From Chapter 2 of "Beach Glass"
The Moving Walkway
1966
A schoolgirl opens an atlas and discovers the world. Long before she travels on her own, that larger world is told to her in stories, maps and songs; schoolwork makes it part of every day. Learn the map. Turn the globe. Turn it well and put your finger on it. This is where you'll go. It's the same motion used for learning about love: you turn the stem of your apple around and count the alphabet until the stem breaks off. This is who you love.
The schoolgirl learns that each country, state and city has its girls: they smile up at her from books, offering baskets of the local crop, the national dish, the exported product: olives, salmon, pineapple, rice, bananas. Climates make these grow, make variations in the skin colors of other girls: race, ethnicity, language, border, war. We can't go to some countries. We can't play with some girls. We don't salute their flag.
My school is an atlas. Almost half the other girls come from a different land or are first-generation in America. They share their names and languages, their rice paper, beads from India, Japanese jumprope. All year round, the birthday parties are like stops along the Silk Road--or Mexican, with pinatas. Beauty and difference shine in every face: Nerit and Irit and Shira, from Israel; Charissa, from the Philippines; Gabriela, from Sweden; Penny, from China; Narcy, from Iran; Yasmin, from Egypt; Bina and Sangita, from India. On my block are the girls next door from England; and the Catholic girls next to them whose mother fled wartime Czechoslovakia on the last refugee boat. I play with Jewish girls with great names like Hildy Schneider, Heather Klapman, Rebecca Block.
I want to be Japanese-American like Marianne or Chinese-American like Ellen.
I want long black hair.
I don't yet feel that I, too, have an ethnicity, or that I am a real Jew, in part because from the time I can remember I'm blonde and grown-ups shriek at me tactlessly "How can she be Jewish with that little shiksa nose?"
Yet I am a Jewish girl, born of a Jewish girl born of a Jewish girl and mother from mother before her, my lineage skimming back to ghetto, shtetl, Sinai and Pharoah; I have three languages by birthright—English, Yiddish, Hebrew; by Law of Return I have two nations; I too am a "mixed" child, born into a political parentheses of choices about assimilation. I'm already nestling into my Jewish heritage of humor, food, and wordlife; but I'm raised remote from faith, belief, and Torah, partly because my mother found ten years of Hebrew School at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple to be an exercise in hypocrisy. Thus, at five, I feel I'm the American cheese on white bread at the U.N. buffet.
But I'm the one with Barbie hair. Schoolgirls touch me softly on the playground, saying, in their many languages, "Can I play with your hair?" My hair is sun-streaked, long enough to sit on, when I'm five. I stand in line for my turn on the jungle gym, my turn on the bars, and feels the fingers of girls on my head, on the back of my neck. This is my earliest memory of sheer physical pleasure, the tingle on the skin that shoots endorphins to the brain, invited, safe. Keep doing that. Yes, braid me. The hairplay and the touching games pass the time in lines: I don't care if I never make it to the rings, the ladder, the tetherball, just keep doing that: big circle/little circle, going-on-a-treasure-hunt, warm fingers on my back. "A cool breeze and a little squeeze." Girls' hands, stroking, singing.
We stand up playing hand games: My Sailor Went to Sea, Miss Mary Max, Going to Kentucky. We play games close to the ground: hopscotch, jacks, two-square, four-square,
Duck Duck Goose, cartwheels, handstands, statues, freeze-tag. I go home and write stories about girls around the world, or curl up and read stories about girls around the world. When my mother yells at me to go out and play, I wander around our backyard pretending I run a school for girls around the world. I name each one of them. I begin collecting dolls from around the world. I join a Blue Bird troop with girls from India and Israel, and we learn songs in Hebrew, French, Hawaiian; play with each others' hair.
But Girl World changes to Daddy World at days' end when my father comes home from work in his cool little convertible sportscar, the Sprite. Let's go to the beach. We leap into the station wagon with our salt-stained hooded sweatshirts. The radio is playing the Turtles, "Happy Together," or Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots Are Meant for Walking." We jump on the Santa Monica Freeway to the beach just beyond where our car shoots out of the tunnel toward Malibu. It's a short drive from our house, but at rush hour after work or on Saturday mornings there's plenty of time to glean political information from my father's pithy comments on other cars' bumper stickers. We know we're near the beach turnoff when we see the sign for Dewey Pest Control. Then we're urged to boo and hiss the exclusive Jonathan Club on Pacific Coast Highway because they ban Jews; I am terrified of accidentally swimming into their beachfront property.
The instant we park and get out of the station wagon and I hear the ocean, I have to go to the bathroom. My mother takes me, joking that by trudging across the burning sand with half-made sandwiches on her back she's recreating the Jews' flight out of Egypt. I make sure we don't pee too close to the Jonathan Club. She says, "So go ahead! Call them pisher!"
But at the edge of the water my old man takes over; he's a bodysurfer, at home in the ocean, and he teaches me about California waves. This is a cultural key of a very different kind from Jewish deli food being passed on to me; it's Gentile mishegoss of the highest order. Jews in Beverly Hills have swimming pools; the goyim surf, risking their necks. On the other hand, both Judaism and Christianity agree on the significance of immersion in water: the mikveh, the baptism; and, though untutored in liturgy, I accept the ocean as God-like. It's something larger than us all. I never lose this feeling that every wave is holy. And I must bow my head to enter, every time.
First, when I'm really young, I'm taught to hold my breath and push my face into the water. My handsome cousin Steve gets me to put my face in his backyard pool by placing pennies in the shallow end and letting me try to pick them up. At the beach I push my face into the less predictable ocean water, seeking shells instead of pennies, to get used to timing breaths and feeling waves slap my face. Then my father begins taking me out into "big water" on his shoulders. He teaches me that swimming in the rough Pacific requires a great deal of focus and practice, that it's unfair to dismiss surfer dudes as mentally soft or undisciplined. You must merge with the ocean's own intelligence. Walk sideways into a wave to avoid being knocked over. Now wait for the next wave. Not that one; your wave. Into its perfect yawn you may dive, holding your breath, careful to keep your face parallel to the ocean floor. Now, in that eternity of waiting in dark water, listen to the lifespan of your wave passing overhead. To emerge at the wrong time would be sheer folly. Listen. When the roar dwindles, when the rush of rough tide over the back of your legs has ebbed, then pop up through the top, with as much force as possible. Shoot up through that roof and in one motion, inhale and check to see when the second wave is coming. There. Now ride that next one in.
I'm a real California girl now. Sun and sea. I never wear my shirt at the beach or on the trail at Yosemite, where we go hiking and camping. I know the scent of a redwood campfire, the rhythm of a wave. "I love nature," I shout.
For Jewish women with small kids like my mother and Naomi, the commitment to the outdoor life, the camping life, cabins and roughing it in piney air far away from the pediatrician and the in-laws is a challenge. It's more of a challenge for my mother; Naomi's world-traveler method of packing consists of throwing underwear and a toothbrush into a brown paper bag. From a pile of my early crayon drawings, my mother's first Yosemite camping list for our family of four flutters out. It includes:
Aprons
Raincoats & boots
Small ice chest
Electrip pans, lids, cords
String, scotch tape
Binoculars
Depilatory
Cold cream
Talcum powder
Hair dressing
Hair spray
Hair dryer
Hair rollers
Make-up
Deodorant
Hand & body lotion
Electric razor
Vaseline
Bactine
Band-aids
Tweezers
Mirror |
Socks for all
Tennis shoes
Underwear, bras
Old pantyhose for cold nights
Sandals
Bathing suits & cover-ups
Cardigan sweaters
Pants, dresses, shirts
Tops, t-shirts: light & heavy
Levis, denims, capris
Warm pajamas
Shorts
Terry cover-ups
Sweatshirts & old slip-on sweaters
Beach towels
Suntan oil
Aspirin
Cuticle scissors, emery boards
Toothbrushes & paste
Caladryl
Headgear for kids
Flares |
For the rest of our lives, we tease Myra about this list. "Socks for all" becomes the first insider-phrase in our family lexicon of Morris-isms. A former Girl Scout, my mother comes prepared—mostly, it appears, to look good for Roger on the trail, judging from the staggering array of cosmetica and hair product. But there's something wonderful about that juxtaposition of depilatory, hair dressing, aprons, rubber gloves and flares. If she has to send up a flare to get help from a stray park ranger, my mother will receive him dressed to kill, with her cuticles filed, warding off bears with an emery board and hair dressing. And in fairness, Yosemite has its edge of danger: the staged firefall spilling down over the cliffside, real bears wandering into our campsite and snorting fiercely at my dad, who responds by poking his head up from a moth-eaten sleeping bag and suggesting casually, "Go away, Fido."
My mother organizes things and looks gorgeous; my father fixes things and avoids confrontations with grizzlies and John Birchers. When we go to Big Sur, he rigs a rope swing so all the little girls at the campground can experience what it feels like to fly out over the riverbed and back. "Test it first," cautions Myra, and indeed, Roger falls on his ass on a boulder. For days, we admire the massive purple bruise on his left bun.
My father keeps his cool with Mother Nature, taking a rough wave, shooing away a bear, getting up and walking away when the bough breaks at Big Sur, snoring through earthquakes, rousing us all to hop in the car and go out to Malibu at night to see and small the "red tide." His mother, my grandmother Mia, prefers cruise-line travel and shakes her head at our increasingly hippie campouts and tries to understand. For Christmas she buys my parents Terry and Renny Russell's classic On the Loose, inscribing it with a reminder of her desire to be included in the changing culture: "This lovely book keeps reminding me of you two…Roger, the cover is Malibu--the day you took me along!!" The book's actual dedication is "To Ma, who worried," and next to this my grandmother adds "Could be 'Ma' Morris??"
In my suntanned little body, having scaled Vernal Falls and Bridalveil Falls, I still believe it's Girl World and that I've got the power at the start of the Summer of Love in 1967. I'm enrolled in Camp Western Trails, a day camp with trips to the Griffith Park Observatory and Knotts Berry Farm. Adult supervision is inconsistent; for the most part we kids form gangs, teach one another nasty camp songs, steal popcorn, whine and wheedle our way through long smoggy afternoons. And then, one day, we're taken to a go-cart racetrack and each kid gets to drive a motorized vehicle around a gritty, fenced-in course.
I am six. Someone tucks me into the driver's seat of what resembles a small racecar--no helmet, no instructions. I know my Jewish mother would say Stop, this is too dangerous. But, dimly cooperative, I put my pedal to the metal and shoot forward in blurred speed, swerving to a halt just as I crash into the chain-link fence. Jolly counselors shout encouragement; teenage attendants laugh. Shaking, I crawl out of the car and run from the yard. I want to go home, but I have to wait until each kid gets a turn. It's the first time I can remember failing at anything--school, books, words come so easily, and even the physical world hasn't been implacable so far, though my male cousins tease me and say girls have no muscles. I can do around the world on the low bar at kindergarten; I just can't drive a car.
Then I notice the treehouse. It stands near a water tower, in grand imitation, overlooking the park. A treehouse would be the perfect place to nurse my wounded feelings--and, having ascended the magnolia tree in our yard at age four, climbing doesn't spook me. I have a climbing tower of my own that my daddy built for me, up near the ivy in our third-tier back yard. Eagerly I approach the wooden stairs and start upwards. But there's a cluster of boys' faces scowling down at me. "No girls allowed!" they shout.
"Can I come up for just a look?" I beg.
They consult one another. Then: "Sure, if you strip for us," yells one guy.
I don't quite get it, but I agree. I assume "strip" means moving fast, as fast as you could go. Dragstrip. Sunset Strip. I associate these words with motion. I think they're inviting me to race them, though I don't know how we can do that inside a treehouse.
At the top of the ladder, I find I'm surrounded by a circle of older boys chanting "STRIP!" But there's nowhere for a footrace in that tiny little room. "Take off your clothes," explains one boy, and shock scrapes over my face. Strip doesn't mean run fast after all. I had been tricked by a boy. Being on top of the English language has always set me apart, until now; but here's a new world of obscenity, revealed in a flash of sun-flecked dust. There are double-edged words with wrong demands, with meanings that bode ill; there are command words that shouldn't be commands; there are words boys use against girls to shame them; and these guys are nothing like well-behaved Junichi: A Boy of Japan. They want to look at me even though they don't like me or want me in their club.
"Come on, strip. You said you would," and they start toward me. I look around in panic as the boy-shapes seemed to flood from every angle. I turn to flee and find the door blocked. But I plunge out of their treehouse, finally, down the ladder and into the park.
Eve, my Jewish foremother, also climbed into a treehouse (of knowledge), and was thrown out of the Garden of Eden, charged with tempting men to sin. This treehouse is rancid with spoiled fruit for me, too; the first lesson that in some men's eyes women are not progenitor, just genital. This is a bitter part of the apple of knowledge. I cling to my camp counselor. Isn't it time to go home?
The next day we're taken to the beach--a place where I'm sure I'm in my element, and I play in waves with my shirt off, feeling free. Then a boy comes up to me and says, "You're going to be arrested. It's illegal for girls to go topless on the beach." The police are coming to get me, he sneers, and I think: but why? I didn't go onto the Jonathan Club part of the beach. I'm far more prepared to defend myself as a Jew than as a girl. On that beach, at six, waiting to be arrested for either identity, I begin to grasp why I am so attracted to children from other countries; as a girl boldly trespassing in a society where knowledge and power are male, I'm a bit of an immigrant myself.
Maybe that's the last day I ever take my shirt off at the beach. From then on I learn to undress nervously under a towel. My mother, meanwhile, awakens to my other free-wheeling habit of not wearing underwear when we go to the doctor to have a cyst burnt off my knee. I assume I'll just roll up one pants leg for this minor operation, but no; I'm directed to take off my jeans, and now my mother's embarrassed, and someone covers up my genital area with scratchy waxed paper towels—as though I'm a loaf of bread that has to be protected from the mold-bearing air. I'm told to wear underwear from now on. And I've been handed the concept of modesty on a waxed paper towel to add to the police warnings from the boy on the beach. These warnings are sealed in the scar on my knee; that to be a girlchild is to learn shame and caution and cover-up. I begin to detach from my body and live in my head, where gender makes no boundary.
But in two meaningful ways, I react physically to all that's happened to me, that Summer of Love. I announce that I want my hair cut. Short. I can sit on my hair, I love the feeling of girls' hands in my hair, but in that summer between kindergarten and first grade I want a boy's haircut. And then I try to pee standing up, in the boys' room, at school.
It's pretty obvious to me that I'm going to have crushes on girls for the rest of my life, and when my beloved babysitter Diane gets engaged and moves away (to exotic Costa Mesa), I craft the first love letters of my life. "Diane, I ache for you. Next to my Mom and Dad, I love you best. I even have dreams about you." I illustrate this with a drawing of my babysitter on the beach, wearing a bikini and shades, holding out a towel to me, and above my head a puffy thought-cloud sighs "Diane, I wish I had you."
First grade begins, but is complicated by a teacher's strike. We're squeezed into half-day classes, and watch our teachers marching on the pavement holding signs. Suddenly everything's political. On the first day of first grade, in Miss Moseley's class, we're introduced to Cold War preparedness—of a very different nature from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons my father loves to watch with me.
"Does anyone here know what a DROP DRILL is?" my teacher asks, in a kindly voice, and a roomful of "gifted" six-year-olds gaze back in blank consternation. Someone has to be an expert.
We've been hand-picked for our brains. The tallest of the five Susans in our classroom thinks she knows, and raises a long, blond arm. "Come on up, Susan," beckons Miss Moseley, and as Susan stands in front of us in her stiff slip and party dress, her buck teeth worse than mine, Miss Moseley orders, "Drop!"
And poor uninitiated Susan sticks out her wrist, opens her hand, and drops her snotty Kleenex on the floor.
Every Friday, the air raid siren goes off, a distant reminder of impending doom. But we schoolkids never talk about that sound. We adapt to this new game of hugging the chalky classroom floor on those random days when our teachers stammer "DROP" in the middle of math or just before recess. DROP means that like so many obedient chipmunks we hurling ourselves down under our desks, doubled over, hands clasped behind the neck, young behinds pointing to the sky as we sneak a peek upwards at ancient wads of chewed gum on the undersides of desks. DROP will not protect us, my mother explains, but I worry because it's an assignment we can flunk. "None of you responded fast enough!" my teacher complains during one drop drill. "Only Jo Ann moved quickly." We learn that we have summarily, failed our atomic bomb test, although it isn't quite expressed that way. I'm already used to getting A or Excellent in everything and feel panicky disgust when a C in "safety" shows up on my report card, spoiling my perfect record. Apparently, I'm no more than average in preparing for nuclear war.
"It's horrible," says my mother. "They want you to protect your eyes and your organs." She had to do Drop Drill herself, back in the day. My parents have rolled up our American flag and locked it away in the front closet. They're cutting up chicken wire and crepe paper and making a giant peace sign rigged with Christmas lights. It's going to hang in the window this season, and my mother poses me under the sign in my little dance smock from Academy West Studios--the smock with red hearts. I hate flashbulbs, but I'm a big girl now, and feeling frisky in my tomboy haircut, I smile for this camera-- since my mother isn't the Hollywood studio man. When the photos are developed at Sav-On, my mother titles this picture "PEACE AND LOVE" for the family scrapbook.
Then my father's buddy Dick comes over to take professional studio photographs of our family in the backyard, up against the ivy. My father is funky and free in his beard, sideburns and a sweatshirt. My mother's in a groovy pantsuit with a silky bandanna around her head. I'm forced into a white lace blouse with a giant frill over the chest, an impractical, itchy garment I have never worn. For half a roll of shots I snarl or look away, arms folded. Then I rip the frilly blouse off and fling it to the ground. I want my formal picture taken with no shirt. My mother cajoles, then commands: I cannot be topless in the family portraits. Suddenly she takes the silk scarf from her own head and ties it artfully around my shoulders, Dick grabs his camera and snaps, and that's the one. That's the picture we frame and hang on the wall forever. I'm laughing triumphantly with my father; scarved, yes, but shirtless!
Mini-battles for girls are now my bread and butter. On the school playground, I'm in a hot game of two-square with Gigi when two sixth-grade girls corner me against the fence. "We want you to sign this petition to let girls wear pants to school," they say. It's my first invitation to political activism; I'm not sure what to do, whether signing will get me in trouble, but I can dig where they're coming from. If I'm pondering the mystery of why girls have to wear shirts, how revealing to meet fellow-travelers challenging the rule that girls have to wear dresses. I take up their cause, and test the waters by wearing culottes to class. They're not exactly pants, but kind of a play suit. Immediately, I'm sent home with a note from the teacher, who says that the culottes are "too revealing." My father reads the note and snorts, "She's a bat!"
Bio Note
Bonnie Morris is a professor of Women's Studies at GWU. She won First Prize in gay and lesbian nonfiction from ForeWord Magazine for her last book, Girl Reel [Coffee House Press, 2000] which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
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Bonnie
Morris
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