At the
age of ten, I was all wire and bone. Braces on my teeth, thick metal-framed
glasses magnifying eyes already too big for my anxious little face, the rest of
me just fragile twig-limbs held together with skin and nerves.
I was trying hard to grow up in a tiny backwater town in rural Maine,
where the worst, the absolute worst, insult you could fling at somebody was
“Ya think yah pretty smart, don’t ya?” And there I was, with test scores
that caused teachers to abruptly stop talking when I walked by, and a freakish
ability to not only write with either hand, but to write backwards and upside
down with either hand, and to read college textbooks - forward, backward or
upside down - with complete understanding and eerie, 100% recall. In a town full
of slow-talking farmers who could spend days discussing the new truck (which
would inevitably be a newer model of the old truck), I was an alien, and a
monster. My parents and teachers, good Yankee farmer stock all, were bewildered
by my presence, and I carried with me everywhere a vague, free-floating sense of
guilt, knowing that on some level my very existence was an affront to everything
they believed about equality and fair play.
And then that year, the year I was ten, all my guilt came home to roost.
It came in the form of Mrs. Herrick, a big horsey woman with huge square white
teeth, teeth startlingly like Chicklets gum.
Gum which, I hastened to assure myself, and sometimes, unfortunately,
anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity, I would never chew in school.
Three days a week, at 1:00, Mrs. Herrick would appear in my homeroom door like
Vengeance herself, beckoning me with crooked finger, and I would go with her to
a dusty, airless closet off the library, where I would study alone, under her
watchful eye. At the end of each day, she would interrogate me about what I had
learned, and more terrifyingly, about how I spent my days when not in school.
I knew that there must be some answer I could give her, some secret code,
that would make her go away and leave me alone. Something all the other kids
knew, because she only came for me. But I didn’t know what to say, and so I
stuttered, and twitched, and was finally released with a sigh from Mrs. Herrick
and an admonition to “Be quiet in class.”
And so I sat, trying with all my might to be quieter, somehow, than I already
was. To breathe more shallowly, to take up less space, to shrink down until I
would finally become as small as a mouse and could creep away unnoticed. I was
only ten, and despite all of my foolishly excessive analytical skills, on some
level I still believed in Tinkerbell, and that I really could turn into a mouse
if only I tried hard enough. But I failed to become a mouse, just as I failed,
each afternoon, to come up with the magic answer that would make me just like
the other kids.
It wasn’t until a decade later, the year I was twenty, that my mother would
make a casual comment about “that special teacher for advanced students that
came three days a week” and I would understand that my afternoons spent
cowering in that cramped closet were supposed to have been a gift.
