Sewing Lesson

by Linda Boroff

“Grow up!” Dierdre told herself over and over, as tears welled. And now, despite getting lost three times, she has located her homeroom, a miracle. Her new classmates sprawl and squirm in graffiti-scarred wooden desks, staring numbly about like refugees. Affixed to their shirts are stickers bearing their names in Magic Marker.

William Tecumseh Sherman Junior-Senior High has been expanding to accommodate a tsunami of postwar babies. On this first day of school, the wave makes landfall, scurrying through the green-tinted aluminum “new wing,” chattering in high, uncertain voices.

Their sheer numbers overwhelm the senior high students, relegated like an afterthought to the khaki stucco “old school.” As if aware that they have missed some demographic boat, the boys slouch against the walls in their ducktail hairdos and leather jackets, surveying the newcomer hordes with disdainful, put-upon sufferance.

Beyond the windows, a boulevard of elm trees shimmer russet and amber against the deep blue Minneapolis autumn sky. To Deirdre, they seem to usher in the demise, not only of summer, but of childhood itself. Each time a breeze passes through, they shrug off masses of leaves that drift lazily to the earth below.

Tall for her age and agonizingly shy, Deirdre yearns to replace her prominent nose with a perfect inclined plane, which she draws ceaselessly in the margins of her books. If she gets it right, she half-hopes, she might magically awaken with that very nose! Last night, she had snipped away at her dark, truculent hair with her mother’s fingernail scissors; now, her head displays the outline of a scalene triangle. In the girl’s restroom this morning, she had used her Number Two pencil to line her eyes.

Deirdre’s homeroom teacher, Mr. Buchelman, also teaches science. Like many youngish men of the early nineteen-sixties, he is prematurely middle-aged in his black-rimmed mission-control eyeglasses. An ample stomach throws his forward stride into a slight sideways lurch, as if demonstrating some principle of mass versus momentum. His thinning crew-cut resembles the rear end of Deirdre’s old teddy bear.

Steve Osby leans over to Billy Lefebre. “What a twink.” He raises his right upper lip in a practiced, quivering sneer.

In response, Billy holds his thumb and index finger in a circle and flaps his other fingers. “Flying asshole. Hey!” he says, jerking his thumb behind him, “Check out the freak.”

Deirdre looks too, and sees, a few seats away, a girl who seems to have been assembled incorrectly. Her name tag says “Karen Arp.” Stocky and flat-chested, Karen has the short arms, thick neck, and round head of a kindergarten sculpture. Coarse brown hair hangs in uneven rags from a wobbly center part, revealing low-set ears with heavy lobes. Her gappy front teeth protrude in an overbite. She is wearing a wrinkled white blouse, plaid pleated skirt, and dirty white sneakers with no socks.

Frankly staring, Deirdre feels a perverse gratitude: she might be hopelessly ugly, but at least she is not an official freak. Her compassion, triggered easily by squashed birds and rodents, arises much more slowly for people and often requires prodding.

Steve leans across toward Karen. “’S’cuse me,“ he says, “can I ask you a question?” The girl smiles and nods eagerly. “What planet did you come from?” Karen’s face freezes, and she fixes both boys with a blank, pale blue stare.

“Does everyone know where to go when the bell rings?” Mr. Buchelman peers around the class. Karen waves her arms frantically and shakes her head. “Karen,” he consults a notebook, “you have first period English in Room 12B.” Embarrassed that he has used the word “period,” Deirdre ducks her head.

“Oh no,” cries Billy. “I’ve got a class with the freak.” The bell rings, and the class surges to its feet, recalling for Dierdre a recent Vanguard launch, the rocket soaring aloft on a promising gush of flame, only to crumple back seconds later and lie sillily on its side, writhing and spurting like a fizzled firecracker. Dierdre follows the others, worried about blundering into the boy’s restroom or locking herself in a storage closet.

Hours later, in the teeming, cacophonous lunchroom, Deirdre and her best friend Jill slide their trays down a tubular aluminum pathway to the cashier, then navigate the aisles to a table near the back door. Karen the freak lurches past them with her loaded tray, in search of a place to sit. Several tables wave her away.

Meanwhile, the popular girls have actually pushed two tables together to accommodate all their new friends. Older boys even join them, slinging letter jackets across the backs of their chairs. Jill and Deirdre stare like slaves at a royal coronation.

Jill has close-set green eyes and a petulant, dissatisfied mouth. She pokes disconsolately at her Velveeta pizza. “What are the boys in your classes like?”

Deirdre thinks of Billy and Steve. “Appalling,” she replies, which for Jill is the final straw. She lays down her fork.

“Dizzy, speak English, will you?”

“Okay, they’re awful.”

“Well say so. How do you expect to be popular if you're always using words that nobody even knows what they mean? I’m trying to help you.” Jill suddenly glances at the end of the table, where Karen now sits, gobbling gratefully. “Oh no, we’re ruined.” Karen looks up and waves to Deirdre, who returns the gesture as minimally and unobtrusively as she can, looking around to see if anybody has noticed.

Despite Jill’s efforts, Deirdre’s worst fears of social failure soon come to pass, and she finds herself paired with Karen any time choice is permitted the other students. Thus, they became dancing partners in phys. ed, seatmates in homeroom and share a sewing machine in home economics.

Deirdre’s rapid social descent leaves Jill with no alternative but to move to another lunch table, and in fact to drop Deirdre completely. So Deirdre and Karen now lunch together every day, along with Willy Mowg, a boy only three feet eight inches tall; a Native American girl who speaks to nobody, twins with cerebral palsy, and Bruce Dilman the Genius. Bruce is a twitchy, obsessive boy with eyes the color of mercury. Whenever he achieves a perfect score, a wisp of smile fleets across his face, hovers uncertainly as if marooned in unfamiliar terrain, and vanishes.

Of all Deirdre’s classes, sewing is far and away the worst. Here, she and Karen share a table, easy targets for the teacher, Mrs. Grady, a living needle of a woman, who has shrunk and sharpened with age—unlike Mrs. Maxwell, the cooking teacher, who is plump, creamy and pleasant, like one of her own white sauces.

Their semester sewing project is to make a skirt, a task as daunting for Deirdre as satellite orbit appeared to be for America. Even NASA isn’t perfect, Dierdre tells herself, but NASA does not have to answer to Mrs. Grady.

Dully apprehensive, the girls labor away, dreading the inevitable blunder—the fabric marked on the wrong side, a seam pinked too close—that will bring down Mrs. Grady’s celestial wrath. Deirdre hardly dares to glance up from her demon of a sewing machine, pursuing her hands with its single sharp tooth, racing across yards of cloth as if intent on reaching Deirdre herself, piercing bone, flesh and gristle in retaliation for her clumsy basting.

Karen’s skirt is bright yellow, with a print of red flowers in orange flowerpots. Deirdre can tell by the way she holds it to her body that she is proud of it, crooked seams, wavy hemline and all. Mrs. Grady, noting her enthusiasm, treats Karen a little more kindly, leaving her reservoir of malice proportionately fuller for Deirdre.

In fact, Deirdre’s only refuge is the dressing room, where she is reading a smuggled copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Whenever she dares, she brings her skirt into the curtained room for a “fitting,” the book secreted beneath.

The class is learning how to get dressed: Mrs. Grady stands before them in a navy blue suit. Fixing her audience with a vulturous stare, she holds aloft a white Playtex bra suspended between her talons.

“Now girls, take your brassiere, bend forward, and let your bust faaaaaallllll into the cup,” she commands, evoking for Deirdre a suicide plunge from a skyscraper, or the apogee and perigee of Wile E. Coyote. Deirdre thinks of her own “starter” bra, whose empty cups gape before her each morning like the excavation sites for two sports stadia. It is a struggle to even imagine the swelling, pendulous weight, the supercharged mystery of real breasts.

One Friday night, Deirdre attends her first dance, spending four unbroken hours seated mutely in the shadows of the school gymnasium on a splintery folding chair. Beside her sits Karen, a red bow in her hair. Before them, couples move hesitantly through the reverberating twilight in clumsy unison, like lame animals. Basketball hoops loom above, and long fluorescent tubes hang suspended from aluminum girders. The floor is painted with yellow, green, and blue lines; mysterious boundaries for unknown games played by incomprehensible rules. The music is a dirge of adolescent despair: Why was I born too late? You've gone from me, oh woe, tragedy. Are you somewhere up above and are you still my oh-wone true love? Rising stiffly as the dance ends, Deirdre realizes that a dull, yearning ache deep in her core is not destined to go away anytime soon.

Preoccupied with his bacteria cocktails, Mr. Buchelman benignly neglects his homeroom, which reverts to a preadolescent jungle, with Karen the chief prey. The moment she enters, Billy and Steve set upon her, “arping” her last name like a couple of Brylcreemed sea lions. They then commence a free-associative heckling, topping each other in jokes and puns. Sometimes they steal her notebook and read her clumsy homework aloud. For anyone feeling insecure or nasty, Karen makes a convenient target. Incapable of self-defense, she waves her arms as if at a cloud of gnats, and covers her ears.

Drained by bouts of relentless abuse, Karen fades noticeably by third period social studies, rubbing her eyes with chubby fists, resting her head on her arms. When the lunch bell finally rings, she leaps to her feet and charges first out the door.

Their teacher, Mr. Devlin, has a long stinger of a nose and narrow, yellowish eyes that landed on student after student like wasps. He paces the room, pounding his fist into his palm: Do they realize that communist revolts are going on at this very moment in Indochina? He stabs with his finger at a small green country on the pull-down map: Vietnam. America must take a stand before communism crosses the Pacific—his palm sweeps through Micronesia, grazes Australia, and obliterates the Antarctic—to devour our way of life!

The students occupy three long rows before Mr. Devlin's desk. Karen, in the far right corner of the last row, is enviably situated for neglect, while Deirdre, in the front row, faces Mr. Devlin square-on. To Deirdre’s left lurks the two-headed monster, Billy-and-Steve.

The Cuban Missile Crisis arrives. Deirdre, her parents, and her younger sister Fran ride it out at a cousin's house, everyone eating “like there's no tomorrow,” her father jokes.

“That's not funny, Hiram,” snaps her mother.

“I hope,” Deirdre whispers to Fran, “I don't have to die a virgin.” After reading The Sun Also Rises, she has concluded that she really belongs in 1920's Paris, sipping absinthe at Harry's Bar and sleeping with matadors.

The family stares at the television, at a blurry photo of some whitish lumps circled with black crayon: Irrefutable Proof. For all they know, they could be looking at an X-ray of the descending colon rather than the impending demise of civilization.

The crisis soon ends, and the world has formulated no monumental insights, achieved no catharsis, reached no spiritual epiphany. Like wildebeest that manage to be ignored during a lion hunt, they are lucky this time, that’s all.

Winter mornings, massive cars with names like Star Chief and Roadmaster lumber up and down icy, grimy streets to disgorge their plodding carpools, pupating in wool and fur. Deirdre trudges the halls in a gothic stupor, reflecting on her unsuitability to life in this culture. Her only comfort is English class, where the teacher has given her poem—about the emotions of a young girl at the running of the bulls in Pamplona—an A.

In sewing class, Deirdre sneaks her book into the dressing room and discovers Mellors the gamekeeper and Connie Chatterley decorating one another’s pubic hair with forget-me-nots. Deirdre reads greedily, recklessly, trying to imagine herself that way with Bruce Dilman the Genius. Riveted by guilty fascination, she loses track of time and is thus discovered by Mrs. Grady, who steals up and yanks the curtain aside like a Victorian gumshoe.

“What’s going on in here?“

“Nothing!”

Mrs. Grady advances, seizes the book, and reads the open page. “What is this filth?“

“It’s not!“

Protesting her innocence, Deirdre is dragged from the dressing room by her arm. The book is confiscated and sent with a note to the principal. For her deception and depravity, Deirdre will receive an automatic F on her skirt and be barred from the end-of-semester fashion show.

Face hot and flushed, heart pounding, hands icy, Deirdre faces the silent, gawking classroom. She is a criminal now, and her life is ruined. She thinks suddenly of Mary, Queen of Scots. Like Mary, all that is left her now is to die well.

Amid gasps of horror, Deirdre seizes her skirt with its hated pattern of lollipops, wads it into a ball, pins sticking her hands, and hurls it into the wastebasket. Mrs. Grady, perched balefully on her desk, announces that since Deirdre cares so little, her entire semester grade will now be an F.

“Don’t worry,” Karen the freak tells Dierdre as the bell rings, “I get lots of F’s.”

In social studies, Mr. Devlin turns on a film. “This will run over into your lunch period,” he warns, “but if you care enough about your country, you may stay.” Deirdre subsides gratefully into the dark. Oh Bruce, Bruce, she whispers to herself experimentally.

As usual, the film is about communism, beginning with the standard map of its spread across Europe, China and Asia. To Deirdre it looks as if the world is having a period: the red stain soaking East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia . . . a big blot on Cuba, over to Korea, oozing across Laos.

Deirdre thinks of her own period lurking in her womb, awaiting its hormone trigger to do her in someday in the white skirt it will be just her luck to wear. On the screen, Lenin harangues a crowd of babushkas; Stalin, a smug walrus, nods at his tanks rolling past.

The lunch bell rings.

There is a stir, which quickly subsides as the class recalls the sacrifice asked of it. Karen alone leaps to her feet, notebook spilling papers, and begins to labor toward the door in the twilight. As she crosses the projector beam, her profile eclipses that of John Foster Dulles. Mr. Devlin rises, strides to the projector, and flicks it off. Steve Osby leaps up to turn on the lights. Karen freezes.

“Of all the people,” Mr. Devlin begins almost gently, like a gourmet nudging a quail egg with his fork, “who need this film, you,” he points at Karen, “need it the most. Your grades are the lowest in the class . . . ” he pauses, eyes half closed, “and you're the first out the door!” The detonation nearly lifts his feet from the ground. The class flinches and ducks.

Karen backs up, wheels and flees to her desk. The skirt she had been sewing falls from her notebook, and in her panic, she treads on it. Mr. Devlin twists the projector back on, Steve turns off the lights, and Khrushchev finishes pounding his shoe.

Huddled in her seat, Deirdre thinks suddenly of missile silos, and of affronts that are not to be endured, even if the world has to end. She rises, her heart pounding like Russian artillery.

“Mr. Devlin, Karen didn't understand. What you meant.”

“She understands now. Sit down, Deirdre.”

But Deirdre remains standing. The class draws in its breath. Knees wobbling, Deirdre walks to the center of the room, picks up Karen’s skirt, shakes it out, and folds it neatly in quarters. On the way to Karen’s desk, she bumps into the projector cord, jerking the plug from the wall. A whole cadre of Soviet guided missiles vanishes instantly, the voice-over decaying with a growl into silence. Karen takes her skirt, buries her face in it and sobs.

Deirdre could never recall what happened next, just as she could not remember the fashion show or her sewing grade, or what became of her book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. High school seemed to fade away, like the roar of a crowd being left in the distance. Years later, she spotted Karen hanging around one of the malls, wearing a lot of iridescent blue eye makeup, a short, tight dress stretched over her ungainly body. Her hair had been teased into a conical croquette and bleached to a shade one could easily associate with nuclear Armageddon.