14. New Schools, Mary Jane, and Tough Love…
Note: This is the fourteenth installment of the serial publication of my memoirs, “What’s Left Behind.”
To read previous chapters, go to https://medium.com/whats-left-behind.
I remember being glued to the spot outside the darkened classroom, waiting for the teacher to arrive. Among me, a dozen or so other kids milled about, exchanging lighthearted banter about what they did over the summer. I felt painfully conspicuous, yet equally invisible — like an unclad mannequin in a luxuriant store window. I agonized over a single, unyielding thought: if kids had treated me as badly as they did in North Sayville, how mean would they be to someone they didn’t even know?
Just as I choked back a deluge of tears, a round lady with short black hair and wide, dark eyes came waddling down the hallway.
Mrs. Clutterbuck.
“Alright, folks,” she said, balancing a stack of books and papers in one hand while the other applied a wad of keys to the classroom door. “Put your things away and find a seat.
I had been sizing up every student in keen observance, trying to weed out the most callous ones and creating a mental list of whom I’d be wise to steer clear of. That was when I noticed her.
Lila Donegan.
Lila was tall — the tallest person in our class, if not our entire grade. That alone was comforting; when we took our class photo, I would not be the one positioned in the last row, dead center. Lila also had small, round, coke-bottle eyeglasses and a mouthful of braces (two more points for me; I had neither!)
Then I saw her left arm. It wasn’t a whole arm. It was short — half the length of the other — with a misshapen hand where her elbow should be.
But what struck me most: Lila was popular!
Having hailed from North Sayville, where, if you weren’t perfect you were an outcast, it surprised me to see that Lila had any friends at all.
Among those many friends was Monica Reznicek.
Shorter than me, with symmetrical limbs and dark eyes (no glasses), Monica had a staunch determination from the day we met to prove that she belonged in Bellmore and I didn’t.
Monica bullied me differently than I was used to. Kids had always just mocked me outright. No shame, no restraint. But Monica ridiculed me so guilefully that I often couldn’t discern her motives; manipulative, callous, and, quite frankly, the female version of my brother, she did things I could never prove, like kicking me under the table at lunch or pulling my hair in chorus. Worst of all was the contagion of her bullying to the other kids: Monica’s personality was such that once she didn’t like me, no one else did, either. I hadn’t been at Bellmore Elementary for more than a couple of months when I realized I was no more accepted there than in North Sayville.
I looked at Lila, who, on the surface, epitomized the ideal target for all sorts of mockery, yet everyone liked her. Meanwhile, I was once again the heckled outcast. I was learning that no matter how much I tried to be kind and keep a low profile, I was destined for contempt and criticism — an awareness that only validated my growing belief that I was unworthy of any love or kindness in the world.
Then, about halfway through the school year — in some asinine attempt to make us friends — Mrs. Clutterbuck had Monica and me sit with our desks pushed together. For a while, it seemed the most dim-witted decision in the history of sixth-grade teachers, but then, eventually, gradually, surprisingly… it worked!
Monica and I became inseparable.
Slowly, things began settling into place for me. But for Colin it seemed that moving to Bellmore only sent him reeling; it was then that he fell deeper into heavy drinking and drugs.
On the morning of my sixth-grade graduation, I sat in the living room, dressed in my black, ruffled skirt, white blouse, and new shoes, spinning myself in the recliner. With every revolution, I watched the minutes tick past on the VCR clock.
It all started the night before when Colin failed to come home. I don’t remember my mother being too bothered by it — it was neither the first, nor the last time my now 15-year-old brother had stayed out all night. But early that next morning, she received a phone call that Colin was in the emergency room with a broken leg.
Once again, Colin had managed to foil my glory.
I heard the door open downstairs and raced to the front hall, where I saw Eric ambling up the steps, cradling my brother, whose right leg was wrapped in a large plaster cast.
“Ma’, I’m gonna be late,” I complained.
“Aisling, I know. Give me a minute, okay.”
“But I have to go!”
“Just wait!” she snapped at me.
Crestfallen, I returned to the living room, sulking on the couch while Colin argued with my mother. He hadn’t been drinking, he insisted. He simply jumped off a set of monkey bars, breaking his ankle, and when he tried to walk home, the pain was too much, so he stopped to rest on that person’s lawn, but he fell asleep.
If nothing else, my brother was a master storyteller.
Usually those stories involved Hilda, the woman who managed the delicatessen and lived in the apartment downstairs from us. A tall, German lady with a masculine build, Hilda had short, curly bleach-blonde hair, boxy teeth, and a deep, raspy voice likely attributed to the fact that she could always be seen with a cigarette in her hand.
Hilda never liked Colin, spying him for a troublemaker from day one. Colin, didn’t like Hilda and immediately set out to cause her as much grief as possible.
One morning, my brother, who had always loved playing with fire, nearly torched Hilda’s apartment when he started a small blaze on the side of her garage. Luckily, my mother caught sight of the fire from the kitchen window and extinguished it with the garden hose before it caused any real damage.
Another time, Colin broke into Hilda’s apartment and stole a large container of silver dollars — then dropped it into the canal trying to escape empty-handed, creating an irrevocable buried treasure in the process that, on sunny days, could be seen glinting from the murky canal floor.
Eventually, Colin’s got so incorrigible that my mother sent him to rehab. The decision had been in the making since he broke his leg and was sealed the day my mother found a hoard of marijuana plants growing underneath his bed. Eric removed the door from Colin’s bedroom and my mother got on the phone to make a reservation for him at South Oaks — a residential drug rehab in Amityville.
But my brother never lasted at South Oaks, nor any other rehab he was sent to. He’d stay hardly long enough for them to learn his name before he started feeding my mother promises about making changes in his life — if she would just let him come back home! Colin haggled and pled till she cried uncle. Then, after being on his best behavior for as long as he could muster, went right back to his old ways.
My mother tried.
Wholeheartedly, repeatedly, she tried.
Time and time again, I watched Colin break her heart, much the way our father had, yet she kept on trying.
I remember her attending “tough love” support groups, then weeping quietly against the locked door one night while Colin begged from the stairwell for her to let him come inside, sobbing about how cold it was and he had nowhere to sleep. One might think I wasn’t too bothered to see him hurt for a change. But I was. In fact, it deeply saddened me to see him suffering and alone. More than upsetting me, it confused me. After all the grief he had caused in my life, why should I care in the least if he suffered?
That night I wanted to open the door for him; I even considered bringing him hot chocolate and a blanket. But I wouldn’t dare let anyone be privy to my sympathy and concern. Instead, as I did in regard to all matters of my family and emotions, I played aloof and indifferent.
Continue on to Chapter 15. BFFs, Boys (Men), and a Watershed Moment…
