My Story

3 it happened in math class

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. But no one knew this but me. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

I had no money. The other girls rode to school in a bus. I had no nickel to pay for the ride. Rain or shine, I walked the two miles from my “aunt’s” home to the school.

I hated the walk, I hated the school. I had no friends. The pupils seldom talked to me and never wanted me in their games. Nobody ever walked home with me or invited me to visit their homes. This was partly because I came from the poor part of the district where all the Mexicans and Japanese lived. It was also because I couldn’t smile at anyone.

Once a shoemaker standing in the doorway of his shop stopped me as I was walking to school.

“What’s your name?” he asked me.

“Norma,” I said.

“What’s your last name?” he asked.

I wouldn’t give him the name I had—Norma Mortenson—because it wasn’t the name of the man with the slouch hat and the Gable mustache. I didn’t answer.

“You’re a queer kid,” the shoemaker said. “I watch you pass here every day, and I’ve never seen you smile. You’ll never get anywhere like that.”

I went on to school, hating the shoemaker.

In school the pupils often whispered about me and giggled as they stared at me. They called me dumb and made fun of my orphan’s outfit. I didn’t mind being thought dumb. I knew I wasn’t.

One morning both my white blouses were torn, and I would be late for school if I stopped to fix them. I asked one of my “sisters” in the house if she could loan me something to wear. She was my age but smaller. She loaned me a sweater.

I arrived at school just as the math class was starting. As I walked to my seat everybody stared at me as if I had suddenly grown two heads, which in a way I had. They were under my tight sweater.

At recess a half dozen boys crowded around me. They made jokes and kept looking at my sweater as if it were a gold mine. I had known for some time that I had shapely breasts and thought nothing of the fact. The math class, however, was more impressed.

After school four boys walked home with me, wheeling their bicycles by hand. I was excited but acted as if nothing unusual were happening.

The next week the shoemaker stopped me again.

“I see you’ve taken my advice,” he said. “You’ll find you get along much better if you smile at folks.”

I noticed that he, also, looked at my sweater as he talked. I hadn’t given it back to my “sister” yet.

The school and the day became different after that. Girls who had brothers began inviting me to their homes, and I met their folks, too. And there were always four or five boys hanging around my house. We played games in the street and stood around talking under the trees till suppertime.

I wasn’t aware of anything sexual in their new liking for me, and there were no sex thoughts in my mind. I didn’t think of my body as having anything to do with sex. It was more like a friend who had mysteriously appeared in my life, a sort of magic friend. A few weeks later, I stood in front of the mirror one morning and put lipstick on my lips. I darkened my blond eyebrows. I had no money for clothes, and I had no clothes except my orphan rig and the lone sweater. The lipstick and the mascara were like clothes, however. I saw that they improved my looks as much as if I had put on a real gown.

My arrival in school with painted lips and darkened brows, and still encased in the magic sweater, started everybody buzzing. And the buzzing was not all friendly. All sorts of girls, not only thirteen-year-olds but seniors of seventeen and eighteen set up shop as my enemies. They told each other and whoever would listen that I was a drunkard and spent my nights sleeping with boys on the beach.

The scandals were lies. I didn’t drink, and I didn’t let any boys take liberties. And I had never been on any beach in my life. But I couldn’t feel angry with the scandal-makers. Girls being jealous of me! Girls frightened of losing their boy friends because I was more attractive! These were no longer daydreams made up to hide lonely hours. They were truths!

And by summertime I had a real beau. He was twenty-one, and despite being very sophisticated, he thought I was eighteen instead of thirteen. I was able to fool him by keeping my mouth shut and walking a little fancy. Since taking the math class by storm a few months ago, I had practiced walking languorously.

My sophisticated beau arrived at my home one Saturday with the news that we were going swimming. I rushed into my “sister’s” room (the one who was a little smaller than me) to borrow her bathing suit. Standing in front of the bureau mirror, I spent an hour putting it on and practicing walking in it.

My beau’s impatient cries finally brought me out of the bedroom in an old pair of slacks and a sweater. The bathing suit was under them.

It was a sunny day, and the sand was crowded with bathers and with mothers and their children. Despite being born and raised only a few miles from the ocean I had never seen it close up before. I stood and stared for a long time. It was like something in a dream, full of gold and lavender colors, blue and foaming white. And there was a holiday feeling in the air that surprised me. Everybody seemed to be smiling at the sky.

“Come on, let’s get in,” my beau commanded.

“In where?” I asked.

“In the water,” he laughed, thinking I had made a joke.

I thought of my tight bathing suit. The idea of hiding myself in the water while wearing it seemed to me ridiculous. But I said nothing. I stood watching the girls and women and felt a little disappointed. I hadn’t expected that half the feminine population of Los Angeles would be parading the sands with almost nothing on. I thought I’d be the only one.

My beau was getting impatient again; so I removed my slacks and sweater and stood in my skimpy suit. I thought, “I’m almost naked,” and I closed my eyes and stood still.

My sophisticated boy friend had stopped nagging me. I started walking slowly across the sand. I went almost to the water’s edge and then walked down the beach. The same thing happened that had happened in the math class, but on a larger scale. It was also much noisier. Young men whistled at me. Some jumped up from the sand and trotted up for a better view. Even the women stopped moving as I came nearer.

I paid no attention to the whistles and whoops. In fact, I didn’t hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jean from the orphanage who belonged to nobody. The other was someone whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.