I missed half of my 4th grade year. I think the adventure might have begun with the school portrait I brought home that year, the one that caused my mother to say over and over, “Something is the matter with Karen,” and my aunt to respond soothingly, on the weekends she came over, “Don’t make so much of it, Joyce. All children go through stages.”

I developed what I could’ve sworn was a matching set of lymph node lumps. In retrospect, I think it must have been more akin to a hernia. I couldn’t do anything strenuous because — I was told — something might rupture. I still went to school, but did miss PE… in one sense of the word. In another sense, I didn’t miss PE one iota, being already on my 4th year of, “Ha! You’ve got her on your team!” There was a boy who towered above us in height and below us in intellect, who I don’t recall ever doing anything cruel himself but was a pawn in the hands of other children. The children would tell him I loved him, motivating him to scoot closer and closer, and me to scoot further and further away. The game culminated when I fell with a plop off the cafeteria bench. (Score one point for the other side.)

I developed a minor stomach ailment, and long past the time my stomach had recovered, I faked it: a tactic that strangely worked, where none had before. Now I did stay home. Sometimes my mother worked at the house entering figures in ledgers at the dinette table. “Let’s pretend,” I coaxed her. I pretended we were friendly monsters who lived in the center of the earth: I, Fluffyascarya, she, my brother, Terrory. The ledger was her math book (Terrory being a veritable whiz at mathematics). Left alone days, I wrote a “book” in the style of Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmations, with proper British phrasing.

in a sense, I missed half of fourth grade. In a sense, I might have missed less than I found. Just before Christmas, a packet of cards came from school, with a note from the teacher that she hadn’t made the children write them, they’d wanted to. A little before I resumed attendance, in February, at a small parochial school, I began having play dates with a child I had gone to school with in the primary grades. We would go to the library on Saturday, then to my father’s restaurant. There in the booth, we drew pictures of our dolls and wrote each other poems and cheers and notes that bordered on love letters.

Somewhere along the line, my mother found those letters and photocopied them. On one, that nine-year-old friend had enscribed in fresh cursive, “To be kept for at least 20 years.” I held it in my hand the other day. I realized it had been nearly thirty years.

© 2010, karen. All rights reserved.

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This entry was posted on August 30, 2010 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Karen, Memoirs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.