To the Finish Line

This summer, I spent a week at the Lesley University Writer’s Workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  One of our assignments was to write a short piece about something that we wish we could steal from someone else.  This memory, much to my surprise, was the result.

On this Thanksgiving morning, yes, I am thankful that I am no longer 13, but, even more so, I am grateful for the ability and the freedom to write.

*                                                      *

I wanted to steal #2 Hutch Court, every brick of Michele Klein’s house.  I was thirteen and I wanted to rip the silver and purple wallpaper from her bedroom walls and scotchtape it onto my drab yellow ones.   I wanted her trundle bed, and her heart-shaped picture frames.  I wanted her dark-blonde feathered hair and I even wanted her brother, Arthur, with his lisp and his tall afro.  I wanted to steal Mrs. Klein too,  Mrs. Klein who bought Jordache jeans and would try new cookie recipes and offer warm samples after school. Michele Klein had everything.

But, what, in the end, I really wanted to steal was the white sofa in Michele Klein’s living room. You see, her parents, Michele and I had all gathered to watch television, maybe Happy Days, or Taxi, on some Saturday night sleepover.   And I did not know, but I started to bleed and it wasn’t a picked scab or the kind of thing where I could say, “ummm, Mrs. Klein, I didn’t realize that I had a cut on my leg and I got some blood on your perfect white couch in your picture house with your perfect children. I’m so sorry, but can I have a bandaid and …”  No.  I had bled from my you-know-where and I was 13 and there was no way in hell I was gonna tell the Kleins that I had ruined their white couch cushion with blood that had seeped from my friggin vagina.  So I grabbed a paisley couch pillow, placed it perfectly atop the stained cushion, scrambled upstairs to change into my nightshirt, and worried.

I sneaked downstairs at maybe 3 am, grabbing some Bounty and some dish soap from the kitchen sink and started scrubbing and scrubbing, yelping,“Out, damned spot! out, I say!”  like goddamn Lady Macbeth.  Only now it looked not just like a blood stain but a blood stain that had smeared as some idiot 13-year-old tried to scrub it away.  I was tainted.  I was disgusting.   And I was doomed.

The best solution that I could muster was to hoist up the el-shaped couch, to lug it through the front door and down Hutch Court, deposit it in the field with the powerlines where kids sometimes went to smoke their Marlboro lights, to dart back, to climb back into the trundle and then, in the morning, to act as stunned as the whole Klein clan.  I rolled up my sleeves, bent my knees, and heaved the white mess over my shoulder.  I had to hurry.