Invitation

Recently, I received an invitation to my 40th high school reunion, a school from which I didn't graduate. I was kicked out. Bounced, as my father said. 40 years later, and I still feel remnants of shame. I can see the girl I was then, sneaking cigarettes, richocheting from exuberance to despair. 

The first joyous flash of insight when I realized that A Separate Peace by John Knowles was a theistic story about good and evil, and not just about events at a boys' private school, that literature contained clues about what it is to be human. (It's ironic that there in a southern all girls' boarding school, we were reading about the experiences of boys.) I listened for themes in music appreciation class, studied Jean Valjean in French class, whacked a tennis ball around the courts with my Latin teacher, Jorge Suarez, whom I alternately adored or despised, or ridiculed during class. I charged our pinny-swathed opponents during field hockey games, girded in goalie pads, my face obscured by a face mask. I never passed geometry.


But, increasing swells of anxiety lay beneath the gregarious facade of my rebellious, uniformed teen-age self. When we read Childhood and Society by Erik Erikson, and discussed identity, I felt empty. Who was I? I had no idea. The issue of being adopted, being different and somehow lacking filled my mind with dread. 


I told no one. No one must know.


I felt wild. A friend pierced my ears with a safety pin, I dyed my hair. I shrieked and giggled and gossiped and linked arms with my chums. I sprayed a substance into a brown paper bag and inhaled it until I blacked out.


On Father's Day weekend sophomore year, I performed Gunga Din with a practiced cockney accent. Later that day, my cousin would find out from her father that her parents were getting divorced. What had seemed solid was collapsing.


By the following fall, girls riding horses and school team allegiance to mascot Foxes and Hounds seemed superficial and silly. I spent time alone in the woods reading Thoreau, or re-playing Paul Simon's I Am a Rock lyrics:

I have my books

And my poetry to protect me;

I am shielded in my armor,

Hiding in my room, safe within my womb

I touch no one and no one touches me.

I am a rock

I am an island.

I found a separate, uneasy peace, of sorts, taking long walks in the woods. In those days, I didn't know the language of frozen emotions. I turned inward, dis-connected. Eventually, they sent me home.


I was given a second chance: repeating my junior year. But, my friends, now seniors, had outstripped me, were moving rapidly away. I didn't know how to do life, and I was tumbling through space.


One day, after hiding out in the infirmary to avoid an algebra test, I drank a bottle of Romilar CF, the drug of choice for angst-ridden, risk-taking private school girls. The pain stopped, and I literally bounced around campus, giddy and high, with no thought at all about consequences - which were swift.


Within hours of detection, I was packed up and shipped home. There had been the incident of the horse in the academic building, and those illicit cigarettes in the attic, and that undermining mockery of school rules and school spirit.

As Robert Frost's poem - The Road Not Taken - ends: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
                                                                                   I took the one less traveled
                                                                                   and that has made all the difference


I am the girl I was then, know her bones and spit, foibles and strengths; we're on intimate terms. I am friends with what was once frozen and inexplicable.