I By Sharon Doubiago Photo Illustrations by Marly Stone We move to Ramona the first of April, three weeks before my thirteenth birthday. On Friday night I stay with Sarah. Her twelfth birthday. Our1 last night together. I’m full of anguished love for her. I don’t want to move. She is so beautiful. Her long legs, her thick blonde hair, the depth of her being I fall into. She has pubic hair, the first person my age I know of, other than myself. In the sixth grade she was the smartest kid in the school. I was second smartest. In the seventh we entered enormous Rancho Los Amigos Junior High School and became lost from each other. This night, we come back together, renew the bonds of our souls. We vow to always know each other. We still do. On Monday afternoon my brother, sister and I are enrolled in the fourth, sixth and seventh grade classes of the Ramona schools. Los Amigos Junior High in the Los Angeles School District had three thousand kids, Ramona Junior High has one hundred. Do they wear lipstick here in the seventh grade? Will they get the wrong idea because I do? I don’t dare go without it now, I’m so plain. The principal, Mr. Nordahl, looks across his glasses from Bridgit to me and says,’’Good!” His eyes fall to my breasts, the same size as my mothers. They’ve been growing since I was nine. “You, my dear, will be our Miss Ramona when you are sixteen.” “And Bridgit, I see that you are the brain of the two.” He looks up from her records. She is eleven, two years younger than I, but only a year behind in school, because in the second grade her I.Q. registered 182. She doesn’t have breasts yet. “We can use you, too.” Then he focuses on my little brother. “ I see, Jason, that you have neither brains nor beauty.” He makes a funny sound with his tongue. “What’s a fellow gonna do with two older sisters like these.” We leave Jason in the fourth grade, the teacher looking like the witch who ate the little brother. “Can’t read? Jason, you could be with me for years.” Then the four of us follow the principal through the dust of the playground over the dry arroyo that separates the elementary school from the row of four classrooms that constitutes Ramona Junior High School. At the end of this day, on the bus ride home to Olive Hill, I will hear how last week a seventh grader raped a first grader in this arroyo. “ I hope Jason will be okay,” Mama frets. This annoys Daddy and the principal. I’m afraid, my body too large around us. Mr. Nordahl and our parents disappear into Mr. Silverman’s sixth grade class, leaving me and Bridgit in the open corridor looking out on the desert. We will learn later that Mr. Silverman is the smartest man in Ramona. Also the cruelest and most evil. His greatest disgust is dumb kids. He persecutes them. He’s Russian and that’s probably why he’s hated. Now I see that he may have been Jewish, but that immense reality was something I didn’t encounter until I was an adult so I can’t say for sure. “ In this school,” Bridgit suddenly announces, her voice echoing down the hall, “ I am not going to be smart. I am going to be average. From now on, I will get Cs.” I looked at my sister alarmed. I die in the humiliation, in the prison of my limitations. My mind seems capable of learning anything, but my ability to move myself into the world is so blocked. “ Why?" “ Because, ” she says very firmly. “ Boys don’t like smart girls.” Suddenly, Mr. Silverman appears at the door. The longest eyebrows I’ve ever seen. At least two inches, shining silver in the sunlight as if coated with Vaseline, like I use to thicken my eyelashes. They stick straight out from his forehead, shading deepset, gleaming, silver eyes. “Welcome, Bridgit.” He shakes her hand as if she’s a man. “ I see here from your records that you are a brilliant student. My class is most fortunate to have such a student come along at this time. Welcome to Ramona Sixth Grade.” And the door slams, taking my little sister, newly embarked on the road to averagedom, enveloped in the brilliant Mr. Silverman’s arms, with it. My sister and I usually have the same perceptions of the world but I don’t understand her declaration that boys don’t like smart girls. All my life I will think they only like perfect girls. The most beautiful, the smartest, the most graceful, the kindest. The principal and my parents leave me at the door of the seventh grade. So I walk in. All eyes turn. Three or four whistles crack the air, wolf whistles, cat calls, the boys out of their seats, leaping from their desks. Is she stacked! The teacher, Mrs. Williams, is meek, bored, uninterested, ill or something. I keep hearing an obscenity I’ve only heard hissed from Peeping Toms in LA, or read on the walls at the Paramount. Fuck. One boy, tallerthan me, is balanced on one hand, swinging around on the top of his desk, screeching whee-wh'ee-whee'. Another is on top of Mrs. Williams’s desk chanting Blondie! Blondie! Blondie! I stare at the linoleum in front of me while Mrs. Williams announces my name over the din. The white dark-stained thing lying at my feet is a used Kotex. She leads me to the desk next to the monkey boy, who is now moving an unpeeled banana back and forth in his mouth singing my favorite song, Yes, I ’m the Great Pretender. The girls stare at me, still and sullen. One growls as I walk by her. After I sit down a condom blown up like a balloon shoots across the room, hits me in the face, then lands on my desk, deflated, saliva, snot or something spilling out of it. Everyone roars with laughter. “ It’s a rubber,” the fat girl in front of me whispers. There's a motherly tone in her voice. She tells me not to worry. “ It’s just a joke.” When the bell rings for recess she says “Stick with me. I’ ll protect you.” In those last cruelest months of seventh grade, Judy is my only friend. Everyone in town says I will be Miss Ramona when I’m sixteen. “You’ re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” the grocer says the first time I shop in his store. Wherever I go someone says this. I want to hide. They want something from me. I would give it if I could, but when they look closely they see the truth. Then I’m just a big disappointment. Worse than that because I’ve aroused their hopes. “SmileV’ they beg. “You’ re too serious,” they complain. It’s hard. Nobody can see their own face. You can’t see yourself walking down the street Bridgit and I attend the Miss Ramona Beauty Pageant held in Ramona Theatre, which is owned by a man named Hugh Hefner. Everyone knows his name because he has just launched a new girly magazine, Playboy, from Ramona’s sister theatre in Escondido, eighteen miles down the mountain. Now he’s moved back to Chicago and the Ramona Theatre is in disrepair. The glamorous high school girls parade in bathing suits across the stage beneath the screen, which in the glaring spotlight is torn, has coke and beer stains. We eat popcorn and agree on the girl we think the most beautiful. But she doesn’t even place. The winner is Pat Dawson. In our few weeks in Ramona we already know about her. She’s the school whore. Judy explains, “Out-of-town judges don’t know reputations or real personalities.” It’s our first experience with a small-town scandal. All Pat’s term the whole town chokes and gags about the whore Miss Ramona. My mother, however, uses Pat as one of her examples in her on-going lectures about the great and secret power, the power of positive thinking. We are all in the car. Jason who has just failed fourth grade sitting between me and Bridgit, driving around the hills, exploring, as we always do on Sundays. Mama and Daddy are telling us again. “Jason could learn to read if he put his mind to it.” “Of course Pat’s not beautiful. Anyone can see that.” We all laugh with Daddy. “ But for that night, for the purpose of winning the Miss Ramona contest, she thought herself beautiful. And so she won.” 6 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
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