. . . she tried to be the best girl she could be
not her own idea of the ideal child
While FDR’s new deal lifted my family’s boat as it did millions of others’, my parents were unhappy people. My father, in particular, was a disappointed idealist. He did not understand why doing the right thing didn’t bring the rewards he expected. My mother was a woman displaced in time with no future as a housewife because it wasn’t what she wanted. She went back to work -as soon as I entered kindergarten. But I was on my own by the age of four.
I knew that there were kids playing out in front of our apartment building watched over by their mothers. I couldn’t join them with my mother, because she wanted none of it. I decided to go down by myself. Although I was only four, I knew that I would be out of place by myself. I thought that the best way for me to be accepted was to be the best little girl possible. I had to be pleasant, agreeable, fair at all times to all the other children, cause no trouble.
I honestly don't know why the other mothers accepted me, but they did. The generosity of including me was something I was always grateful for.
Princess
During that year, I made a best friend. Her name was Isabella. If I was the best little girl I could be, Isabella was perfect. If I was the outsider, Isabella was the Princess, perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect manners- if a little aloof.
On my floor of the apartment building lived a retired Ziegfeld Follies chorine and her husband. My mother called her a lush. All I knew was that she walked funny, talked funny and smelled funny. She used to stop me on the street. She'd straighten my disheveled clothing, wash my face with spit and tell me in her slurry voice to stand up tall and walk straight (which I couldn't do because I was pigeon-toed). So you know I didn’t look like a princess.
The following September was the start of Kindergarten. Kindergarten back then in the 1940s was a half day program and there were two classes and one classroom. The morning session was three hours (9-12) and the afternoon was two (1-3). Each class went a half year in the morning and a half year in the afternoon. Luck would have it that Isabella and I were in the same class, and we did everything together.
This was the year that I was selected to be studied by a team of educators as a gifted child. I have an idea how this happened. The class may have had art in the form of crayons in our notebooks very often, but we only had painting once a week. Every day, two children at a time went with the 2nd Kindergarten teacher into the painting room. It took a whole week for every child to get a chance to paint.
Of course, Isabella and I paired up for painting. Each week we painted the same thing. A green stripe at the bottom of the paper for grass. A blue stripe at the top of the paper for sky, a blocky house with a couple of windows. a sun, flowers, trees. One day, I looked at Isabella’s painting and then looked at mine. We’re painting the same thing, I thought. I don’t want to paint this any more. I asked, very politely, if I might have another piece of paper. I was told “no.” (Now, as an adult, I understand that World War II was underway and resources were scarce.) But I was frustrated by the teacher’s no, and I dipped my paintbrush in the red paint and scribbled all over my paper.
As a result, I was told that I had to stay after school. (it’s not this story up till now that got me pegged as “gifted”, just a spoiled brat at this point). I got my second piece of paper in my detention, but I wasn’t allowed to paint whatever I wanted. I had to paint the picture I was working on when I scribbled on it.
I was so mad at being made to stay after school. All the kids were laughing at me. And I plotted all week what I would paint in my next painting session. We were the afternoon class. As such, before we left we had to straighten up the room, put all our things away. Turn our chairs upside down on the top of the table. The teachers set the window shades just so. All of this was so the janitors could clean the room. Then we put on our coats and hats and boots and gloves. We lined up two by two to leave the building with one teacher at the head of the line and the other at the end.
And that’s the picture I painted the next week and the picture that the teachers chose to be on the top of stack of pictures clipped to the radiator cover. (Because two classes shared the same classroom, we couldn’t hang our pictures on the wall.) I had worked very hard on that picture and it was quite different from what I had ever done before. It was different from what any one else in the class ever painted. It might not have been the only thing that got me into the child study, but I’m pretty sure it was one of them.
Isabella and I played together pretty much every day after school. I’m not sure what she saw in me, but as for me, the specialness of my friend dazzled me. We always played at her house, since no one was home at mine, and I have no idea what her mother thought of me. She was always polite and gracious to me, but there was a gulf that I didn’t experience with my parents.
Now, of course, you might say that you’re not going to have the same relationship with someone else’s parents that you would with your own. But, my parents treated my sister and I as little adults. As such, they included us in conversations, as equals. At the dinner table, they discussed the daily news, history. My father would talk about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Economics (to the extent that we could understand). My mother stopped reading me children’s books when I was five. Instead, she read excerpts of what she was reading herself. - anything funny, anything beautiful, anything moving, and anything meaningful. She introduced us to art, to music, to good food – the pleasure of life. My sister and I felt included in the intellectual and artistic expressions of living. I got none of that from Isabella’s parents. Just a kind of dry hospitality.
While Isabella and I remained "best of friends" , by the second grade I began to expand my friendships. I brought Isabella into play with my new friends. These new friends were more curious about things, had a sense of humor that didn’t seem to exist in Isabella. I began to see her brand of specialness somewhat limiting. But I couldn't abandon my first friend.
One day in the seventh grade, we were taking our weekly spelling test. Our teacher – who usually stood at the front desk – was calling the spelling words out this day as she slowly walked up and down the rows of desks. Suddenly, there was a screech and it came from Isabella. “Cheating! For shame, Isabella.” the teacher said as she pried open Isabella’s hand. “look, class, Isabella wrote out all the spelling words on her hand and was copying them to the test paper.”
I was shocked – both that Isabella had cheated and that the teacher had shamed her so in front of the class. One of my father’s life lessons in living color.
Education was so important to my father that he cautioned us frequently. “Cheating is a foolish thing to do. You’re in school to learn. The result of tests tell you where you need to study or, if you don’t understand something, to get help. It’s to help you learn what you need to know out in the world. If you cheat and succeed, you still haven’t learned what you were sent to school for. And if you get caught, you can get yourself in trouble and, if it’s an important test, you can ruin your reputation as an honest person.”
I knew then that I would never cheat because I just learned in his lecture what he would think of me if I did it. Another lesson in my personal book of being the best little girl I could be.
But here was the princess, cheating on a stupid spelling test. I couldn't understand how she didn't know it was wrong.
Sometime in the eighth grade our futures parted. I heard her mother talking to another about how Isabella was going to go to Country Day School, a private school in the area. Isabella would not be surrounded by all the problems that beset the regional high school. I took the test for Hunter College High School and passed. The following year I would be traveling by subway into Manhattan and a new environment. It didn't occur to me until I was an adult that maybe I was one of the people they wanted to get Isabella away from.
That I had to be the best little girl to find acceptance followed me throughout my life- in school, at work, in life in general. Every once in a while I would push at the restraints and say what was on my mind, but it never went over very well with others – so here I am.
Every once in a while, I wonder what happened to Isabella when she went to Country Day School. Did she finally break out of her chilly principality – like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday? Did she finally become a good student? Or did she just learn how to cheat better. Bad! The Best Little Girl you can be doesn’t think like that.
As a child, I had never thought that Isabella was an insecure little girl. I thought that was me. I guess it’s just as hard being a princess as it is to be the best little girl you can be.
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The two pictures are not of me and Isabella,but they are representative of the two of us. They are free photos from Pixabay. Also, Isabella is not my childhood friend’s real name. Both of us have suffered enough.
