white trash queen

Madeline was my rich friend. Well, she wasn't exactly rich, but her father Stan was. He drove a convertible porsche and had a young, blonde girlfriend. Madeline was my only friend whose parents were divorced. I thought that was tragic and romantic. The rest of our parents, despite hating one another, stayed together FOR THE CHILDREN.

I wanted to be Madeline so badly. Her parents never spoke, which meant she never had to listen to them fight. Stan sent her mother fat checks every month, and Madeline got everything she ever wanted. Stan drove us around town in his convertible and took us for rides on yachts. (My father had always dreamed of having a boat. When I was seven, he found a little motor boat somewhere and fixed it up. One day, we towed it out to Queens, and my father and I set out for our sea voyage. Luckily, we were only in three feet of water when it sunk into the sand. We walked out of the marsh and back to the car, sodden and defeated.)

Madeline's mother Martha never liked me very much. In fact, I suspect she thought I was white trash. I'll cite the following examples:

Case # 1: I was biting my nails in front of Martha. She grabbed my nubby finger out of my mouth, examined my nails and exclaimed "Have you never heard of a manicure?" Her face turned into dried prunes as she scowled down at me.

Case # 2: I was having dinner at a fancy restaurant with Madeline and her mother. (My family never ate out in restaurants. Sometimes on Fridays we ordered a pizza.) I surveyed the menu and read one item after another that I was unfamiliar with - chicken piccata, veal marsala, shrimp diablo. The list was endless. Finally I saw something I recognized - chicken fingers! When the dishes were placed on the table, I pulled the chicken fingers in front of me and went to work, dipping the chicken into the honey mustard and relishing the flavor. Madeline and her mother kept staring at me. As I licked my fingers clean over my empty plate, Martha glowered at me. "I suppose you don't spend much time in restaurants. Appetizers are shared, not hoarded". Woops.

Case # 3: Okay, I don't even remember what I did that time. Martha sucked her lip, stared straight at me and said "That girl is white trash!"

Martha, in my opinion, was in no position to judge me. The only reason she had money was because Stan had gotten her pregnant on their first date and her father threatened to kill him if Stan didn't marry her right away. It was rumored that Martha's father had done some "contract" work for a mob boss, so I guess Stan took him at his word and ushered Martha straight to city hall. Seven months later Madeline was born. Three months after that, Stan moved out, and the big checks started rolling in.

Martha never recovered from the divorce. She had been working as a mechanic's secretary when Stan knocked her up, and she had thought the dirty days of work were far behind her. She hoarded the checks Stan sent her and spent very little on Madeline. Martha talked about money incessantly: how much she had, how much things cost, how she was afraid she would somehow lose money. When we were 13, there was an ice storm. Even though Martha had paid some boys to shovel her sidewalk, an old man fell and broke his arm on her property. The old man sued Martha. Her insurance covered everything, but Martha's premiums rose and she bemoaned this fact on a daily basis.

Much to Martha's dismay, Madeline often invited me to spend the night at her house, especially in the summer. Madeline belonged to a pool that my family could not afford, and I went to the pool as her guest as often as I could. On a steamy July morning, Madeline and I jumped out of her canopy bed and raced each other to the shower. I beat Madeline by a foot.

Against character, Martha had just had the entire bathroom redone. The shower was newly tiled and the walls were freshly painted. New silver fixtures decorated the sink. As I entered the bathroom, Martha scolded me to keep everything neat, and warned me not to get water everywhere. I mocked her voice as I stripped off my pajamas and climbed into the steaming shower.

After using plentiful amounts of Martha's fancy smelling soaps, I was about to turn off the water when I noticed that I needed to shave my legs. (I had been shaving for less than a year, and had not yet mastered the art of shaving without butchering myself.) I lathered soap all over my legs and rested my foot on the built-in soap dish on the side of the shower wall. I had an especially hard time shaving around my ankle, which would end up looking like a carved pumpkin if I wasn't careful. I bit my lip in concentration and put all of my weight on the soap dish, trying to navigate delicately around the ankle bone.

And then, it happened. A snap, a slip, and I was on my back, water pelting me in the face. I squinted my eyes and sputtered water out of my mouth, trying to determine what had happened. My head was sore where I konked it on the side of the tub. A thin trickle of blood was trailing down my foot from my ankle. The soap dish lay in a broken mess beside me, and new white tiles were crumbling off the shower wall. I had snapped the soap dish off the wall. I had ruined the brand new shower. I was white trash.

I scrambled to my feet and bit my nails, trying to think up a way to pay for the damage I had just done. If I baby sat every day for the next six years, maybe. But what of school and softball and bike riding? I would have to give it all up for this stupid shower with its white tiles and expensive shampoos. I was doomed.

My mind raced. In an instant, I saw the answer sprawled out before me. Or rather, I saw myself sprawled out in the shower. I laid back down in the shower, limbs akimbo, and threw a bottle of conditioner hard against the shower wall. "Ouch." I screamed. Not sure if I was loud enough, I howled again and again. "Ouch! Ouch! Somebody please. Help me. I've fallen and I CAN'T GET UP!"

Within seconds, Martha and Madeline raced into the bathroom and pulled back the shower curtain. I didn't care that I was stark naked, or that they were the first two people to see me so since I had "developed". I clutched my head and moaned, "The pain! The pain!" Madeline laughed hysterically, as all good friends do when one is injured. Martha, however, looked stricken. She shut the water off and bent down to me. "What happened? Is anything broken?" I braced myself for the onslaught of names that was headed my way. "The soap dish and the wall are broken". "No! I mean is anything broken ON YOU?"

Martha looked absolutely terrified. I realized then that she was afraid I had hurt myself in her house, and she would be responsible. I hadn't considered this. I had only faked the second fall to escape blame for the wrecked shower. I now had the upper hand!

I stood slowly, alternately holding my head and my back. "I...think I'm all right. A towel, please, hand me a towel." Madeline threw a towel at me and Martha wrapped me in it like a broken bird. She guided me into Madeline's bed, sitting me gingerly upon the comforter and checking me over for bruises and brakes. I was her new pet. She cooed and clucked over me, as her eyes calculated how much this could run her.

Once I was dressed and dried, with a cup of tea in front of me, Martha finally asked: "How did this happen, dear?" Dear? She was more afraid than I had thought. I choked back a tear, signifying how terrible it was to relive the moment again. I stammered out my story. How my feet went out from under me as I tried to turn the water off. How, possibly, the new tiles were just too slippery. It was awful. The pain. My neck, my back, my head. With that, I folded up into myself and Martha petted my head.

Later, sitting by the side of the pool, Martha brought me iced tea and rubbed sunscreen on my sore back. It had taken some work to assure her that I didn't need to see a doctor, but I eventually convinced her that the sun and the pool would soothe my sore bones. She doted on me from that day forward. Finally. I felt like the white trash queen I was meant to be.