Holly in Love (2 page)

Or it may just be that every day starts out with homeroom, and homeroom is so ghastly it taints my entire morning. When your morning is shot, it tends to spoil the afternoon as well.

You see, this year there are fourteen more students in the high school than the building was intended to accommodate. I am told that the administration gave considerable thought to the problem of what to do with the extra fourteen when assigning homeroom, that one time of the day when all 846 of us have to sit down at the same time.

Well, 832 kids got classrooms with neat stuff like windows, blackboards, chairs, and clocks.

Fourteen of us got assigned to the basement.

Last year, there was this ugly little hole in the wall down in the basement that was used to store gymnastics mats and vaulting horses. This year, the ugly little hole in the wall stores us.

Every morning when I walk into that place, I feel like a convict up for a twenty-year stretch. Gray linoleum floors. Gray cement-block walls. Bare bulbs hanging from a gray, water-stained ceiling.

Once—only once—I complained to my father.

“Holly,” he said. (He was fresh from a minister’s conference on Hunger Throughout the World, and I should have known better.) “In Latin America, the average length of schooling is 1.9 years. In Bangladesh, they use pieces of cardboard for blankets. In Guatemala, some of the Indians live in huts made of cornstalks.”

“It’s a beautiful homeroom,” I told him. “I love it.”

It’s hard to complain in my house.

Once when I was fed up with cafeteria food and sick of making sandwiches to carry, I complained. My father said that the number of people suffering from severe malnutrition in the world is estimated at 500 million and to eat my peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich and like it.

So I eat my peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich and like it, but nevertheless, in a very private complaint not to be forwarded to my father, school this year is
lousy
.

Starting with homeroom.

Now, my father feels I should never even
think
a thing like this, let alone
say
it, because every person on earth has fine qualities and we must love our neighbors, but the fact is that I am the only decent person in that homeroom. It’s true. The other thirteen are complete and total duds.

There’s Ted Zaweicki. A fat old thing with a brain like the rest of his lard. Impenetrable.

And Ron White, whose personal habits are so awful that when I listed them for my mother she said I had a disgusting imagination.

And Pete Stein, who is a winter sports freak and can’t utter a complete sentence without the word
snow
. He just sits there massaging his muscles and talking about whether synthetics or wools keep your legs warmer.

(“Now wait a minute,” said Kate. “You can’t say a homeroom with Pete Stein in it is nothing but duds. Pete Stein is wonderful. You even voted for him for class president.” This was true. I also thought he made a fine goalie for the hockey team, and I had admired through the years all the many cups and trophies Stein had won. I liked him in the way one likes a huge, bumbling mongrel the neighbors own. But Stein was an athlete. A fine breed, excellent for TV entertainment on slow Sunday afternoons, but not the sort with whom I wish to strike up intimate friendships.)

The only other girl in the homeroom is Hope Martin. Hope is constructed on the cigarette principle: thin, sleek, and dangerous to my health. Hope has a designer label attached to everything she wears, carries, or smells of. Since my father does not allow designer labels in our house (“If God had meant for your jeans to have somebody else’s name on them…”), I never know for sure whether I’m envious of Hope’s labels or if I despise them. At least I always have something to read in homeroom.

“Have any dates this weekend, Hollyberry?” said Hope. She knew perfectly well I had not, and she just wanted to expose this fact to the rest of the homeroom. She used my nickname in the most offensive, provoking way possible.

“No,” I said. “I studied my Spanish.” The one subject in which I always get 100 is Spanish. It’s because I’m very highly motivated. I figure when I move to that hot climate, Spanish will be extremely useful.

Hope chose to ignore the remark about my Spanish and went back to the topic of dates. “I did,” she said, and she told us about them. Hope used to refer to her male admirers as if a pocket calculator could not possibly keep track of them all, but now she is dating a college junior and has discarded all the children with whom she used to associate. “Grey,” said Hope, repeating his name lovingly. I don’t know whether Grey is his first name or his last or whether the man has only one, and I refuse to exhibit any interest in him, so probably I’ll never know. “Doesn’t it sound suave and well-bred?” said Hope. “So adult. Just like Grey himself.”

You can see that dating a college man has not done a lot for Hope’s basic personality. Now she walks into high school as if she’s just visiting, especially in this homeroom of rejects. By now the only thing the rest of us hope when listening to her is that she’ll go away.

Saying “Hollyberry” had sparked the class’s attention. My name has been the focus of jokes since nursery school. A minister’s daughter named Holly Carroll should expect that kind of thing—Christmas Carol, Hymnbook Hannah, and Hollyberry are among the nicer variations I have endured. Everybody but the clods in this homeroom got bored with name-teasing me years ago; here, it’s still a major source of entertainment.

“Hey,” said Zaweicki, “you know, if Hollyberry married Vice-President Bush, she’d be Hollybushberry.”

“True,” said Ron White. “But if Holly married Dickie Wood,” he added, referring to a freshman, “she’d be Hollywood.”

You see why I feel older than my classmates? I was listening to that kind of stuff in the fifth grade, and they’re still dishing it out. Unfortunately, I’m still reacting to it the way I did in the fifth grade: with a great deal of tension. My cheeks blazed red. I felt like a toaster with little hot wires on my face.

“Look at those cheeks!” yelled Zaweicki. “Now she’s Holly
Blush
Berry!”

I would have liked to flatten Zaweicki’s face with my Spanish book, but having tried the violence technique in the past, I know that a) I will owe a fine for damaging the book, and b) I will get teased for being the minister’s daughter—“What would your father say to such an act of total aggression?” Zaweicki would demand.

I let the teasing drift over me. It was like letting a blizzard drift over me. Not too successful.

“She’s trying to ignore us,” said Ron White, “but it’ll never work.”

Hope sat calmly doing her nails. Nobody ever teases Hope. I don’t know why.

Stein said, “You are
boring
, Zaweicki.
Shut up
, White.”

They shut up instantly and even looked embarrassed. Stein is such a leader type that any side he’s on is the winning side. “Thanks, Pete,” I said.

He nodded, looking put upon, as though girls were always placing demands upon him and it was really irritating, sapping the energy he needed for winning hockey games and scholarships.

Finally the homeroom bell rang, and we chugged up the stairs out of the bowels of the basement and on to our first period classes.

Hope glided up the stairs just in front of me, and I read her jeans labels for two flights. If I did have labels on my clothes, I thought, mine would probably read “Irregulars and Seconds.”

Between fourth and fifth period, Kate stopped me in the hall. “Lydia and I are going to go hunt for some good buys in secondhand ski boots,” she said. “The fraternities over at the college are having a sale. You want to come? Anyhow,” she added, grinning eagerly, “we might meet somebody interesting.”

The odds were slim that tiny-footed Kate was going to find a good fit in a ski boot that a twenty-year-old male athlete could no longer wear. It was just an excuse to go over to the fraternity and check out the boys there. Now, I am always ready to meet interesting boys. The trouble is that a boy selling used ski boots is a boy looking for a new pair of ski boots, and therefore
not
a boy I would find interesting. I would be interested in the boys who were
not
thinking about skiing, and they wouldn’t be at the sale, so what was the point in going, right?

Kate said, “It’s only eleven degrees out, Holl. Wear your gloves.”

Eleven degrees. In November. It was going to be one frigid winter.

Jamie Winter walked by, grinning at me. “Some expression on your face,” he said. “All I have to do is look at you, Holly, and I can tell it’s Monday, and snowing, and winter, and school.”

I laughed, but nobody else seemed to get the joke.

Hope, standing behind me, said, “Honestly, Holly, with your looks you could be dating college boys, too. But no, you exchange jokes with Jamie. He’s not even a senior, Holly. He isn’t even
seventeen
yet!”

Hope was like wall-to-wall carpeting. Impossible to get away from. I wished she would roll up and go away.

“He’s so
young
,” said Hope. “Why even bother with him?”

“I’m not bothering with him,” I snapped at her. “We just talked for twenty seconds, is that a crime?” Jamie was already turning the corner in the hallway. I hoped he had not heard Hope’s remarks. He would think I was interested in him, that Hope and I had had some prior conversation about him. I wasn’t interested in anybody, and certainly not sixteen-year-olds. Every male in the whole high school seemed too young to me. That was half my problem. I just couldn’t seem to work up any enthusiasm for anybody this year.

I left Hope still expounding on the virtues of dating older men like her wonderful, suave Grey and went on to English. We were reading Dickens. Mrs. Audette was having us look at a particularly horrid chapter where the poor little urchin was shuddering with cold and neglect, and you could almost
feel
those chilblains on your icy little hands.

“What’s a chilblain?” said Kate.

“A sore on your hands from too much exposure to cold,” said Mrs. Audette.

O Hawaii. O Mexico, I thought. Save a corner for me! Before I get chilblains!

W
HEN YOU LIVE IN
a town like this, either you ski and skate and snowmobile, or you live like a hermit.

I go in stages.

Some weeks, I want company so much I go right out and face the ice and snow, pretending that I actually like that kind of thing. I’ve always
wanted
to lose my toes to frostbite. I
prefer
tears of wind-driven agony to tears over soap operas. I
like
using one Chap Stick per week keeping my lips from cracking open.

Other weeks I feel that everybody out there but me is insane. Who needs that kind of company? So unless I can manage the indoors angle of the outdoor sport (like sipping hot chocolate in the little muffin shop beside the skating pond, or eating popcorn in front of the fireplace at the ski lift shelter) I just stay home.

Now, at home I have three activities other than homework and chores, which I regard as burdens, not activities.

The first is reruns. I love television reruns. It’s so comforting to see the same show you’ve already watched four times. I even watch “I Love Lucy” shows that were reruns when my
mother
was watching television. I like the ones where the heroines are always getting into embarrassing and stupid positions but somehow survive, like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” or “Rhoda” or “LaVerne and Shirley.” I can really identify with doing something stupid and having to pay for it.

If my parents are in a strict mood, which is often, and they are afraid all this television will destroy my moral fiber, I move into my second hobby, which is daydreaming.

I have never heard anybody mention this as a hobby, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps I’m the only one who does so much of it. Or maybe other people won’t admit they like to sit around daydreaming. I daydream best when I’m doing something where nobody will interrupt me. Ironing, say. There is no way my mother is going to interfere when I voluntarily approach the ironing basket and get to work. It is possible to stare down into the pattern of a wrinkled shirt for fifteen minutes and still look occupied.

In my daydreams I am always slender and beautiful, cavity-free and complexion-perfect. I am someplace hot and exotic, preferably sandy, and I am resting up after doing something impressive and strenuous.

Now if my
mother
were having the daydream, it would be about the strenuous and impressive deed instead of the vacation afterward. No wonder my parents think I am basically lazy.

There is only one thing I do in life that requires effort. That’s my dollhouse. I work on it in secret because I feel sort of funny about it. Kate knows, and Lydia, but I don’t think anybody else does, and I’m not sure Kate and Lydia have the slightest idea how much time I spend on it.

My father built it for me years ago; I think I was five. It’s an enormous Victorian dollhouse with nine rooms, and it has a wraparound porch with gingerbread trim, an attic, and a marvelous stairway that sweeps up through two curved landings.

When I first saw the dollhouse, I was totally uninterested. My father’s heart was broken. Here he’d spent a thousand hours creating this work of art and all his little girl said was, “Didn’t you get me anything else?”

Once in a while I’d arrange the dolls in different beds, or put the kitchen furniture up in the attic, or see if my plastic horses could gallop in the door, but that was the extent of it. It was last winter when I got interested again. I happened to notice that three of the rooms in the dollhouse were not furnished. You would think a girl as swift as I would have spotted this sometime during the previous decade, but as I said, the dollhouse was not my first concern during those years. Anyhow, I decided that given a choice between sledding with Kate or furnishing the library (I knew it was a library because my father had put a tiny brass plaque over the door that read
SSSHHH!!! LIBRARY!!!),
I would furnish the library.

I made shelving out of popsicle sticks that I stained brown with Magic Markers. I turned a macaroni box into an old scarred desk, covering it with brown paper and covering the brown paper with tiny graffiti. With a little bit of glue and gray satin, a plastic spool of thread became a shiny office chair. Books appeared from tiny squares of cardboard and wrapping paper.