In my youth, Baltimore City had “open enrollment,” a policy that probably kept the desegregration of schools here at bay a little while longer, as one theoretically could attend any school. The city’s best and the brightest competed for slots in the “A” course at Western and Polytechnic, public schools that were allowed to be same sex schools well into the ’70s. Finally, a girl enrolled at Poly, which was known for its math and science curriculum. Poly trained the engineers, City College trained the doctors. And, once upon a time, Western and Eastern trained the girls who married the engineers and doctors. To this day, no boy has ever attended Western, a detail that fascinates me. (Eastern is gone, City College a magnet school.) How do they keep the boys out of Western without breaking the law?
I made the “A” course, so I went to Western for ninth grade, which was far from our neighborhood. My father or another friend’s parent took us in the morning. To get home, I rode public transportation, the #15 Lorraine. It was free; students were given a booklet of tickets each month to cover our rides. The #15 didn’t come all the way to my neighborhood; few public buses did. I got off on Forest Park Avenue and walked a mile home, alone.
They speak of growth spurts in adolescence, but mine was slow and steady. I was at least 5-7, perhaps at my eventual height of 5-9 by the time I was 14. My relationship with my body was the usual stew of adolescent hatred. I thought I was fat and ungainly. And I was a very young 14, the kind of girl who would have still been kicking boys in the shins if there had been any boys at Western. Other girls spent the lunch hour in the courtyard our school shared with Poly. I spent it in the library, where I obsessively read and re-read the memoirs written by a writer better known for his children’s books about a Utah family whose middle son, Tom, was a “Great Brain.” I was in my Western phase.
So, imagine a female version of Lennie from Mice and Men, book-smart but world-stupid, 14 years old in chronological age, 11 in emotional age and 18 years old in appearance. Imagine her walking a mile down a semi-busy street – a golf course on one side, houses on the other. Her skirts are short because that’s the style; her tops are tight because she’s constantly putting on weight.
There were the old men, who were drunk. The young men, who were stoned. All with the same goal — “Get in my car. C’mon. You don’t want to walk, I’ll take you where you’re going.” I wasn’t stupid enough to accept their offers, but they were often stubborn, following me down Forest Park Avenue, repeating their offers. This confused and frightened me. I thought I must be doing something wrong. Walking funny, perhaps. According to a family story, my grandmother counted the rolls of fat in my baby thighs and noticed I had one more roll on one side. (Oh, I was a stunner.) A pediatrician was consulted and he allowed that one hip was slightly higher than the other, which might make me twitch a little when I walked. “If it were a boy, I might fix it,” the doctor allegedly said. “But it’s okay for a girl to walk like that.”
Clearly, it wasn’t. I walked home, my errant hip twitching, and shut myself in the black-and-white tiled bathroom, wondering what message I was transmitting to the world and how I could make it stop.
And that’s just one story about the #15 Lorraine. What happened _on_ the bus is another one, a very different one. I’ll save that for another day.
School days, school days, dear old golden rule days . . .
I was carrying a Polaroid camera for some reason…must have been taking pictures at school. It was maybe a mile along Magnolia Blvd. to Tujunga Blvd. to catch the 159 bus. Magnolia runs through North Hollywood Park, which is a sizeable city park with lots of trees, a branch library, and a sculpture of Amelia Earhart. I must have been 16 or so.
A middle-aged guy sitting at a park table not far from the street called out, I forget what, but it was enough to make me slow and look. He said something about the camera–again, I forget what–and something about being a photographer.
I’d already slowed and looked, so the social engagement and obligation seemed locked. I went over and showed him the camera. He wanted to show me how to take a good picture, or something to that effect. Had me sit on the table’s bench, turn a little this way, turn a little that way. Took the picture.
I don’t remember how his hands got on mine; anything that came immediately before that was obliterated in memory by the feeling of the dry caress and my stomach turning. I got my camera back and left. My emotional masks were pretty well developed by 16, so it wouldn’t surprise me if my poker face held.
Even afterward, I didn’t really know what he wanted.
Still have the photo.
Laura, do you think this experience was helpful to you in your life? So many parents appear to cosset their children now and seemingly no child walks to and from school anymore, or anywhere. Although I agree there are dangers, I have thought there are also lessons to be learned, not to mention growth of self confidence.
It gave me a lot of material. Seriously. So I’m grateful for it.
I came of age at a time of seeming openess. But for all the country was supposedly going to hell in a handbasket, there were a lot of topics that simply weren’t broached. I vividly recall watching the old television drama “Judd for the Defense” when I was a grade-schooler. A girl is found, sobbing: “He raped me.” I had no idea what rape was. I consulted a dictionary, where I found the definition “assault.” I looked up “assault” but now I was coming full-circle. Clearly, something awful had happened, but what? Sex education was taught in Baltimore schools, but it was so clinical and out-of-context that one couldn’t imagine that sex was anything but a duty to God and country to keep the human race going. They also showed us two spectacular ’50s-era films, “Girls Beware” and “Boys Beware,” where everything was so coded that the mind almost burst from trying to fill in the blanks. “Janie was found wandering the highway . . . she was never the same.” “Bob spent lots of time with his older friend Joe, until his parents explained it was wrong.”
I am glad I had the freedom to roam my neighborhood, which was a beautiful, beautiful place. (Still is. If it weren’t so remote, I’d want to live there.) Dickeyville was an old mill village tucked into the edges of a gigantic park, with a stream running through it and little white houses. I was allowed to go anywhere within Dickeyville; I just couldn’t cross Forest Park Avenue without permission. I rode my bike, I looked for salamanders in the ruins of the old spring house, I roamed the wooded hills behind our house, and always felt safe. So my childhood was pretty idyllic.
I understand the impulse to protect children. But I also remember that Sleeping Beauty’s father failed utterly at this task.
Spring cleaning made me very melancholy. Typically, I don’t “open up” here or anywhere; the only personal information that my website reveals is that my hair color isn’t natural. But this feels like the box within the box within the box, a dangerous illusion buttressed by the fact that I know almost everyone who posts here. Including you, Paul, although we’ve never met face-to-face.
The #15 Lorraine is a story about shame. There’s a school of psychology, advanced largely by Gersh Kaufmann (spelling could be widely off here) about shame, which I cannot render accurately or with one-tenth of the nuance that the subject requires. Try to track down the Atlantic Monthly that has an article about it; it would be at least five-six years old. I don’t regret the innocence of an era that allowed me to have such an open and (otherwise) idyllic childhood. But the price of that was not knowing how to handle the deviants I met along the way, not realizing that I could talk to an adult about it, that what was going on wasn’t my fault. But that’s the paradigm of abuse, isn’t it? Isolate, separate, silence.
In hindsight, I realized that the calendar had gotten to me, that an important day came and went without acknowledgment, but my subconscious found a way to make me own up to it in a most indirect way. There’s also been some family stuff that’s left us all feeling a little vulnerable and lost. A loved one is in a bad way, most unexpectedly.
On the up side — the Orioles are in first place. Okay, it’s April, but — first place! Second-best record in all of the AL, behind only the White Sox. I watched them lose to Boston last week, but from amazing seats behind home plate, perfect for what proved to be a pitchers’ duel. I wore my Colts Corral jacket, a vintage relic that is the envy of all of Baltimore — and something that I will never, ever give away.
It’s amazing how times have changed. I grew up in the 60s, and I think half the time my mother never knew where we were; we were playing in the woods, in the street, riding our bikes all over town. I went ice skating on a pond by myself one day when I was about 8 and fell through the ice (it wasn’t deep), came home sopping wet, cleaned myself up and I don’t think my mother ever knew. She used to leave us alone in the toy department at the store all the time. There was a huge bird cage at the Malley’s Department Store in the shoe department and I’d watch the birds while she shopped elsewhere.
Things changed, though, when in 1975 in New Haven a girl was murdered in the parking lot at Malley’s. Suddenly it wasn’t perceived as “safe” anymore and parents started watching their kids more. Now we have organized playdates, no one lets their kids out of their sight. I feel bad for my daughter, who doesn’t feel the sense of freedom I had growing up, and I admit that as a parent I’m concerned about her safety. But I don’t think there’s more stuff going on now than then, we just are more aware of it.
I think every kid growing up in the ’70s had a crime like that. In suburban D.C./Baltimore, it was the disappearance of two sisters at Wheaton Plaza. A bunch of us drove by the site the other day and recalled that the girls were never found and the case, as far as the public knows, went nowhere.
Okay, not that I know you AT ALL, and I’d probably be pissed if some stranger thought they could say this to me, but being the dope I am…
Your posts recently (not just #15 Lorraine) make me wonder if you’re in a sort of melancholy mood lately? Or maybe just more nostalgic than usual?
I’m impressed that you can open up this publicly. All I can do with my blog is tease Keith Snyder and David Montgomery. Do you ever stop and go, “Oh, crap, why did I post that?” I’m not pointing at anything specific, just wondering in an overall writer/blogger/artist sense.
I can tell that you’re somewhat of a private or guarded person in life, but then you lay so much out there on this blog. You fascinate me… you…
Okay, I’ve got a crush on you, Laura! That’s it!
Aw, crap.
As you know, Laura, you are my long-lost twin, and your experiences walking home are virtually identical to mine. I still recall the scorching shame I felt at the come-ons I endured, although it never occurred to me I was doing something wrong. I just *was* wrong, with a body too rich for my age and no place to hide it. One time a guy pulled his van over and got out to talk to me; I’m mortified to say that I held a conversation with him, and when he invited me to get in his van and go to California with him, I actually smiled before I said no.
I remember a line from a Thomas McGuane novel: “Something had gone wrong with men, and the weak ones were dangerous.”
Karen” I assume that you were talking about New Haven Conn You mentioned Malleys. II lived there from 1942 to 1046 and from 1949 to 1953. That is a long time ago. El Syd