Angstolescence

Twelve is an age when every day is momentous. What someone said to someone else, or who looked at whom how, or what new cruelty classmates had perpetrated on someone, or what note or slam book or graffitto had made whom burst into tears, all these things feed into  the daily angst-fest that is adolescence. But all this is the tip of the iceberg; in relation to those things we see, there is much that we do not, lurking under the water, massive and frightening. The rest of that mass is made up of the hormones ricocheting around from our emerging bodies, the terror and excitement both of the new beings we are becoming, but also the  things we don't know how to say. 

I think of my adolescent self as a kind of Easter Island statue, huge and solemn, silent and isolated from the outside world on an island, and massively, massively mute. Yet within that hulking self there are many secrets hid, stories that, when I was twelve, I had no way to tell. The sad thing is, those hulking figures stretch on and on for miles down the beach, lines of them, all equally desolate and tragic. The tragedy is that their muteness prevents them for sharing their pain with one another.

In the seventh grade, I was very excited about our new teacher. In sixth grade we'd had a nice but nerdy teacher who had talked to us as though we were still little kids, telling us for example that he came to work on a "choo-choo train", and it enraged me that he didn't see just how terribly adult we were, or at least, I was. When I found out Mr. R. would be our 7th grade teacher I was thrilled: he was the "cool" teacher, bearded, sandal-wearing and long-haired, a hippie, not only did he not wear a tie, he wore African printed dashikis over his unwashed jeans. And he talked to us about sex. 

The year before, I'd suddenly grown a pair of tiny breasts with which I was still so unfamiliar that when opening those schoolroom desks that swung upwards on a hinge, I frequently slammed the lid into my tender chest, forgetting that it stuck out an inch or two extra, and too embarrassed to let on what had happened I simply doubled over until I could hide the tears that had sprung up in the corners of my eyes. I was still unused to my new body. I was also fascinated to discover that boys suddenly stared at me, approached me in the playground and on the way home, whispered things to me or to each other in the halls. 

Our class was probably around eighteen to twenty five kids; probably a little over half our number had begun to show full signs of puberty. Mr. R. would look us up and down and take stock. The first time he did this, I nearly died of shame and wanted to climb under my seat.  I had worn a leotard top and because my mother insisted that I wasn't ready for a bra, my breasts I guess were pretty visible, because Mr. R. gave the entire class a running commentary on what he saw there, and on the state of my development in general. He proceeded to announce to the boys that most likely I had a fair amount of hair "down there" as well. I was mortified.

Now, this was all done in the guise of education. Telling the boys what they might expect when they had their first sexual encounter, which he intimated should be gotten over with as early as possible. 

I was horror-struck. At the same time, I was new to all this frank talk about sex that liberated people in the 70x were supposed to be capable of, and I thought Mr. R. was treating us like adults. Somehow I thought it would be childish to act upset or to tell an adult, so I didn't. Nobody wanted to be labeled what our cool teacher referred to as a "prude", and each of us assumed we were the only ones who were uncomfortable with his lesson plan.  A few days later, Mr. R. brought his pet boa constrictor to class, he took it out of its tank and placed it into a cloth bag which he proceeded to hand around to the girls. 

"This is what a man's penis feels like," he pronounced. We felt a massive squirming thing through the cloth and were terrified. 

Every day had fresh tortures, and as the year progressed we girls began to discover the lay of the land. We all had to go to a sewing class with Mr. R.'s wife, held at their house around the corner. Mr. R. would always saunter in, sometimes half-dressed, and lean across us, caress us, find excuses to come in when we were half-dressed for fitting a skirt or blouse. Without ever really discussing it we just stayed in groups, even to go to the bathroom. His wife seemed cowed, like the saddest person in the world, as she watched his antics. He stalked us on class trips, and during a sleepover trip he walked into the room where we girls were in rows on the floor in our sleeping bags, he wearing nothing but one of those Dashikis. "What," he said impishly as he sashayed between us girls, while  we in our nighties wrapped our sleeping bags tight around us as he tried to get a peek at any part of us left exposed, "does a red-blooded American male wear under his Dashiki?"  As he was standing right over me I had a pretty good view, and I announced: "Jockeys, and if you ask me they don't look all that clean". 

For that, I was punished nearly daily with new humiliations. He had an unerring instinct for hte jugular, worse than any bully our own age, and he wielded it mercilessly at anyone who didn't leap on board his fan wagon. He had a seductive charm that had students, parents, and school administrators in his thrall, and despite feeling that something was very wrong we all mostly vied to be in his good graces.The few students who were skeptical were treated to daily exposure: he would read their journal entries aloud to the class in scathing tones, ridicule their sexual development or lack thereof, propose theories of their probable sexual orientation, or simply rate their physical and psychological attributes, all in a diatribe to the class as a whole, who of course would chime in, making the humiliation complete. 

We never talked about this with each other; the desperation to be cool overrode all else. I feared that complaining would earmark me as a prude, a social kiss of death. If we admitted we were uncomfortable with it all, we were admitting to still being kids. 

It's also important to remember context. All this happened in the early 70's, at which time child-rearing was done very differently than it is today. Our parents were for the most part completely self-absorbed, and left us to our own devices much more than is done today. In fact, they barely noticed us, truth be told. I say this without bitterness, it's just the way it was.

Well, as you might imagine Mr. R. crossed the line many times. Usually 2 girls per class, sometimes 1, sometimes 3. The year after I had him as a teacher, a student forced the issue by running away from home and moving in with Mr R and his wife. (Mind you this is elementary school) Her parents threatened to bring in the police: Mr. R. was asked to resign quietly, no charges were pressed, no parents were told. In fact, that summer, he led his usual cross-country trip of a handful of eighth grade students, none of whose parents knew about the incident or his employment status. 

Back to the Easter Island image. Recently, thirty-five years after the fact, many of my classmates and I began talking about all this, and of course, a lot of new information came out. More than that, though, our adult selves were able to articulate all the complicated things that were going on back then and to share the equally complicated ways in which our year of learning dangerously had affected us over time. There were students who were sure they were the only ones being humiliated, or the only ones not having sex, or the only ones not cool enough fo Mr R to like, or the only ones who had been molested. Tears came pouring out in some cases, tears that had been stemmed for so many years they had turned hearts to stone. Tears from those who had been self-medicating and isolating themselves, from those who had buried all their emotions. The tears were therapy, the words were therapy, the stony Easter Island statues spoke to each other, no longer so incredibly alone.