1982, Randolph, Massachusetts

By Courtney A. Walsh

In the fifth grade, I had my first real crush.

I didn’t really count my younger years, when I’d daydreamed longingly about Michael Mancini and his cocky class clown antics - or Butchie Drake, who was always climbing trees and scraping knees. I was just a baby then.

I was now a big girl, almost in junior high, and Keith Karlson had arrived on the scene with all of his new-boy allure. He was golden, and his feathered hair was just like Shaun Cassidy’s. His piercing ice-blue eyes set him apart from the other boys. He was the mini Adonis, and all the girls swooned without knowing what swooning even meant.

Sitting behind him in class, I liked the way his shoulder blades bracketed, and as I traced the outline of them with my gaze, I imagined that was the exact spot where his angel wings had been clipped, leaving behind these stumps. It was the archetypal schoolgirl crush, and I was the schoolgirl.

On the day my mother was set to come to school to do a demonstration of Chinese brush painting, I woke up wondering if she would see my love for Keith Karlson as she stood in my classroom, painting ancient letters on her rice paper tablet for us. Surely, if she could read these slashes and squiggles, she could read the love crime all over my face.

She yanked the brush through my hair.

“OUCH!” I yelped. The bristles raked against my scalp and got caught in the snarling “rat’s nest” that had appeared overnight, somewhere between last night’s bath and my morning Cheerios.

“Hold still. Let me get the tangles,” she said, concentrating hard on her task, cupping one hand on the crown of my head while the other worked through the wild underbrush.

“That hurts!” I whined, as I did whenever she was being too rough because she was in a hurry to move efficiently onto whatever next household task awaited her. Dishes were driving her to distraction, and we were both excited and nervous for her to come to my class.

In the car on the way to school, I nervously advised her, “Mum, don’t embarrass me or treat me different than the other kids, OK? For today, just pretend that I’m not your daughter, and get up there and do your thing, OK?” I pleaded nervously.

“Don’t worry honey, I’ll be good. I’m just not sure about this technique; this isn’t like oil painting. It’s a lot trickier to get the brush strokes right.” She absently checked her reflection in the rearview mirror and ran her fingers through her hair, flipping it back out of her face a little. This half head toss was as much a part of her as breathing and as familiar to me as her perfume.

I knew that she wasn’t listening. “MUM, I’M SERIOUS!” I barked. Keith Karlson could not see me as some kid whose mother painted weird Chinese letters and stuff. He had to see me as the fabulous creature I wanted to be but wasn’t. He had to see my angel wing scars and heavenly glow too. I worried that she’d ruin my chances as the future Mrs. Karlson.

“All right, relax, you’re making me more nervous. This isn’t easy you know, getting up in front of a bunch of strangers. Your father’s the teacher in the family, not me,” she revealed.

The houses whizzed by, and typical scenes of morning in the suburbs were everywhere: people getting the paper in their robes, men in suits getting in cars, kids with backpacks and lunch boxes waiting for the bus.

“Mum, they’re not strangers. They’re my friends,” I said.

Well, most of them were, anyway. Ever since Ronnie Borley had called me “fat cheeks,” puffing his own out to make his cronies split their sides laughing a few years earlier, he’d become a mortal enemy. I wasn’t overly fond of Kristin Banes’ bullying ways, either. “Walsh, YOU’RE DEAD!” she had screamed across the playground field one afternoon, giving me nightmares for weeks. But the rest of them were pretty OK.

“And anyway,” I continued as I helped her unload the blocks of paper and box of brushes and inks, “they’re fifth-graders. It’s not like any of them are exactly Chinese-painting experts.” I rolled my eyes, my new signature move. I was 11 and already the smart-ass.

“All right, Missy. Let’s go in.” We both steeled ourselves to face the 25 little art critics eagerly awaiting us in my homeroom. I was arriving with the celebrity of the hour, and it gave me a flutter of excitement. My stomach did a little lurching dance with my throat, which had suddenly tightened with the anticipation of seeing KK and my mom in the same room. My universe was getting tinier by the minute.

As my mom set up her easel, the teacher introduced her, and the seat squirming got stiller. Voices hushed to whispers, then were silent, as she took out her brushes.

“These are different than regular paintbrushes, which are made out of wood and horse hair, or sometimes even boar hair,” she explained. “These brushes are much lighter. They’re hollow, like straws, and they are made from an oriental plant called bamboo.” A giggle rippled through the room as someone in the back, (probably stupid Ronnie Borley,) hollered “A rigabamboo!”

The teacher tsked loudly at him and filled my mom in: “It’s from a line of a song they all know.” She spoke in shorthand female grownup to my mother, who’d looked confused and nervous for a minute, having thought the kids were laughing at her demonstration.

My mother visibly relaxed and then resumed her instructions on how to hold the brush. As I looked around, I saw that everyone was holding their yellow pencils in the exact delicate way that my mother was holding her bamboo brush. They were all dipping their pencils into invisible inkwells, carefully mimicking her graceful movements.

And I noticed something else then, too. Keith Karlson had his chin in his hand and was staring intently at my mother, not at her painting or her brushes or the rice paper block on the easel. And I looked around to see that some of the other boys were in this same staring pose, looking dazed, like they were moonstruck or had taken Love Potion No. 9.

Disaster! Keith Karlson loved my mother! In fact, ALL of the boys seemed to love my mother. They were definitely not looking at her like she was a mom. They were seeing the model, the beauty queen, the movie star. My mother looked over at me, then and gave me a little wink.

The next day, when I got to school, the kids huddled around me, telling me how “awesome” and “cool” my mother was. I held my breath and waited to hear what Keith would say. And finally, he chimed in.

“Your mother’s so pretty. What happened to you?” he asked with a serious expression. The other boys snickered.

“Shut up!” I thought to myself. In my own mind, I prepared a defense, “Everyone in my family says I look just like her … they even call me ‘little Barbara’ sometimes,” I would announce proudly. But I got very quiet and just looked back across my desk into those baby blues that every girl wanted to do the backstroke in. I couldn’t summon any smart responses, and my eyes wouldn’t do their new casual, heavenward roll. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

The silence stretched between us and opened up a great divide of time. It stopped and almost moved backward, as it hung there, full of his question and my sudden muteness. After what seemed like an eternity, KK just shrugged his shoulders, which no longer seemed like the place where wings had been attached, and he turned away.

Staring at the back of his head, I noticed a really big tangle in his Shaun Cassidy mane and thought to myself, “Boys shouldn’t have hair long enough to tangle into gnarly rat’s nests.” And I felt an overwhelming sensation of panicked failure, of never measuring up.

I wanted to brush his hair, to paint for him, for him to really see me. I was overtaken by the sensation of a book sliding off my own perfectly brushed, untangled hair, the weight of it sliding invisibly to the shifting ground below me.

Courtney A. Walsh is an experienced blogger, a communications professional, a freelance writer, an adventurer, a seeker, and a gypsy. With an extensive background in marketing, advertising, creative writing, film, cultural studies, and languages (not to mention having mastered the art of overblown self-aggrandizement), Walsh has worked with the U.S. National Park Service and on a project for MTV’s Real World. Recently, between proofreading ad circulars (which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds), she completed a memoir, Lipstick and Thongs in the Loony Bin, available for purchase on Lulu.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, November 26th, 2007 | Email This Post

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