The Only Jewish Girl In The Trailer Park
My head is bleeding profusely from being pushed off the monkey bars by Theresa Gross whose nose is bleeding as a result of my having socked her in the face, the sock itself the result of being pushed off the monkey bars in the first place.
I grimace in pain at the front desk in an attempt to be noticed by Miss Sherry who has the power to grant me a pass to the infirmary. I can feel the blood running down the back of my head in a rivulet, snaking its way underneath my dirt-stained collar. I’ve already been told to stand quietly and wait my turn but truly, there are no other turns for which to wait. I stand alone. I sigh. “Ms. Stoll, I will attend to you once you have obeyed the rules and are standing behind the dotted line.”
I turn to look behind me-a dotted line painted like a highway along the floor from one end of the front counter to the other. I move behind it. And wait. Miss Sherry continues to read whatever it is she’s reading with the kind of intent usually reserved for Members of The President’s Cabinet when deciding whether, or not, to invade, you know, Whoever. I start having an acid flashback. My two older brothers often spend the night with their super-cool friends sneaking booze out of my parent’s liquor cabinet (called the White Piece for some reason-the thing is red) talking about all the very cool times they’ve had. Such times almost always involve acid flashbacks, which sound alternately awesome and terrifying. I believe that I’ve caught one because that’s what happens sometimes and it is called a “contact high”.
Plunk! the delicate sound of a blood drop hitting the linoleum floor.
“Ms. Stoll, I can feel you moving. If you continue to fidget, you will have to wait even longer.” There is no one around. There is nothing she has to do that can possibly be as important as attending to a child’s bleeding head. I am eleven years old and I know more about prioritizing than she ever will.
“Miss Sherry?“
“It’s Miss Cherrier,“ she snarls, pronouncing it as if it were French, which I know it’s not.
“My head is bleeding.”
“Speak when you’re spoken to.”
“But you won’t speak to me!”
With the most apathetic look possible she glances up. “You are spoiled with no respect for your superiors.” She is saying this and staring straight at me. She can see my bleeding head. She can see the pool of blood congealing beneath my feet and she doesn’t care! She continues, “So when you stand behind the dotted line and I decide that I am good and ready, I will attend to you.”
Dotted line?!!! The pain has grown so intense that everything looks dotted to me! The pool of blood swirls around like a riptide and turns into a mess of snakes. I hate snakes! I start shaking, which has an immediately contagious effect on Miss Sherry. “IF YOU SAY ONE MORE WORD, I WILL HAVE YOU THROWN RIGHT OUT OF HERE!” The Brownie motto waves on a flag behind her head:
Brownies. Where girls become strong, independent, and courageous young women.
The payphone is just off to the side of the front desk-a stone’s throw from where I stand. I glance toward Miss Sherry, hunkered into her Very Important Papers. I hope they’re divorce papers. No way! Who’d marry her? They’re probably death papers. Yeah! I hope someone she knows died! I hope her house has caught on fire and all her cats are perishing in a burning maelstrom of flame and smoke and because I am a Strong, Independent and Courageous Young Woman, I make a mad dash for it.
The second my feet leave the dotted line Miss Sherry is up, her arms made of rubber like that guy Gumby, and she reaches out to envelop me in her stretchy green globules.
JUST HOW MUCH TROUBLE COULD A SEVENTY-POUND SHORT-SHORTS WEARING LOPSIDED-PIG-TAILED-HEAD-BLEEDING-GIRL BE? I’m no Firestarter! I’m no Nancy Spungeon (having just last month snuck Nancy Spungeon, The Autobiography, out of my brother’s room and reading it cover to cover, swore off forever having children or getting involved in punk rock.) Miss Sherry drags me away from the telephone. The receiver clinks violently against the plastic side five times before settling into a gentle swing, and then, stasis.
“You think I’m blind child? Do you think I was born yesterday? You have horns!”
“I What?!”
And here, Miss Sherry thumps the top of my head, right where the blood is streaming from. “Your horns are bleeding. And if you think I’m about to disease myself with your Jew horn blood, you’ve got another thing coming!”
Jew horn blood? Miss Sherry grabs my left elbow and drags me to the bench next to her desk. I expect to be shackled and offered a bowl of gruel, which come to think of it, would be a step up from the food we were given earlier. “My mom’s gonna be really mad when she comes to pick me up and sees me chained to the desk.”
“Your mother isn’t coming to pick you up today Debbie,” she says, triumphantly. “Your mother is in jail which is exactly the sort of thing that comes from not leading a Good Christian Life.“
The worst thing you could be in Bradenton, Florida in nineteen eighty-three was Jewish or black. “Just look at your hair-” I reach up and touch my hair. It feels alright to me, if a bit sticky. “You think G-D would have given you hair like that if he loved you?”
“I don’t believe in god.”
She gasps and then smiles benevolently, “It isn’t your fault, raised by wolves who don’t know right from wrong.” She leans into me, no longer afraid that she will disease herself I guess, “But with your sass mouth and loose way of walking, you’re going to end up wishing you’d been sent to a convent when you get older because it’s girls like you who end up pregnant and living in the streets addicted to glue.”
As she explains this to me more patiently than anything she’s ever said to me before, she gazes fondly out the window upon a scraggly angel named Sonia Dudick. Now lemme tell you this: Sonia Dudick has dyed black hair covered in half a tube of Dippity-Do to make it stand up straight in a pretty good imitation mohawk. She’s paler that a dead person and lest you forgot, the Florida motto is The Sunshine State. Sonia Dudick is the most popular girl in Brownies, a. because she looks scary, and b. because she practices witchcraft underneath the slide on the playground. She communes with people’s dead pets for fifty cents a pop. She lives in a trailer with her alcoholic father and her redneck brother is the biggest weed dealer in town. The thought occurs to me that perhaps Miss Sherry is stoned and that’s what’s got her so confused, because it doesn’t take a genius to see that Sonia Dudick is fucked up and will continue to be fucked up and will most likely die fucked up even if everyone loves her Now. Sure, she attends Sunday School at the Church of Christ but also, she’s a witch.
Miss Sherry is waiting for me to smart mouth her so she can continue her diatribe. She is waiting for me to say something derogatory about Sonia Dudick so that she can explain to me, in her patronizingly patient tone how Sonia is whatever it is she is and I’m not that is causing my head to bleed while nobody attends to it and while we’re at it-WHY THE HELL IS MY MOTHER IN JAIL?! But I remain silent. Because no matter what I say, I know it will be wrong. I know it will cause the both of us more pain. I know that when I grow up and become famous, The President of the Freaking United States, or whatever, that I will still SUCK BEYOND UNDERSTANDING in Miss Sherry’s eyes because I AM A JEW. And right then and there I decide that although I will never be a model Brownie citizen, I will live by the Brownie dictum;
Brownies. Where girls become strong, independent, and courageous young women.
I open my mouth and scream as loud as I can. And while I’m screaming I remember the Boy Scout motto and think to myself, hell yes, I’m prepared too.
