Can I Sit With You?

by Wynn Putnam
Age seven at the time

When I was almost eight years old, my family emigrated from Holland to Ontario, Canada. We spoke only Dutch, so when we went to school in Ontario, the teacher put my twin sister, me, and my two older sisters all in grade one. Once we learned how to speak English they would reevaluate us to see if my twin and I should really be in Grade three, and my older sisters in Grades four and six.

This was a one-room school house so we felt awkward and big sitting in the grade one row while kids our own size sat on the other side of the room and at the back. When the older, bigger kids would point and snicker at us we did not know what they were saying so we smiled at them. We wanted to learn to speak English, and be able to join in with their fun and sit with them.

This was a country schoolhouse, so everyone brought their lunch. At noon we followed the other Grade Ones, got our lunch bags from the hall, and started to eat. But one day when we went to get our lunch bags, a couple of the bigger kids went in front of us and grabbed them. They looked in our bags, ate what they liked, then tossed the bags into the garbage.

My sister and I went back to the classroom and tried to communicate to the teacher that these kids had taken our lunch. We could not say what had happened, and she thought that we did not have a lunch that day. Apparently a kid at the back said that we had already eaten our lunch and some other kids laughed. We started to point at the kids who had taken our lunch and made gestures with our hands, when the teacher took an apple out of her own bag and started to cut it in half. We shook our heads and started to cry. All of a sudden a few of the younger children came over to our desk and gave us some of their lunch, a cookie, an orange -- I can’t remember exactly, but they wanted to share. We stopped crying, smiled, and told each other in Dutch that the foods we were now being given were delicious, even better than what had been in our lunch bag. We communicated our thanks to these kids by smiling and making gestures of what we were trying to say.

For the next while we put our lunch bags in our desks, because it took quite a bit more time before we could speak English well enough to tattle on the few kids who tormented us because we spoke a different language. Most kids in the class tried to help us belong, even when they could see how big we looked in the grade one row, and that we talked in a strange language.

Smiling faces are the same in every language, and it’s easy to communicate with other kids that way and join in their fun. Kids like to sit with you when your face shows a friendly smile -- even if you cannot speak their language, they understand.

By Michael Procopio
Age 6 to the present

The men in my family loved show tunes. My grandfather, being of Italian stock, listened to opera. My father preferred Broadway musicals. Original cast albums like Cinderella, Camelot, A Chorus Line, and Annie followed us wherever we traveled in his car. My older brother loved big movie musicals, specifically those produced by Arthur Freed and his friends at Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios. Most directly influenced by him, I learned to converse in a language liberally peppered with musical references. We compared the events of our own lives to those which occurred in the movies, usually unfavorably, since it is often difficult to make homework and cleaning up after dogs more interesting than dancing around pirate ships or singing with Munchkins.

In my family, a boy singing songs from The Sound of Music was nothing extraordinary-- in fact, it was encouraged. The subtle changing of lyrics to suit any occasion was applauded by my elder brother. Sadly, singing "I Am Six, Going on Seven" in a voice approximating that of the eldest Von Trapp girl did not translate well to the playground of my elementary school. Worse, my impression of Ann-Margret's frenzied "Smash the Mirror" number from Tommy was not received with applause but with baffled silence, then derisive laughter, which I found confusing since my brother and sister had both loved the impression as I performed it the day before. Upon review some thirty years later, it seems reasonable that a six-year-old boy writhing on the on the grass and pulling at his hair while singing in an exaggerated vibrato might make other little boys uncomfortable. It was clear to them that I was different. It was clear to me that they simply did not speak my language.

By the second grade, my performances were much more subtle; intended for more intimate audiences. To offset the boredom of a long bus ride to Olvera Street in Los Angeles, I decided to entertain my field trip seat mate with what I thought was a subdued interpretation of Esther Williams' playful version of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." The boy sitting next to me had always been kind and therefore, I thought, deserving of my talents. Far from being entertained, he squirmed and moved as far away as he could from me without physically hurling himself from the bus. I thought he'd get it. I thought he'd understand. In a way, I think he did. I don't think he spoke to me again until the third grade. I rode the rest of the way to Los Angeles in silence; my status as a resident alien confirmed.

There were few opportunities to further humiliate myself since I did not sit with other boys at lunch or get invited to their houses after school or even play with them unless compelled to in group sports like dodgeball wherein they sharpened their throwing skills and I perfected my dodging abilities.

If a boy admits to liking show tunes, he invites trouble. If a boy who likes show tunes also admits to dreaming about taking bubble baths with Michael Landon, he invites danger. To my mind, liking musicals seemed a perfectly normal, masculine thing. Blowing kisses to the shadow I saw in the shape of Mr. Landon cast by my night light every evening did not. I'd never heard of another boy doing that, so I kept my mouth shut, which felt unnecessary, since everyone seemed to know anyway.

Names like "girl" and "sissy" were first muttered and then shouted at me. As we got a little older, the words "fag" and "homo" entered the vocabulary. I objected to "girl" since I had no desire to be one, Ann-Margret impression aside. "Sissy" I wasn't so sure about-- I was bigger and faster than most of my taunters, but I was mildly obsessed with people like Charo and activities such as watching Days of Our Lives. By the time fifth grade came and the abandoned fantasies of Michael Landon were replaced by thoughts of holding hands with a tall Brazilian-Swedish boy, I knew my taunters were speaking the truth when they called me a homo; I don't think they meant as a compliment.

The name-calling eventually lead to physical threats. The occasional sock in the arm or leg stuck out to trip graduated to stomach-punching and being shoved against walls. Once cornered in the library by one of the meanest boys I knew, I pleaded with him to leave me alone and warned him of the nearby presence of our school librarian. He laughed and suggested I cry to her as he punched me in the stomach. I weighed my options and decided the best course of action
was to bury my fist in his eye. I was surprised by how much my hand hurt. That never seemed to happen to people in the movies. The following year, the boy was placed in a classroom for children with learning disabilities. I briefly worried that I had caused his brain damage. At least, I thought, he wouldn't be bothering me again. For the most part, no one else did either.

The rest of my elementary school career was spent rather quietly. When forced to play soccer with my classmates, my attention turned to the nearby boundary fence covered in honeysuckle vines. Whenever the vines were in bloom, the class broke from play to swarm the flowers. I'd hum Lena Horne's version of "Honeysuckle Rose" from Thousands Cheer quietly and to myself, since I didn't think anyone would appreciate the fact that I had a song for nearly every occasion. Or understand. Except my brother. I'd tell him, since he was the only person I knew who spoke 'Musical' better than I did. As long as I had him to talk to when I got home from school, I remained relatively untroubled by my scholastic isolation.

When I was 12, three major events occurred that altered the course of my social life: I started middle school, entered into an aggressive attack of puberty and my brother moved to France, where he could watch musicals in French, thus combining two of his greatest passions. Though the news he sent of Gene Kelly dancing and singing with Catherine Deneuve made me nearly faint from excitement, our conversations were few, given the physical distance between us. The combination of being in a new school environment with a rapidly changing body and no brother to confide in made the issue of my own social awkwardness more acute. Since my body and voice had decided change without first consulting me, I decided I might as well go for broke, and change my personality too. Twelve-year-olds are famous for that.

I watched the other puberty-stricken people around me, noting what they wore and what they listened to and eventually learned how to be more like them, to blend in. Never entirely, but enough to be accepted, be invited to parties, and allowed to sit with others at lunch. Instead of humming Cole Porter tunes in public, I started tapping my feet to Adam and the Ants, the Go-Go's, and other musicians favored by 'tweens in 1982. I learned to speak the language of the people around me, to enter their world and shed some of my former reputation as an alien. I succeeded to some degree-- gaining friends and higher social status, but I never felt that I could be completely myself around anyone. On the outside, I could appear as normal-- whatever that was-- as I wanted to be. Inwardly, I felt like an alien passing for human. The names Judy Garland and Fred Astaire never passed my lips in public, no matter how much I wanted them to.

As I got older and entered college, I found what I had secretly given up hope of ever finding-- people my age who spoke openly of Leslie Caron, Alice Faye and Donald O'Conner. People who spoke my language. People like me. And they didn't look like aliens, but rather attractive human beings who were proud of being different from 90% of the general population. Eventually, I learned to look upon my show tune-loving tendencies as a source of pride. Now, I sometimes sing them out loud specifically to annoy people. In fact, if you happen to walk through my neighborhood today and you listen very carefully, you might hear a bit of Mary Poppins, Meet Me in St. Louis, or the sound of other musicals coming from the open window of my home and me singing right along with them. I don't really care who hears it. Unless it's playing too loudly during my downstairs neighbor's nap time. It's one thing to have fun annoying people from time to time, but it's an entirely other thing to be rude to one's neighbors.

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 Tammy Harrison
Age 11 at the time - Sixth Grade

In 1975, my childhood ended and my life became a mess; beyond a mess really. It was a mess that I had no control or say-so over. My dad had suffered a cerebral aneurysm burst in the back of his brain -- more than one blood vessel had blown up in his head - and my mother was incapable of caring for herself, let alone her five children. (But she tried!) After fighting with one of Dad's brothers to keep her five children, she moved us all back to our hometown to live with her.

Mom attempted to be both a mom and a dad to us. She got us enrolled in school and things started appearing normal again. I was in the sixth grade. Dad was still recovering in the hospital.

For some reason, there was a girl in my class who didn't like me. Glenda. I still, to this day, have no idea why she didn't like me. I rarely talked, as I was painfully introverted because of my family life. I had no friends that were in my class as all of my friends who lived in my neighborhood were either older, younger or went to other schools.

Glenda was just flat-out mean. And I was a prime target for her anger because I didn't talk back and didn't fight back.

She'd walk into class in the mornings, and I'd be sitting at my desk. If the teacher wasn't in the room, or if she had her back turned, Glenda would tower over me and pummel me. Right in front of everyone. She just pounded my head and arms. No one laughed. No one helped. They just watched and when Glenda was done, she went to her desk and sat down as if nothing had happened.

I did nothing.

My parents were both abusive alcoholics, which means that when they drank beer, they got mean and beat each other up. I'd lived a life of people hitting each other--all the time. If it wasn't my parents fighting, it was one of my brothers fighting. Or my aunts and uncles. Even at my young age, I'd decided that if Mom would just quit fighting Dad back, she'd spare herself a lot of pain, bruises and unexplained hospital visits.

So, I sat there and took my beating from Glenda.

Every school day from August through February of my sixth grade school year.

One morning, the hospital called and said Dad was gone. He died in February 1976. Mom gathered us around and told us. We cried because she was crying, but he'd been gone from our home for six months already, so we'd already had time to get used to not having him around.

I missed school for a few days to attend the funeral.

When I returned to school, I sat at my desk that morning waiting for my daily torture session from Glenda.

It didn't happen.

Instead, at my desk was a packet of sympathy cards from my classmates (including one from Glenda.) I don't remember what they said, or even what hers said. All I know is that from that day on, Glenda left me alone. She never raised another fist to me. I suppose she figured the pain I was now feeling from the loss of my dad was enough for her, she'd moved on to hurt someone else.

Thankfully we went to different junior high schools. Within three months of my dad's death, my mother got tired of his family's interference in our lives and she abandoned us. (Left us! My mother left her children while we were at school. I still can't believe it, over 30 years later!) I was put into foster homes since I refused to live with my dad's family, who had taken my sister and three brothers. Then Mom committed suicide the next year, because the family wouldn't let her have her children back. She killed herself because she couldn't love her kids again.

I was lucky though, because I had my Gramma from Tramma. She was my mom's mother, and she and I had a very special relationship. She loved me like no one else did and she treated me as if I were the princess in her castle.

It would seem all was okay, but I still had that old resentment. In my mind there was still retribution, retaliation and revenge to be had on Glenda. I took to this goal as my mission in life. She'd hurt me when I was already hurting. She beat me when I was already down. She could not have cared less about my feelings or my soul - she had her own agenda and that involved my oppression. In the world that I'd come from, I'd thought I'd never be free of my feelings towards her until I let her have it, once and for all.

I played basketball in the ninth grade. Our school happened to play her school. And there, walking into the gym, all cocky and excited with pre-game anticipation, was Glenda. I'll never forget the way I felt when she came into my view. I was no longer the introverted, gotta-take-someone-else's-punishment type of person. I had overcome a lot of issues, especially since defying my dad's family and living where I wanted to live. I wasn't taking anyone else's crap anymore. Glenda's included.

By Jackie Olsen (http://www.jackieolsen.com)
Elementary School

In elementary school my sister seemed to sail through unscathed, whereas I was subject to any number of indignities from my classmates on a regular basis. I was, to her, a pest, a trial, a barnacle on the side of her gloriously perfect ship. It was horrifying and vexing by turns to be that little sister. I couldn’t get it together no matter what I did. I was always late, always making her late, always forgetting something or breaking something else.

I was plagued by two boys who made fun of me almost constantly in third grade. Nothing my parents did seemed to stop the abuse. And my sister did her level best to duck out of walking me home from school and by the time I was 8 I was able to ride my bike home by myself. It certainly suited her not to have to deal with her pesky little sister.

One day the two boys lay in wait, unbeknownst to me. I rode fast, standing up on the pedals on the hills. Suddenly something sailed by, and then there they were, running up to me on the bike, throwing something at me. Eggs! I was being egged. One hit my arm and splattered over my shirt. I rode harder and made it around the corner. I was soon home.

My sister was in the kitchen and turned from the stove to see me stagger into the house, tears in my eyes. “What! What happened!” she asked.

“They egged me,” I cried. “Eggs. They threw eggs at me.”

And wouldn’t you know it, my sister turned out to have a sympathetic bone in her body, and she vowed to get those boys for me. “I’ll ride home with you tomorrow.” I soon calmed myself at the prospect of my big sister helping me out.

Next day it snowed, hard. The sky was white and we walked home from school together.

From out of the gloom came the boys. “Hey, fathead,” said one of them. I’d been called “fathead” all year, despite my using the great comeback line “fat heads have big brains.” Like that helped. They just didn’t let up, those boys.

My sister froze in place. I looked desperately at her as the boys drew in, snowballs in hand. At least it wasn’t eggs this time around. But she wouldn’t be any help at all, I could tell. I summoned my courage.

I yelled, “Think of an ICE COLD SHOWER,” sneering. “Imagine the ICE COLD WATER.” They stared at me. “You’re covered in ICE COLD.” In the moment I couldn’t think of anything else to say, but I used what little I had.

We pushed through and ran, and they didn’t throw the snowballs until we were halfway down the block.

“I can’t believe you did that,” said my sister. I couldn’t help noticing just a little bit of admiration in her voice. Ah, the triumph.