FRESH YARN presents: What I Want to be when I Grow Up... by Gloria Nagy

FRESH YARN presents:

What I Want to be when I Grow Up: and/or How I Spent My Summer Vacation
By Gloria Nagy

Personal essays. Mrs. Murphy's sixth grade English class, Hawthorne elementary school, the un-slums of Beverly Hills, l955-ish. The zenith of my personal essay period.

Mrs. Murphy, the Mount Rushmore wanna be. A thick, heavy, bovine person. A Newtonian proof; too much gravity in her gene pool, pulling everything downward. Her head seemed weighted by southward bound creases, crevices actually; as if the physical act of smiling had somehow escaped her developmental process. A heavy footed, sluggish slag clunking down the aisles; her melancholic, monotonal voice whining instructions as if the very act of having to deal with us required every ounce of her remaining life force.

Mrs. Murphy loved essays; also sentence diagramming. She didn't have to talk. Clunking up and down the aisles checking for cheaters, or sighing at her grey metal desk in that cavernous classroom with the too high ceilings and the too high windows, allowing the prisoners slaving away below only a glimpse of tree tops and cumulus clouds and the possibility of freedom. Freedom being up, the apple before the drop, up somewhere other than here bent over our stiff little desks trying to look forward to a life beyond Mrs. Murphy and her ilk.

Her ilk included Mrs. Pearl, the homeroom teacher and frustrated, failed "Star of Light Opera" as she called it; was that opera without all those fat people? Mrs. Pearl with her black Clara Bow bob and her huge, purple lipsticked mouth, which when closed looked like an eggplant, though I don't think I'd ever seen one then.

Mrs. Pearl and her tiny purple smeared teeth, sitting at the battered old piano (prisoners, we were-captives, an audience without the possibility of exit).

"Don't throw bouquets at me, don't hold my hand too much." No problem there. Mrs. Pearl catching me in the middle of what I still think was a pretty passable imitation of her, as I mouthed the words, "People will say we're in love," and dragging me out of the class, slamming me up against the lockers, her face, the opposite of Mrs. Murphy's, vibrating with energy, rage, mania. "You, you spoiled brats!! You have everything!! Everything!!! And you don't appreciate it!!!"

Was I? Did I?

"How I spent my Summer Vacation": Alone, mainly. Did a lot of running around in the backyard, jumping in and out of the sprinklers. This kept me cool and busy and pretty well blotted out the scary sounds coming from the house. My father screaming and yelling. My mother also screaming but with the highly unnerving add-on of hysterical sobbing at no extra charge.

In and out, back and forth. No friends over; too risky, too hard to predict the eruptions or count on the sprinklers drowning it all. No biking around, don't want to go too far, just in case, she "Did something to herself." I wasn't sure what that meant, but it certainly didn't sound good. Doors slamming. Despair. That heaviness again. Fucking Mrs. Murphy following me home.

"What do I want to be When I grow up? Anybody but my mother. "When I grow up I want to be a writer and live in New York City and New England." Oh, okay. Not that I knew anyone who had done any of that. Also, I would like a dog and to never have to diagram a sentence ever again in my life or write another personal essay or at least not until I am really a person and know what to say.

When I grow up I will no longer be a prisoner of the Beverly Hills penal, or school system; no longer required to attend Mr. Green's math classes nor look at his bulgy, hairy, flexor muscles (can't he roll those sleeves down? Long division is hard enough without all these distractions): I won't flinch when he slams the plastic ruler into his palm while pacing the aisles (cheaters again), or have to avoid his hard, glittery eyes darting behind those rimless glasses (way before fashionable), so angry in that scary way my father was, just looking for an excuse to attack.

72 goes into 3,450 just enough times to get out of here.

"What I did on My Summer Vacation: Part Two." Somewhere in the middle of the screams and sprinklers, it was decided that my brother and I should go away to Camp for a month. This was quite a shock. We knew nothing about "Camp." My father was not a camp kind of dad. Money was to be spent making money not on providing indulgences for seven and almost eleven year olds with a perfectly good sprinkler system and the Good Humor truck tinkling through the neighborhood twice a day.

My parents were members of the first generation born in America of refugees; the children of Jewish escapees from the Russian Pogroms. People like my parents were the "filler" between the movie people and celebrities in Beverly Hills. Not rich, but "well-to-do." Lawyers, doctors, widget manufacturers, real estate developers, who aspired and worked hard. Seriously hard. White knuckled and humorlessly hard; trying to move up block by block; the B.H. status climb. The further from Santa Monica Boulevard, the closer to Sunset, the more successful.

We were then at about the 600 block-a long way to go. So Camp?

What did I know? I knew nothing of bird watching, canoeing, white toast, "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall," marshmallow roasts or sleeping in a room with lots of other female people. Even at ten, when I thought "Camp," I saw barbed wire, arm numerals, and for sure, no Bazooka Double Bubble or Hershey Kisses.

This was not a choice we were given and I still have no idea where the hell it was. Camp Kiawa, somewhere on a lake. Arrowhead? Big Bear? Maybe just a reservoir in the Valley. Off we went. I was numb. My brother was terrified.

Camp. Confinement behind fences. To hall bells, we now add whistles, more lines, more herding. Teams. Organized activities. Teams, like sixth-grade softball, my morbid fear of balls being thrown toward me, making me every team captain's nightmare. I would stand waiting to be picked, praying silently, "just don't let me be last," anything but the very last one. Usually, I was second or third from the last, but the last of the so-called normal kids, meaning without serious impairments of the permanent nurse's excuse level.

The truly unexpected and miraculous thing was, I started to love camp. I got it. The bossy little big mouth became extremely popular. Arts and crafts. Talent shows. I'm home. And I fell in love.

My counselor Fern Fox with her kinky poodle cut black hair and her big black eyes and her smooth olive skin and her "leadership ability" and her big soft smile and her confidence. Love. My mommy for a month. I had no sister, and a distracted, disinterested mother; providing me with minimal female bonding experience.

I shared a cabin with Fern and another camper, who had no reality to me, just a white shape between me and Fern. I can't see her now at all, only Fern. If Fern was an abalone, I was her rock.

Oh, Fern! I would lie awake at night and watch her sleep. Even asleep she looked cheerful and confident. She seemed to just know what to do, like good mothers are supposed to. I thought a lot about her unfortunate name, trying to conjure up visions of her mother, who had decided to name a tiny, cute little baby, Fern.

I searched for nicknames. "Fernie." "Ferno." What a burden! In today's world, just imagine. "And now, the beautiful wife of the movie star, Fern Pitt." "And now, we are honored to introduce our lovely First Lady, Fern Bush." It didn't seem to bother her. Nothing seemed to bother her.

Even the escape of my roommate. Not everyone did so well at camp. My very own seven-year-old brother had been sobbing almost continuously and threatening to run away. Fern even went with me to console him, and then my own barely-noticed roommate was gone, flashlights at our door after midnight, Fern racing around. The "search" to track her down and the kids whispering about other "escapes," brought back my first "Camp" fears.

Paranoia roiled through me, "Was this all a ruse? Were there barbed wire fences behind the trees? German shepherds ready to pounce and rip into sunburned little Jewish kids? Mammoth men in helmets with no lips and big guns racing around the woods, shouting in that terrifying language?"

When my roommate came back the next morning, wrapped in a blanket just like in the movies, she wouldn't speak to us. She curled up on her side and waited for her parents to come and take her home. I remember watching her and thinking that that should have been me.

But what a relief! It wasn't. Camp really was great. No torture. No lampshades made from my red-headed, freckled white skin. I became very skilled at the weaving of lanyards and had my first kiss from a boy named Lee with more freckles than I had myself.

Then I won a prize in the talent show and it all went to my head. I began using a "Nom de Plume" in my letters home. I became "Gloworm," finishing my cursive tail with a glowing worm drawing. "Dear Mom and Dad, I'm having a really great time and I'd like to know if I could stay for another two weeks. I know Parent's Day is coming up, so if I can stay, you could just pick Ronnie up early and leave me here. Love and kisses, Gloworm."

I saw my Father first, standing in that rigid, uneasy way he stood at all ad hoc social occasions; not mingling or speaking to anyone. I looked around for my mother, but all I could see was a strange woman standing next to him, her back to me. A woman with very short, dyed blonde hair and toreador pants and big hoop earrings and some sort of peasant blouse. She turned and waved in my direction and I moved closer, my stomach squeezing up, my heart beating too fast, my body preparing me for danger, for some sort of terrible change, some sort of paying me back for becoming conceited and loving Fern and liking Camp and having fun while my brother cried his eyes out every night.

The smile was my mother's. My mother had a beautiful smile, and lots of big white teeth. But my mother was dignified, a shy sort of person in public. My mother had curly neck length brown hair. What had happened to her? Was this what she meant by, "Doing something to herself?" Everything about her was different. I kept moving forward, but I think, looking back, my heart was breaking into pieces and crumbling up in my chest. I was not often speechless, but I was then.

Maybe even without the drama of her transformation, long before the days of makeovers, maybe the month of real distance just highlighted the emotional distance, but it felt as if my mother had disappeared and the truth is, I never did get her back. Not really. She had been kidnapped by some hussy in pedal pushers; gone forever or at least, what was left of my illusion of her.

My obsession with all versions of The Stepford Wives and any body snatching science fiction movie, where the people they love turn into empty-souled strangers who still look like the people they love and they can't put their fingers on it, but in that heroine-of-science-fiction-movie-way, they just KNOW, started right there in the straggly woodsy, run-down picnic area of Camp Kiawa, the summer before seventh grade.

The next week I went home on the bus with my campmates, singing all one hundred verses of the eternally horrible bottle song. I had my awards, my artwork, my lanyards and the piece of paper with Fern's address and phone number on it, but camp had really ended on Parents' Day.

Maybe it always does. They shouldn't really be allowed to come, you know. It invades, rips the sleeping bag open while you're still dreaming, holds a whistle and flashlight up to that precious little circle of fledgling identity. Me without them.

"What do I want to Be when I Grow Up? Part Two:" When I grow up I want to be someone who never has to respond to a bell or a whistle, someone who does not have to line-up or participate in any sort of team activity. Someone, free and confident and cheerful. Someone like Fern, only with a nicer name.