The Brownie Pants

After a long day of cleaning and doing laundry and grocery shopping and paying the bills and getting the oil changed and ironing the 15 button down shirts of her husband and two parochial school children, my mother would have to drive us to Lombard or Fucking Wilmette to battle it out for an hour-long “basketball” or “volleyball” game with the children of St. Mary’s or St. Joseph’s, or some other Catholic grade school that HAD a gymnasium to practice in. We weren’t so blessed and had to practice at the gyms of real (public) schools. I don’t recall anyone ever teaching us any rules or skills to these games. The ball would just show up in your hands and you would start running and jumping wild as a Whirling Dervish, and sometimes things would happen that were considered lucky, and you would get points, and other times, you would foul out. This happened to me. Whereas I do recall being better than mediocre at volleyball, but mostly because I was insane with energy and they gave you knee pads, which made you invincible, I don’t recall anyone ever teaching me any rules about basketball. It isn't true, of course, that we didn’t have coaches. Very dedicated, kind, and exceedingly patient fathers or older sisters or brothers would coach our teams, but I was too busy goofing around to pay attention, and for some reason, this wasn’t corrected, because I was the muscle of the team. I would foul out of every single basketball game, usually near the end of the third quarter, and this was never discouraged. I suspect it may have actually been strategic, to put the giant girl out on the court to pick off the other team’s most talented ball handlers. Some cute little thing would come towards me dribbling, and I’d stick out my arm and clothes-line her in her throat because no one ever told me that this was not the goal of basketball.

I didn’t care about the rules. It never occurred to me to ask. I fouled out of every game and spent a quarter sitting on the bench, so the most important thing to me about the basketball games was my hair. I would put it up in tremendous curly pigtails and adorn it with giant bows and then spend a minimum of four hours trying to “do” my bangs. This took resolve and courage and was achieved with a curling iron and hot rollers and bobby pins and barrettes and eight cans of Aqua Net, and they never “turned out” anyway. The girls’ sports teams were much about the hair. We looked like gymnasts from Czechoslovakia (that country existed back then) flailing around the court.

The one thing that was OK about being the tallest girl in my class was that I got picked first for all manner of PE activities, the most exciting of which were capture the flag and dodge ball, capture the flag because there were only three boys in my class who could run faster than me, and dodge ball because of my lightening fast reflexes and Hulk-like strength. I was 5’7” as a 12 year old, and being tall is the most shameful thing you can be when you are a young girl. The only thing that would have been more shameful would have been if I had been 9 feet tall with actual reproductive organs coming out of my forehead.

I didn’t know my own strength, and again, we were encouraged to try to win, so I would bean the smallest girls right in the face and specifically aim for the nuts of the boys, again, because no one ever told me not to. It occurs to me now that the PE teachers let me behave this way probably because it was hilarious. It was a Catholic grade school without a gym, so for all I know the PE teachers were volunteers, or worse, being paid some insulting salary of $300 a year to babysit us for an hour 3x a week.

So anyway, after school, and after I did my homework and spent the whole late afternoon doing my hair, my mother would drive around town picking up my classmates, and then she’d have to sit and watch this agonizing spectacle for an hour and then drive us back to Naperville and drop everyone off at home and then come home and cook us dinner. And because my father was a consultant, he left home every Sunday night and didn’t come home till Friday, so she was doing this all by herself. When I would go into emotional hysterics about the tragedy of my unfortunate hair or my embarrassing great height, it’s no wonder that she would tell me to shut up. She had tuna casserole to bake and 7 more shirts to iron and then after all of that, had to help me study the explorers for a Social Studies quiz. And I’m sure my little brother had some needs of his own. And than her husband would call every night from wherever he was, a Marriott in Seattle or Albuquerque or Philadelphia, and he would say, “How did it go?” and I’m sure she wanted to reach through the phone and strangle him for leaving her alone with us all week. It seems like a miserable fucking existence, but she did this for me, and she was then the same age that I am now. Last week I wouldn’t even flip over my apparently-dead next door neighbor lying in her own vomit in my hallway just to see whether or not she was still breathing, so I hardly think I would be any good at parenting a pre-teen and encouraging her myriad extracurricular activities.

I had a lot of activities. I played the piano and the clarinet, and was not particularly talented at either. I loved gymnastics and ballet until I grew out of my leotard and looked so comically gigantic next to the other girls, that I finally had to bow out with no grace whatsoever. I think I fell off a balance beam and was lying in a pool of my own blood and the teachers were just like, she’s too big to pick up. Let her bleed out.

The one thing that my mom wanted me to do that I didn’t want to do was join the damn Brownies. When I was in second grade, even the largest Brownie pants to be found in all of Ohio did not fit me. My mother, who fancied herself to be somewhat of a seamstress, set out to make me a pair of pants that I could wear to Brownies; however, these pants that she made were not the official shade of Brownie brown -- that beautiful smooth brown of Atlantic City boardwalk fudge.

No, these pants were a sort of oatmeal color. I cried every Tuesday afternoon as I changed into my ridiculous impostor Brownie pants, and finally, my mother let me to stop going to Brownies. For the short time I was in the Brownies, I learned two things: (1) how to attach macaroni to things, and (2) how to apply a tourniquet. I'm sure they meant to teach us more about first aid, but they didn't. Just, if someone's bleeding  take off your belt and cut off the circulation until the limb falls off. To this day, that's the only thing I know about helping people. You stubbed your toe? I'm taking off my belt. Your boyfriend dumped you? Here comes a tourniquet! So, come to think of it, Marcie should be counting her blessings that I didn't get around to practicing any first aid on her last week when she was lying in a lump down the hall.

If I ever meet a Brownie-pants-maker, I will glue some macaroni to that culprit's face, and apply a bunch of tourniquets, and bean him in the nuts with a dodge ball.