Introduction: “Sleepwalk” is a non-fiction story of about 145 pages, which deals with my relationship at my Catholic elementary school, with two classmates, a girl and a boy, both initially developing in different ways in 6th grade, and with certain events, and with my interactions with my parents, in 6th and 7th grades and part way into 8th. The story excerpt of this posting is about a third of the way into the story and opens with the Labor Day before I started 7th grade. The events of this passage occurred in the first semester of 7th grade. The title of the story, “Sleepwalk”, comes from the instrumental hit of the late Fifties which plays a prominent part at a party much later in the story. Originally written 2014-2015, this story in full will be published in my first book of non-fiction.
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“Sleepwalk – Non-fiction Story Excerpt
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“As I walked over the playground towards…where our 7th grade classroom was, all of a sudden, I was surrounded by a pack of boys from my class all shouting and waving their arms and I noticed also a group of the girls a little farther on watching all the commotion around me”.
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Labor Day soon came, which was usually fun as sometimes we would drive to Zuma Beach for one last summer opportunity to be sunburned, or we would barbeque hamburgers at home, or take a quick weekend camping trip to one of the state beach campgrounds. I also especially looked forward to Labor Day because then school always started again on the Tuesday or Wednesday after Labor Day and I always looked forward to that, getting excited about something I loved starting all over again new and fresh, thinking of the new school year almost as if it was a new and maybe different life, and a life, a world, in which I just might finally be able to make friends, maybe even a best friend.
Now one thing really new for me in starting 7th grade was that I was now in the new-new school across the street from the old-new school where my 6th grade classroom had been. All the classrooms of the new-new school faced the street, except our classroom that was on its own short wing away from the street. The school itself, only two years old, was very new and clean, and our classroom was also nice and new with cloakroom doors of clear varnished wood that opened out on hinges, and big windows facing south and two doors to go in and out, all of which we could use to get out of the classroom very fast in case of a fire and I really liked that very much. And Pauley and Priscilla were also in the same 7th grade class with me.
Now, something not new but different was that Mrs. Costa, who I had in 3rd grade, had been now moved to teach one of the 7th grades and she was our teacher. Now, Mrs. Costa never really taught us all the time in 3rd grade, and she had a hard time controlling the class and it was noisy and out of hand. And I didn’t like all the noise and the children getting out of their desks and she was the teacher who had me wish that I could be in a school they would make just for everyone who really wanted to learn and do good in school and be quiet. No, she wasn’t a good teacher in 3rd grade – but there were thirty-six children in our 3rd grade class and maybe that was a lot. Also, some parents, it turned out, did not think she was going to be a good teacher in 7th grade. After the first couple of days, some of the students in our class were assigned to the other 7th grade, and one student, a girl, whose mother was a public school teacher, was even taken out of St. Ferdinand’s altogether.
I didn’t know what to think about all of this but I still was happy about school beginning again and I still liked school. However, I soon learned how Mrs. Costa was going to teach us in 7th grade – by assigning us to do “seat work” every day. In the morning, she would write on the board the pages in our Catechism, math, spelling book, and civics books we were supposed to read and then write out the answers to the questions at the end of the chapter or section. Oh…it was so boring just to do seat work all the time, every day, and in silence. Now, I guess she had at least had learned a way to keep the classroom quiet, but it was in a boring, very boring, way. But I accepted the way Mrs. Costa taught us, and I didn’t know – and certainly my parents didn’t know – that we could complain or ask to be sent to the other 7th grade class with the other teacher – which I probably would not have wanted to do anyway as I didn’t really know the students very well in the other class, actually not at all.
However, doing seat work every day all day long was boring and I really would have rather had a teacher who taught us, and talked to us, and really did things with us – like really all my other teachers did, even Sister Alberta who, even with all her mean words and the bad things she did to me, still taught us. So here in 7th grade there really was nothing fun or exciting, no, and, as it turned out, for me that year, the deeper, more significant, and lasting things I learned were not in class but outside the class on the playground, in church, and in the world – at least the part of the world I lived in.
Now, however, even though Mrs. Costa was a boring teacher, she…somehow…seemed one of us, and she was not mean or always offended or constantly offering up to God any suffering in painful holy silence at something we – or just I – had said or done, like my 5th grade teacher and some of the other nuns in the school.
Mrs. Costa never suffered in offended holiness for anything we ever did, which was great because when she said something, you only had to understand the words. I didn’t have to figure out a lot. Her words were just words and what she said was what she meant.
Moreover, Mrs. Costa, unlike the nuns, was married. I had met Mr. Costa once and he was not tall but wide and he looked like a bulldog and didn’t smile much, but also like a bulldog, he wasn’t mean and when he looked at you, he wasn’t going to bite you, but he was just looking at you. She had older children too.
She also said she wanted one day to go back to the old country, Italy, and to Rome to see the pope. We all also knew she loved her spaghetti, because sometimes she talked about food, and one time she had a red stain on her blouse after lunch that she didn’t seem to care about, but the girls really noticed it and talked and laughed about the stain.
Now, Mrs. Costa was also…well, she was flabby, very flabby. When she wrote on the blackboard – which wasn’t black in the new school but green which was also different and new – the skin and muscles of her arm would flap about and sometimes they would slap up against the chalkboard and take off the chalk dust where her flabby arm hit making clean marks all over the board and sometimes some of the boys would say something and some of us would laugh. Then Mrs. Costa would stop writing and look around and say “Yes?” then sort of smile as if she knew what was being said and why we laughed, but then she would turn back to the board and write and flap some more and sometimes someone would laugh again but no one got into trouble. So Mrs. Costa was a boring teacher because she didn’t really teach us like a teacher, but we liked her, and day after day, we did our seatwork writing down the math problems and spelling definitions and answers from our catechism and this was my 7th grade life.
Now something else new that year was that the girls in my class seemed different, older, yes, for even I could see they were changing. With the boys, well, since I seemed changed, and was still changing, they seemed changed too, or at least some of them, yes, some. And the changes in the girls and the changes in some of the boys – with some of the boys sometimes really talking about the changes in some of the girls – just continued on as school progressed through September and on into October. However, in mid-October, before Halloween, the fact that changes had come, and that these changes were bringing new and different things into our lives, exploded within the world of our 7th grade class, and suddenly Priscilla was the subject and center of a whirling, excited, and eventually very sad storm.
One Monday morning, I was dropped off at school – we carpooled – along with two of my younger sisters and the neighbor boys from down the street, in the playground of the old-new school, where the cars could come in and drop us off, and we all started on our ways to our different classrooms with me carrying my books and binder and my brown paper lunch bag.
As I walked over the playground towards the street between the playground and the new-new school building where our 7thgrade classroom was, all of a sudden, I was surrounded by a pack of boys from my class all shouting and waving their arms and I noticed also a group of the girls a little farther on watching all the commotion around me. The boys then were shouting and telling me that a bunch of them – boys and girls – had gone to the movies on Saturday and in the dark, in the balcony, Priscilla was making out with a boy.
Now I sort of knew what making out was, and I asked, “Kissing?”, but they shouted louder and were all around me with their arms waving and they were jumping up and down and they were excited like I had never seen them before and they said no, not just kissing, but rubbing and touching. Then they said “tits” and I still didn’t really understand, so one boy got behind me, put his hands on my chest, and started rubbing me around and around my nipples and shouting almost into my ear, “Rubbing her tits”. Then I said something like, “On her clothes?” and they all said no, underneath her shirt and maybe with no bra on. They then all shouted a lot more and whooped about and soon left and joined the girls. The boys, still as excited and jumping around as they had been with me, but not as loud, went on talking and shouting more, and some of the girls started laughing and shouting too.
And the girls the boys were talking to, not really friends of Priscilla, didn’t look happy-happy, but more mean-happy and they had the bad smile face of Sr. Alberta, or especially even more of our 5th grade teacher, who when she spotted something she didn’t think was proper or morally pure – especially when she was going to point out someone in class who she just happened to think had a dirty mind – would smile just like the girls were smiling, and that smile was usually the only smile she ever had. Maybe these girls had learned their smile from her.
And me? Well, I was….I was shocked and my mind stopped, not by the making-out, if that’s what it was, but by all the boys shouting and getting all excited and the girls sort of ugly and gloating – yes, that’s what was on their faces. For a while, I did not have any thoughts at first – but then I vaguely thought, stupidly, that Priscilla must go to the movies a lot and that her dad must give her money, for she didn’t have a mother. Then I thought that the boys must have told me because they knew Priscilla and I were friends, though maybe they didn’t know we were just good friends, not boyfriend and girlfriend like some of the girls tried to say. But…I was mostly surprised and puzzled and…somehow sad…at how excited and loud and jumping about the boys were, and how happy they seemed to be in an excited sort of way.
As I watched all the jumping about and loud talking and bad laughing, suddenly I became very concerned that with all this commotion. Maybe our teacher would hear about it. Then, as I thought of that, I became even more concerned about the nuns because I knew they would certainly hear about this as their ears, or the girls who carried their ears around for them, were everywhere. The image of Sr. Alberta in 6th grade standing over all of us in line came to my mind, and I wondered if that’s why she was always silently watching because she was also carefully listening to hear what and who the boys and girls were talking about.
And as Sr. Alberta sat away from the sun under the school walkway at lunch with her hawk eye, maybe then she was also looking to see whom she could talk to secretly, on the sly. But I knew that neither Sr. Alberta nor any of the other watchful hawk-like nuns really had to do that, as some of the girls would just go tell the nuns on their own…doing that because they could, because they were good girls in the eyes of the nuns, because they didn’t like Priscilla or her being sort of poor or her hair not being curly and not always really clean, and not being holy or clean enough to be liked by them or their mothers, or to be invited to their birthday parties. Deep down inside I knew that if the nuns heard this – if the girls, with all the excitement and joy of the boys and not even with as much jumping, ran to fill their ears – that Priscilla would be in bad trouble.
I was also concerned about just Priscilla herself because even though maybe this was what happened to her, maybe she did not want it. I thought the boy was probably one of the bigger older boys from the public school who she was with at the movies when I saw her, when Priscilla gave me the nickel, but I really didn’t know why this would happen or why the boy would do that. Now, I had seen my little sisters naked many times and I knew their bodies were different because they did not have boy parts, and I knew girls grew big on top like my mom and my older sister, but…still…I was not sure why the boy would do that or want to do it, or why Priscilla let him do it, if she did. Then as I was thinking this through, the bell rang and I had to hurry across the playground and cross the street to the new-new school to my classroom to put my books down and line up for morning mass.
When we were back in our classroom after church, as we said our morning Our Father and Hail Mary, I looked to where Priscilla sat and she was not there. Then as I looked around the room, I saw many of the boys and girls were smiling as they were praying, but not with a nice smile or look upon their faces. With some of the boys, even now after mass, around their praying lips and eyes there was still a craziness that seemed as if even with the words of Our Father, they were still shouting and yelling about the boy rubbing tits, and their eyes did not really seem to look at or even see anything in the room, but seemed to be looking at something else somewhere else. And their faces…they looked as if they were just going over and over and enjoying whatever they were looking at deep inside.
Now some of the girls, just a few, Priscilla’s friends, looked sorry and sad. But some other girls, as we began praying the Hail Mary, looked happy and a few of the happy ones looked at me and smiled, but it was not a nice smile, not like the smile Priscilla always smiled at me, but it was like they were happy something bad had happened, and they were happy it happened to Priscilla and that it was very bad for her, and it was a very mean smile. I turned back and looked at the flag as we said the Pledge of Allegiance, but I don’t think I said anything out loud because everything was all just bad and very sad.
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Priscilla was gone for a few days but eventually she was back in her seat one morning. She seemed quieter and she did not really look up too much. She did not look up at me to smile even when she knew I was looking at her and slowly moving my hand just a little to get her attention. That was sad, and that is one of the things I really, really, remember about this whole rubbing thing. And then, it seemed, even though Priscilla had been sent away for a couple of days, that maybe it had not quite been what all the excited boys were saying and shouting about or whatever the good girls who were smiling with a mean meanness thought or said to the nuns.
Later that morning, our teacher, Mrs. Costa, just gave one short talk, not a lecture, and talked to us just as if she was one of us, on how we all have to be so careful with what we say or repeat because maybe it wasn’t all true and people can get hurt or embarrassed and that no one had been “raked”. And the whole class listened in silence except me, and I said “Raked?” and Mrs. Costa just looked at me for a moment a little annoyed but not a bad annoyed, and then went on and finished what she was saying and then that was it. There was no lingering self-centered offended holiness – as arose from some of the nuns and our 5th grade teacher, the nuns with folded hands and quiet eyes raised to heaven, or at least the ceiling, and the nose of our fifth grade teacher in the air, not so much in pride but to somehow sniff to see if she could detect even more of the stench of dirty, foul sins that she knew, always knew, lurked just beneath our dirty by mid-week school uniforms, which really was usually just the boys passing gas and smelling after running around on the playground at lunch.
After her talk, Mrs. Costa said we should all go back to our seat work but then Mrs. Costa looked at me for a moment and then went to her desk and got the big dictionary and found a word and then went to Robert, one of the bigger boys in our class, and I heard her ask him to show a word to me which he did and he was nice about it. And the word he pointed to was “rape” and I looked at it and read it a few times and understood it was bad for a girl or woman with the words sex and force. I thought “Oh” that this made more sense than raked, but I still really didn’t know what happened with rape, and that was ok, because also whatever it was, it didn’t happen with Priscilla and that was good. After looking at the word for a moment, I nodded, still looking down at the dictionary, and Robert then closed the book and took it back to Mrs. Costa.
I then also began the boring seatwork – and our classroom was very, very quiet! Then as I wrote out my religion answers, I also wondered why I seemed to be the only one in the class who had never heard the word rape. But I only thought about that for a short moment, because, since I didn’t really know this word, what rape was, and since I didn’t need to because it hadn’t happened with Priscilla, the word was now just like all the bad words some of the boys I stayed away from used when they talked and joked about things I never really understood in the first place. Still…I seemed to be the only one in the class who didn’t know the word. I wondered a bit then how or why Mrs. Costa even used that word, as rubbing tits was the only thing all the boys were shouting. Maybe rubbing tits was rape. But I didn’t really think that was true… I didn’t know what rape really was, but there was no one really to ask, no one I knew. So, I just continued on with my boring seatwork.
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Priscilla and I never talked about what happened to her at the movies. Maybe we didn’t need to. Maybe I didn’t really want to because I didn’t know what to say or ask or even think. Also, we weren’t automatically near each other in the line in the morning since we no longer had to line up by height like in 6th grade, and we didn’t talk as much as we used to talk in the morning. And after a while with the boys, the incident stopped being a topic of talk and joking, and the girls moved on to other things, and after a time it was like it all wasn’t there anymore, a little like it hadn’t happened, and that was good because that was better for Priscilla.
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Now, in 7th grade, since we tended to talk to each other in class because we were so bored, Mrs. Costa, our teacher, moved our seats around in the class it seemed almost every other week “to break up the talkers”. Then, under Mrs. Costa’s direction, we would physically move our whole desk to a new assigned place. I liked changing where my desk was located, because there was always the chance that she would make a mistake and move me near someone I liked to talk to. Unfortunately, Mrs. Costa did not move me often, and when I was, she usually did a good job, and I wasn’t placed near a friend or someone I could or would talk to – doubly sealing my fate again in a boring classroom!
However, in one of these changes, not too long after the rubbing incident, Mrs. Costa put me right in the middle of the class, which I liked, but even better, she placed me right across the aisle from Priscilla. When I put my desk in place, I sat down and looked across to Priscilla who was already looking at me. She smiled, not completely like before, but with now a shyness, a hesitation, and maybe even a little sadness in her eyes. I smiled back, like before, but now, also in my eyes, with a sadness that she had been hurt. In both our eyes and in our smiles, there was a happiness that we were still friends, good friends, and nothing that had happened had changed that we were friends. Also, even though we had changed, and were changing, and our smiles had changed, they were changes that we could not do anything about, but whatever the changes were, our smiles had made them good, for us.
Then, as we sat there silently looking at each other, suddenly, but at the same time, we looked at each other’s hands and after a moment I looked up and then she looked up and I began then to lift my hand from my desk for I was going to reach across the aisle to touch her hand, for mostly I had forgotten we were in the middle of our classroom. But that moment, the moment when our hands would have touched for the first time, was shattered when Mrs. Costa said we were going to go over our religion seatwork, which next to civics, really was the most boring of all. So…I put my hand back down on my desk and we smiled at each other, almost like before.
We did not discuss it or plan it, but we did not talk to each other much across the aisle because we didn’t want to be moved away from each other. So, we talked only sometimes, and it was usually only to help Priscilla with some classwork because I was smarter it seemed, and she needed help, and I was happy to help her…and I wanted to help her. A couple of times, I even went to our teacher to ask if I could move my desk over a bit to help her better and Mrs. Costa looked at me thoughtfully for a moment and then said yes. Maybe she was remembering what it was like being twelve in 7th grade. Looking back on it even years and years later, the thought came to me that maybe Mrs. Costa had deliberately moved me beside Priscilla in the first place because she knew we were friends and that it would be good for Priscilla to have a friend near her. I then thought, “Wow, was Mrs. Costa really that good?!” I didn’t know, and, of course, by that time, Mrs. Costa was no longer around to ask.
Priscilla and I survived one desk switch, but not the next, and after a month or so, Mrs. Costa moved us away from each other, but that was okay because we were friends, good friends, and Priscilla seemed happy again and she was also doing better in school.
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My Catholic school experience was totally different. I felt very sad for Pricilla. I thought of the loss of innocence and how sad what happened to her was. If it happened. Could have been immature hormonal boys whose imagination went wild. We will never know.