Diamond in the Rough (4 page)

Yesterday they took away my window,

But I can still see things my way.

Don’t let them tell you what you can do.

Do your own thing, do your own thing today.

To this day it’s one of the only jingles I’ve ever heard that was not only plaintive but in a minor key, surely a misguided notion by someone at Thom McAn, but it worked for me, especially the sentiment that “yesterday they took away my window.” Which was Canada.

I do remember finding something good even in the isolation I felt after we moved to Carbondale that July. I knew absolutely no one, and the prospect of school terrified me, but in those two remaining months of summer, before I was to start school, I discovered how much I loved to be alone in the house. It was the time I could really sing, whether it was along with Lulu on “To Sir with Love,” or the words I made up to the classical pieces I knew on piano. “Minuet in G,” for example, went like this:

When the Minuet in G is played,

People dance and parade.

When the Minuet in G is played,

Watch the people dance and then parade.

What I’ve heard of this song

It is very good,

Good for listening.

When the Minuet in G is played,

People dance and parade.

So I guess even way back then, at least part of me wanted to write songs, even though I hadn’t yet heard my songwriting heroes, the ones who would define the genre I would come to want to inhabit.

I could easily entertain myself for hours while alone at home, just singing and playing and blasting the stereo or the radio. It was always terrific news when the rest of the family would head off to Walmart and I was allowed to have my own, private world of music.

But soon the wretched day came when it was time for me to start school. What had happened to me? I’d managed the transition reasonably well in Canada, but I felt as if only a limited amount of luck had been allotted to me thus far and that with the move to Carbondale it had run out. I had no faith, none, in myself, in my family, in whomever I might meet, in the teachers I would have. The really odd thing is that I was right.

I was to take a bus, another first, to Lincoln Junior High School, a massive brick structure just east of downtown Carbondale that housed the town’s entire seventh and eighth grades. There I had the misfortune of being assigned to the meanest teacher who ever drew breath. He was given to throwing erasers and chalk, barking lessons to us in his pinched voice like the army sergeant he once was, crew cut and all, and reading his paycheck aloud to us every Friday. Mercenary? Pshaw.

There was also corporal punishment at Lincoln, and we had one specific hall monitor, a gigantic hulk of a man who would slowly stroll down the halls, chuckling as he whacked a ruler against his palm. I swear the place felt like a lockdown facility. I was twelve years old, a time when bodies and minds and hearts go through so much, and I was simply not equipped for this passage. The passage had to do with the big, bad world, and I wasn’t ready to be in it—the mean teachers; the ominous, punitive hall monitor; the jaded, cruel kids; the sheer size and breadth of the humanity. I’d attended two small schools in my life, and I had thin skin.

My mother was standing in the garage when I came home that first day. I’d held it in until then, but when I saw her, my mouth opened and no sound came out. I was sobbing so hard I simply put my head on her shoulder and drooled down her back. She was devastated to see me in such misery, yet surely it was something I would get used to and get over. But it wasn’t. I was literally Lincoln Junior High School–phobic. It felt like a cold, vast, prison, and I was a new inmate. I just couldn’t figure out what my crime was. The panic attacks started every morning in homeroom. All I wanted was to go home, back to my music world, back to my mother. I couldn’t take it. I began to feel dizzy and anxious, and I started calling Mom within the first weeks of school to come and get me because I felt sick. We had, I think, a white station wagon, and my little brother, Clay, must have been in the car, since he couldn’t have been more than three then and Mom stayed home with him. How often did I ask her to come get me? Once a week? It seemed like every day. For a while she would do it, and I don’t remember her being mad about it. When I was home, I became addicted to soap operas like
Love Is a Many Splendored Thing
. I read books and played the guitar. I was learning Simon & Garfunkel, specifically “April Come She Will” and “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” and “The Dangling Conversation.”

I was taken to the doctor to figure out what was wrong, but they couldn’t find anything. So eventually my mom felt she had no choice but to refuse to pick me up anymore. It was my job to go to school—something I tell my own daughter—and it was their job to make me go. But once it became a battle, we were all screwed. Maybe I could have been homeschooled for a time. Or maybe a deal could have been struck whereby I would go to Lincoln for part of the day but not all. But there was simply no insight into my heart except to regard me as rebellious. Later my mother told me, “We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t take anything away from you except television, because you had no friends and never went anywhere,” the implication being that punitive measures were the natural course of action, and at that time I suppose they were. I was in over my head, and so were my parents.

I got creative, holding a thermometer against a lightbulb to feign fever. That wore itself out, too, and I knew that if I were to keep avoiding school, I’d have to up the ante. I would ask a teacher if I could use the bathroom, excuse myself, and just leave the building. I didn’t play hooky to do something fun. I would have preferred to be home with my mother. I’d wander the streets of Carbondale for a few hours and at around three-thirty I’d go home, where no one was the wiser until the school started calling there when I’d go missing. Sometimes I would leave school between periods and not go home at all until after dark, when I would lurk around the house until one of my parents came out and found me. After that I was driven to school every morning, where the staff was instructed to keep an eye on me at all times. I still found ways to get out.

One of my favorite places to go was the strip mall near our house. There was a Santa Claus shack stored in the back alley, behind the supermarket. The Santa shack was a little building where Santa would take up residence in front of the grocery store at Christmastime, but it was kept out in back the rest of the year. I would go to the store, buy a bag of caramels and a crossword-puzzle book, head for the alley, and hang out in the Santa shack, having put on several layers of clothes, given that it was winter, and resembling nothing so much as a twelve-year-old homeless girl. I might just as well have had a grocery cart loaded with empty cans. But I did have a home.

I suppose the worry to my parents was at a breaking point. In fact, I recently learned that a photo of me from that year, a black-and-white portrait that was taken by a professional, was arranged for the express purpose of identifying me should I really run away, or worse.

Me at twelve—photo taken in case I ran away—1968

The pinnacle of this situation occurred that winter, after I’d played out every trick, both at home and at school. Either Mother or Dad was driving me to school in the mornings now to ensure a safe delivery. So one day I got up before anyone else in the house, while it was still dark, and left. Around the side of the house was the pop-up camper trailer we used to take on vacations. It was all folded up for the winter, but there was still a small door you could open to crawl into. I let myself into the cramped space between the two benches and in front of the cupboards inside the trailer. I locked the door from within, and I stayed there. It was cold and dark and tiny, and it was better than going to school. Anything was better than going to school. I heard footsteps in the crunchy snow as my dad came out to look for me. He even tried the door on the camper, but I had locked it, and he didn’t pursue that idea.

I stayed and stayed. I stayed so long that I peed on myself. I was afraid to get out, because I knew I’d have been made to go to school. A war had begun, and neither my parents nor I had figured on my being so formidable an opponent. Finally I estimated that enough time had elapsed and that school must be over. I crawled out of the camper, my legs hardly able to stand, and saw that the sun was heading west. So it was afternoon, and I’d dodged another day at school. I began my walk to the Santa shack, but a neighbor saw me, put me in her car, and brought me back home. My mother was there, and so was my father. When he saw me, he got that look, the dark scowl that meant he was extremely displeased and that most probably sparks would fly. And sure enough, Dad grabbed me by the arm and began to drag me to the car. It was only two-thirty. There was still an hour of school left, and he wanted to make sure I got there. But my mother stopped him. Did she smell the urine on my clothes? She stopped him and gave me something to eat.

My hiding place, 1966

It’s ironic that my father was studying psychology during this time and didn’t see what was happening to me, but you have to understand he was a Skinner man. It was all about behavior and positive and negative reinforcement, usually with M&M’s as I recall. Clearly what I was doing did not fall neatly under the heading of behavior that should be positively reinforced. No M&M’s for me. My father decided the only way to deal with me was to reverse the lock on my bedroom door and nail my windows shut when I went to bed at night. He would let me out in the morning and drive me to school, where he and my mother would take turns waiting outside each of my classrooms and walking me to the next one.

Given their strict midwestern upbringing, and what had to have been the limitations of their youth, my parents didn’t have a lot of resources available to them regarding a child like me. Nowadays we’ve got kid shrinks galore and private schools and Ritalin, but back then it came down to a battle of wills. Not giving up without a fight became my fallback position, even after I was long gone from my parents’ jurisdiction.

My parents did send me to a therapist, but of him I recall very little. What seemed to help the most was my father’s telling me that if I would sew my own clothes, he would buy me all the fabric I wanted. I’d never had all of anything I ever wanted before, and I loved clothes—I still love clothes. And thanks to Mom, I could sew. I’d watch the clock at school as the day wore on, counting the minutes until three-thirty, when Mom would take me to the fabric store and I could indulge myself. I got into a matching-bolero-and-skirt phase, and I bought tweedy wools and lawn stripes and would work up in my mother’s sewing room after school as the winter days grew darker, until I was called down to dinner.

I fell in with some girls at school—Gwen Geyer, Gail Parrish, and Peggy Cochran. They thought I was strange but befriended me anyway. I was the kid who didn’t want to go to school, whose parents had to accompany her to class. But between therapy and the sewing and the girls, I began to be able to tolerate Lincoln Junior High. I was allowed to stop going to therapy. It was enough that I was sent. There would be plenty more to come anyway.

In the spring, with all the determination I could muster, I managed a perfect attendance record, wearing the bright paisley peasant dresses I’d made during that season in hell. The homeless girl was home again, at least for a while.

3

She Opened a Book