HUMOR
No Fur For The Fifth Grade MafiaLOS ANGELES 25 August 2008 |
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In third grade, I came home from school crying. Some kids on the bus had teased me about my brown hair, calling me mousy. My bus was made up of kids from kindergarten through fifth grade, but the fat cats of the bus were a group of nasty fifth graders, drunk with the sweet power of being the oldest.
“It’s not fair, Mom,” I whined to her willing ears. “I hate my boring, ugly, brown hair.”
“Well, Joanna from down the street is bald because she has cancer. Would you rather be bald and dying of cancer like Joanna from down the street?”
“Yes,” I said.
And I meant it. If I were like Joanna from down the street, dying of cancer, people would feel sorry for me. That sounded wonderful.
“I think you’d be pretty sad if you got cancer, Lenore. I think you’d be wishing for your brown hair every day and every night, and crying yourself to sleep when you didn’t get it,” Mom said. “Then, while the chemotherapy was keeping you hunched over the toilet, vomiting your insides out, and your face was swollen from irritation, and you were covered in sores from radiation, well, then I think you’d wish you had your brown hair back.”
Stupid Joanna, I thought.
I wished I could be just like those fifth graders. I had wanted to be friends with them. It was impossible now. No longer feasible. Not now that I knew how they felt about my hair.
That evening, I watched my mother as she primped and made herself beautiful for her date with my father. She sat at her vanity combing through her stick-straight, brown, shiny hair. Prettier than mine, definitely. She was telling me what she would order from the restaurant in an exaggerated, excited voice.
“Duck breast, sliced into pieces. The pieces will be laid one on top of the other, on top of the other, on top of the other. They are all going to have that thin piece of fat on the top, the piece Daddy likes to leave on and eat, but I’ll cut it off. They are going to drizzle a cherry sauce over all of the pieces, and each bite will be so delicious,” she said.
Then she held her comb in her fist and pulled her hands to her chest, right in front of her heart. She took a deep breath in.
“Lenore, it’s going to be marvelous.”
She zipped up her knee-high leather boots and grabbed for my hand. We walked to the front hall, where there was a walk-in closet. She pulled a floor-length fur coat off of a hanger and pulled it around herself. It swallowed her up whole, and she looked so beautiful and glamorous. She looked superior. And she marched like a queen out into the kitchen, where my father was sipping a glass of red wine, waiting for her. Pre-drinking, he called it.
“Heard you had a bad day today, sweetheart,” my dad said.
“I want a fur coat like Mom’s,” I said.
“Must have been some bad day,” he said.
“There are some kids making fun of her. They think they’re better than she is, I guess,” my mother explained to Dad.
“They’re incorrect,” my father said.
Because he said “incorrect” instead of “wrong,” it sound very scientific. As though he’d done a study, and concluded that the fifth graders were, in fact, not better than his child. I believed it.
I was very spoiled, so that Christmas, I not only unwrapped a rabbit fur coat, but a matching rabbit fur muffler and rabbit fur earmuffs to wear with it.
“Put it on, Lenore,” my mother said, smiling. “Model it for us!”
I slid my arms into my new fur coat and hugged myself, brushing my hands up and down the silky fur. It felt cold on the outside and warm on the inside, so that anybody who tried to touch me would freeze, but inside, I’d be warm and protected.
“These, too,” my dad said, holding up the muffler and earmuffs.
When my hands were tucked inside the muffler and the black, shining fur coat was around my body, I looked like an illustration of a British children’s book about a wealthy orphan. And my brown hair sure as shit didn’t look boring and mousy when it was poking through rabbit fur earmuffs.
From the moment I had unwrapped the rabbit fur coat and the matching accessories I’d wanted to show them off to the nasty fifth graders who thought I was boring. I couldn’t wait to see their faces when I walked up the steps of the bus, enveloped by beauty and superiority, and marched down the aisle of the bus in the same royal way my mother had marched into the kitchen before she went out to eat her perfectly trimmed, cherry-flavored duck breast. I begged my mother to pack me a bagged lunch of duck breast for that first day back to school, but she told me I’d have to settle for my usual ham sandwich.
Victory seemed inevitable; the fifth graders didn’t have fur coats and I did. If I had been just a few years older, I could have also worn bright red lipstick, which would really have demonstrated my sophistication and ascendancy.
I woke up early, too excited to sleep. I was the first person at my bus stop, bundled in my eye-catching coat, with the earmuffs clinging to my ears and my tiny hands stuffed into the furry muffler. I saw the bus coming around the curves of my winding, residential street. The moment of truth was approaching.
I stepped onto the bus, and there they all were, trading pencils. That was the big thing back then. Pencils were much like currency. My mother had special-ordered pencils with my full name engraved on the sides for me. “Lenore Margot Zion,” carved into each and every pencil in gold lettering. These, while exclusive, were difficult to trade, as Lenore Margot Zion is a rare name and there were very few of us in the area.
I stuck my head into the air, making sure not to look at the fifth graders. The first few seconds of walking down the aisle of the school bus were nothing short of bliss. I’m winning, I thought.
Then the fantasy collided with reality.
“How many animals had to die so you could wear your ugly coat, LeWhore?” I heard.
My chin, which was so proudly turned up, dropped immediately. I looked at the clot of evil fifth graders. Stone cold gazes met my eyes. The fifth graders, all of them, were smirking at me with nastiness. This was the first time I’d ever heard that clever rhyming of my name with the word “whore.”
“My name’s Lenore,” I said, unable to even address the issue of the teasing of my splendid coat.
“No, your name’s LeWHORE, LeWhore,” one of them said.
“I have a fur coat,” I tried.
“We can see that, ANIMAL MURDERER. BABY SEAL CLUBBER.”
“I don’t club seals!” I yelled.
“No, you club BABY seals,” one said.
I couldn’t win. So I did what any fur-coat wearing girl being accused of killing sweet, fuzzy animals would do. I tried to buy them off.
“Do you guys want my markers? They’re pastels, not classic colors,” I said.
“LeWhore is too good for the classic colors,” they teased.
I returned home from school that day crestfallen and confused. I looked at myself in the mirror and brushed my fingers lightly over the rabbit fur of my coat. I stuck my hands into the muffler and spun them around the silky lining. None of it made sense. I looked amazingly sharp and superior. My coat was made of fur, goddamnit. I took it off slowly and tucked a hanger into it, shoving the coat to the back of the closet. After the day’s teasing, I could never wear it again. I placed the muffler and the earmuffs into a box and put them on the shelf in my closet. Maybe this coat and its accessories had been so grand, so completely fabulous, that they’d been just beyond the fifth graders’ reach. They couldn’t comprehend the coat and its cold, black rabbit fur. Its glory had surpassed their range of understanding, and all they could do was recognize that it was something they didn’t know.
“How did everyone like your pretty new coat today?” My mother and father asked me at dinner that night.
“It was so beautiful and so fantastic that they couldn’t even see it. I guess there must have been a blind spot of shining light where I was all day, until I took the coat off,” I said.
“You’re always a shining light, doll,” my mother said.
“Dad, do you think I can catch cancer?” I asked him.
“You can from cigarettes,” he said, puffing on his cigar while eating dinner.
I went to bed that night, dreaming of all the wonderful pity I’d receive once I caught cancer from cigarettes, just like Joanna from down the street. Maybe, after the chemotherapy was over, my hair would grow back bright red instead of mousy brown.
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