They were BFF. They dressed the same, wore their hair in the same preppie flip, were good at sports - and they rode the latest model bicycles. I was what would now be called a geek, smarter than the average bear, my mother (when she was home) dressed me funny and I rode a beat-up bicycle almost as old as I was. We were all twelve and it was 1952.
Barb and Connie had their routine down pat. Those of us who rode bicycles to school had to pass through a narrow gate into the bike lot. Barb and Connie stationed themselves on both sides of the gate and waited for me to peddle up. As soon as I was within voice range, they started in. Their voices were anything but cruel. Oh no, they pitied me. Poor poor Mary with her pathetic bike. Poor poor Mary with her out-dated clothes. Poor poor Mary with that ugly hair-cut. Poor poor Mary with her sick mom.
The first time I rode through their gauntlet I didn't quite believe what was happening. I wasn't silent like Janet who came to school with her mother's pancake make-up over the bruises we knew we there. I wasn't waddling-fat like Cheryl who cracked jokes all the time - all about herself. I wasn't smelly like Paula who stunk of old pee. Barb and Connie and I had once played together, shared paper doll clothes, giggled over how dumb our brothers were. Besides, they were in with the popular kids. Why would they bother to pick on me?
By the second month of daily torment I dreaded them - and I dreaded school, which was my one sanctuary in a world that seemed too often filled with terrible danger. There was the atomic bomb and who knew what the Russians would do - and there was coming home from school to find my mother crooning wordlessly in the kitchen or passed-out gray on the living-room couch. There was nothing to do about any of it - not the terror of seeing the mushroom cloud, my mother's chest not moving, two sweetly smiling girls waiting at the gate to the bike lot.
So each morning I slung my book-bag over my shoulder and climbed on the old blue bike. I rode up Titus Avenue and turned on Cooper Rd. I pedaled steadfastly. With each breath, I whispered, "I hate you. I hate you." And then the ride was over much too fast. I turned onto the gravel path that led to the bike lot. Barb waved merrily. Connie put her hand over her mouth to cover her giggles. I looked straight ahead and road slowly between them.
I dismounted. They had not followed me. They never did. My hands shook as I locked up my beloved bike. When I turned to walk toward school, I saw that Barb and Connie were gone. I wanted to be gone too. I wanted to leave my body, that stubborn body that choked down breakfast, put on a skirt and blouse that didn't match, climbed on my bike and rode without hesitation toward what might as well have been a mushroom cloud - or my over-dosed mother's gray face.
It didn't occur to me to tell anyone. My father was lost in his struggle to support his family, pay my mother's doctors and be both mother and father to my brother and me. Tell other kids? Tell my teachers? I was too ashamed.
It would not have occurred to me to kill myself. My mother had tried that far too often. And I was terrified of death. It would be fifty-eight years before I would read an October 9, 2010 Associated Press headline: Ohio school sued after four teens kill themselves: Bullying The deaths over the past 2 1/2 years come amid a national spate of teen suicides.
I read further: Suzana Vidovic found her sister's body hanging over the front lawn. The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket - and laughed.
"They were laughing at the way she looked," Suzana says, crying. "Even though she died." ---Meghan Barr, A.P.
My tormentors stopped as abruptly as they had begun. One morning I rode toward the bike lot and saw no one there. I did not feel joyful. I felt no relief. I wondered what they would do next. I stayed numb and shielded for the rest of the school year and through the next.
Our Freshman high school year, Connie, Barb and I became friends. By then I had figured out how to dress, what to say and how to subsume my real self to fit in. By then, I had stood over my mother's comatose body and hissed, "Die. Why don't you just die!" and then run to find my father to save her. By then, I had realized the reliable comfort in a boy's arms, a boy with whom I could be my real self.
Barb and Connie never apologized. In fact, none of us ever brought up the achingly long seven months of 1952. Not till now.
