to go to law school, they also celebrated the right to smoke in public. In an instant, my concern over a tardy slip vanished, replaced by a desire to be embraced by a girl as cool as Phoebe.

After that day I followed Phoebe slavishly, taking up cigarettes and making a career goal of becoming cool. We spent countless weekends at her house because it was more hip than mine. Her older siblings might have protested the Vietnam War, whereas mine might have protested the protesters. Phoebe did spend one night at my house, and Mom had only this to say about her: “That Phoebe is up to no good.”

This was fine because I preferred Phoebe’s neighborhood to mine. She lived at the border of Hyde Park and Mount Lookout, an area where parks sprang up every few blocks and the tree-lined streets featured signage with flowerboxes. It was a place that valued the arts and social programs. On the other hand, it had a reputation for being so exclusive it bordered on incestuous. Everyone there knew everyone else from the country club. Many of the parents owned summer homes on Lake Michigan, all within minutes of one another, and they frequently took the party north. When the parents went away for weekends, the children threw gigantic parties with hundreds of kids. Word often reached the parents about their children’s parties through the country club, and when it made its way to my parents, Mom would simply roll her eyes and say, “Well, that
is
the Hyde Park way.”

On a balmy fall evening, Phoebe and I dressed for a party at her cousin’s house down the street from her own. I wore a turtleneck under a cardigan with a snowflake design at the yoke, while Phoebe’s womanly figure beckoned from a man’s sleeveless undershirt, over which she wore a red cashmere cardigan with pearl buttons and holes in the elbows. We walked to what was supposed to be a small gathering. I marveled at the gabled Victorian house. Marijuana smoke wafted overhead. On an expansive front porch, at least two dozen kids leaned into the railing or sat cross-legged on the plank floor. Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” spilled from a speaker in the window, while a curtain swayed in the breeze. Some people gripped the necks of beer bottles while others, stippled across an endless lawn, smoked joints. There were about fifty people, and Phoebe wandered into the crowd, shoeless. Her boyfriend was a senior at X, our shorthand for St. Xavier High School. In his frayed Oxford cloth shirt, he reached up from the grass to hold a joint to her lips. She dropped to her knees, took the joint from his hands, drew on it, and leaned into his waist.

I found myself hugging a post on the porch, alone in the crowd. Soon I heard a familiar voice call my name and quickly spotted a glimmer of strawberry-blond hair in the dark. Liz’s friend Colette waved to me from the lawn. I carefully negotiated the squatters on the staircase in order to reach her. Colette’s pale blue eyes and wide smile always offered me the kind of reassurance that I longed for from an older girl. She was by far the worldliest person I knew. Her father, a famous chef, had come to this city from France. He died when Colette and her sisters were young girls. Naturally inclined to nurture others, Colette advised me on issues such as boys and which classes to take or avoid.

To my surprise, she handed me a beer. I took it, relieved to have found my anchor at the party. She bent forward and whispered, “Someone’s been asking about you,” and backed away to assess my reaction. Her eyes expanded over a dimpled half-grin.

“Oh,” I tried to sound nonchalant. “Who?”

She mentioned a football player. Was she joking? I laughed too loudly.

“Shhh,” she warned, just as a towering young man with braces joined us and introduced himself. I gave Colette a nervous look, afraid to face him, but she helped us through an awkward introduction. And I, in the way that a fourteen-year-old might go from feeling like the most ungainly girl on the planet to Queen of the Universe, rose to the occasion. He flirted with me; I giggled a lot. Colette slipped away.

On the walk home I was so intoxicated by the thought of a boy seeking me out at a party that I showered Phoebe with a frenzy of chatter while she stared blandly, unimpressed. She had known this boy since grade school. He was a bore back then, and she was pretty sure he was still a bore. I came to an abrupt halt. Was it true? He was a bore? Phoebe knew so much more about boys than I did. But he was a quarterback!

“Looney, you need to play it cool,” she said, grinning at the obvious incongruity of those words in the same sentence. Silently I cursed myself, and yet I was aflutter with nervous energy.

By the following weekend I was scheduled to go on my first date, with Colette acting as chauffeur. The night before my date, Liz knocked on my bedroom door. By now she had her own room, Rosa’s old bedroom down the hall. She’d just come from ballet and was still in her leotard and pointe shoes, clutching two empty Coca-Cola bottles in one hand. In the more or less accusatory tone that she generally took with me, she asked, “Looney, do you
know
how to kiss?” She pushed past me and headed for my dresser, where she deposited the bottles and stopped momentarily. When confronted with a mirror, ballerinas are compelled to check the position of every bone, every muscle, so that nothing falls from alignment. As if conversing with herself in the mirror, Liz watched her right arm unfurl—the unraveling of a sacred scroll—to announce her turned-out leg with its arched foot suspended in midair. “Well,” she said, “have you ever been kissed?”

She possessed the physical trappings of a ballerina—slim figure, coordination, comportment—but I liked to think that I had the sensibility and motivation. Ballet demanded the subtle energy necessary to convince an audience of the transformation from girl into rose, the same energy that I was certain must be radiating from my core, if not for all the man-made artifice I had to juggle. Walking in these legs had made me an acrobat on stilts, as I saw it. My every move from an upright position was calculated to the most minuscule clamp in one muscle, to the release of another, and so on. These moves were in my hips, my shoulders, my stomach, even my face. Especially in my face, I thought, as I glanced in the mirror. It never failed to surprise me how starkly my stressed body contrasted with my face. Mine was a choirgirl’s face. And yet, any girl in wooden legs is in pain about two-thirds of every day of her life, pain that varies from low-grade and chronic to walking on broken glass in bare feet or hauling a large man on her hip. Ballerinas know that level of pain, and they make it all look effortless. I decided that, given a pair of legs and two complete hands, I might mesmerize a crowd with a twist of a wrist juxtaposed against a lift of my chin.