Ms. Creant

I have always been bad. It is not something I chose for myself, or can help, it is just the way things are. I am bad to the bone. When I was five, my mother brought home a white teddy bear from the A&P. “It’s a honey bear,” she chirped. I loathed it on sight. I liked brown teddy bears, so when Mary Shower, a sly shyster of a seven year old, offered to trade me her brown bear for it, I handed it over. She promised to go to her house and get the brown one, but she didn’t. When I reminded her, she pushed me down in the dirt and kicked me several times. Then she stuffed my honey bear under her arm and went to play with other children.

When I got home, my mother asked me where my new honey bear was. I told her that I had traded it to Mary Shower for her brown bear but that Mary didn’t give me her brown bear and my mother fell apart. “I got that honey bear for you,” she said, and two deep vertical lines appeared between her perfectly shaped brows. “I didn’t pay a whole dollar for that honey bear so you could give it away.” “But I didn’t give it away, I traded it,” I told her. It seemed important to set the record straight. After my father spanked me and my mother cried for awhile, I was sent to my room without any dinner. I felt like an arch criminal for a very long time.

That year, my friend Mary Ann and I changed our names to Dorothy and Patricia, such beautiful names, we assured each other, far more exotic and fancy than our own. She became Patricia and I told my mother that henceforth I would answer only to Dorothy. She discovered that I was quite serious when she called me home to dinner.

“Susan,” she yelled. “Su-san! Come in now.” Nothing happened. “S-U-S-A-N !!” she screamed. “It’s dinner time.” “I’m Dorothy,” I screamed back from the crotch of the sapling magnolia tree which could barely hold my weight. My mother was mortified because all the neighbors knew that her daughter was named Susan. Since she cared about things like that, she couldn’t very well call me Dorothy; they’d all think she’d gone wacko. She upped the decibel level. “SUSAN R------ C---!” she shouted in her overdrive voice. I stayed in my tree. This went on for weeks. I would like to say that I got to miss a lot of lousy dinners but my parents were really big on eating. Every night I was dragged inside and plunked down at table, unrepentant. Eventually I got tired of this and told them my name was Patricia.

My secret friend Gwendolyn walked partway to school with me every day. Incredibly, she said that she was 24 years old although she was shorter than I was at six. She had a large head with a long nose that nearly touched her pointed chin, and she looked elderly. The other kids called her "A Dwarf." “I love Frank Snotrag,” she confided, dancing clumsily on her short legs while she hugged herself. "You mean Sinatra," I offered. "That's what I said, Snotrag," she replied indignantly. I thought that somebody must be having fun at Gwendolyn’s expense but I never told anyone the things she said. It was obvious that she had more than enough trouble in her life already.

She boosted me up a maple tree to pick green pods that we split in half with our fingernails so they would stick to our noses. We called them “pollynoses.” My teacher ordered me to throw mine away immediately but Gwendolyn got to wear hers all day because she didn’t have to go to school. I would gladly have traded places with her. School was boring, and there was a whole world of adventure in the woods, and in books, which I longed to explore.

In school we were studying Genghis Khan and the Mongrel Hordes, thousands of mutt dogs racing through ancient cities with their tongues out, lifting their legs on everything. Contemplating the effects of this was truly astounding. I found a book called The Story of a Hundred Operas in our bookcase and read all of them. The most romantic was Aida, who loved her boyfriend so much that as he was sealed into his tomb alive, she jumped in to die with him. Years later, I got to relive this fantasy when I married my first husband. The marriage ended due to a lack of necrophilia on my part.

Most adult books seemed to feature heroines who fainted as soon as things got mudgy. Such frailty was presented as proof of how delicate they were, veritable flowers of femininity. This would not be easy. We didn't even have the right kind of furniture. I practiced fainting in my room, careful to fall on soft pillows I’d arranged on the floor. My dog watched with keen interest from the bed, awaiting her chance to jump me. She had no sense of how serious an endeavor this was. Or how much I had riding on it. Since I had never really fainted, I felt inadequate and unfeminine. I wondered what would become of me when I grew up and didn’t flower; not being feminine enough to faint was a source of private embarrassment for a very long time.

Meanwhile, there was often a rousing game of hide-and-go-seek going on outside, and everybody could play. We ran and hid as if our lives depended on it while the kid who was “it” yelled, “Allee allee infree!!” and searched us out amid squealing and pushing as we tried to get back to "Home free. Home free all!!" After several rounds, we couldn’t stand the tension anymore and we all collapsed on somebody’s lawn, drained and content.

It was summer.