I chatted on facebook today with an old friend, a really old friend, a friend of the variety of playing dolls on hot summer days, of kool-aid and spying and hide and seek in the dusky evening light. She lived on our block, maybe three houses down, and she and her sister and brother were a mainstay in my sister’s and my life. When I was in 8th grade, just as my parents marriage began its final crumbling, it came out that her older sister, a year older than me, had an inappropriate relationship with a teacher and coach at the high school. Maybe I should say that the teacher had an inappropriate relationship with her, as she was, after all, a girl, in school still. There was absolutely no way that relationship could be deemed or rationalized as appropriate. I never found out the details: Life for me at that point was just about getting through, getting out of that small school, that small town with a population of 300. Imagine, the rumors. Imagine, telling the truth. The teacher was gone, quite suddenly, relocated to another state. My friend’s sister, too, was gone to me. I never spoke of it with her, I wasn’t that close to her really. I do remember the talk around town…and I do remember unabashedly KNOWING that she was telling the truth. I was not surprised when this news came out. I just knew.
Now my friend and I chat, many years gone by, many miles between us, and she asks, point blank, how that could have possibly happened, how that teacher could have placed his hands on girls backs and asses and no one stopped him, no one appeared to even slap his hands away. How vulnerable we were, we are, in the face of authority. I am struck too by how deeply hidden this story is inside myself. I have spoken of it over the years, but I have never acknowledged the power of it, in my life, in my friends lives. How UNEXAMINED this story is for me. How stories like this lie alongside other small town stories of incest, of the kids who were beaten too hard and too often, and with a belt, of the old man with no teeth who no one spoke to, of the retarded man who lived with his mother and walked with a strange gait. Stories abound. So many things hinted at, spoken around. But I still don’t know them.
We are like onions, peelings fall away, and we cry. Are there stories you have rediscovered from your past? Happenings that so make up the fabric of who you are that the threads are strong, but almost invisible. How potently this story, with its many holes, comes back to me.
I remember in my HS one of my best friends actually moved in with one of our teachers – we were seniors but that doesn’t make it OK. Hell, when I went to college I was only 17 so she was she was probably 16 or 17 when their relationship started. Other teachers knew and did nothing. I wonder about it to this day but have never asked her.