Fear of the Unknown: Stories I Thought I Knew
I’m 45, and I am driving a carpool of sixth grade girls to and from their musical theater class. They’re loud! They’re funny! And they’re disgusting, burping and farting loudly and purposefully, then yelling “You ate the burp!” and dissolving into snorting, screeching laughter. “You ate the fart!” This, alternating with loudly singing along with the radio, or with the Hamilton cast recording that’s so often on around my family now. They’re in sixth grade, which means middle school, just across the street from their elementary but miles away in its meaning. It’s not just the middle school, it’s Middle School, subject of so many Disney Channel shows, the grade nobody claims to want to teach.
I tell them what I remember from sixth grade: my dress for the sixth grade dance, what songs I sang in middle school choir, my Duran Duran poster, silly things I remember about the teachers. Pretty soon they want my stories every time we drive home, and I indulge them. I tell about the time my slip (we wore slips!) popped its elastic and fell to my feet as I climbed the stairs. About the Spanish teacher I had who pelted the class with Nerf balls. About the P.E. teacher whose voice I still hear anytime I run: “Keep on shufflin’! Keep on shufflin’, girls!” she called to the group in the back where I placed myself with others who had taken on the challenge of getting as little actual exercise as possible (looking back, I know I could have outrun all but the sportiest girls in my grade; why did I walk in the back?). The swimsuits we had to wear in the school pool, which rarely fit, looked like 1970s tennis dresses, were “Gator green,” and were made of some non-lycra material that sagged like a wet towel draped between two chairs. The high diving board, and the rare chance to be pretty great at something in P.E. since it was so like gymnastics.
The girls love these stories. They ask for my middle school stories like littles ask for bedtime stories, and the funnier the better. I am happy to tell them.
And then, I start to run out.
At first, it’s me choosing which stories to steer away from, like the swim teacher who urged me to try diving. He kept me after class to make his case, told me how well my skills would transfer over from gymnastics. He later turned out to be a pedophile, but he didn’t get me; my gymnastics coach already had done so the year before.
More often, though, I start telling a story because it’s so funny… and then, it isn’t. How I had a party in seventh grade to which I invited boys and girls, but only two people came and we just hung out in the yard. I was just about to explain how I hadn’t known there was another party the same night, when the end of the sentence came and nobody had told me. I had made invitations, paper ones homemade with markers, and handed them out in the Texas history class (taught by a teacher who looked exactly like Dr. Red Duke, from local TV news). I made these paper party invitations, I decorated them with smiley faces and god knows what, and I actually walked up to kids I never talked to outside of assignments and handed them these dorky, little-kid handwritten invitations— like 40 of them. The more I narrate this to the girls in the backseat, the more embarrassed, then ashamed, I become. OOHH. THAT was what it was like. I’m surprised by this new perception. Of course the kids I invited didn’t come, and of course I hadn’t known about the other party. That was because I hadn’t been invited to it, and only now am I realizing that was on purpose.
Oh my god, did the two girls who did come know? Those loyal, kind girls who never really mentioned aloud how nobody else was there, who just listened to cassettes out on my porch and shared some chips and soda? They must have seen what was happening. Were they there because they pitied me? Or to support me? Or both? It had been 30+ years since that non-party night, and I hadn’t ever seen, not really, just how bad it was. How clueless I was. They had to have known. I wish I could remember which girls it was who came over and stayed. Their faces are blurred out in my memory.
I end the party story quickly and laughed it off, but in the months that follow, as my daughter continues up the ramp into adolescence, my own memory will show me more and more of my own. Almost none of it looks like I perceived it then. I feel like I’m remembering, but simultaneously I’m also hearing a voiceover explaining to me what is happening onscreen like one of those audio-descriptions they have for blind people at a theater. Everything in the description is more detailed than what I had seen for myself.
There was when I got my period, for example. What I knew about periods, I knew from school, and a little from books. But not much! I had read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret multiple times in elementary school, and I remember reading quizzically about her pink sanitary belt and pads and her backache “lower down,” but I was not so puzzled that I had any further questions about the book. I didn’t know periods meant blood. It didn’t say that in the book, or if it did, I skipped it every time. By the time my first period came, I did know about the blood, and I had seen pads in my mom’s bathroom cabinet. She had tampons there too, but I didn’t make the connection till later what those were for. When I bled the first time, I swiped a pad, and then I just used washcloths from the closet, rinsing them out and hanging them to dry on the tub faucet in the bathroom I shared with my sister, seven years younger. Next time, I rode my bike to the Eckerd’s drugstore, outside our little suburban development just past the golf course, and bought myself some pads.
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want go to my mom. I just didn’t. I can see, now that I am also someone’s mother, how much it must have hurt her later on, when she found the stained washcloths and the wastebasket full of Kleenex. She approached me, I fessed up, and she bought the pads from then on.
Somewhere around that time, the school choir had a pool party at someone’s house not far from mine. On my period and still a pads-only girl, I suited up in my favorite swimsuit (a pastel floral one-piece) and white shorts. I know what you’re thinking, and no, I didn’t bleed through the shorts. That happened to me a ton, like it does to most girls, and I’ll admit I was at college before I learned that it was pretty common. I thought I was just extra bad at being prepared. No, that didn’t happen at the pool party, but what did happen was me standing around eating cookies and sipping lemonade with my teacher and a few moms who were there to help out, saying “no, thanks, I just don’t really feel like swimming.” In Houston, Texas. Where the last few months of the school year are 80 degrees and up. Yeah.
Also, the shorts weren’t a cool Spandex kind one might plausibly wear into a pool; they were linen, with rolled cuffs and a zipper fly and pleats. So, when I finally got so hot I decided to swim after all and wore my shorts into the pool, it can’t have looked good.
It also can’t have looked good after my swim, when I first stood around the pool deck drip-drying, with a huge, waterlogged pad inside my somewhat-see-through swimsuit inside my very-see-through shorts. Or when I went into their guest bathroom “to change,” but I hadn’t brought dry underwear or an extra pad, so I ended up just putting the wet suit and shorts back on, filling the crotch with a carefully constructed toilet paper substitute. Yeah, I am seeing it pretty much how you’re seeing it. I know.
Of course, in those days I also put on a leotard three or four days a week to spend three hours in the gym, and the pad (not tampon) inside my underwear (not trunks, which were basically just expensive underwear for under leotards, but I didn’t know how to get any trunks) must have been obvious to everyone at the gym too. Pads in the mid-80s weren’t the slim ones of today with their pocket-sized pink wrappers. I went on with pads for at least a year before I swiped a tampon from my mom’s bathroom, hid in my closet, unfolded the little pamphlet with its anatomical diagrams and toxic shock syndrome warnings, and figured it out. All the while, I was bleeding into pads while bending, flipping, straddling the balance beam, doing splits in a handstand.
Nobody mentioned that either. Not kids, not those moms at the pool, not my teachers or coaches.
At 45 years old driving the carpool, I eventually tell the merrily burping, farting girls I’m all out of stories. At 50, writing this book now, I get the feeling I’ll never be done remembering, cringing, and wondering “what else did people see and understand that I didn’t?” I was way, way more unaware of my own presentation and of others’ thoughts than I knew.
Like when a handsome, popular boy asked me to a dance. Was it a joke? Probably. I was spared finding out; he broke the date before the night of the dance came.
Like when my coach said I was special, and I believed it?
Or when teachers said I was smart, and I believed it?
Like anytime I thought I had done well, or thought I had something important to say, or thought I was liked, or thought someone was interested. Was I wrong?
Even now, as I write, I feel a mental glance over the shoulder. What am I writing now that you understand but that I may still be blind to?
Maybe it my age(soon 73) but I’ve not had many childhood memories. Your honesty, transparency and vulnerability blow me away! Love you my friend and you inspire me.