I'm Down: A Memoir (9 page)

“He is,” I said, not knowing what one was, and thinking that sounded more important than what he really was.

“So how do you have a horse?” she asked.

I told them we kept it on my uncle’s ranch on the Skagit River, turning a rundown cabin into a ranch. And even I cringed at how thick I was laying it on.

But Gretchen just said, “That’s cool. We should go ride together sometime.”

And as the recess bell let me off the hook, I pushed my luck. “Coco has won prizes for her looks.”

Catrina looked skeptical and repeated, “Your dad is a contractor,” forcing me to look up the word
contractor
when I got back to class. Turned out even Dad’s put-down job was kind of an exaggeration.

Then one day after school I was waiting to get onto my school bus. I was half watching an Asian boy named Donald Lin, who was obsessed with earthworms, explain to anyone who would listen about an experiment he was doing in a compost bin, when I heard the
thump—thump—thump
of a car stereo that clearly had its bass turned up to eleven. I knew immediately it was Dad. The blaring rhythms of Kool & the Gang came wafting up the block long before he did. And my classmates looked curiously at each other, wondering where the loud music could possibly be coming from. And then he came into sight behind the wheel of the car we referred to as “the boat” crammed with all his buddies: Big Lyman, Delroy, Reggie Dee, and Eldridge.

“Mishna!” he screamed from the driver’s side window. “Hey, Mishna!”

At first I was overjoyed to get picked up by Dad and the coolest gang of guys I knew. But this pride was shattered when, walking toward the car, I noticed all of my classmates staring like they had never seen rust before. And when I got to the car, Christopher Scott and Stacey Leigh were practically falling over themselves laughing.

“Hey, Dad!” I said as I climbed in the car.

“Hey!” Dad announced to the car, “Look how beautiful my daughter is.” He turned the radio back up and shouted over it, “Now isn’t this better than the bus?”

“Yeah,” I said, resisting the urge to step on the gas pedal myself.

Still, once we pulled away from the school and were halfway down the block—and I was riding on the hump between Dad and Reggie—and the tunes were bumping, I had to admit, it was way better than the bus.

But the next day Christopher decided it would be a good idea for him to spend recess making fun of Dad. And I decided it would be a good idea for me to pop him in his bitch face. It actually wasn’t that conscious. I was near the wood chips when he walked over and said, “Hey, Mishna, where do you think I can get a car like your dad’s?”

“Huh?” I asked.

“I bet I could get one of those at the Goodwill. Is that where you got your car?” He said it so sincerely, it was confusing.

“We didn’t get our car at Goodwill,” I said.

“Did you get your dad there?” Again with the sincere questions, but now Jodie, Ingrid, Marylyn, and Donald were watching.

“No,” I said.

“I can’t hear you,” Christopher said. “I asked if you got your dad at Goodwill?” I didn’t say anything. He was being tricky and I didn’t know how to counter it, so I tried to ignore it.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Cat got your . . .” Before he could say “tongue” my fist moved to his face on its own. It happened so fast that as I watched him holding his bloody nose, I honestly wondered what had happened.

Then, I learned the lesson of what happens when you pop a brat at rich school—they tattle like a fucking girl. I wound up in the principal’s office sitting next to Christopher, who was holding his nose like a little bitch, and saying, “I don’t know why she hit me like that for no reason . . . I didn’t even have a chance to defend myself.”

I begged them to call Dad and let him punish me, because I knew that the punishment in my house for fighting was Dad getting happy and saying, “I guess you let him know.” But they didn’t. They made me write an apology note to Christopher.

No matter
, I thought,
I have some well-earned kudos coming my way from the classmates—I fully landed that punch
. However, said kudos were not forthcoming. In fact, at the next recess, Donald stayed fifty yards away from me at all times. And rather than invite me to play foursquare with her, Marylyn just looked at me like I was the wild woman in the attic from
Jane Eyre
.

I walked over to Gretchen and said, “Why is everyone being so weird?” and she grudgingly threw me a line because I was standing right there.

“Well . . . ,” Gretchen said. “You kind of lost control.”

“No,” I said. “I let Christopher know.”

“You actually let him get you upset,” she said. “Which is what he was trying to do. And I sort of understand it, it’s just a little weird to us here.”

“Us?” I asked.

“Well,” she said. “You’re newer than some of us who have been here since first grade.”

“Oh,” I said. “That us.” I scratched my head and said faintly, “Thanks for talking to me, Gretchen.” And walked away to be alone on my playground structure, where things were simple and strength was rewarded.

On Presidents’ Day we stayed home from school. Anora spent the day with her school friend Maybelline because she was popular, and I hung out with Dad because I was not, and because Zwena was with her mom. I still would have wanted to hang out with Dad either way, but the fact that our phone was “down” again, and we couldn’t dial out, meant he couldn’t pawn me off on anyone. People called in for Anora.

Dad and I were about to head out to the basketball court so that he could teach me about dribbling with my left hand and Malcom X, when he got a phone call. Dad got a little giddy as he answered it. Having our phone shut off made contact from the outside extra exciting.

“Wolff residence,” Dad said. “Oh, hey, Candy . . .” Candy was Maybelline’s mom and I knew instantly there was something up with Anora. Dad listened for a while before snickering and saying, “No . . . I’m not laughing.” I got the feeling he was being yelled at as he listened more attentively and said, “Yes, I know this isn’t funny.” Followed by, “Okay, I’ll be right there.” Dad set down the phone and grabbed his coat. “Stay put, Mishna. I gotta get your sister, I’ll be right back.”

My heart skipped a beat: I knew Anora had done something wrong.

Maybe this is it!
I thought, as Dad tore off down the street to get Anora.
The moment Dad will realize that every time he said
,
“Anora, I guess you learned your lesson about messing around,”
she hadn’t learned her lesson at all. And that I was, in fact, a lesson-learning machine.

As I waited impatiently for Dad and Anora to return home, I decided I wanted to look extra good when they came back. And I scanned the house for ways to have them catch me in the act of being dutiful. I tried on “Caught in the act—sweeping” where I held the broom and looked up, like, “Hey, you guys are home . . . Oh, this broom? . . . I just got an uncontrollable urge to sweep.”

Then I tried “Caught in the act—making them tea.” That was where I look up from the teapot and say, “Hey . . . Tough day? . . . Who wants tea?” But in the end I just got really impatient that they were taking so long and put my head on the counter and thought about what I would buy at the corner store if I had a dollar, until I heard them drive up. Then I hurried to the sink to get caught in the act—washing dishes.

When Anora and Dad walked in I tried to ignore them—much too caught up in my dishes. They ignored me, too, and walked in laughing and carrying on.

“What happened?” I asked, trying to hide my eagerness.

“Why you so nosy?” Dad asked. “We just walked in the door.”

“I was just curious,” I said. “Because you guys are in such a good mood.”

“Well,” Dad said. “Candy took the girls on her errands today, and they all decided to play themselves a little game.”

“It was a really stupid idea,” Anora said, giggling.

“What was the idea?” I asked, trying to be cool.

“They stole something at every joint they went to,” Dad said.

“Wow,” I said “That’s . . . wow.”

Anora is the one in the middle, with child.

“Maybelline blamed Anora,” Dad said, “and Anora blamed Maybelline.” And apparently hilarity ensued, because Dad was acting like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. I didn’t get why it was so amusing that my sister was becoming a delinquent. And I wasn’t letting it go.

“So . . . ,” I said, looking at Anora and trying to seem sympathetic. “I guess you’re punished, huh?” Then I turned to Dad. “She’s punished, right, Dad?” My sister glared at me, noting that it was a dick move.

“Nah. I think she learned her lesson. We just have to return all this stuff.” I looked at the stuff—a pack of gum, a nail file and three stickers—and I knew none of it was going anywhere, except in her mouth. I had learned my lesson.

“M
ISHNA, WHAT ARE
you doing?” Mrs. Lewis interrupted her lesson, and everyone in class silently turned to face me. Based on the temperature of my cheeks, I was sure I was blushing.

“Nothing,” I replied nonchalantly.

“Are you eating the paste?” she asked.

I was actually squirting paste out of my missing-tooth hole for two boys in my row. So I said, “Not really, I . . .”

“Bring me the paste now, Mishna.”

I walked to the front of the classroom and handed her the round pot of Elmer’s. Dave DeLuca and Andrew Tanaka, who had watched me with rapt attention only a few minutes earlier, looked down and away like they didn’t know me.

“Why do you eat the paste?” she asked.

Everyone was looking at me, so I tried to look like I didn’t care by licking any residual paste off my lips and smiling like it was delicious.

“Does that mean you don’t know?”

I shrugged. But I knew exactly why I did it. I needed the attention.

After six months at rich school, it was obvious to everyone I wasn’t going to fit in—so I fit out. I started doing the stuff
other kids were afraid to do in exchange for an audience, like hemorrhoid talk. I harassed Mrs. Lewis with endless questions about hemorrhoids. I could work the word
hemorrhoids
into a question about any subject. For example, you may or may not know that the first president of the United States was George Hemorrhoid, or that four times twelve is hemorrhoid. For creative writing, I read aloud to the class my epic thriller “The Hemorrhoid That Lives in My Basement.” And Mrs. Lewis stopped smiling as much as she used to . . . hemorrhoids?

And I took any dare. Besides paste, I ate glue, paint, and a rubber band. I was
Fear Factor
for third-graders. It didn’t make me popular but at least I could get a crowd to spend five minutes watching me destroy my esophagus.

Mrs. Lewis continued to stare at me in front of the classroom, paste in hand for, like, a year.

“Can I go back to my seat?” I asked.

Mrs. Lewis disregarded the question. “I think you are purposely disrupting my classroom for attention.”

Like, duh
.

But rather than admit that—yes, sheer neediness drove me to eat the Elmer’s, I faced the class and circled my ear with my finger—the universal sign for “Hey, is this lady is crazy, or what?”

“Do you act this way at home?”

“No,” I said. The one time Dad caught me showing my sister how I could swallow a marble, he punished me for wasting a marble. And for the most part when I was at home I acted how Mrs. Lewis wanted me to, which was causing problems with with my friends at home. I had recently been left out of a very important game of Slam Charades (like charades, but meaner, and with words). And when I asked Jason about being dissed, he leveled with me. “Yo, you act kinda weird sometimes.”
When I asked him what he meant, he said, “You just say shit, and nobody understands what you’re talking about.”

I also knew I didn’t have real friends at school. I could tell the difference between being liked and being a paste-eating sideshow.

Mrs. Lewis heard the titters from the kids who had seen my “crazy” gesture and her face went from bad to worse. And standing in the front of the class, while Mrs. Lewis scolded me, I started to think about a Sunday school class where we talked about limbo—and how much I connected with the idea. Except to me heaven was a crappy street where all the kids did after school was try to invent new ways to call me white, and hell was a room full of kids in French polos. It seemed that both heaven and hell sucked the same amount, but differently. But I’d have given up my teeth, my hair, my feet, and my education to be truly popular in either one. And I wondered if I would have friends after I died.

Mrs. Lewis was angry and ordered me to clean out my desk and move to the empty one in the back of the class.

“Next to Zachary?” He always had his fingers in his mouth.

“Yes,” she said. “The empty desk next to Zachary Stein.” Then added, “Facing the wall.”

Over the course of the year I had been moved farther and farther back in the classroom, which from a feminist standpoint might have been something to be proud of. I was the only girl in “behavioral problem” row. But I took no pride in it. To me it was just proof that I was defective. It oddly never occurred to me to stop eating paste.