The next morning I put on pants (even though I didn’t technically have to because I was in my own home), sat down with my new books at my “desk” (the kitchen table we fed the cats on), and got ready to rock my brain!
Just to be clear, my mom did make an actual effort to start our day at 9:00 a.m. sharp and do schoolwork until about 1:00 p.m., before “do whatever you want, kids” time. This lasted for maybe a week. With no one to supervise any of us, slowly but surely, the family wake-up time slid to a nebulous “midmorning.” After a few months, we’d miss all studying before lunchtime because we ate out every day (eating at home was for oppressing housewives), and the restaurants filled up around one, so it was better to leave the house at noon to beat the work crowd. And if we got up around 10:30, that meant . . . I mean, showering is a thing that takes time, guys.
Any structure in our lives disintegrated. “Can the doodles in the margins of my geology chapter count as art class? Really? Thanks, Mom!” Schooling became “We’ll get to it later!” around other, more important things, like grocery shopping and going to see the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings. Eventually, my brother and I were on our own. No rules, no tests, and no pesky governmental supervision for children who had recently relocated and weren’t on official census lists.
I don’t mean to imply that Mom was completely hands-off with our educations. She did stuff. When she got interested in something, she’d say, “Let’s go learn about history!” and we’d jump in the car and drive around the state for a few days visiting all the Civil War memorial sites. (It’s super fun to roll down a grassy hill where thousands of Confederate bodies are buried.) She’d also yell “Study!” a lot from her bedroom while watching The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, and during the first Iraq war she made us start learning Arabic because, “You never know what will happen.”
There was, however, one big rule that was enforced during our free-for-all education: We were expected to read. Constantly. All day, every day. Whatever we wanted at the library, the used bookshop, adult or kid section, anything that didn’t have nudity or Stephen King on the cover, we could read.
Naturally, I became obsessed with detective pulp fiction. Perry Mason was my favorite. Not the actor who played him in the TV show, Raymond Burr. I hated him; he was bulky, and his skull looked creepy underneath his skin. No, my Perry Mason was taller and debonair, like Cary Grant, or my second love, David Hasselhoff. I collected all but one of the Perry Mason books (The Case of the Singing Skirt eluded me; it was my collection’s white whale), and I arranged all eighty-one of them by publishing chronology on a makeshift bookshelf in the back of my closet. Because of their influence, my life’s dream became clear: to enter the glamorous profession of “secretary,” like Perry’s loyal companion, Della Street. Either that or “moll”—whatever that job entailed.
I was also expected to work hard on math, for my grandpa. Since he was a physicist, he would quiz me on equations when we’d go back to Alabama for our monthly visits. My mom liked to impress him. And I did, too, because he always gave me hard candy when I got something right.
“Tell me the Pythagorean theorem.”
“A squared plus B squared equals C squared?”
“That’s my girl! Now have a Werther’s and scoot to the kitchen. Hee Haw’s on.”
According to my mom, there was a pressing urgency for me to learn as much math as I could. An uncredited study she read once said, quote, “Girls become really stupid in science after they get their period, so you’d better learn as much as possible before that happens.” I had such anxiety about this “clearly proven” biological fact that I was studying calculus by the age of twelve. When I finally got my period, I cried, not because I was growing up, but because I had just learned derivatives and really enjoyed doing them. I was scared that estrogen would wipe the ability to do them from my brain.
I guess at a certain point, my dad expressed concern or something about our education. My brother and I didn’t see what the fuss was. I mean, we were FINE with doing whatever we wanted and not being forced to “study” like the rest of the world’s plebes. But to add structure to our lives, my mom shifted her focus, like any smart businessperson, to outsourcing. Our lives became nothing but lessons.
Ballet, tap, jazz dance, youth orchestra, martial arts, watercolor at the local community college (me and a bunch of eighty-year-olds rockin’ the stand of maple trees!), cross-stitch, poise class (held in the back of a department store, for REAL!), my mom basically trained me to become a geisha. With dance lessons alone, I went to class at least three hours a day. Big calves, you are mine for life. So even though it was weird and thoroughly uncomprehensive, my brother and I got an education. Of a sort.
Here’s an average daily schedule to give you some perspective about a weekday in my eight-to sixteen-year-old life: