Third Grade Smackdown
Things I'm surprised I've done, part 1:
Instigated a fistfight with the class bully when I was 8 years old.
I transferred from public school to St. Mary's in the third grade. My mother got a job teaching second grade so Gregg and I got free tuition the whole time; certainly the only way private education would have been feasible then, for better or worse--better because it offered some discipline & focus for my smart-but-shiftless brother and a more accelerated curriculum for both of us; worse because it pummeled the most damaging aspects of Catholicism deep into my already guilt-ridden young psyche.
This was not an easy transition for me by any description: I'd actually been pretty confident and well-liked among my peers and teachers at Randall, but for the first time (not the last; see "A Crack in my Elegant Veneer" from Memories) I went to school with a gnawing pit in my stomach. I had homework for the first time, I was inexplicably resented by my bowl-cut coiffed, oversize-spectacled, Pall Mall puffing, abusive hag of a teacher Mrs. Wood, who first put me in the remedial reading group (I'd been reading since I was 3) and hypocritically taught me just how close cleanliness is to godliness by dumping out the overflowing contents of my desk into a paper bag one night and forcing me to search for my things when I came into class the next morning. And the cliques of snotty vapid girls (they could be saved for another post) and aloof boys were already fully ossified, as they would stay through high school graduation.
Moreover, there was a towheaded miscreant in our class named Bruce who'd been left back the year before and who made it his sole mission to ridicule and terrorize the more Milhousey nosepicking types among us third graders (I mean that literally and figuratively; I was admittedly a habitual nostril-pirate, and often attempted self-induced nosebleeds and hyperventilation to get out of class). John "Master" Bates got it marginally worse than I did--beyond a certain dodgeball-victim *je ne sais quoi* I can't recall why he was such a social leper; I'd probably find him cool now--and I was more untouchable (and more loathed, surely, with insinuations of favouritism that loomed spectrally throughout my entire time at St. Mary's) to some degree because of my mother's position--but anyway, Bruce didn't spare me much. And I felt like I already gave at the office in the bullied department, so to speak...my brother could've [past tense?] easily taught a workshop on how to be an obnoxious, manipulative, preying-on-weakness, insecurity-concealing assholish brute. But I was a "good girl" and merely complained to my teacher and my parents and did my best to follow the advice to "just ignore him" that attended the torment from my perpetrators at both school and home. Until one morning before lessons started, when we were all lined up in the hall.
I don't know if Bruce was picking on me specifically or if I was defending someone even more socially denigrated than myself but I just fucking snapped, and shoved him really hard into a big metal wastebasket and then proceeded to absolutely wail on him while the other students stood dumbstruck or cheering in vicarious id-release. A girl classmate definitely tattled, which sent Bruce and me down to the principal, Sister Ann Henry's office. Sister Ann Henry was a sometimes jolly, sometimes scary, ruddy-faced, white-haired Franciscan who still anachronstically wore a habit and I could swear even a wimple (although dressed in a conversative brown suit) during a more lenient period of nun fashion. I was convinced I was going to get into serious trouble over this, seeing as I'd made the first shove, but I merely got a short talking-to about the unChristian implications of beating the shit out of someone, and then dismissed. Bruce was another story. He generally left me alone after that incident and didn't return to St. Mary's the following year, to our unspoken collective relief.
The year after I moved to New York my mother sent me a newspaper clipping from the local Police Beat; apparently my childhood tormentor was convicted of rape.
Instigated a fistfight with the class bully when I was 8 years old.
I transferred from public school to St. Mary's in the third grade. My mother got a job teaching second grade so Gregg and I got free tuition the whole time; certainly the only way private education would have been feasible then, for better or worse--better because it offered some discipline & focus for my smart-but-shiftless brother and a more accelerated curriculum for both of us; worse because it pummeled the most damaging aspects of Catholicism deep into my already guilt-ridden young psyche.
This was not an easy transition for me by any description: I'd actually been pretty confident and well-liked among my peers and teachers at Randall, but for the first time (not the last; see "A Crack in my Elegant Veneer" from Memories) I went to school with a gnawing pit in my stomach. I had homework for the first time, I was inexplicably resented by my bowl-cut coiffed, oversize-spectacled, Pall Mall puffing, abusive hag of a teacher Mrs. Wood, who first put me in the remedial reading group (I'd been reading since I was 3) and hypocritically taught me just how close cleanliness is to godliness by dumping out the overflowing contents of my desk into a paper bag one night and forcing me to search for my things when I came into class the next morning. And the cliques of snotty vapid girls (they could be saved for another post) and aloof boys were already fully ossified, as they would stay through high school graduation.
Moreover, there was a towheaded miscreant in our class named Bruce who'd been left back the year before and who made it his sole mission to ridicule and terrorize the more Milhousey nosepicking types among us third graders (I mean that literally and figuratively; I was admittedly a habitual nostril-pirate, and often attempted self-induced nosebleeds and hyperventilation to get out of class). John "Master" Bates got it marginally worse than I did--beyond a certain dodgeball-victim *je ne sais quoi* I can't recall why he was such a social leper; I'd probably find him cool now--and I was more untouchable (and more loathed, surely, with insinuations of favouritism that loomed spectrally throughout my entire time at St. Mary's) to some degree because of my mother's position--but anyway, Bruce didn't spare me much. And I felt like I already gave at the office in the bullied department, so to speak...my brother could've [past tense?] easily taught a workshop on how to be an obnoxious, manipulative, preying-on-weakness, insecurity-concealing assholish brute. But I was a "good girl" and merely complained to my teacher and my parents and did my best to follow the advice to "just ignore him" that attended the torment from my perpetrators at both school and home. Until one morning before lessons started, when we were all lined up in the hall.
I don't know if Bruce was picking on me specifically or if I was defending someone even more socially denigrated than myself but I just fucking snapped, and shoved him really hard into a big metal wastebasket and then proceeded to absolutely wail on him while the other students stood dumbstruck or cheering in vicarious id-release. A girl classmate definitely tattled, which sent Bruce and me down to the principal, Sister Ann Henry's office. Sister Ann Henry was a sometimes jolly, sometimes scary, ruddy-faced, white-haired Franciscan who still anachronstically wore a habit and I could swear even a wimple (although dressed in a conversative brown suit) during a more lenient period of nun fashion. I was convinced I was going to get into serious trouble over this, seeing as I'd made the first shove, but I merely got a short talking-to about the unChristian implications of beating the shit out of someone, and then dismissed. Bruce was another story. He generally left me alone after that incident and didn't return to St. Mary's the following year, to our unspoken collective relief.
The year after I moved to New York my mother sent me a newspaper clipping from the local Police Beat; apparently my childhood tormentor was convicted of rape.