LJ Idol Topic #26a: Turtles All The Way Down, Take 2.

[the_vernacular]

Six days before I left for boarding school, Gran tried to make me leave Doggy Bear behind. She kept telling me that girls my age didn’t have stuffed animals and everyone would think I was a baby if I showed up with a raggy-eared dog-bear-thing. Eventually, I hid him at the bottom of my trunk and figured that if that was true, I’d hide him under my pillow or something like that. I’d had him since I was three; I couldn’t just leave him home. As much as I felt like I was ready for the independence of not having any parents to tell me what to do, I wasn’t quite ready to face being alone for the first time in my life. I had to have somebody come with me, even if somebody was a stuffed animal.

It was suppertime when I arrived, and I was shuffled off to a dining hall which consisted of several long tables of girls, all chatting in low voices as they ate off plastic trays that once again betrayed the modernity that the building’s edifice tried so hard to conceal.

I went up to the kitchen, where a woman heaped a plate with chicken, green beans, and tater tots, and I found a spot at the empty end of one of the tables, feeling very out of place among all these girls who were so clearly already set in their friendships. I felt suddenly uneasy as I saw them, all pink-skinned and pale. The blondes easily outnumbered the brunettes. I could count the number of girls who weren’t white on two hands. There were two black girls. There wasn’t anyone who looked even remotely like me.

Another girl, blonde and blue eyed, with curls piled high like a beauty pageant contestant, kept looking at me from down the table. I tried to keep my eyes on my food, not wanting her to think I was staring.

“I have a Buddha statue in my room.”

I looked up from my food. “What?” I asked.

“I think I’m going to convert. Buddhists are just so much more spiritual than Methodists.” She was standing right in front of me, pink cheeks, blue eyeshadow, and all.

“That’s...nice?” I tried. “Um.” I held out a hand. “I’m Amy. I just got here.”

“I’m Laura Jean. Amy?” she asked. “That’s not a Chinese name.”

“I’m not Chinese,” I answered, almost feeling as if I should apologize for disappointing her.

“Oh!” she said. Her cheeks flushed pink. “I’m sorry! You look Chinese. What are you?”

“Duh,” said another blonde girl. “She’s Mexican. Can’t you tell?” She flashed a brilliant smile at me and said, “Como esta, nueva chica?”

I had no idea what she'd just said. “I’m not Mexican,” I said. “I’m Choctaw.”

“You’re what?” asked Laura Jean.

By now, a small knot of five or six girls surrounded us.

“Choctaw,” I answered. “Native American.”

“Oh my god!” said one girl. “Do you live in a wigwam?”

“Are you a squaw?”

“Do you wear moccasins?”

“Do you really say ‘How?’?”

I frowned at my remaining tater tots. “No, no, no and no.” They kept asking me things, like whether I lived on a reservation, or whether my relatives wore feathers and hunted buffalo. I didn’t bother explaining that their questions were kind of offensive. I didn’t want to be that kid who everyone thinks is touchy about everything right on the first day.

After dinner, one of the teachers gave me my room assignment. I climbed up three flights of stairs to find Laura Jean in cute plaid shorts and a tank top. I considered my own frilly flannel nightgown, packed in the bottom of my suitcase.

“You’re going to be my roommate!” Laura Jean squealed happily. “Jesus, we’re going to have so much fun. Do you like Twilight? There are Native Americans in that. They’re werewolves.”

I tried not to sigh. Instead, the necklace she wore caught my eye. “Is that a turtle?” I asked.

She stopped bouncing, and clasped her charm. “Oh! Yes! You would know the story,” she said. “It’s a Native American one. About the turtle and the scorpion?”

I didn’t know that one. “Maybe it’s a different tribe?” I tried. “We don’t all have the same stories. What is it?”

“It’s like...” She turned the turtle around in her hands. “Well, see, there’s this turtle who lives on the banks of a mighty river. And one day, a scorpion comes to the turtle, and the scorpion says it needs to cross the river. But the scorpion can’t swim, so it asks the turtle if the turtle will let it ride across the river on its back. And the turtle says to the scorpion, ‘but if I let you ride on my back, you will surely sting me, and I will drown.’ But the scorpion says, ‘Where is the logic in that, my friend the turtle? If I sting you, we will both drown. So that sets the turtle’s mind at eain se, and the turtle lets the scorpion ride across the river on his back. But halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the turtle, suddenly and without warning. And the turtle begins to drown. And as the turtle is drowning, the turtle says, ‘Scorpion, why have you stung me? Now we will both surely drown!’ And the scorpion says, ‘I can’t help it. It’s in my nature.’”

Laura Jean was still twisting the little silver turtle on its chain when she finished the story.

“So why do you wear a turtle?” I asked. “Why not a scorpion?” I didn’t want to tell her that I was pretty sure that story was from the Middle East.

“Well,” said Laura Jean. “It’s the Christian thing to do, right? To give people the benefit of the doubt, beyond all odds. Even if you think they might sting you. I wear it as a reminder.”

I smiled at that. “Even if you’re thinking of becoming Buddhist?”

She laughed, and petted her turtle. “Even if.”

I wasn’t sure of Amy at first, but she was a really cool girl. I mean, secretly, when we were alone in our room. She was a little weird, and a little babyish. Like, she slept with a stuffed dog bear thing, and she had little girl clothes. So it wasn’t really a surprise that the other girls made fun of her, even after I told them that she was my roommate and I didn’t like it.

I felt bad explaining to her that I couldn’t sit with her in the cafeteria, but it was really bad for my image. I mean, all those other girls coming up to her and saying ‘How!?’ and talking about big wampum and stuff? She didn’t even tell them off, and it made it kind of hard, you know, when she wouldn’t defend herself. I couldn’t do it, because they would have made fun of me, too.

Then there was the day that I had this idea.

When Amy got back to our room, I had everything set up. A chair, in the middle of the room, in front of the full-length mirror. A towel draped over the chair.

“What’s this?” she asked.

I showed her the scissors. “I’m giving you a makeover,” I said.

“A what?” she asked.

“A makeover,” I said. “I’m going to cut your hair and do your makeup, and then we’re going to pick out some new clothes for you from my stuff.”

She frowned. “Why?” she asked.

“Because,” I told her. “I don’t like when they tease you. If you...I don’t know. If you looked more like the other girls, they might stop.”

She took a deep breath. I could tell she didn’t like the idea. “Laur,” she said. “I’m still not going to look like them. I’m still not going to act like them. A haircut won’t fix things.”

“No, no,” I assured her. “It’s at least worth a try. Look, I know about looks. In my old school, I wore flannel shirts all the time and I was a huge loser. Here, I’m one of the most popular girls in the school.”

Finally, she relented. She still seemed skeptical about it, but she let me drape the towel around her shoulders and rinse her hair.

“We don’t have that story,” she said, after many minutes of silence.

“What?” I asked her.

“The scorpion one. It’s not a Native American story. I Googled it. It’s a Sanskrit story.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what Sanskrit was, but I guess it wasn’t Native American. “Sorry, that’s what my dad always said.”

“We have a story about a turtle,” said Amy, as I snipped into her thick, dark hair. “It’s...do you know the story of the tortoise and the hare?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “Everyone knows that one.”

“It’s like that,” said Amy. “But different. The...it starts with Turkey.”

“Turkey the country or the animal?” I asked.

“The animal. There was a wild turkey. And one day, when Turkey was flying, he took a nasty spill, and suddenly, he was falling right into the middle of the river. Well, as much as turkeys can’t fly, they really can’t swim, so Turkey was fearful of drowning, but then he saw Turtle in the middle of the river, and he landed right on Turtle’s shell, and cracked it into a dozen pieces. And that’s why Turtle has a segmented shell today. But Turkey felt so bad about what he had done that he got all the spiders to spin silk to hold Turtle’s shell together, and when he was finished, Turtle was so grateful, he told Turkey that Turkey could wear his shell for a day.”

“What?” I asked. “So you had a turkey in a turtle shell?”

“Uh-huh,” said Amy. “Anyway, just as Turkey put on Turtle’s shell, along came Rabbit. And Rabbit was still in a bad mood from losing a race to the slowest animal in the animal kingdom. So, thinking that Turkey was Turtle, he challenged Turkey to another race. And of course Turkey agreed, and the race was on. But no sooner had Snake given the signal for the race to begin, than Turkey rose up into the air and flew so fast there was no way Rabbit would ever catch up, and so Rabbit lost again.”

“And then?” I asked, after Amy was quiet for a long time.

“And then nothing,” she said. “That’s the end of the story.”

“Where’s the moral?” I asked her. “It’s not like...I mean, the scorpion story is to remind you that people don’t really change, or something.”

“There isn’t a moral,” said Amy. “Not all stories need morals.”

The day after my haircut, I went downstairs to breakfast. My hair looked gorgeous. Laura Jean’s mom was a hairstylist, and Laura Jean had cut my hair with long layers so it was full and shiny and I looked like a model in a magazine, especially after she’d loaned me her makeup and her skinny jeans.

She waved to me, and ushered me over to sit with her at the table with the popular girls. I hesitated, but moved to join her.

“Ew,” said Sandra. “What is she wearing?”

“I wore that yesterday,” said Laura Jean. “You said you wanted to borrow it.”

“So, what, now she’s just a wannabe you?” asked Eileen. “Why are you telling her to sit with us? Is she, like, your new pet project? Are you trying to rescue her from the reservation or something?”

They talked to Laura Jean, and not to me, like I wasn’t even there standing in front of them. Finally, I took my tray and went to the corner table where no one ever sat.

I could see the disappointment in Laura Jean’s eyes. It was almost as if she was more upset about it than I was.

When I got back to our room that night, my hair was still gorgeous, but it hadn’t exactly done anything for my social status. Laura Jean was already there, sitting on her bed, staring at the door, as if she’d been waiting for me to come back.

Her blonde hair was black.

“What did you do?” I asked.

She didn’t answer my question. Instead, she held out her hand. “I have something for you,” she said.

It was her turtle charm.

I shook my head. “I can’t take that,” I said. “You wear it every day. It’s like...it’s like part of you.”

She thrust her hand out insistently. “I got myself something else,” she said, and she pulled back the collar of her shirt. “I think it’s something I need a better reminder of.”

Glistening against her collarbone was a tiny silver scorpion.