Can I Sit With You?

by Amanda Jones
Age 8 at the time

I had a pedestrian, mildly tortured school experience learning to sort between what mattered and what didn’t, with just the typical betrayals and embarrassments. It was my brother who suffered the brunt of pre-teen flailing, and watching what he went through taught me more than all the bullying I endured.

Marco was (and still is) my sweet older brother. As a child he was scrawny, friendly, funny, affectionate, and energetic. And he had Williams Syndrome, which meant he was a special needs kid. Only in those days no one had yet thought up political correctness, so my brother was just “retarded.”

Williams Syndrome is a genetic disorder with a long, scary list of symptoms. When I look up the most common of them, it says: “Unusual facial structure, developmental retardation, short stature, heart problems, and puffiness around the eyes. Personality traits include being overtly friendly, trusting strangers, and an affinity for music.” My brother had all of these. He still does.

For most of elementary school other children were kind to Marco. They included him in games and they’d even willingly invite him to their birthday parties. But at age 12 this swiftly changed. As hormones began their insidious creep, many friendships turned into outright cruelty.

My brother and I did not go to school together. He went to an all-boys school, and I went to an all-girls. But we lived opposite a park and would go there together almost daily. I was three years younger. He was my only sibling, my big brother, my friend, and often my rival and archenemy. I loved him. I didn’t know to be embarrassed of him, even when he laughed inappropriately loudly or let fly with the animal noises he was prone to making when overexcited. But as he got older he would embarrass the other kids, as if just knowing him made them uncool.

One awful day my mother was called to school early, bringing Marco home with red eyes even puffier than normal. Two former friends had cornered him and beaten him up in the bathroom, calling him Mongol, circus freak, animal. He could not understand what had happened, and his face registered only confusion and disorientation. And for the first time in my life I felt real, adult rage. It sped through me like fire, closing my throat and making me break out in sweat. I was eight years old and I had just felt the shock of injustice.

Marco stayed home for a week to recover. There were hushed phone calls and the low hum of my mother’s fury venting into the mouthpiece. Marco and I lived alone with our mother. Our father had hit the road with a younger woman when I was five. He couldn’t handle raising a “retard.” At the time I didn’t think much about what it must have taken for my mother to raise the two of us alone for so many years. Now I do, and I am staggered.

A month after the “incident,” Marco and I encountered the perpetrators at our park. My brother flinched when he saw them, his “overt friendliness” damaged. He wanted to go home. He started making noises. His hands came up over his head. The boys, angry that the "retard" had caused them innumerable hours of detention, strode towards him, their fists balling, mouths ugly grimaces. At first fear turned my legs and stomach soft. And then, like some sort of miraculous intervention, the rage hit me again and I became possessed. I raced towards the boys yelling words that had never dared cross my lips before.

“You bastards.” (I’d heard my mother call my absent father that often and suspected it was a terrible slight.)

“You stupid, mean little bastards. You assholes. You keep away from my brother!”

And my God, it worked. It actually worked. The boys didn’t know what to do next. They stopped, their faces froze and they stood there looking just like stupid little assholes.

The best part of all is that my brother started to laugh. He laughed his inappropriately loud laugh with a few animal noises thrown in for good measure. The boys sloped off, vanquished, with that sound at their backs. It was wonderful. Admittedly I was an eight-year-old girl and even mean boys probably knew better than to beat up on a small female child, but it was the first genuinely empowering moment of my life. And I guess I learned that it was actually possible to stand up against injustice.

Many years later, I used my brother shamelessly as an acid test for the men I dated. If they were embarrassed of my brother or they were mean or ignored him (and most did), they didn’t last long. They were filed in the “stupid asshole” category and dispatched. And then I met a guy who was different. He didn’t deal with Marco like he was retarded. He wasn’t overly condescending or patronizing or even sickly solicitous. He treated him like an adult who liked to laugh loudly, hug people, and dance erratically. He called him Big Man, which made Marco’s skeletal chest swell with pride. Greg was doing an MBA at an elite business school filled with future captains of industry who wore button-down shirts. One night, he invited Marco and me to a party with his fellow students. I was edgy, thinking that my brother’s unbridled enthusiasm for singing and dancing, or even the animal noises, might cause a scene, and I really liked Greg and didn’t want to have to dispatch him quite so quickly.

When we got there, Greg casually took Marco around, introducing him not as his girlfriend’s brother, but as his “buddy.” He gave Marco a beer and let him loose. Hours later, from across the room, I noticed a circle forming on the dance floor. With rising dread, I broke through the crowd to face what was happening. Marco and Greg were both lying on their backs, spinning in circles, breakdancing to “Red, Red Wine” by UB40. The crowd cheered and clapped and my brother hooted and glowed. Marco had found a hero, and I had found a husband.

I guess the moral to this story is that in the end, it’s much cooler not to be a stupid, mean bastard.

By Liz Henry
Age 10 at the time

Almost every day in 4th grade my best friend Laurie Arminia and I would run outside to play under the geodesic dome monkeybars at recess. We'd comb through the sand with our fingers and explain to each other where everything was in our space city, and where the farms were, and the roads. I'd look up to see Laurie lost in thought with sand in her hands, her thick black hair flying around like a Shetland pony's mane. The grey steel monkeybar dome overhead saved our space colony people from the poison atmosphere of Planet Zyax, which we had named after a book called "The Humans of Zyax II". Other people ran around whacking tether balls or playing four-square. Laurie and I were little kids. No one paid any attention to us. We'd climb to the top of the dome and survey our planet like twin gods. Twice a week, instead of going to recess, she and I would stay inside being "library aides", shelving books and helping kindergarteners learn to read. Doesn't it sound like a fairy tale? Too good to be true!

The next year everything changed horribly. My family moved to Houston, Texas, which I had pictured as a sepia-toned dusty Western movie. Perhaps I'd ride my horse to school, tying it up to the hitching post!

That really was too good to be true. Texas was a brutal suburban landscape of malls and golf courses. The 5th grade girls wore 3-inch heels. I was as short as most kindergarteners, still wearing Garanimals, midget-sized Wranglers, and (horrors, for piano recitals) dresses with smocking across the chest. Middle class 5th grade Texas girls in 1980 wore Jordache jeans and couple-skated with boys at the roller rink. I
was in deep trouble.

Luckily, before school started, I met Jennifer, who lived around the block. Though Jennifer was a year younger than me, she became my friend. I'd dial her phone number over and over; I can still hear the song of it in the beeps, 444-6784, 444-6784; a busy signal. Jennifer had a makeup mirror that flipped over and lit up to show what you looked like in night and day lighting, far away or magnified. She had enormous makeup kits. I'd lie on her waterbed (?!) to watch her smear on base, foundation, powder, eyeliner, lip liner, lip stick, mascara, and 5 kinds of eyeshadow while we listened to Prince albums as loud as possible and Jennifer insulted me in ways I didn't understand. "Quit watching me with your beady little roach eyes!" or "I think you're a Mexican, you have squinty eyes like a Mexican." It was as unlike Laurie Arminia as you could get. Jennifer was completely alien. I learned all the words to the Prince songs. Jennifer was like Prince, and David Bowie, with their makeup and thick eyeliner, screaming and posing, dancing on the rim of the bed, all the gleaming album covers and posters and magazines.

One day at recess a horrible girl followed me outside from the "cafetorium". She had been making fun of how I ate my sandwich while reading a book. Cheryl wore suede ankle boots. Her mom's boyfriend took them on ski vacations. Cheryl said that reading was gay, and that I should be named Liz the Lez. To escape her, I went out into the blazing sun of the sidewalk and the heat-shimmered parking lot. Other kids followed us out, hooting. I saw Jennifer's face laughing at me in the crowd. She was chanting with them, "Liz the Lez, Liz the Lez." Someone pointed out that I was about to cry. People were crowding around me, too close, like stampeding animals. I felt sweaty and scared and a little dizzy. Sounds all started to blend together, babbling nonsense sounds, waves or wind or a waterfall over rocks.

Cheryl — with her blond, feathered hair and her disco metallic shirt — came right up into my face really close and went, "Is it true? I heard it was. I heard you used to be a boy, and you got a sex change. That's why you're so flat. You don't wear a bra. And you're like a boy and like boy things. Cause you're really a boy. LEZZIE." I realized then that "Lez" meant lesbian. All the advice my mom and dad had ever given to me, like Just walk away and Just ignore it, flew out of my head. I felt like my body disappeared, and I was like a cloud of light and air. And I said this... in a voice that could rule the world... I'm not making it up:

"That's the dumbest thing I've EVERY HEARD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. How could I have a sex change when I'm only in 5th grade. I'm not even hitting puberty yet. And even if I had a sex change, SO WHAT IF I DID. And if I was a boy, I wouldn't be a lesbian, don't you know anything? And we're little kids, you dumbass, we don't have sex anyway, which is what it means, it's about who you have sex with, I have read about it, and people have the right to do whatever they want because it's a free country, and I believe in free love and I have constitutional rights, and I'm not a lesbian I'm BISEXUAL."

Then my body came back into sweaty existence, and my head came back down onto my body, and I ran into the school and hid in the bathroom and cried so hard that snot ran down the back of my throat and I sort of choked and threw up. I went to the nurse and my mom came to get me. They asked me what happened, so I just said that I threw up after lunch. I spent the rest of the day in bed with an ice-cold towel on my head,
sipping ginger ale, reading science fiction, and feeling very confused.

I was still friends with Jennifer until 9th grade. My mom said that Jennifer was a bad person to be friends with. She wasn't nice. My mom was right, but there was something my mom didn't get. I needed to understand what was the deal with Jennifer.

My life has been something of a variation on that theme ever since.

Can You Hear Us Squee!?

One of Shan's favorite people -- professional comix artist, rabblerouser, and fellow quirky kid mom Lea Hernandez -- is not only going to contribute to Can I Sit With You?, but she's going to donate the book cover! This kind of generosity and ass-kickery in the name of kids who aren't even hers makes us all sniffly with glee.

We have more writings promised from some of your favorite bloggers, but since they've not publically announced their intentions, we can't yet crow about them. Yet. But keep your eyes peeled. Especially this week.