First Grade

I'm almost positive that on my first day of first grade, I wore my white turtleneck with ladybugs on it with the corduroy red skirt and my hated blue buckle shoes. Alana was in my class. Laurie was across the hall in another class, and I was sad I wasn't there with her. Her teacher seemed nicer than mine. A very nice girl named Nancy (not Nancy the Druggie from high school) was in my class, and she used to wear dark blue Jordache jeans almost every day. Nancy was not Jewish, had an older brother named James, and was very skinny with stick straight brown hair and bangs. I loved her hair. I wanted to be skinny like she was.

I felt like I didn't do very well in first grade. We were given seven or eight dittos every day, which I found boring, plus one of which was ALWAYS a cut-and-paste. I didn't have good eye-hand coordination when it came to the Elmer's, and hated to be dirty. Thus, I was always one of the last people still at their desks working, while everyone else was playing. My mother told me they actually pulled me out of class to find out if I got in trouble if I went home dirty in an "Is this kid being beaten at home" kind of way, because I was so anti-glue. I still hate glue. Even Gluesticks.

The desks in first grade were set up in a horseshoe, and inside the horseshoe there were three rows of desks. I sat on the outside of the horseshoe, near the door. I had a crush on a boy named Matthew. A very, very big crush. My love was unrequited however, because he liked Alana.

The summer before kindergarten started, my mother taught me how to read. We didn't quite go to the library every day, but it felt close. I have clear memories of sitting on the couch in the living room yelling into the kitchen where my parents were, "Daddy, what does T-H-E spell, again?"

All in all, first grade kind of sucked. My teacher was angry and mean and yelled a lot. I was scared of her and hated her.

It was a very big deal who we sat next to at lunch. I always wanted to sit next to Alana. So did a girl named Lisa. I think Alana liked Lisa better than she liked me, but I still liked Lisa just fine.

There was a boy named Chris who sat at our lunch table, and nobody liked him. All I remember about him was that I thought of him as being messy and dirty, in a shirt-untucked, dirty fingernails, messy hair kind of way. We used to chase each other around in the lunchroom a lot, and one day Alana ran past me, tapping me on the arm, yelling, 'Chris-touch!" At first I didn't even understand what she was saying. I just knew it was bad to have and I should get rid of it.

Then it became clear. Chris, or something of his, had touched Alana. She could only get rid of his "contamination" by passing on The Touch. If your fingers were crossed when someone tried to pass you Chris-touch, you were immune. Now, I can see how cruel that game was, and how horrible Chris must have felt. Then, as a five and six-year old, I just wanted to give away the Chris-touch to somebody else, lest I get lumped in as being as undesirable as he was. Long Island is a cruel place to grow up.

Every day after we got back to the classroom from recess, we had "rest time" and were supposed to put our heads on our desks and stay quiet. One by one, we were allowed to go to the back of the classroom to get a drink from the water fountain. There was a girl named Lynne who would fall asleep during rest time, and people would laugh at her.If we were good throughout the week, on Fridays our teacher would make popcorn for the class. We NEVER got it.

I can't remember if it was every day or once a week, but a different kid was allowed to go to the front of the room and read to the class. That kid was also allowed to pick another kid as a "helper" in case they got stuck on any hard words. The day it was my turn to read to the class, my teacher reminded me about picking a helper, and I told her I didn't need one. Which was true - I really DID know how to read. I think she thought I was being obnoxious, and I felt she disliked me even more after that day.

One day after school I went to Alana's house, which I thought was much bigger and fancier than my house. Her older brother Michael also had a friend over - Jill's older brother Jared. Alana and I went into the basement and played with a machine that spun paper around while we poured different colored paints onto it. As we went upstairs to Alana's bedroom, her mother called out from somewhere that Alana's silver was drying on her bathroom counter. Huh? A first grader has silver? And her own bathroom? Anyway.

Alana and I got in an argument while we were in her room, and she called me an asshole and said she was locking me in her bedroom. It was the first time I'd heard the word asshole. I told her she couldn't lock me in from the outside, she insisted she could, and Alana closed the door from the outside. When I opened the unlocked-from-the-outside door and looked down the hallway, Alana was nowhere to be found. I wandered downstairs to the den and sat on the ottoman, where Michael and Jared were playing Atari. Michael was nice and made me feel comfortable, and I told him Alana had called me an asshole and I wanted to go home.

When my father came to pick me up, Alana and I pretended nothing had gone wrong - I don't know why. We went down to the basement to get my paper with the paints on it, and it was still wet. With our fathers standing in the entryway, I accidentally dropped the paper face-down on the polished floors. I was MORTIFIED. One of the fathers suggested I leave my painting there to dry and Alana could bring it to school for me. I wanted to apologize about the floor, but couldn't get the words out, and we left. Alana never gave me that painting.

At some point that year, I got in a fight with Alana, got very VERY angry at her, and near the back of our classroom I scratched her down her arm. VERY hard. To be honest, I shocked myself a little bit with how deep that scratch went. Alana's arm bled. I don't remember what our fight was about, but think it had something to do with Jennifer - the girl who lived around the block from me. Of course I was forced to apologize, and Alana was told to accept my apology, but nothing was ever the same after that. We'd eventually be friendly, but never friends again.

Another thing that happened in first grade was that on the day before a week's vacation started, I got nauseous. It was right before we were supposed to go to gym, and the whole class was standing in line in the hallway. I said to Alana, "I think I'm going to throw up" right before puking right there in line. After being sent to the nurse, my mother came and picked me up. When my father got home from work I was laying on the loveseat in the den watching The Young and the Restless with my mother. We were leaving that day for New Hampshire (or maybe MA) and I thought I might have ruined the trip by getting sick. But it was determined my puke was a fluke and we left on time.

In first grade I was very involved in gymnastics after school. I didn't feel like I was very good at it, but maybe I just had gymnastics coaches with high expectations and I picked up on that. At the very least, I was averagely good for my age. Oh screw it, my roundoffs were perfect. So you can imagine my mother's surprise when she got a call from the school saying they wanted to put me in Special Gym. It wasn't the gym class for the retarded kids, but just one step above that - an extra gym class for the kids who were just ... less than coordinated, shall we say.

My mother's response was a very polite Whatchu talkin' bout, Willis? They claimed I couldn't even walk on a balance beam. My mother assured them I could. There was a bit more back and forth I wasn't aware of at the time, and my mother finally figured out the problem. Apparently all first graders got tested for Special Gym. Apparently the gym teachers presented the test as a game of playing Circus. Apparently I was not down with playing Circus.

My mother came to the school, told me I had to prove to the gym teachers I was capable of walking on the balance beam, and so I hopped on up, and danced my way from one end to the other. Maybe I threw in a cartwheel or something. My mother, giving her best "Told ya so!" look, confirmed that I would NOT be going to Special Gym, and left the school.

These days it's called Shoprite, but back then it was at Foodtown that I had the horrifying and unfortunate experience of running into my teacher. At the supermarket. Food shopping. Outside of school, where she belonged at all times, whether or not school was in session. My mother was so nice to my teacher, and it bothered me - didn't she understand that I hated this woman? That she screamed at kids and made them cry? But of course, I couldn't say anything in front of her. Plus, the sheer shock at seeing her in a place where regular people go - it blew me away. My mother claimed that "teachers are people too" but in my six-year-old brain that did NOT mean they should be shopping at the supermarket!