I’ve been staying at my aunt’s house in Bristol, CT the last few days, and driving back and forth from there to the assisted living facility where my dad is staying (recovering from a stroke), and the hospital where my mother entered hospice earlier this week. (She passed yesterday.)
Coincidentally, the road I’ve been taking daily back and forth goes directly in front of my old high school, which doesn’t look much like a high school, since it’s a prep school, and is a collection of lovely old houses. Miss Porter’s, though we mostly called it Farmington (the name of the town it’s in).
I stopped in, and even though they’re not in session, they let me take a quick pic. See that wooden shelf in the entry hall? It’s changed a lot, but back in 1985-1989, that was where the girls (it’s an all-girls’ school) left notes for each other. Cute notes, sweet notes, you’re my bestie notes, etc. I didn’t get a lot of notes like that, especially the first year.
I hadn’t wanted to attend Porter’s — I’d wanted to go to the local school that all my elementary friends were going to. But my parents wanted the best education they could afford for me. They couldn’t actually quite afford my high school (my dad scrambled to get the tuition together every semester, even though I was a day student rather than a boarder), but they were determined to give their daughters the best education they possibly could.
I’m guessing my mother also was more comfortable sending her daughter to an all-girls’ school — she’d gone to an all-girls’ convent school herself, back in Sri Lanka. Teenage girls at school with boys could get into a lot of trouble.
But oh, I didn’t fit in at Porter’s. Three hundred girls, almost all of them white, almost all of them a lot wealthier than my family, often from serious generational wealth. I didn’t come from the right background; my spring break was spent at home with my little sisters, not at my grandfather’s club in Florida or on a tropical island somewhere.
I was pretty much a total loser back then, as nerdy as nerds get, and I definitely didn’t fit in. I was a little plump, and had developed a giant chest early, which I hated, and so I mostly tried to hide in my clothes, and live vicariously through my books.
And I didn’t wear the right clothes — I wasn’t super comfortable being a girl at all, so mostly wore jeans, and Laura Ashley dresses were favored at Porter’s back then (if I’m remembering right). I hadn’t even heard of Laura Ashley or her dresses. Plus, I would read books literally all the time, and was a big old Star Trek geek.
So I had no friends, and basically lived in the library after school, until my dad had time to come from the hospital and pick me up. I read my way through all the little paperback genre fiction on the spinny racks, and the librarian was very kind to me.
I didn’t get sweet notes on that Main building shelf, and at one point, I even got a string of anonymous hate mail. I still don’t know why. Kids can be mean.
I was really miserable, but I didn’t talk to my parents about any of it at the time; we didn’t have that kind of relationship. My mother and I didn’t understand each other very well back then (it got better much later, after I had children). And besides, most of what made me a social outcast, I knew they couldn’t do anything about.
But as I was driving past the school the last few days, I realized something — if I had actually told Amma that I wasn’t making friends in part because I didn’t have the right clothes, she would have pinched every penny she had to, to make sure that I had those Laura Ashley dresses. She understood far better than I did how much clothing can become a symbol of belonging to a community; she would have made sure that at least I didn’t stick out like a sore (brown) thumb.
Life there got better for me — I made a friend over a Star Trek book, spring of my first year, and then she helped me make other friends, and I got to know some of the other day students better, and some of the other (very few) girls of color, and I joined the theater crowd, and the education really was excellent, the teachers were amazing — by the second year, I was loving being there.
But if I’d just talked to Amma back then, back when I was miserable, she would have done her best to make that freshman year better.
Ah well. I was young, and so was she. Amma was eighteen when she married, and nineteen when she had me — Kavi’s age, which is bewildering to me. (And how many times have I wished my daughter would just talk to me about her worries and troubles? History repeats. She usually does eventually now, which is something!)
But I did finally learn how to pay a little more attention to my clothes and appearance; I think that made Amma happy. She had a really great eye for style and fashion and beauty.
If you like something I’m wearing these days, you should give Amma a good portion of the credit. She always dressed so beautifully.
