The Cat Ate My Gymsuit (2 page)

I
hate my father. I hate school. I hate being fat. I hate the principal because he wanted to fire Ms. Finney, my English teacher.

My name is Marcy Lewis. I’m thirteen years old and in the ninth grade at Dwight D. Eisenhower Junior High.

All my life I’ve thought that I looked like a baby blimp with wire-frame glasses and mousy brown hair. Everyone always said that I’d grow out of it,
but I was convinced that I’d become an adolescent blimp with wire-frame glasses, mousy brown hair, and acne.

My life is not easy. I know I’m not poor. Nobody beats me. I have clothes to wear, my own room, a stereo, a TV, and a push-button phone. Sometimes I feel guilty being so miserable, but middle-class kids have problems too.

Mom always made me go to tap and ballet lessons. She said that they’d make me more graceful. When it came time for the recital, I accidentally sat on the record that I was supposed to dance to, and broke it. I had to hum along with the tap dancing. I sing as badly as I dance. It was a disaster.

Father says that girl children should be born at the age of eighteen and married off immediately.

Stuart, my four-year-old brother, wants to be my best friend so that I can help him put orange pits in a hole in his teddy bear’s head.

I’m flat-chested. I used to buy training bras and put tucks in them.

I never had any friends, except Nancy Sheridan. She’s very popular, but her mother and mine are PTA officers and old friends, so I always figured that
Mrs. Sheridan made her talk to me—Beauty and the Blimp.

School is a bummer. The only creative writing I could do was anonymous letters to the Student Council suggestion box. Lunches are lousy. We never get past the First World War in history class. We never learned anything good, at least not till Ms. Finney came along.

So my life is not easy.

The thing with Ms. Finney is what I want to talk about. She took over for Mr. Edwards, our first English teacher. He left after the first month. One rumor is that he had a nervous breakdown in the faculty lounge while correcting a test on noun clauses. Another is that he had to go to a home for unwed fathers in Secaucus, New Jersey. I personally think that he realized that he was a horrible teacher, so he took a job somewhere as a principal or a guidance counselor.

When Mr. Edwards left, we got a whole bunch of substitutes. None of them lasted more than two days. That’ll teach the school to group all the smart kids in one class. We were indestructible.

The entire class dropped books, pencils, and pens
at an assigned time. Someone put bubble gum in the pencil sharpener. Nancy pulled her fainting act. We made up names and wrote them on the attendance list. All the desks got turned around. Mr. Stone, the principal, kept coming in and yelling.

And then Ms. Finney came.

C
eleste Sanders was the first to spread the news.

“Hey, we got a new English teacher. A real one, not a sub. First-period class says she looks like a kid.”

“A new one. Let’s walk in backwards.”

“Everyone give a wrong name.”

“Let’s show her who’s boss.”

Everybody rushed down the halls and into class. Some of the guys started to make and throw paper airplanes. Alan Smith played “Clementine” on his
harmonica. He’d learned it from the instructions on a Good and Plenty box. Jim Heston played the Good and Plenty box, and Ted Martin played a comb. There was applause and cheering after the performance. At 1:15 the coughing started. A few kids didn’t do anything, but I did. I really didn’t like what was happening, but if you’re a blimp with fears of impending acne, you go along with the crowd.

Ms. Finney just sat there. She was young and wore a long denim skirt, a turtleneck jersey and had on weird jewelry—giant earrings that hung down to her shoulders, and a macrame necklace. She didn’t smile or yell or cry or read a paper or do any of the things that teachers normally do when a class gets out of hand. She just sat there and looked at everybody.

Finally it got quiet. Everyone started to squirm. It was really creepy after a while.

“O.K. Give her a chance,” someone muttered.

We all looked around to see who was talking. It was Joel Anderson, the smartest kid in the class. When almost everybody else would be fooling around, he would sit there reading a book. Some of the kids thought he was a little weird, but everybody usually listened to him.

He put his book down, looked at Ms. Finney, and said, “Are you going to teach us anything?”

Somebody giggled.

The class got very quiet.

I looked at Joel and thought how brave and smart and cute he was. We’d been in the same classes since kindergarten, but I hadn’t said more to him than “Hi” and “What’s the homework assignment?” I didn’t like to embarrass anyone by having them be seen talking to me.

Ms. Finney stood up, looked at the class, smiled, turned to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote:

“Ms. Barbara Finney.”

Turning around again, she smiled and said, “That’s my name. I’m your new English teacher, and I hope this year is going to be a good one for all of us.”

I thought about that. First of all, she’d written “Ms.” Was she just trying to be sharp, or was she really into it? And she’d written her first name. Teachers never do that. They never admit to having first names. They’re always Miss or Mr. or Mrs., hardly ever Ms., and never with first names. It’s supposed to be a big mystery, like do teachers really
have to go to the bathroom or do anything but teach and go to meetings?

She spoke again.

“I decided to be an English teacher because I care about people communicating with people. That’s why I’m here. I want to do it and help you all to do it too, as effectively as possible. A poet named Theodore Roethke once said, ‘Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.’ Please, let’s try to move among mysteries together.”

The class looked at her and at one another.

Alan Smith laughed and said, “What is this gonna be, a class of detectives?”

Ms. Finney looked at him without smiling. But she didn’t yell, either.

“I know that this may all seem a little strange to you now. Maybe it won’t work, but let’s try. Take out a piece of paper, and for the rest of the period think about communication and write about what it means to you.”

We all took out paper. I stared at mine and then snuck looks at Ms. Finney. She was young and pretty and seemed nice. She sounded smart. She was different, but I wasn’t sure how, and I didn’t know if I could trust her. I mean, she was a teacher, and an adult.

During one of my looks, she stared right at me and smiled. I lowered my head and pretended to be writing. Dumb teacher. Who did she think she was? What does a blimp know about communication? How could she know what it feels like to be so fat and ugly that you’re ashamed to get into a gymsuit or talk to skinny people? Who wants to say, “This is my friend, the Blimp”?

Class was almost over, and I still hadn’t written anything. I stared at my paper again and began:

The bell rang. Grabbing my books, I rushed up to the front and put my paper face down on the desk. No one else was going to see what I wrote or drew.

Going to gym class, I overheard some of the kids talking about Ms. Finney.

“She seems O.K.”

“Weird.”

“I like her.”

“She’s a creep, like the rest of ’em.”

In the locker room all the girls rushed to get dressed, except for me. I sat on a bench.

Nancy came over and said, “Marcy, not again! You’ll flunk.”

I just sat there. Trying to change into a gymsuit while hiding my mini bra and fat body would have been a gymnastic feat in itself.

Once the class started, I walked up to the gym teacher, Schmidt.

“All right, Lewis. What is it this time?”

“The cat ate my gymsuit.”

She shook her head, frowned, and wrote another zero in her marking book.

I sat down to watch my eighty-millionth volleyball game.

T
hings got better at school after that, at least for me. For a while, some of the kids were mad at Joel for spoiling their fun. But a lot of the kids were glad that everything had settled down. And we started doing some really neat things in class. There was a lot of writing, but I like to do that. Sometimes it is easier to write things down than it is to say them out loud. Ms. Finney said that to communicate is to begin to understand ourselves and others. She wanted us to be
honest in our thinking, and to write well. That’s really hard, to be honest and remember things like commas and paragraph structure and stuff like that.

The really nice part is that she never asked us to discuss anything that she wouldn’t discuss herself. One day we had to write about the things that bothered us. Ms. Finney stood in front of the class and said, “I remember that when I was a kid, I used to be so embarrassed because I wore braces on my teeth and everyone used to call me ‘Tinsel Tooth.’”

That may not sound important, her telling us that, but it made it easier for us to write about and discuss things that bothered us. You know, like mothers who insist on being Girl Scout leaders when you don’t even want to be a Girl Scout; falling down steps when you are trying to make an entrance; bad breath; having to take your younger brother to the movies; aunts and uncles who keep asking if many people “shoot up” marijuana; dumb stuff like that. It surprised me how many people had problems. I’m sure that lots of people had more trouble than we talked about, but Ms. Finney was careful not to let it get too personal.

One time, she talked about some guy named
Marshall McLuhan, who wrote about people getting turned on by music and films and stuff. Then Ms. Finney turned off all the lights, put on a whole lot of light boxes that blinked on and off, turned on an album real loud, and told us to experience it. She said she wanted us to decide for ourselves whether this type of thing was an escape or a way to really get involved. It was really neat, but then the vice-principal, Mr. Goldman, walked in and called Ms. Finney out of the room. When she came back in, she looked very upset and put the lights back on and stopped the lesson.

We also put on a play. Ms. Finney asked me to be assistant director. That was very hard for me. I had to get up and walk around the room and get stuff ready. I always feel safer sitting behind the desk, where nobody can see my body. But Ms. Finney asked, and it would have been hard for me to explain to her why I didn’t want to do it, so I did it. It ended up being O.K.

Don’t get me wrong. Ms. Finney wasn’t perfect. She never got reports back on time, she gave hard tests, and once in a while she got mad. She also did weird things like holding on to a piece of chalk, forgetting what it was, and trying to smoke it. Sometimes
she let kids get away with too much. But she really tried.

And we all really dug her. In the beginning, some of the kids were worried because they were afraid they wouldn’t learn what they had to know to pass the college entrance exams. Other kids thought that Ms. Finney was just plain weird. But eventually we all said that we did learn. We wrote more for her than we had ever written before. She never gave true-false or multiple-guess tests. I think most teachers like them because they’re easier to correct. Instead, she made us write our own interpretation of what we’d read.

She brought in all kinds of books to read. And a lot of us bought paperbacks from the book club. It was like a celebration the day the books came in the mail and Ms. Finney sorted them out and gave them to us. I spent most of my allowance on books. We shared and swapped them. I feel like I’m addicted to the printed word. Like I need a book fix when I get upset.

We talked about poetry and current events and plays and movies. Ms. Finney knew an awful lot, and she made us feel that we knew a lot too and were important. She really listened. It was amazing.

And she didn’t talk to us just in English class. During her free periods she’d walk around the school and drop in on some classes, like home ec. and shop and art, classes where there were times that she wouldn’t be interrupting other teachers. She’d taste the food that the kids made, admire the sewing, and look at all the projects in shop. It made everybody feel good, like she knew that there was more to us than just the time we spent in her class.

One day she came into my gym class. I had just told Schmidt that my little brother had misplaced his security blanket and was now using my gymsuit instead. Ms. Finney looked at everybody playing volleyball and then came over and sat down next to me.

“Hi, Marcy.”

“Hi, Ms. Finney.”

“Who’s winning?”

“The blue team.”

“Don’t you feel well?”

“I’m O.K. Why?”

“Just wondered.”

We sat and watched the game for a few minutes. I didn’t know what else to say.

She turned and said, “I’m going to ask Ms. Schmidt
if I can play. I’m a real clod at volleyball, but it’s fun. Do you want to play too?”

I shook my head. Looking at me as if she wanted to say something else, she just smiled and walked over to the game. Schmidt obviously said that she could play, because she took off her shoes and joined the red team.