From print issue v. 31: “Plan A” by Catherine Klatzker

It was a long time before I could speak of being a high school dropout, before I unraveled the shame that encircled that particular secret in my life.

In sixth and seventh grades, Sister Angela Marie ignited creative discussion and raised my expectations for discourse, maybe even some historical background, in future classes. My eighth grade teacher Sister Malachy met those expectations around the 1960 elections for Kennedy and Johnson. We studied Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy and looked at how moral decisions were made in the face of severe adversity and personal loss in civics studies.

So I hoped for some in-depth discussion in eighth grade religion class, also taught by Sister Malachy. I raised my hand and asked her questions I believed she could answer. “How do we explain the Inquisition? How can we justify obedience over conscience?”

Sister Malachy’s rosy face turned nearly purple when she answered me, “The Pope is God’s representative on Earth, traced directly from Christ to Simon Peter to all the Popes, and in matters of doctrine he is divinely infallible. It is our duty to obey. We do not question the authority of the Church. We believe.” She drew out the e in believe. Her teeth clicked as she snapped her mouth shut.

I should have paid more attention to the change in her complexion when she spoke to me in Religion, to the clicks and snaps. I knew I had underestimated Sister Malachy’s reactions when she marked me down “below the line” on my final report card. “Below the line” referred to the area of the report card reserved for Deportment, Courtesy, and Respect. Attitude. To be marked down in those areas was to be effectively shut out of every Catholic High School in the Bay Area. Academia was emphasized less than Attitude. I did not want to go to Mercy High School, but I did not want to be blackballed either. My academic grades were better than many who were accepted to all the local Catholic high schools.

At thirteen — almost fourteen — years old, I was a little afraid of Sister Malachy when I approached her after school. The lump in my throat felt the size of a walnut. She jingled her keys impatiently. We stood in the eighth grade classroom, away from the windows, her desk, and the painted radiators, toward the front of the room and the long blackboard. I smelled chalk dust. She swished the long black skirts of her habit, jangling more keys and the objects in her pockets.

“I want…. I want…. to know why you marked me down “below the line” and why…. why… you never spoke to me about it before the last report card,” I stammered.

“Young lady, you know very well what this is about. You are a bad example and other girls follow you. You always ask too many questions. Schools like Mercy don’t want girls like you. You don’t know your place.” Snap.

“Questions? What kind of questions?” My throat was parched, my voice cracked.

She sneered at me. The blonde hairs on her upper lip were prominent. The stiff wimple of the Sisters of the Holy Cross “halo” that surrounded her face rippled as she rocked forward toward me. “Don’t get smart with me, young lady. Religion, as you know quite well. All your questions come up in Religion. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I was confused. She didn’t believe I was sincere. My questions offended her. I saw that I crossed an invisible line in questioning Sister about every problematic religious inquiry that popped into my head. She thought I was challenging her. Well… maybe I really didn’t belong there, but I didn’t want to believe that. I assumed enlightened inquiry was still possible, at least in school where I had learned to expect it.

I had heard bad things about public high school, that the education was inferior and the kids were undisciplined. I didn’t know anyone outside St. Matthew’s anymore.

“This is not fair,” I told my parents at home. “Sister Malachy is blackballing me for asking questions she can’t answer, that she doesn’t like.” We were in the dining room of the Clark Drive house. The French doors were open to the side patio, a small, bricked area covered in bougainvillea and leading out to the backyard. A bee buzzed, a gentle breeze lifted the tablecloth and it settled again.

“Did you ask her to change the grades below the line?” my father asked. He was scowling. His hairy arms rested on the table.

“She said they’re final. She said Mercy High doesn’t want me.”

“She says you are disrespectful,” my father declared. “You must have talked back to her. This is what you get.” I wondered if he was going to hit me — or worse, my mother — for not controlling me. When he blamed me, he generally blamed her, and his rage was not far behind. But he closed his mouth and said nothing. His hands were ominously still.

My mother’s gaze dropped to her own clasped hands, then backward toward the kitchen; the smell of bread in the oven was wending our way. Always the bread. I wondered if pummeling the bread dough was useful to her.

“San Mateo High is right down the street,” she said distractedly. She had just learned she was pregnant with her thirteenth child. She had things on her mind.

“San Mateo High School is really just down the street?” my father asked. “Well. They have to take you.” He was not going to hit anyone. They turned away from me.

The discussion was over. I felt like nothing. This was the worst-case scenario; he yelled and hit when he cared. There was no offer to intervene, to speak to the Sisters, or to visit the public high school with me. My parents left the room in separate directions. The issue was settled.

I accepted the idea of going to public high school — I had no choice — and I expanded my reading to include a history that examined beliefs I tried to reconcile with spiritual life. I discovered Transcendentalism and Henry David Thoreau when I was fourteen years old — not a religion, a philosophy. I was just in time for the Sixties and Flower Children, but I was not a joiner. I still escaped in books. I was becoming anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-organized religion, and it was easy to make up who I was when I didn’t know anyone at San Mateo High School, where I ended up in the fall.

Meanwhile, I took the bus and visited other Catholic Churches, not St. Matthew’s where they knew me, but St. Catherine’s in Burlingame and a big cathedral in San Francisco that looked like a humble imitation of the Duomo di Milano where I went to Confession. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I have committed the sin of doubt, I doubt the teachings of the Church,” I told an unknown priest behind the confessional screen. “This Religion is false,” I told him. “This is a thought I have all the time, that it isn’t the truth and it can’t condemn people to hell for breaking its rules,” I said.

Maybe God is a sham — the jury was still out at the age of fourteen. I confessed I didn’t believe in the Church, didn’t really believe in Christianity. These are all just my imaginary friends. I didn’t fully trust anyone and maybe there were no answers. I felt doomed for even thinking those things. The priest in the beautiful San Francisco cathedral made the sign of the cross. He said to my doubts, “Say three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers, that is your penance.” That was all.

I walked out into the bright morning and shivered in the warm sunshine. The ground seemed to shift beneath me. “C’mon,” I said to God, if there was one, “let’s get out of here,” and I shook off the Catholic experience. I didn’t belong in their schools or in their Church. I knew I didn’t belong anywhere that I couldn’t ask questions. I realized how like my father the Church was: ask no questions, give total obedience, and accept its absolute authority. I had just left the Catholic religion.

***

I got away with a lot in public high school when I started in 1960 because I was cute. I got away with how poorly I dressed in hand-me-downs and cheap shoes that gave me blisters. My school self was flirtatious and giggly — that was my cover. It felt hollow, but it was all I knew to do to appear normal. I slept in spongy pink hair rollers for the perfect swinging flip by day. I thought it was OK when I overheard the redheaded boy tell someone I looked like a tall Natalie Wood, and I thought it was because of a certain shade of lipstick and a new sweater I was wearing. A family I babysat for gave me the sweater. I managed to appear normal by looking cute and doing well in my classes. I attracted the attention of Cyril, a twelfth-grade boy who drove me to and from school in his father’s red 1959 Chevy convertible. Flirty girls sang out to him, “Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb!” from the Edd Byrnes ’77 Sunset Strip show popular at the time. Cyril flashed his Slavic smile, stubbed out his Camel cigarette and walked me to class from the seniors’ parking lot.

Mr. Robert Quinlan — my English teacher, then Journalism teacher, and the San Mateo High newspaper advisor — was dapper, impeccably attired in his button down shirt, Italian black suit and narrow tie. His black hair was thinning, his warm brown eyes laughed often, even before the corners of his mouth turned up. I was a junior when I heard some of the news staff laughing, reciting portions of Canterbury Tales one day.

“What class is that?” I asked.

“English,” he answered.

“Mr. Quinlan, why don’t I get Canterbury Tales in my English class?”

He reached for the wire-rim glasses he rarely used. “Who is your counselor? Let me look into it.” He handed me a hall pass and a note to my high school counselor to make the change.

The harried counselor was a woman I had never seen before. “Honey, you can’t take that class, you’re not College Prep. Somebody signed you up for Business track when you started school here. You have the language, Latin, I see, but all the wrong electives. Hmmmmm. Everything except math is good, but you’re missing a lot. Why did you take Latin, I’m just curious?”

“My father said I had to.”

She mumbled, made a few calls about “this girl who’s on the wrong track and just found out. She has only a year and a half left. Can we fix it?”

Finally, she plopped her file down on her cluttered desk and looked defeated. “You should have been College Prep from the beginning, but someone messed up. Now it can’t be fixed. I’m sorry.”

She was sorry. I wondered who messed up, if it was me. Did I even know there was more than one track? I loved to learn. I assumed I’d go to college. Did my mother send papers in to school by mail? Neither parent had ever visited my high school.

“Can I at least get into the English class I need?”

“Nope. It’s overcrowded with College Prep kids already. No room. Where were you thinking of going to college? What are your plans?” she asked.

“Never mind, we don’t have any money. It probably wouldn’t happen anyway.” My head hurt. I practically ran from the warren of offices.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. You’ll never do anything but be somebody’s secretary and type letters, what did you expect? You are nothing. An inner voice berated me. I felt small and poor and ashamed.

Back in the news staff classroom, Mr. Quinlan shrugged his shoulders helplessly when I told him my situation. I didn’t know there was more than one track. Why hadn’t it sunk in that no one looked out for me? Who did I think was looking out for me? My parents? Now that I was trapped, I looked around me at school and I understood how it worked: who had people looking out for them and who didn’t, who had nice clothes and who didn’t, who would get to go to college and who wouldn’t. Your thoughts are too big. You’re never going to be as big or as good as you think you are. It penetrated my consciousness that I had attended parochial schools on full financial aid. Parochial High School would have been on “scholarship” too. Money was a forbidden subject in my home. My father did not allow any discussion of family finances in his house. Certain questions were not allowed at home. We were kept in the dark.

On a cold winter afternoon in Moline, Illinois, there had been a knock at the door of our two-story wood frame home on 39th Street, four blocks from the Mississippi River. When we’d answered, no one was there, but there were stacks of assorted boxes, all addressed to us. The boxes were filled with foods and gifts; there were gifts for everyone in the family, with our names on them, even for our parents. There was food enough to fill our cupboards. “Look, look, Daddy! These just came for us!” My sisters and I were excited to show him our bounty when he came home. His face had darkened. He scowled.

“Virginia!” he yelled. When our mother appeared from the kitchen, he’d yanked her arm roughly. “What is the meaning of this? Where did these things come from? What have you done?” He made everyone leave the kitchen and shut both doors. We’d heard loud yelling, and thwapping, the sound of her being hit, over and over. She had feeble protests.

“But I thought…”

“Don’t think! How often do I have to tell you? Don’t think!” Thwapp.

“But they said…”

“This is charity — we don’t take charity.” He spat it. Charity was a dirty word.

“We are not poor! You think I’m not good enough? I don’t take good enough care of you? Never, never, never let someone give you something for nothing. There are always strings attached. I should make you give all these things back.” Thwapp.

“Yes, Daddy,” our mother said.

It must have been Christmastime, when people gave to the poor and felt charitable. We were poor. If we ever talked about family to outsiders we risked his rage. He’d hit Mommy over and over. We did not even speak of this to each other, except to be glad for the food and toys.

In the bedroom I shared with my sister Linny, I pulled my oversized stuffed bear onto my lap to prop up my high school annual. At the end of my sophomore year, every other yearbook entry referred to my smile, my laugh. I was always smiling and laughing at school: my school self. Mr. Quinlan’s entry named my long freshman book reports that made him pluck me for news staff in the very beginning. What was I thinking, that I was somebody? I was still nobody. Vague, lonely feelings arose along with the clear message: I was nothing. A split-off child part of me cried loudly in my mind. I stuffed down the Moline images, the peeling wallpaper next to my bed when I tried to make myself so small I could melt into the wall. I broke off a fingernail down to the skin and brought myself back to my bedroom, looking through my yearbook.

I could not imagine myself in any future that I conjured up. When I questioned my mother about my college track, she said, “Of course you’ll need secretarial skills, the Business track. Why do you want what you can’t have?” She must have done it, and now it was too late. College was out.

Boo, the school newspaper editor, wrote in my yearbook, “Hope you keep your love of Henry David Thoreau.” Boo planned to go to Vassar after she graduated. Thoreau’s love of nature appealed to me. I read about sauntering in New England nature and found the bonus of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”

I was wasting time in high school, I thought. I should be living my life. I opened up my copy of Walden and read, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” In the frontispiece of this treasured volume I found my father’s handwriting: “To Catherine on her 16th Birthday with Love from Mom and Dad.”

On my sixteenth birthday the living room was littered with toys — Irene and Paul were toddlers and their stuff was everywhere. Gifts for my birthday were in a pile out of their reach on the second-hand baby grand piano given to Mom by my older sisters, Harriet and Mary Lou. My parents and eight younger brothers and sisters sat around the room — all four of my older siblings lived elsewhere. Tchochkes from the little ones were almost as endearing as their homemade cards. Eighteen-month-old Paul was the center of attention, attacking the wrapping paper theatrically.

I opened a book shaped package. It was exactly what I wanted. The Viking Portable Thoreau. Then the next, and the next. Excursions, and A Writer’s Journal, and the Sherman Paul collection of critical essays on Thoreau, not so easily located. The inscriptions inside were all in my father’s handwriting. He was looking at me, his eyes smiling. “Is this what you wanted, Cabby?” He invoked his pet name for me from when I couldn’t say the “th” in “Cathy.”

Sometimes I want something I can have? I sat on the thin green-carpeted floor, stroked the Viking volume lovingly, and looked up at him. His smile mirrored the pleasure of my response. How could I reconcile the love I saw on his face and the fear I felt? It tied me in knots. I felt so unsafe with my father. Paul popped onto his lap and he allowed it without shifting him onto my mother. My mother registered our interaction and looked away; she smiled at Paul. I felt uncomfortable and I turned away too, then, and looked down, confused. We all looked away from a past we didn’t want to know.

My father had taken a special trip to the UC Berkeley bookstore to find the volumes of Thoreau I wanted for my sixteenth birthday. I had asked only for Thoreau. My father saw me — who I was and what was important to me. He was the only one who did. And he was hideously damaged. I could not wrap my head around his love that did that for me, his random rages, my spotty childhood memories of his disturbing goodnight affection, and his talks to me about men who “can’t help what they do when they are excited.” The last of these talks had been just a month before.

The other kids who were with us had left and we were sitting side-by-side in the living room on the floral couch with the bamboo frame. He might have been thinking about his four oldest children, no longer at home, or he could have read something in the news. “Boys are not responsible for what happens if things go too far with a girl,” my father said. “Girls need to be responsible. That’s what I want all my girls to know, that boys and men can’t help what they do when they are excited. They just can’t control what happens after a certain point. And girls can, they can stop it before it starts.”

I cocked my head. What did you just say? “I don’t believe that, Dad. Everyone has control.”

“No. Men don’t. I know what I’m talking about.”

Even fathers? Who protected me? It was a whisper of a thought.

I scootched back a little, farther away from him. He was sober; he was not a threat. His hands appeared gross and hairy on his lap. His large blue eyes bore into me. He meant something more than I could consciously comprehend. I felt soiled. He was repulsive. Only later, I realized he was rationalizing his own deviancy. I wondered if my sisters had similar discussions, but we never shared anything like that and it made me feel nasty.

***

College was my best escape strategy, my Plan A for leaving home. Academia could clarify my life’s direction. After my mother owned up to interfering in that plan, I became picky and sullen at school. My PE teacher nearly threw me out of class one day when I told her I wouldn’t follow “ambiguous” rules for some inane dress issue that had nothing to do with my life. “Ambiguous?” she screamed at me. “I’ll show you ambiguous, Squirt. Either change clothes now or go to the office.” I knew it was a non-issue and I was just picking a fight.

I decided I didn’t have to do what I was told. Everyone wanted me to expect less and schooling that led nowhere became meaningless to me. I thought about the loser dropout kids I saw hanging around the Mom and Pop grocer’s a block from school, smoking cigarettes and looking tough. I would never just hang around the high school I didn’t go to and do nothing. I was not one of them, I thought. They seemed lost to me.

I didn’t know how lost I was. I checked out ads in San Francisco for room rentals to see what it would take to move away from home on my own, and I sold the violin that smarmy Great Uncle Walter had given me. I felt an unexpected elation when I decided to quit school. I felt happier, my step quickened, I found myself bursting into song throughout my day.

Years later I recognized that feeling as the exhilaration that can accompany a choice of suicide, too, because of deciding to end hideous fear and denied pain. When I remembered the feeling of quitting high school, I thought deeply about the meaning of choosing my own path, of all the unknown consequences of every choice, of my need to make just one thing, one choice, matter.

According to my plan, I stopped going to school altogether in the spring of my junior year. I became a dropout. For many weeks no one even knew I had stopped going to classes; no one noticed. I had upgraded from babysitting to work as an usher in the movie theater downtown, as well as piecemeal work making wetsuits, breathing in the smells and fumes of neoprene and acetone at a small scuba diving shop on Bayshore Drive, escaping my house, saving more money. I took long walks all over San Mateo, Coyote Point, and Skyline Boulevard up near Crystal Springs Reservoir. I breezed in late one night after midnight to find Dad waiting for me in the living room.

“Where have you been?” he bellowed. “You are supposed to be home by ten. What are you up to? Who have you been with? Your mother’s too damn lenient, you are grounded.”

“I was walking. I wasn’t with anyone. What do you care?”

His face reddened. “Don’t you talk to me in that tone. You obey the rules of this house as long as you live under my roof. This is not a discussion.”

He was still blustering. I barely heard him. I heard scampering up the stairs — my little sisters were eavesdropping. A few words got through to me; he would be much tougher on my younger sisters than he had been on me. So I would have to be careful how I left because he very clearly stated Plan B.

The feeling of exhilaration re-materialized, of fluttering hope. I did not have to live under his roof anymore. I could — I would — go.

Bio: Catherine Klatzker was born fifth in a family of thirteen children. She has been a pediatric critical care nurse in California for twenty-two years before retiring to write, play with grandchildren, visit the ocean, and get to know her siblings.

Catherine’s essays and stories have appeared in The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Emrys Journal, Tiferet Journal, Lime Hawk Journal, The Examined Life Journal, and in mental health anthologies from In Fact Books, Same Time Next Week, and from Lime Hawk Literary Arts Collective, Parts Unbound. Her book-in-progress, (new title You Will Never Be Normal), was shortlisted for the 2015 Mary Roberts Rinehart Nonfiction prize from Stillhouse Press.

To order back issues of Emrys Journal, visit http://www.emrys.org/bookstore/