The Brown Table

Good at reading, Bad at school.

St. Hedwig’s was a one-story cinder block building in the slightly shabby suburban community of Rossmoor, California. In each classroom, for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, there was one door that opened onto its long fluorescently-lit hallway and another that let us out onto a treeless asphalt lot where, during recess and while we waited for our parents to retrieve us, we played kickball, hopscotch, and make-believe. The church, which you saw from the street, was modern and many-angled, filled with glass bricks and light. The rectory was a Spanish mission-style building tucked away behind magenta swarms of bougainvillea. By comparison, the school was an ugly, cheaply built afterthought.

Just outside the office of our principal, Sister Mary, was a long table. It was “the Brown Table,” and it was where you were sent when you were in trouble.

*

When being a child gets hard for my son Julian, he will ask me if I’ve ever felt that way before. He has been having a hard time with “consequences” at his preschool. He’s scared of them yet incurs them frequently, more than his peers, and this embarrasses him. I find myself regularly affirming for him that being a kid is really fucking hard. He asks me if I ever had consequences at school. “Oh yeah,” I tell him. “Major.” He asks me to tell him about one time. “A real story,” he says, nervous that I’m going to make something up to placate him. The thing is, I should placate him. He has just turned five. I should make up something that makes me seem like I figured out my behavioral issues, that I’ve conquered my big emotions. But I don’t, partly because I haven’t figured those things out and he knows it, and partly because I want tell him the real story. “At my school,” I begin, “there was a place called the Brown Table.”

*

I pretty much lived there until I was encouraged to transfer out of St. Hedwig’s in sixth grade. I went to the Brown Table for lying. For saying hell, damn, and crap in second grade. For graduating to the big curse words in fifth. For forging my mom’s signature on my religion homework in first grade (I forgot the second N in my mother’s first name, Nancy). For telling my fifth-grade classmates I was an atheist, and then for trying to start a club for nonbelievers. For wearing eyeliner and for telling a kindergartener the details, as I knew them, of sexual intercourse. Because I snuck in chewing gum in second grade and because I violated the dress code by rolling up my uniform skirt in fourth. Because in third grade, at slumber parties I made out with my girlfriends, who told their parents, who called the school. For masturbating in first grade by sitting on the heel of my foot and rocking. For pulling the hair of the second-grade girl who said I was lying about my father working on satellites in outer space.

But the thing I was most consistently sent to the Brown Table for was reading. I regularly read books not assigned by my teachers, and I did so under my desk or inside my desk, or by saying I had to get something out of my locker and reading in the bathroom. In third grade, I took one of these bathroom breaks and snuck into the church to read, which caused a schoolwide panic and resulted in an in-person meeting with my mother and the principal. While I waited for my mother to arrive, I sat at the Brown Table.

“But what’s funny is that when they sent you to the Brown Table, all you got was a pencil and paper. You were supposed to write lines. Or you were supposed to be bored. That was the punishment.”

“What are lines?” Julian asks.

 “It doesn’t matter .”

St. Hedwig’s Rebel Without a Cause.

*

My mother often leveled me in the process of raising me. But there were two things about me that were consistently validated as being capital-G “Good.” The first was that I was pretty. Little else mattered because my looks meant I could get married someday. The second was that I was a great reader. The family mythology is that I taught myself to read when I was three. But having recently had two children pass through that age, I find it unlikely. I did arrive at kindergarten knowing how to read and feeling that I had an edge over my classmates. I won all the reading and writing contests, and I was not humble. I remember feeling special. What confuses me now is how quickly it became a liability.  

In first grade, we had an assignment to write a book report on what we were reading at home. I wrote on Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins. I remember the horror (and the titillation) I felt when Karana’s little brother is killed by a pack of wild dogs. At the bottom of the book report was a requirement that a parent had to sign, verifying that their child had read this book. Mrs. G pulled me aside and took me to Sister Mary’s office, where we had to call my mother. The book, Mrs. G alleged, was too advanced. She did not believe I had read it. She said that I had forged my mother’s signature, which, as I mentioned before, was a fair accusation. But not that day. My mother was so mad at Mrs. G that she came in person (I see now that she must have had to ask to leave work early). Mrs. G, already an unkind woman, was furious when she had to apologize to me. I went to the Brown Table more frequently after that.

In second grade, I was sitting against a butter-yellow cinder block wall in a windowless room that they used for extended care, reading “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe. It was so early in the morning that it was still dark outside. Mrs. T raised her eyebrows and said, “You’re not reading that.” I thought her statement referred to the content, so I said, “I’m not scared.” She picked up the book and pointed to a word on the page. “What’s that word?” she asked, amusing herself. “Deeter-mind-dead.” I said, sounding it out with an added consonant. She shook her head. “Determined,” she said, walking away. My cheeks burned. I put the book in my backpack. But, I wanted to say to her, I know what it means.  

In third grade I read the entire oeuvre of Roald Dahl (I dressed up as Matilda for Halloween). I read Katherine Paterson’s The Bridge to Terabithia and E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. That was the year of Fear Street, of Nancy Drew and the Babysitter’s Club, of Sweet Valley High, for which I had to receive consent from my mother to take out of the library. My mother also bought me a set of illustrated and abridged Shakespeare comedies, and I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream over and over again (I can still see each facing page’s illustration perfectly). I was never without my copy of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, and my sister and I played goddesses (she, Athena, me, Aphrodite). I stole my mother’s copy of Mists of Avalon, which felt like the biggest book I had ever seen. I don’t remember finishing it but do remember feeling like I had been let into a world of adult fairy tales. I didn’t want the kid’s stuff after that. 

In this ferment of great literature for children, I started writing a series of stories during my regular sessions at the Brown Table. They were about Guinevere (Gwen, for short), an orphan who was sent to live with her rich, beautiful, and perfect best friend. I stapled the loose-leaf pages from the Brown Table into a spiral bound Mead notebook. I kept writing. My third grade teacher, Mrs. F, took the notebooks away. “What’s seven multiplied by six?” she asked. I had no idea. “Then you can have them back at the end of the day,” she said.

Fourth grade was Catcher in the Rye. Again I was accused of (and exonerated from) lying. In fifth, V. C. Andrews (I think Flowers in the Attic scrambled my eleven-year-old brain in ways I’m still recovering from. At an event for her short story collection Ghost Lover, Lisa Taddeo talked about the impact Flowers in the Attic made on her, and I was thought, This is why we love each other). The book was confiscated and not allowed back due to its highly sexual content. Anne Rice was sixth grade and seventh was Wuthering Heights, which is entangled with my first French kiss. Both the boy and I were wearing rollerblades, he still had braces, and I couldn’t believe how wet it was, a blind swim against a rubbery wave.

I otherwise had no Heathcliff. My journals from then describe a girl who felt she had no one to talk to, who worried she was cold or dead inside. One who was too prudish, too bookish, and too flat-chested to command any kind of attention. That year I ditched school for the first time. I rode my skateboard alone to Super Saver Cinemas, tucked into the back of a strip mall on Seal Beach Blvd, to see the film adaptation of Great Expectations, a book I might have said was my favorite if anyone had ever asked me. The school called my mother because the voicemail I had left for them, in which I had practiced my deepest and most harried version of her voice, sounded suspect. Brontë, Dickens, Gwyneth Paltrow in green—I was getting grounded for everything.

In eighth grade I started going to the high school to get my books. I found Ariel there: an off-white paperback, the edges darkened and graying, the title set in bold black type. It was in the protracted afternoon lull between school ending and the expectation of being home. I was already reading poetry, mainly fixated on Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Oscar Wilde, poems whose music and meaning felt accessible. I must have had an awareness of the Plath mythology. I hoped to find something pithy and melodic. I took the book and sat on the ground in front of the stacks, in a way I still can be caught reading in libraries, as if hiding. I read up through “Lady Lazarus,” not really understanding anything except Plath’s urgency, the vividness of her lines and her fevered visions: flowers, mirrors, animals, all cast in a spooky fatalism. And that was it for me.

Brontë and Plath enveloped me in what I would now call a kind of literary tradition. Those two aching, gothic books (and the drama of the lives of the women who authored them) connected with my own experience of enormous, sometimes unbearable feelings and made me conscious of a lineage of women who worked through those feelings with words. When does one become a writer? I often say that we start out in mimicry and become a writer when make the leap into own voice or style. But that becoming also begins in these moments of connection to forbearers who we’re always in conversation with. There isn’t anything I write, even this newsletter, in which I don’t feel accountable to the books I’ve loved and felt loved by.

I was not exceptional or a prodigy. I was precocious, maybe. I read at the dinner table. I took a book to the dinner parties my mom dragged me to and read in a corner. I often walked between classes or to soccer practice while reading.

And yet, I was really bad at school.

*

There is a cavity between the child—who was by all accounts voracious for information, joyfully curious, and naturally creative—and the teenager who fails out of one high school, does barely passable work in another, and gets rejected from every single college she applied to. It’s only twenty-odd years on that I can look at those months before graduation day and take in the full scope of my humiliation. I wasn’t going to college. I had failed in all senses of the word.

I recently read a newsletter by Anne Helen Peterson that talked about her relationship with her pastor, who was also her childhood friend’s father. She describes him as “One Significant Adult,” a person who is not within the family unit, whose care and attention alters a child’s life. I can pinpoint that moment of connection with my English teacher at my second high school, and I know that every other moment of professional achievement arises directly from that mentorship. He helped me in quiet and overt ways, no question. He took my attempts at fiction seriously and did not give up on me. I attribute that to getting waitlisted, then accepted at the eleventh hour, to Kenyon College.

But mostly I had locked adults completely out of my life. I made myself untouchable. I greatly frustrated some of my teachers; the rest, other than that English teacher, uniformly ignored me. I can see the enraged faces of a few of them, still radiating that desire to punish me. I became a target, an example. I was classified at various times as gifted, troubled, depressed, anxious, and learning disabled. I was written off and left behind. School was bad at seeing me, and I was one of the loud ones. I became the person I wanted to be by accident.

*

I want to end this piece saying that because I went through this, my own children will be fine. Because I am paying attention. In the background of my educational disaster were parents who were, well, not. But despite my self-assurance and my vigilance, there are many days when Julian comes home and doesn’t feel fine. We try to redirect some of the beliefs he’s internalized: that he’s a bad kid who’s always in trouble, that he’s unliked by his teachers. The school has assigned an occupational therapist to visit him, to help him with impulse control and social interaction. As of this writing he hasn’t seemed embarrassed by his “extra teacher.” But he notices, and he has questions. He knows that the way he absorbs information is different from his peers, as is his uncanny recall, and we feel that we’re doing a pretty good job of making him proud of the way he knits disparate ideas and facts into coherence.

But I also see everything he doesn’t say. I have sat across from his incredible preschool teachers at parent-teacher conferences where they explain, “Julian is extremely articulate and bright. He seems to have a kind of photographic memory . . . But.” And that but kills me. Maybe it doesn’t surprise the teachers that my eyes well and overflow. It surprises my husband. But then he has never made himself untouchable. I apologize to the teachers, then ask them to continue.

If Julian (or my daughter, Paloma, following close behind him) decides not to care about school, all of my relevant life experience will not get him to hear me. He is already learning that to master “consequences,” he only has to lose his fear of them. How soon did I learn that if I wasn’t afraid of the Brown Table, I could do anything I wanted? And how, from the vantage point afforded to me by these “mistakes,” can I say that this realization was a bad thing and not what saved me?

*

Last year, we read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory together, his eyes following my finger as it moved along under the words. After that, Charlotte’s Web, Comet in Moominland, the first two Harry Potter books, and his own copy of D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. On his fifth birthday, he received a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which we read in the evenings, even though it’s legitimately scary and occasionally he listens from under the covers.

He recognizes words, is right on the edge of pushing the phonics together. I don’t teach him or rush him. I just read. This is how we spend much of our time together. He never gets bored of the text-heavy pages, never seems to tire of my voice or lulls in plot. There is so much of these books that he doesn’t understand. So much too of the world. But he’s really good at reading.

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Books mentioned are available at my author bookshop. Even Flowers in the Attic. We use gorgeous illustrated editions of Harry Potter that are a bit more entertaining. And here’s the abridged illustrated Shakespeare. Someone please reissue this series!