Girlfriends

When I was six, I had my very first best friend.  Myrth was quiet and funny, with fair skin and brown eyes.  I was fascinated by her hair, which she always wore in ringlets.  Every day I watched the dance of those light brown spirals that dangled from the top of her head down past her narrow shoulders.  They bobbed when she moved around our first grade classroom, and when she ran across the playground they bounced like ping pong balls on an episode of Captain Kangaroo.  I longed to cup one into the palm of my hand and feel it's soft curve, or gently tug the bottom of one and watch it boing back into place.  Out of respect for Myrth, I did neither.

I eventually talked Mom into curling my hair into ringlets.  With the bristly pink curlers snapped into my clean, damp hair, I went to bed full of excitement and anticipation.  Would my friends recognize me with my new hairdo?  I barely slept that night, imagining how it would feel with those pretty sausages wiggling every time I moved my head.  How fun it would be to share hairstyles with Myrth.  The next morning Mom brushed and fiddled and turned the locks around her fingers, but my hair wouldn't cooperate.  "Oh well, I guess your hair is too straight," she said, eventually brushing my hair into a ponytail.

After that, my longing for ringlets faded, most likely because it wasn't Myrth's ringlets I was enamored with, it was Myrth.  At age six, she was my very first friend and I was learning what it felt like to have someone special in my life who was separate from, and unknown to my family.  She wasn't the daughter of one of my mom's friends and she wasn't a cousin, or a neighbor.  She was someone I had met and made friends with all on my own.  I loved that there was another little girl who was just like me but with different hair and different clothes, from another neighborhood, and another family.  I looked forward to school every day where we would giggle and play together at recess.  I was special to her and she was special to me.  Even with boring hair, life was good.

My Best Friend's Hands

          When I was in first grade I had my first best friend.  Myrth had fair skin, brown eyes, and light brown hair worn in long bouncy ringlets.  I spent my six year old school days with Myrth, sitting in the cool hallway playing Barbies or jacks, or running to the playground to jump rope or take a turn on the swings.  At lunch we sat together on wooden benches, talking and laughing while eating bologna sandwiches from wax paper bags.  Life was good.
          In addition to her ringlets, I was fascinated with Myrth's hands.  Her skin was so fair that the backs of her hands were often mottled with a faint lacy pattern.  I used to sneak peeks during the cool morning recesses and then compare them to my own tanned hands.  I wondered why mine never had the same pink pattern.
          At home one night after going to bed I woke up with a horrible stomach ache.  I began to cry and then got sick.  Mom heard me and helped me into the bathroom.  Daddy asked what he could do to help and Mom told him to hold my hand while she went in to clean up my bed.  Daddy reached for my hand resting on the toilet seat and that's when I noticed.  My hands had the same delicate pattern that I had occasionally seen on Myrth's.  I was sick but I was also thrilled.

Barbie, Ken and Sex Ed.

          In elementary school I had a best friend named Myrth.  "It means laughter," she told me.  "My big sister's name means beautiful," she added.  Her sister's name was Linda.  Myrth and Linda lived with their parents on Friends Avenue near the downtown area of our community.  I had always wanted Linda and my older sister to become friends too, daydreaming of the tidy arrangement that would make, but they never did.
          One day, Myrth came over to my house for the afternoon and we decided to play with our Barbies.  We played on the grass in our sunny backyard, dressing the dolls in several outfits and fussing with their hair, leaving our Ken and Midge dolls to fend for themselves.  After playing for a while, I suggested that Ken come over to Barbie's house for a sleepover.  Myrth covered her mouth in shock.  "Ken and Barbie can't sleep together!" she gasped and she leaned in closer.  "That's how babies are made," she whispered in my ear.
          Thanks to my older siblings, I'd already had some inkling of how babies were made but this was news.  I didn't know that it could also happen when a couple slept in the same bed.  I was embarrassed at my ignorance and at my inappropriate suggestion, and made Myrth promise that she wouldn't tell anyone.  For the next few years, I thought there were two ways babies were made:  1. man and woman having sex, and 2. man and woman sleeping in the same bed.
          After that sunny afternoon and all through my "health" classes as I learned about human sexuality, nothing ever disproved Myrth's theory.  By the end of my freshman year in high school I was determined to find out the truth.  As much as I didn't want to, I knocked on Mom's bedroom door one night and popped the question.  "Do two people have to have sex for a woman to get pregnant, or can a woman get pregnant just by sleeping in the same bed with a man?"  I wanted to make Mom promise not to tell anyone, like I had made Myrth promise all those years ago, but I felt ignorant and embarrassed, and really just wanted to get out of there.
          Mom set me straight and then asked, "Do you have any other questions?"
          Hell no! I was thinking to myself as I left, silently closing the door behind me.

Growing Pains

Okay, no one loves junior high school, with one exception.  I'll call that exception, 'Anna'.  Anna came home from seventh grade one day and said (and I am not making this up), "Mom.  I just love junior high."  But she is the exception to the rule.

Before junior high, life made sense.  I wore clean clothes, my hair was always combed (seriously, in an old photo taken while camping at Yellowstone, my hair was braided neatly and I wore a headband that matched my shirt).  We lived in a pretty blue house with a swimming pool.  We were boy scouts and girl scouts.  We went on vacation every summer.  My father worked relatively close to home and my mother was a teacher.

I was a good girl and felt sure that my teachers, neighbors, aunts, uncles and grandparents loved me. I did well in school with minimal effort and I won foot races and spelling bees.  When I got into trouble it was for mild misbehavior (tattling, not sharing, answering back).  If something or someone upset me, I could easily find an adult to give me sympathy along with a warm hug and like a Band-aid on a skinned knee, I felt better.  Life was good.

Then I entered seventh grade and everything changed.  My parents were divorced and we'd moved to a smaller house in a different neighborhood.  It was a nice house and a nice neighborhood, but it was different.  Suddenly my clothes didn't fit without the benefit of safety pins.  I was too tall and too thin to wear anything off the rack.  Mom purchased an enormous box of Wate-On and I was expected to choke down six of the dry, chalky tablets every day.  I wore braces that always seemed to have food stuck in them and I began to get pimples.

Now school didn't work the way it was supposed to work.  I understood little of what the math teacher was saying (base 12? slide rules?).  I couldn't get my locker open and was always late to class.  For the first time in my life, I had teachers who seemed annoyed with me.  Friends I had had all through elementary school were different.  They had grown up over the summer, dressing in a way that was foreign to me.  I was still wearing tennis shoes and knee socks but they were wearing kitten heels and stockings.

I had lived a charmed life and without warning, I had fallen from grace.  The contrast was stunning.  I lost confidence in myself and spent most of my time playing catch up.  In those days I blamed it on my parents' divorce, but I now I know it wasn't the divorce.  It was adolescence and I wasn't alone.

The Life of Tracy

I walked into my seventh grade science class and slipped into my chair, plopping my books on my desk.  As I leaned onto my elbows and put my chin in my hands, Tracy walked into the room.  She smoothed the back of her dress with her hand as she sat in her chair.  She smiled as she said, "Hi" to the girl in the desk next to hers.  I ran my tongue across my prickly braces.  Had I remembered to brush my teeth this morning?

The teacher took roll and then asked a student to collect last night's homework.  That was the first time I had given my homework any thought since class the day before.  I heard the smart, "snap" and watched Tracy use the silver end tabs to open the rings of her binder.  She removed her homework, refastened the rings and handed the paper to the student collecting homework.  When he came to me, I shook my head and began picking dirt out from under three of my fingernails.

I shifted in my chair to relieve the slight poke I felt in my side caused by the safety pin in my waistband holding up my skirt.  I checked out Tracy's pastel plaid dress and modest white sandals.  I pushed my feet further under my chair.  I decided I would wash the Keds I was wearing when I got home.

I rested my chin on top of my two stacked fists and peeked over at Tracy.  She sat with her back straight, her hands folded neatly on her books.  She crossed her ankles and tucked her feet to one side.  She had a dark blonde page boy that never flipped up, but always curled under.  I pushed out my lower lip and blew the bangs out of my eyes and thought I might try to trim them after my shower this evening, after I washed my Keds.

I was in seventh grade over forty five years ago, yet I still think about Tracy from time to time.  Whenever I have a clean house, folded laundry, completed lesson plans, gas in the car and dinner in the oven I think I am living the life of Tracy, and I like it.  Other days I spend hours in my backyard drinking cosmos and working crossword puzzles, while spider webs, weeds, and dust bunnies collect all around me.  I am a work in progress, and after all, Tracy had a head start.