Field Day

“Judashala,” my mother called up the stairs. “Can I talk to you?”

I grimaced. I knew what was coming. My mother wanted to come to field day. “Um, I’m kinda, like, doing my homework, Mommy.”

“This’ll only take a minute, sweetie.”

No, I thought, it won’t. I got up off my bed and dog eared the page in A Wrinkle In Time. I trudged down the stairs where my mother was leaning in the doorway connecting the kid part of the house, which had been added on by turning the garage into two bedrooms, one up and one down, to the grownup part of the house. I didn’t want to go into the grown up part of the house.

I raised my eyebrows, hoping to indicate that she was interrupting me. She didn’t get the hint.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Homework. Math or something.” I looked at the bookcases Daddy was building on our wall going up to the girls’ room, not wanting to look at her.

“Honey… tomorrow’s field day.”

“I know…”

“Mrs. Alban called and said you wanted to go this year.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like I have a choice after what you did last year.” When I was in fourth grade, terrified of the humiliation that field day would surely bring, I tried to purposely break my arm so I wouldn’t have to go. First, I tried falling off my bike. Then I tried jumping off the table on the patio. The problem was that I was afraid of heights so falling out of a tree would mean getting up the tree in the first place, which would have been a problem. Finally I took a big rock and pounded my arm, hoping it would crack. It didn’t come close and my mother caught me. She was so horrified when she realized why I was doing it that she wrote a letter to my fourth grade teacher basically telling her and the whole school off. At first I thought it was really cool – way to go rebel mom – but then Mrs. O’Keefe read it to the class. She had tears in her eyes when she read it. Now I wasn’t just a looser who couldn’t run to save her life, I was a pathetic loser who couldn’t run to save her life and teachers “worried” about me. Their worry translated into me getting beaten up at the bus stop after school. Try explaining that to your mother.

“I didn’t mean for it to hurt you, Jude…”

“I know, Mommy…”

“Since you’re going… Daddy and I are going to come and watch you. Nobody will bother you with us there.”

I looked at her full in the face. Her hair was a quarter of an inch long, growing back after the chemotherapy. Her skin looked pasty and her eyes had dark circles around them. She looked old, too old to be my mother. She was forty nine but she looked sixty nine. And anyway, everyone else’s mom was like thirty five or something. Why did I have to have such old parents? Her lips were dry and cracking. She wasn’t wearing the fake breast. I pounded my hand against the wall, trying to think of why she shouldn’t go.

“Mommy… aren’t you too tired? You’d have to stand… they don’t have chairs,” I tried.

She smiled at me. “Oh, sweetie, don’t worry. Mrs. Alban said she’d get a chair for me and Daddy can carry it around.”

I imagined my father carrying around one of those tan folding chairs. What if it broke when she sat on it? After seven children, four dying in infancy, breast cancer and diabetes, my mother looked permanently nine months pregnant. I could just imagine her sitting on those flimsy chairs that we sat on in the cafeteria for assembly and it breaking right underneath her. “You’re going to sit on a chair?” I said dumbly.

“I’ll be fine. What’s wrong, honey? No one will hurt you with your Mommy there. Just let one of those troglodytes… those uneducated… just don’t worry, Judy.”

I pounded my fist a little more and pushed my hair out of my face. “Well…” I didn’t know anywhere to turn but I couldn’t take her being there, looking so old and fat and ugly… “Mommy, if you come could you at least wear your breast?”

She looked surprised. “I guess I could, honey…”

Tears welled up in my eyes. “And makeup! Like… lipstick or something…” My mother flushed. I could see she was beginning to understand, but I had to go on. “I mean… you just look so… old. And sick. Can’t you just be like a normal mom if you come?”

“Of course.” She squeezed my arm. “Of course. I’ll try to look like a normal mom.” She turned around and walked back towards her study. I stood on the stairs and watched her walk away into the grownup section, leaving me on the stairs. I could feel her squeeze on my arm still.
The next morning I ran to the school bus barely talking to my parents. My mother was still in a house dress when I left. Immediately I imagined her wearing it to school… Other moms didn’t wear big old house dresses and call them djellabas. Other moms didn’t introduce themselves as Dr. Something-or-Other. Why could she just be Mrs. Something-or-Other like every other mom? Why did she have to always show off that she was smarter than them? I had learned to seem stupid and stay low – why didn’t she learn that? I kicked a rock all the way up to the bus.

“Judy, I see you are joining us for field day this year,” Kara Silk, a blonde haired viper said to me on the bus. Normally she didn’t speak to the likes of me.

“Yeah,” I mumbled.

“At least you aren’t in my class this year. My class is the gold team but I hear you’re class is the blue team. I guess we’ll win this year.” She laughed and flipped her platinum blonde pony tail in my face.

I tried to pretend I wasn’t there. I sat quietly and ignored the other taunts while my stomach twisted and turned. I looked out the window and imagined I was Meg or Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle In Time. Their parents were professors and always wrapped up in their work, too. But their mother was beautiful and young and their youthful father was off missing but I knew they would rescue him at the end of the book because my mom had read it to me already and I had all but memorized it, aiding in my reading it now. They were scientists and doing something important. I didn’t even really know what my parents did. Linguistics. What the hell was that? Most of my teachers didn’t know either. All I knew was they spoke a lot of other languages and sat in their study talked about it all day long when they weren’t teaching. I think they even dreamed about languages because one night I had a nightmare and slept between them, those two hulking mountains and I heard my mother say something in her sleep in some other language. I think it was French or Yiddish or something.

Mrs. Alban was waiting for me outside the classroom. She was worried; I could tell all the way down the hallway. She smiled a big pink and white smile at me. I think it was supposed to be encouraging. I wished the day was over already.

“Judy! Your mother told me that she and your father can make it to field day. Isn’t that nice?”

I smiled and nodded. Please, please, please leave me alone. Please.

“You’re so lucky, Judy, to have parents that care so much about you and are so smart. I just love talking to your mother. She’s so educated. And your father is so funny!”

I nodded again, hoping to get past her and to my desk before anyone else saw the teacher being nice to me. She might as well hang a kick me sign around my neck, I thought. Luckily the principal came on over the intercom and gave us a little “pep” talk for the day’s activities. I figited as my desk mate tied my blue yarn around my wrist. As I leaned over to do hers, she whispered, “You shoulda stayed home and we mighta won.” I looked down so she wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I thought she was sort of becoming my friend.

We went outside and I saw the whole playground and field was set up for the various torture devices they called games. Things where you threw a ball through little holes that barely seemed big enough to hold the ball, races where you had to pass batons that always stuck in my hands, and then the worst – the batting range. I could hear the taunts still from third grade when some kid I didn’t even know tried to hit me with one of the bats. My stomach seized. I thought I might throw up. Then I heard her voice, calling me, “Judashalah! Hi honey!”

I turned and saw her. She was wearing bright red lipstick and dark black eyeliner. She looked older and sicker and uglier than I had ever seen her. She had on a black polyester pantsuit that looked molded to her round, protruding belly. The other moms were all in jeans and t-shirts with pink lips and long brushed hair. They were everything she was not. I just burst out crying and ran back into the gym. She came after me, not sure what was wrong.

“How could you, Mommy!” I cried. “How could you come here looking like that? You’re so ugly!” I cried.

My father started to say something about how I couldn’t say that to my mother, but she just put her arm around me. I could feel her small and round but frail body against mine. I closed my eyes and turned to her shoulder and wept. Everything was wrong with us. We weren’t normal. We were even weirder than other geeks! She didn’t say anything. She just let me cry on her shoulder.


Afterward

Three months later, my mother died of complications from breast cancer on September 27, 1982, Yom Kippur. I atone for the sin of not recognizing my mother’s special attributes during her lifetime every year, although I never really shared her religion in my adult life. At eleven, I couldn’t see that I would also be short and fat and no Barbie doll and that it wasn’t the end of the world. I didn’t know that I had the ability to hurt her deeply because I was only concerned with my ability to be hurt. I also didn’t realize how much love it took not to get angry at a rude ungrateful child for her hurtful words and to just hold her while she cried.