TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 154

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 17, 20000000007


Dear Teensy Geniuses,

	I dreampt that I had a monumental 
backache.  And when I woke up, I realized where 
the inspiration for the dream had come from.  I 
have a monumental backache.  It feels like one of 
those back aches that you get from sleeping the 
wrong way.  How was I situated in bed?  There's 
not much bed to situate in.  It is true that it's 
a queen sized bed, but I only occupy a sliver of 
it because over half the bed is covered with 
paperwork.  Oh, I know that sounds sloppy, but 
think of it this way: enough space to store 
things is a luxury.  We are a herd of three that 
came to live under the roof of a woman living 
single in her house.  There is really no room to 
file away all the things we needed to bring with 
us.  When the mail comes in the door, where do I 
keep it?  I process it right away, but there are 
bills and letters from social security, 
catalogues and fliers about upcoming events and I 
think you get the picture.  So I store them on 
one side of my bed.  They're even in neat piles. 
It's a surface.  What can I say?  I sleep on the 
other side of the bed, and I don't spread out. 
I've made a big pile of pillows in the middle, 
and I don't cross over.  In the middle of the 
night I must have assumed a ridiculous posture 
and created the ache that I feel in my back.  I 
tried bending over, waaaay over, and grasping my 
ankles, rocking my head closer and further from 
my shins.  I expected to hear a Pop!  There was 
no such noise.  Back aches are mundane.  Once, my 
mother's physician gave her a definition of human 
being: a bi-ped with a back ache.



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The Tao of Lipstick

	At Willard Junior High School when I went 
there, there were dress codes.  Girls had to wear 
dresses or skirts and blouses, and when you got 
down on your knees, the skirt had to touch the 
ground.  Boys were pretty much free to wear 
whatever they wanted as long as it didn't involve 
nudity.  There were also rules about cosmetics. 
Girls were forbidden to wear make-up of any kind 
until the high eighth grade, at which time we 
were allowed to wear lipstick only.  That means 
no mascara, no eye shadow, no silicone 
injections.  There was no rule, but it was 
assumed that boys would wear no make-up at all, 
not even a little blush.

	I had mixed feelings about cosmetics.  I 
daren't make myself alluring.  This was already 
trained out of me by having to guard myself from 
my father.  But on the first day of the high 
eighth grade, would I wear lipstick?  I looked in 
the mirror.  I was thirteen.  I was already a 
little off beat.  My style of dress said, "Heads 
up!  Non-conformist.  Artist type."  I mix 
matched my two pairs of sneakers so that each 
foot wore a different colour.  So, you see, it's 
not as if, in the clothing department, I was 
afraid of what others would think.

	Why was the lipstick question so difficult?

	Because this was a public embracing of 
womanhood.  It was as good as a Bat Mitzvah for 
identity, but there was no excruciating study for 
it.  My mother gave me one lesson in how to apply 
lipstick, and we got me a stick of a pale pink 
colour, very neutral.  I would shine my lips; it 
would be clear I was wearing lipstick, but it 
wouldn't change the colour any.

	My problem was committing myself to 
identifying as a female, an actual member of a 
pre-arranged gender.  There was no doubt in my 
mind that the rules were different for boys and 
girls, men and women.  The girls and women got 
the short end of the stick.  We were set on that 
ordained path: go to college, get a degree, get a 
job until you get married, then forget your 
education, have babies, and there goes your life 
until you're past starting over again.  I didn't 
want to sign on to that.  But I wanted to be 
pretty, not just smart and talented.  I WAS 
pretty.  I was just awkward, the usual discomfort 
being in a bigger body.  I'd lost the skinniness 
of my childhood.  I was now on the plump side. 
And I'd had my hair cut, mostly on a whim, to be 
more grown up.  Because I wanted to be pretty and 
I wanted the attention of boys, I wore that 
lipstick on the first day of high eighth grade.

	In home room, the opening period of the 
day, I sat right in back of Dickie Seymour. 
Dickie Seymour and I were in the same class in 
elementary school.  He was always right ahead of 
me, alphabetically speaking, so we stood in a lot 
of lines together.  On this first day of the high 
eighth grade, all the girls were sitting at their 
desks with a fresh application of waxy colour on 
their lips.  The boys were looking around and 
taking it all in.  At this age, the girls are 
considerably ahead of the boys, so we must have 
scared them, excited them, made them miserable. 
Dickie Seymour turned around, took one look at 
me, and said, "Oh, Nooooooo!"

	The first chance I got, I wiped off the 
lipstick and never wore it again.  Hardly ever.



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Higher learning

	I attended a lot of colleges and 
universities.  In order of appearance, they were: 
The University of Washington in Seattle, San 
Francisco State College, the University of 
California in Berkeley, California College of the 
Arts and Crafts (CCAC), and Mills College. 
Scattered in there somewhere is roughly two years 
of college.  That is all I ever did.  No, I did 
not graduate from a higher learning 
establishment.  What I did was the only 
alternative, at least as far as my mother was 
concerned.  And that was:  I got married.  The 
M.R.S. degree.  Before that, I went from school 
to school for one quarter or one semester each. 
Cal Berkeley was on a quarter system and I took 
one quarter, then dropped out three quarters in a 
row.  At CCAC, I didn't even last a semester.  I 
had hoped to learn how to illustrate my own 
books, but in order to take classes in 
illustration, I had to take several semesters of 
pre-requisites.  The pre-requisites were 
remedial, or at least seemed that way to me.  I 
was spinning my wheels, bored and unhappy as 
well.  A few weeks of this was all I could take. 
I just didn't show up any more, and dropped out 
officially somewhere along the line.  In fact, 
the memories of CCAC are unclear.  What I do 
recall is carrying a huge sheet of copper under 
my arm for metal working class, trying to get on 
a bus and slipping so that the metal sheet cut me 
in the arm pit.  Arm pit hair does not protect 
you from such adventures.

	Mills College is a prestigious girl's 
school.  Then we were girls or ladies.  Now we 
are women.  But girls and ladies had not become 
women yet when I went to school.  Mills was known 
for its music department.  It was the post 
graduate music department that was actually good, 
but I never got that far.  I took the music 
classes they required and enrolled in a creative 
writing class.  In the creative writing class 
there was an unspoken competition for the deepest 
girl in the class award.  Our poetry was moody 
and excessively self conscious, relying on the 
hopelessness of existence for fodder.  Maybe. 
"tortured," is the right word to use.  The 
professor's job was to keep the girls a little 
shallower and give us the cook's tour of writing 
genres.  One of my poems started out, "Mesozoic 
pale of night . . . ".  The beginning was hot. 
The rest of it went on in free association, 
mostly surreal.  All my years being raised by 
crazy people came in handy now.  I discovered 
there was a word for my father's parenting style: 
surrealism.

	I wonder as I look back on my horrible 
college years, whether anyone else knew how 
disturbed I was.  I was probably the most deeply 
disturbed girl in the writing class.  Does that 
mean I won the competition, or did it disqualify 
me?  What an awful awful age that is: late teens, 
early twenties.  For me, it was one horrendous 
assault on the belief system after another.  I 
was unready to join the world on its own terms. 
Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, my parents 
were able to support me while I flailed around, 
drowning in my sea of confusion.  I had  no 
skills in life.  I had no ability to survive in 
the real world, and no concept of what the real 
world was.  I thought that I could live on my 
talent alone.  That would keep people praising 
me, strewing my path with rose petals.  Somehow 
it would translate into a life, a functioning 
life.  But it never did.  I graduated from my 
blazing trials at college directly into the 
protective shade of marriage.  When I swore my 
eternal love to Dweller, I was creating a pact 
that he would take over where my parents left 
off.  He would pay for my food, clothing, and 
shelter, for the incidentals like an occasional 
camping trip, a rare pair of earrings.  In 
return, I would entertain him, feed him, delight 
him, surprise him, love him.

	That wasn't enough.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net