My brother stopped and walked back toward me, hands in pockets, eyes fixed at some point behind me. “Lu, don’t you have any friends your own age to hang out with?”
That was cruel. AJ knew I didn’t. Although I did have a plan to take care of that, a strategy for transformation that would make me the most popular girl in the third grade. All summer, I had been reading magazines like Young Miss and Seventeen, trying to figure out the formula for popularity. Clothes were the secret. Clothes and hair and clear skin, but skin was not my problem, unless one counted freckles. Over the summer, I had started growing my hair out, having persuaded our father that I could take care of it. And after studying the magazines, I had decided on a particular back-to-school outfit, which I found later that day in the girls section at Woodward & Lothrop. My father, as promised, came back to the mall with me that evening and paid for the outfit on hold there, along with some other basics—jeans, T-shirts. I wasn’t a tomboy, but I had grown up in a household of men. (Apologies to Teensy, but she never fussed over me. It was easier for her if I wore clothes like my brother’s, even his hand-me-downs in some cases.) I could score a baseball game, but I couldn’t find the business end of a lipstick. I suppose that made my upbringing progressive in a sense, but it was mainly careless and it left me vulnerable to missteps. The outfit I chose that day was disastrous, but no one in my household seemed to recognize that, not even AJ, who always wore the right thing, said the right thing, did the right thing.
Why did he allow me to make such a horrible mistake when it came to my third-grade back-to-school outfit?
Maybe he simply realized it was too late to intervene when I showed up for breakfast a week later in plaid gauchos, a long-sleeved white blouse, a newsboy cap, and a ring-tab-festooned vest I had crocheted that summer under Teensy’s supervision. Had the Annie Hall fad finally trickled down to the junior set? My father immortalized the first day of school with photos, so I don’t have to rely on my memory: I looked like a caddy, circa 1920.
“I’ve heard of high-waters,” one of my classmates said as I took my seat in the second row. (The front row was for brownnosers. I had made that mistake last year.) “But I hope the water never gets knee-high.”
“These are gauchos,” I said. Then, always quick to go on the offensive—if the other kids didn’t appreciate my superiority, I would simply rub their noses in my grandness—“And they cost seventeen dollars.”
To be fair, I don’t think Young Miss or Seventeen had encouraged me to brag about the price of things to gain popularity.
“Isn’t that a kind of a cookie? Gauchos?”
“Or that old guy with a mustache who died last year?”
Randy Nairn bent over at the waist, walked up and down the aisle, pretending to puff a cigar. For the rest of the day, whenever the teacher’s back was turned, kids would point to me and waggle their eyebrows, smoke pretend cigars. Randy, ever bold, even jumped into the aisle a time or two when the teacher’s back was turned and did the loping Groucho walk.
I was dangerously near tears. And I never cried, never. That was one of the things I was famous for as a baby, according to my father. I never cried. Thinking back on this from the vantage point of having had two children, I now have to wonder: Did I really never cry or did my father just not hear me? I’m not saying fathers don’t hear their children cry, only that they may not remember it as a mother would. And he would have been pretty shell-shocked at the time, trying to care for a new baby, alone except for Teensy and AJ.