Sometimes I feel like a friggin' gameshow host lost in my own reality show, you know the kind where Vanna White comes out all dolled up, stalking across the set in impossible high heels, and her red polyester dress has its own chorus of crazy going on like cicadas in the wings shrieking up a storm. Only I am never dressed for the part.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering how I got here, why I was chosen for this particular drama, and what the premise is. Someone forgot her notes, luckily for me, faking it is second nature—not like those anxiety dreams when I was in second grade.
I often dreamed that I took off my snazzy red woolen coat I've had since I was four. It's a bit too snug and threadbare—only I forgot to put on a dress. I’m wearing knickers and one of those wife beater undershirts, trimmed with lace and a tiny bow on my chest to feminize it. It could be worse, I could have been in my pajamas.
Realizing my error, I hide in the alcove, afraid to come out of the closet—so to speak. I can’t stay in there all day. The teacher is taking role and is about to mark me tardy. Story of my life. Either I’m always missing the bus, or I forget to dress for the part.
Everyone else is properly clothed and primly sitting at their desks with hands folded, the teacher too. I can’t go out there. Is there a sweater, or a pillowcase art smock I can borrow? She calls out my school name. The I'm in trouble name. Not my family name. All eyes are on me. Stagefright is real.
The teacher is both judge and jury, she calls my name, so I slip on my red woolen coat with its frayed red silk lining and black velvet collar, to join the class. She is annoyed, and will stay annoyed with me for the rest of the school year, no matter what I do.
She thinks she is hiding it well. But I can tell. I will flub my lines. It will become a familiar pattern. I will become excellent at subterfuge and hiding my inadequacies, always dressed for the wrong part—not like the other kids who seem to have a grasp as to what is going on.
This fugue state will be my modus operandi all throughout school. I'm a bootstrap kid. Myself and I. And the cats. Only later will I discover that the real director of this particular reality show is called dyslexia, not the indifferent teacher. But no one will cotton onto it. They will leave me sitting alone in a corner, punishing me for what I cannot seem learn, never asking why. And so, I will become an excellent actor, fooling everyone, including myself. The mimic.
Danette and Gail are teacher's pets. They always know what to wear. Cute little frocks nicely ironed, and crisp skirts, so they look like upended tulips sitting in the first row. Dennis, the dreamboat, slicks back his dark slicked pompadour carefully with one hand. Later, I realize it’s a studied gesture probably practiced in front of the bathroom mirror.
He smells like his father Dean, the milkman who is a stand-in for Rock Hudson. During summer I loved Tuesday mornings when he drove up the dirt road to our house in the old Lucas Valley milk truck. I’d come flying down the road in my PJs with my long pigtails wagging behind me.
He’d pick me up and spin me into the air until I was airborne, breathless. I giggled and it felt like I was soaring with the birds until he put me down on the ground. Did he also do this with his own kids? The other kids on his milk route? I suspect so. The model was at hand.
One time he asked if we want anything other than the usual 2 quarts of milk standing tall in glass jug. I dreamed big and added orange juice and cottage cheese to the list, not realizing my grandmother would have to scrabble next week to pay the bill from my impromptu purchases. Math was never my strong suit.
I sat on the wooden milk box and ate the cottage cheese with two fingers, washing it down with orange juice straight from the bottle. I had no idea how I would explain any of this to my grandmother. See, it was my job to collect the milk before the crows got to it. They would flip open the milk box and peck off the foil and cardboard cap to get to the cream. Strange to think of those black crows wanting white milk. The cats lined up waiting for the spoils.
Sometimes we forgot to collect the milk. It would turn to cottage cheese right in the bottles under the hot summer sun. She’d complain about it, and then strain the curdled milk in cheesecloth, feeding the whey to the hungry cats who scrambled into a furry pile with spats and hisses. Sometimes she made paper-thin pancakes for dinner stuffed with cottage cheese laced with lemon juice and sugar. It was a win-win situation as far as I was concerned.
Sometimes in winter when we forgot the milk overnight, the little foil caps that were perched on top of frozen cream expressed out of the bottle, looking like long-necked swans. I didn’t have a father or a mother figure so Dean the Milkman was like a surrogate practice dad. He was a model, so I could be like the other kids. He said he didn't have a little girl, just two boys, Dennis and Steve. I tell him that Dennis is in my class. Can I be his little girl?
I always looked forward to seeing the milkman. A story that his son, Dennis, would never learn. He will also never know that I had a crush on him all through school. I didn’t want to jinx the situation. But the situation jinxed itself. Driving back up Lucas Valley Road after the bars had closed, Dean flipped his beautiful boat of a white convertible into a ravine.
Dennis hid behind a curtain of grief, dressed in black for the rest of the school year. He still smelled like Dean. I was in a fugue state and thought of my red coat. What about the milk, who would deliver the milk to our door? Who would toss me into he air? It was a closed casket ceremony, said my grandmother. The spotlight shone on Dean like a reality show before the final curtain dropped.
6/6/24 WOW—Wide Open Writing with Franny French
