Unknowing

Ninth grade was almost over and we passed yearbooks around one to another for signing. Memorabilia, the early lessons of a maudlin life. We signed what we thought were clever things, snappy things, still finding it difficult to publicly express emotion in an honest manner. Or honest emotion in a true manner, perhaps. Top Girls were learning a formula that would see them through the next three years and maybe more, the buzzwords and tag lines that would later get them into sororities and beauty pageants, and maybe even enviable marriages. My crowd, however, were mostly inarticulate, limited to a few words scrawled in uneven handwriting. We watched the future prep stars practice their farewell handshakes and hugs and crocodile tears, though in a few cases, I had to admit, some people were already so swallowed up with the formulas of emotion that I believed that the tears were sincere. My own life was far from theirs by now, separated by what seemed to me an unbridgeable chasm of chances and circumstance, and what I imagined to myself was a bit of daring, too. While they had gotten together in the evenings to make posters for the homecoming game or on weekends to raise money to buy band uniforms by having a car wash. . . I was elsewhere.

Still, I had to admit I felt something there at the end. I mean, it is impossible not to feel something. Change was coming in a swift and sweeping way. The old world would soon be gone, that world we had built those past three years, the world of shared histories, of teachers passed down from year to year, the sound of the pep band and the principal addressing the student body on special occasions. These were life lessons to be learned, though, the passing of things, the going on to something else. What the hell did I care. It had not been that great.

I had already come to be a melancholy youth, if not yet cynical, an outsider and a rebel, and I felt deeply both the privileges and inequities around me. I had a legacy of standing up for unpopular kids and never doing or saying the expected thing. Still, it surprised me when at the end of the year, Terri approached me shyly and handed me a letter. She didn't say anything but simply looked up for a moment and then turned and walked away. I didn't know what to make of it. It was odd.

Terri was a heavyset girl with thickish skin and oily hair. She dressed poorly in what looked to be clothes from the depression. But her most distinguishing feature was her eyes. She wore coke bottle glasses that made her eyes the size of silver dollars. The glasses were heavy and she was constantly pushing them back up the bridge of her nose where they would once again conspire with gravity. Because of her looks more than anything else, I think, Terri was regarded by the other kids to be retarded. Her name was a trademark insult among thoughtless boys and girls, and so she was eschewed, forced to sit in the rear or to the side of things, isolated, alone. None of the other kids wanted to be associated with her, but she did not bother me, and from time to time I would talk to her. It was never anything much, just a sort of guilty kindness, I guess, something I thought to do because the others would not do it, an unspoken ideal instilled in me early on by my grandmother, my mother, and my father.

When she was gone, I opened the envelope to see what was inside. It was a letter written in purple ink in cursive letters, beginning with the formal "Dear." I wish I had the letter now so that I could quote it. I have tried to emulate it's words and emotion, but I can't. She told me that she was glad she had gotten to know me these past three years, that I was one of her favorite people in the school. It went on like that, the language no more sophisticated than any other ninth grader, but the depth of the emotion and self-revelation were shocking. She was lonely, she said, and it was often hard not to be included in things. But when she was home and loneliest, she often thought of me and it made her feel better. She wished me well at the new school next year.

I thought about it for a long time. I had never thought about Terri except when she was in my vision, probably, or when her name was invoked in jest. She had simply been part of the landscape that made up my life. I tried to imagine her at home, though I was not even certain where she lived. I pictured her in some bedroom surrounded by the paraphernalia of her life, stuffed animals or dolls, maybe. Some pictures of favorite uncles and aunts. I saw a bedspread as plain and washed out as her dresses. It was Friday night. She was alone.

I would have to live with that, I thought, now that she had given me the letter. It haunted me. I didn't want her to be sad, but I didn't want to save her, either. I did not want to call her up for a friendly chat or ask her if she wanted to get a hamburger. And I felt guilty. We were both outsiders, one of us by circumstance, the other by choice. There was a loneliness and longing that enveloped each of us, but it was nothing I could share with her. There was only that. I felt I knew something now that others did not know, that I believed I wished I did not know, too. Once you know a thing, however, there is no unknowing it. Terri, I thought. God damned Terri.