NON-FICTION: Girls Pretending

Published in Palimpsest: Yale Literary & Arts Magazine, v. 4, 2006

Girls Pretending
When I was five years old, my friend Marybeth broke her collar bone. My mother baby-sat for her after our half-day kindergarten class, earning a little money, while her mother worked as a teacher. Marybeth had an incurable finger sucking habit, despite her mother and step-father's efforts to curb it with nasty tasting ointments painted onto her fingers and bribes. She also had the habit of twisting her hair around her fingers and pulling it out, a few strands at a time, leaving her with a bald spot.

Marybeth and I were Romper Room fans, and the day she broke her collar bone, we may or may not have been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with milk in front of the television. My younger siblings, Suzanne and Jimmy, three and two years old, may have been taking a nap. Michael may not have been born, my mother may have been pregnant with him. What I do remember is the drama, the screaming, the whisking away of Marybeth by her mother who mysteriously appeared, called home from work.

The children on Romper Room that day, or some preceding day, or perhaps all week, were riding pretend cars around the studio--cardboard boxes with no tops or bottoms and brightly painted cars on the sides that they stepped into, picked up around their middles, then carted with them as they ran on their little lucky TV-star legs, much like the Flintstones.

My mother may have cut the tops and bottoms out of two cardboard boxes. Marybeth and I may have yanked them off ourselves. We may not have painted cars on the sides. But we did step into them, pick them up around our middles, and race around the den. I have no idea how long we enjoyed this activity, but I do know that Marybeth decided to race her car along the armless sofa, and on her last trip, tipped over and crashed onto her shoulder on the floor. That's when the screaming began. I remember fear, guilt, and a sudden whisking aside, far from the attentions of my possibly pregnant mother.

The next day, Marybeth re-appeared in a full upper body cast, with one hand sticking out of the front, making it extremely difficult for her to suck her pointer and middle fingers, or twist and pull out her hair. Of this I am sure.

Not to be outdone, either before or after Marybeth broke her collarbone, but also during kindergarten, I smacked my head on the radiator at the bottom of the stairs at her house, necessitating a visit to the hospital and stitches that I can still feel being sewn into my scalp.

As a later-in-life child with her siblings grown and gone, Marybeth had many attentions and things that I went without in a house of nine children. Her step-father was a pianist who gave her hours-long lessons on the baby grand in their den. She was an extremely talented pianist.

Her family ate things like tongue, while at my house the exotica included frozen store-brand fish sticks and melted open-faced Velveeta on white bread with mustard. They had matzos that Marybeth and I ate slathered with real butter even though her family wasn't Jewish, and Marybeth got away with not eating all of her peas but still getting dessert. We would lie on the floor near the piano, listening to Peter And The Wolf and Swan Lake with our eyes closed so we could imagine the wolf as a French horn like Leonard Bernstein said, and pretend we were Odette, our spirits flying high above the lake with Siegfried.

Their house was also filled with magazines and books--including her step-father's magazines with naked children in them that he showed us--a luxury that didn't exist at my house, as my father was firm in the belief that we should use our multi-million dollar library that his taxes paid for, rather than buy books or subscriptions. And I did use that multi-million dollar establishment, one I Can Be An ______ (Astronaut, Engineer, Artist) book at a time, nestled in the cardboard castle in the children's section, planning my life and earning my fiercely competed-for reading club stars. But still I marveled over the lavishly illustrated texts Marybeth owned, all shapes and sizes and scents lining the shelves in her very own room, including the oversized ones that made the most excellent sleds when placed on the carpeted stairs, tilted, mounted, and ridden down to bottom.

Which is where my head met the radiator.

But it wasn't all smashed heads and broken collarbones for us. When Marybeth moved and we were on to first grade in our separate schools, I visited her new house several towns away. While we were playing horseshoes, or a sorry game of two-person tag, or pretending we were settlers of the wild, wild West, her step-father, who was watering the garden, decided it would be good fun to drench our t-shirts. At the ripe age of six, I unwittingly entered my first and last wet t-shirt contest.

Showering later in the enormous blue (or possibly green)-tiled master bedroom stall, Marybeth and I pretended we were fountain statues by posing and spitting water out of our mouths. She told me that her stepfather had raped her, but only because he had mistaken her for her mother. I pretended to know what she was saying.