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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Shopping online -- for children
For children who have waited years for a family to adopt them, the Internet may be the last hope.
By Nell Bernstein
[09/22/99]

School's out for Eid
The battle over school closure for religious holidays heats up as Muslims and Hindus demand equal time off for their children.
By Michael Kress
[09/21/99]

The Borrowers
They're not looking for a lifetime commitment. They're just looking for a kid to come out and play with them.
By Eve Pell
[09/20/99]

Eric: Hold your breath, 1946
An excerpt from "Why She Left Us."
By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
[09/17/99]

Why they never told us
First novelist Rahna Reiko Rizzuto talks about the silence surrounding the Japanese internment camps, being "stealth Japanese" and writing herself into two children.
By Kate Moses
[09/16/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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I surveyed the room. It was filled with 15 7- and 8-year-old girls gasping in delight at the prospect of pinkocity. I turned to my 8-year-old sister on my left. Her eyes were gleeful. To my right sat a big girl who looked a few years older than me. I breathed a discreet sigh of relief that I wasn't the oldest girl in class. But upon closer inspection, I noticed that the girl's glasses were at least an inch thick, her dopey smile, unwavering. When she clapped her hands in joy at the thought of a free tutu, I suspected that she might be retarded. When she turned to me and cackled, my suspicion was confirmed: she had Down's syndrome.

When our mother came to pick us up after our lesson, Shana ran to her, excitedly reciting the shopping list of pink things. I remained silent.

"So, was it so bad, Kera?" goaded my mother.

"I'm not going back there. I am the oldest girl in the class, and I refuse to wear baby pink."

Then Shana piped up: "Georgie-Ann is 14!"

"See, Kera," retorted my mother, "You're not the oldest."

"Mom, Georgie-Ann has Down's syndrome."

"Oh." My mother was rendered speechless, if only for a moment. "Well, the class has already been paid for, so you really don't have a choice. At least you can learn something."

"Yeah, like you can't get your money back," I muttered.

My mother insisted I give it a chance. She was so invested in my pathway to grace she actually tried to convince me that I might enjoy it. She knew nothing of the embarrassment I would endure, passing my middle school classmates in their intermediate- and advanced-hued leotards, while I wore my beginner's pink. I would be voted the official butt of all school jokes. I dreaded my immediate future.

As an incentive, my mother offered to register me for softball in the spring if I successfully completed the ballet course. I couldn't recall ever revealing any interest in sports, so the incentive was lost on me. Would it be so bad to return home after school, and just do my homework? Wasn't Hebrew School enough?

At first, I complied. I did the pliés and the demi-pliés, learned all of the positions, performed them as well as anyone else in the class. But when I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror, I was mortified. I stood at least 5 inches taller than most of my classmates. I watched my Dorothy Hamill haircut as it bounced in the air. My pink get-up, which gathered in rolls at the ankles and revealed the tangle of my bunched-up cotton panties, was about as graceful as a body cast.

And if that feast for the eyes failed to satisfy my hunger for self-consciousness, my gaze found its way to the small window in the door, where I discovered three fellow sixth-graders peering into the classroom, fingers pointing at me, hands covering giggling mouths. This class, and my presence in it, was so "gay" -- in the sixth-grade, misappropriated sense of the word. How was I going to face seven more weeks? And how could I possibly show my face at school on Monday morning?

Each week that followed, I devised ways to get out of attending the next class. My mother would not relent. Fine, I thought. I resolved to take the class less seriously. No longer would I try to master beginning ballet. I would resist. I would perform half-heartedly. I would become the class cynic, the reluctant beginning ballerina.

This only served to get me paired up with Georgie-Ann. While she was trying in earnest to perfect her movements, I was equally earnest in making mine as clumsy as possible. Together, we became the anti-Fred and Ginger. I took her stunted fingers in my sweaty hands and tried to spot her as best I could, given my new cool and disinterested demeanor. She attempted to return the favor, but more often than not, one if not both of us ended up on the floor. I laughed at the spectacle of it all. My amusement was shared by no one -- not by my seasoned and underpaid teacher, not by the kids in the class and especially not by my younger sister, who looked at me in horror. Only Georgie-Ann laughed along with me. And it was when she laughed that I realized I might literally be dragging her down with me. I had no intention of mocking her -- I was too self-absorbed to mock anyone but myself. I mean, I had a job to do. I had to shame my mother enough to lose hope in me, and get me out of beginning ballet before the recital.

It was not to be. The impending performance loomed larger with each passing Friday. The tutus arrived via UPS and were handed out two weeks before the recital. Shana pranced around the kitchen in hers, with her hair wrapped in Princess Leia-style danishes on either side of her head. I put my tutu on for my parents, in an effort to prove how ridiculous my developing body looked swathed in infantile, pre-Lycra, limited-stretch nylon. My mom stood her ground. She insisted that I looked just as she'd hoped.

When the night of the recital finally came, my instructor had enough sense to put me in the back row of the stage. I mustered all of my courage to look through, not at, the audience. Sitting behind my parents in the second row were a middle-school classmate from the advanced level and several other girls I sought to avoid. My eyes darted around the room, taking inventory of the audience members who would witness my humiliation. My face alternated between bright fuchsia and deathly white. And we had only just taken our places on the makeshift stage.

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