NOTE: What follows is part one of a semi-autobiographical short story I wrote some time ago. I'll post part two in a few days. I hope you like it.
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The first thing you need to know in order to fully appreciate this story is that I do not feel sorry for myself when I remember the day no one showed up at my birthday party. A person with a long history, even as a third-grader, of producing freshets of hot tears with little provocation, amazingly when it happened I did not cry. Even my own memories of the experience are not sad ones but merely interested ones, almost as though I were thinking about the events that transpired in relation to someone other than myself.
(I find it helpful to process all potentially searing memories in this way: Did that really happen to me in exactly that way or am I remembering something that happened to someone else that I knew or only heard of, and projecting all or part of it onto myself? Have I embroidered the truth to make myself more heroic? And speaking for myself personally, the best way -- indeed the only objective way -- to answer these questions is to, at the outset, refuse to become mired in a fetid bog of self-pity.)
So, did I imagine or concoct what took place that day in March many years ago, and do I relay it to you now with assorted eye-catching furbelows attached, in an effort to gain attention or sympathy? In a word, no. These things occurred and I have eight half-melted candles to prove it. And I'm not whining but merely telling. When I was in third grade my parents threw a birthday party for me and invited all of my classmates, and made some fairly elaborate preparations for the occasion, but nobody came for cake and ice cream or to fete me in any fashion.
I'd have to walk into a classroom full of rude staring eyes, clutching nothing but my bologna sandwich in a wrinkled paper sack, discreetly scratching at my mosquito bites.
First you will need to know the cast of characters, and don't worry about becoming confused because it's not very long. Of course we had a mother, Miranda, who was always at work waiting tables when my sister and I got home from school and on Saturdays. There was our stepfather, Rafe, who really wasn't related because he never adopted us, on account of he never did anything legally if he could help it. I had to call him Daddy but I never thought of him as anything but Rafe, and if you said Rafe instead of Daddy -- in your head I'm talking about -- you had to say Miranda instead of Mama. I meant no disrespect then and I don't now.
I had one sister, Cristina, who was a little older than me but a lot smarter in most ways. Not all.
And there was me: Brooke.
Oh, and we had a dog ... an obtusely rambunctious mutt, predominantly Cocker Spaniel, named Sea Fever ... SeeFee for short. That's it. We were a tribe of four, five if you count SeeFee. We lived in Gulfport, Mississippi ... at least briefly, and at the time of the events at issue. One thing you have to know about us is, we moved around an awful lot. Mostly this was because Rafe was as a rule only one or two steps ahead of the law for some felonious act or other he had committed, or some way he had managed to cheat someone out of money. He was generally no good.
But Miranda, my mom, didn't like to stay in one place very long either; Rafe used to say all the time to me and Crissy, in a know-it-all kind of voice we did not like: "Your mother's not happy unless she's on the road." Also we were poor because Rafe, not being in the least career-minded, never stuck at any one thing for any appreciable length of time and Miranda, though intelligent and attractive and possessed of a winning personality, had no professional qualifications other than that of waitress.
The fall before I turned eight we had wheeled into Gulfport on an afternoon so humid you felt like you were walking around underwater, and the first thing we did was, we secured a newspaper. After a visit to the local grocery store where Crissy and I had to stay in the sweltering car, repeatedly unsticking our sweaty thighs from the vinyl upholstery, we went down to the beach and ate bologna sandwiches on white bread for dinner. Rafe and Miranda gave Crissy and me an Orange Crush to share and splurged for a small Coke for each of them, and the Gulf breeze felt nice as Crissy and I waded, hunting shells.
For hours Rafe and Miranda sat on a blanket in the sand, poring over the want ads, circling blocks of print with a stubby half-chewed pencil they'd found in the supermarket parking lot. By the time the sun melted into a gooey yellow-and-orange puddle on the hazy gunmetal horizon, Miranda had drawn a bead on two or three waitressing jobs and Rafe was pretty sure he'd found us a place to live.
We slept in our car that first night (yeah ... that's about as comfortable as it sounds) but by the next day we'd rented a tiny two-bedroom house with hard, shiny, variegated terrazzo floors and slatted jalousy windows just like the ones we'd had on our trailer in Florida. The house, which sat on a gravel road with big ruts that doubled as reservoirs of muddy water, had come with a few sticks of furniture but there was no bed for Crissy and me (big surprise). We slept on our usual pallets and that terrazzo felt like the hard crust of the earth by morning. There must've been a few holes in screens because the mosquitoes gave us a warm welcome and during the night Crissy and I became decorated with welts.
When my hands were at last empty I sat on a vacant swing and kicked at the dirt.
By the evening of the day we moved into the house, I had what felt like a brick lying on the ground floor of my stomach, resting against my spinal cord way down by my tailbone. I recognized the feeling as fear. The school term had started several weeks before our arrival and the next day we'd be trotted by Miranda down to the local elementary rockpile and matriculated in our grades ... me in third, Crissy in fifth. I'd have to walk into a classroom full of rude staring eyes, clutching nothing but my bologna sandwich in a wrinkled paper sack, discreetly scratching at my mosquito bites, and be "introduced" to thirty people who didn't care if I lived or died.
An object of idle curiosity, is all I ever was -- and not the kind of curiosity that made anyone feel like they just had to know more about me, my provenance, or anything that mattered to me. Groups had formed and the year's cliques were fully populated; my perennial role was to troll the outskirts of existing factions, looking in, gathering information that nobody wanted.
As fall waned, the Christmas holidays came and went, and what passed for winter in Gulfport began to peter out, my birthday approached and I either asked for or was offered a party. I'm pretty sure it is safe to say it was the first birthday party ever planned in connection to my appearance on the earth eight years before, but it's entirely possible I'd had the standard-issue single-candle face-in-a-cupcake type of thing when I turned one. There are no photographs to prove that, though, and Miranda doesn't seem to remember, so it's anybody's guess.
At any rate there was a trip to the store and things like festive crepe paper, colored balloons, paper plates, and cake mix were purchased. Oh, and invitations. We needed invitations so we could invite all my classmates. Miranda shoved a piece of lined paper in front of me that weekend and directed me to write down the names of all the kids in my class.
I mentally went down the rows, remembering the people in my room, careful not to leave anybody out. There was Mandy Matthews, who was pretty and rich and whose long hair bounced and shone. There was Wendy Appenzeller -- shy Wendy with nut-brown hair that touched her chin -- who rarely smiled and had never spoken to me, even though she sometimes looked like she was considering it.
I thought of Bucky Peake, the kid who sat behind me and who was always sticking his big feet onto the bottom of my desk and pushing me because I was a lightweight. He never spoke to me, only pushed. The round freckled face of Constance O'Rourke, who sat two rows up and to my right with her red curly hair the exact shade of barbecue potato chips, swam before me. Surely Constance would welcome an invitation for cake and ice cream! She wasn't much more popular than me but unfortunately that was saying precious little.
"Twenty-eight would be a nice number," I thought, trying to imagine that many third-graders crowding into our tiny, shabby, terrazzo-floored house.
I scrivened name after name: Walter Binney, who sat to my left and made mush out of his pencils by relentlessly gnawing them; Hayley Childress, who was overweight and had a maddening habit of bossing everyone; long-legged, doe-eyed Desiree Rochester, the girl all the boys liked; Frankie Grant, who was the smallest boy in our grade and in fact was smaller than all but one girl, the decidedly diminutive Louise Collins.
Finally, my pencil dull and my eraser nearly to the metal, I decided I had remembered them all and spelled their names correctly, and I relinquished the list to Miranda.
I never saw her address the invitations but a few mornings later when I was leaving for school, they were waiting for me on the kitchen table: a neat stack of thirty small white envelopes. I distributed them at recess. The reactions were varied when I handed them over and explained what they were.
"Show it to your mom, okay?" I said thirty times.
For my trouble I got eleven blank stares, six desultory nods, three "yeah" type responses, three nice-ish "okays" and seven disinterested grunts. When my hands were at last empty I sat on a vacant swing and kicked at the dirt. I tried to watch, without appearing to watch, as a few people read their invitations.
When the bell rang and we had to go inside, two of the brightly-colored cards, freed from their envelopes, were lying on the ground. I scooped them up and threw them in the trash bin at the edge of the playground. "Twenty-eight would be a nice number," I thought, trying to imagine that many third-graders crowding into our tiny, shabby, terrazzo-floored house.
My eighth birthday party had been planned for a Saturday for obvious reasons: it was only March and school was in session. After-school birthday parties were not an option for most kids because, unlike Cristina and me, they had various extracurricular activities such as dance and music lessons. Crissy and I always had to go straight home and if we were five minutes late Rafe met us at the door with his belt already off, ready to whip us. He might or might not ask questions later. We were careful.
The draconian nature of our stepfather's rules and regulations didn't leave much time at school to win friends and influence people, and I reminded myself of this when I remembered my classmates' less-than-elated reaction to the prospect of a celebration in honor of my existence. If only I had more time to schmooze, I told myself. If only we had a phone, maybe I could call Wendy Appenzeller up sometime and ask what she was doing. I decided it behooved me, in light of my upcoming social event, to network one-one-one at every available opportunity.
To be continued ...
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Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 08:44PM 
My, how the landscape of elections has changed. Remember when the issue of abortion used to matter to conservatives in political races? Today presidential nominees can get away with murder, literally. They can smoke, toke and hang out with terrorists who do. What were once considered legitimate leadership litmus tests are now regarded as off-limit character assassinations and hate language. Recently, some nonprofit organizations have been threatened with the withdrawal of their tax-exempt statuses because their leaders merely voiced opposition to what they consider a moral issue: abortion.
