Fourth Grade Love

I think that love and I have had a tumultuous and confusing relationship. As a kid I remember thinking that when I grew up, I would move to the mountains and live, hidden in a cabin deep in the woods, and be a hermit and exist with the land, connected to no one. Looking back, I think the thought of being a hermit came as a coping method to deal with the complexity of wanting to love and be loved and accepted just as I am and at the same time feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere, I was different. In thinking about love, there are moments in my life that stick out like a huge spotted wart on perfectly smooth skin. Some memories are painful to remember and some so ridiculous that as I look back, I can’t believe that they happened. The fact that they did happen makes me question the sanity of my parents. Were they so intrenched in the Mormon church that the very idea of love, different than their devotion to the so-called gospel of Christ, terrified them? Maybe the idea of death and preparing for the afterworld had them so blind that they couldn’t see living life any other way. It is the looking back at my childhood that continues to prompt me to live a bigger life now. I refuse to settle for an ordinary life, walking around in a numbed down corpse, trading connection for a belief that death is larger than life. I don’t think my parents meant to teach me that love and relationships were wrong, they just wanted me to fit neatly packaged in their box of proper righteousness with the corners of appropriateness and modesty folded neatly over any desire that would spark life to look different than organized shame and hidden pain.

I met Ronnie in the 4th grade. We had our desks placed next to each other on Mrs. Barnard’s seating chart the first day of school, so it’s not like I searched him out on purpose. I remember starring at him wondering if he carried some illness I should be warry of – so pale and white with dramatic black hair cut in a slightly crooked line across his forehead. I secretly bet that his mom cut his bangs like my mom cut mine; laying a piece of masking tape a top the first layer of hair thinking that would hold all the other strands in place to guide the scissors in a perfectly straight line. It never worked out that way. His pants were slightly too short and his t-shirt too big making it easy to tell he had brothers who passed clothes down to him at the beginning of the school year. We had quietly slipped into our chairs, glanced curiously at the other to identify who occupied the space next to us and then shoved our backpacks under our seats. Both of us obedient, silent and well-practiced in the art of following rules. I became immediately comfortable with him though I didn’t know his name and without exchanging a word. A bond of ridged similarities beginning to link us together.

Later that afternoon, our teacher instructed us to get out our pencil and paper and write the obligatory four sentence paragraph describing what we did over summer vacation. My summer had been no different than the previous summer: work in the garden and pull weeds, chop and stack wood for winter and whenever possible, escape to another dimension via the stack of books I borrowed from the town library. The library building stood at the bottom of my street, a five-minute walk from my house. Going to the library had become somewhat of a ritual. Walk down the dusty dirt road, slow and careful and far to the edge to avoid the dust but not so close to the edge that I would tumble down the hill. Once at the library, I would stand in the doorway and deeply inhale as if preparing to step into an alternate universe, control the exhale as if to slow my heartbeat of anticipation, then slowly open the creaky door. My first step inside brought me the smell of old wood, faded pages and the ticking sound of the grandfather clock stationed on the other side of the room. The sounds and smells altered time and existence, delivering me from my straight jacket of reality to roam freely in a dream world, fingers trailing over the spines of the books until a word or title jumped out and said, “Me, my turn!” I would add the book to the stack in my other arm and when I could no longer safely carry any more, I would check out with the librarian and head for home. As I closed the door to the library, I always heard her say, “See you tomorrow.” I wondered why she spoke to me. I would walk the 5 minutes home, trying to shield the books from the dust that puffed around me as the cars passed by on the washboard surfaced dirt road. Once home, I would tiptoe up the stairs to my bedroom. If no one knew I had come home, I could hide and read, travel, love and dream of a world bigger than me and happily full of love, fun and adventure.

I tugged my mind back to the classroom and the task at hand and began to follow the directions. As I started to write, the tip of my lead pencil snapped off. That meant I would have to be THAT kid who got up to sharpen a pencil, destroying the quiet of the classroom, distracting all the other kids being good, sitting and writing and happily remembering. I started to push my chair back from my desk with my feet on the floor when I saw something slide onto my desk. Ronnie had placed a pencil on the corner of my desk that touched his. The pencil was green, short and covered with teeth marks, but gloriously sharpened. I glanced at him as he lifted his chin ever so slightly toward the pencil and then turned his eyes back to his paper. I gratefully picked up the little green pencil and fell in line, writing my summer. “I worked. I read.” I wrote something simple enough to be accepted by the teacher but not too much that would draw her attention and cause her to ask questions. This was me, obedient, quiet and hopefully invisible, yet lingering on the edge of my imagination brewed the thought that maybe this year, starting out with Ronnie and the green pencil, wouldn’t be so bad.

A friendship quickly developed. We helped each other with assignments when needed, shared favorite books to read and cookies from lunch, we talked about the places we wanted to visit and different things we could be when we grew older and could move away from our small town. The green pencil remained sitting at the top corner of his desk. Logic says it stayed there so any time a lead broke the pencil remained available to whoever needed to avoid the walk of shame to the sharpener during quiet class time. The place in my heart that treasured our connection saw it as a sign that friendship was a real thing, and maybe in life connection with another person was truly possible; it became a symbol that life might turn out better than I thought and that just maybe love was real.

One day, about 5 months into the school year, Ronnie said he had something that he needed to tell me. He didn’t look at me when he spoke, and his shoulders slumped a little lower than usual. I thought something very bad had happened and I would have to wait until lunch time to find out. We usually sat together at lunch time, enduring the sing song teasing words of, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage.” Normally we sat next to the wall by the door of the classroom trying not to be too visible with our books and conversations. When the lunch bell rang, we would gather up our books, both relieved that recess had ended yet slightly bummed that our time together was over, and we would make it into the classroom before too many other kids came pushing through the doorway. Since he had something to tell me today, we headed to the far side of the playground, hopefully hidden from view, sheltered from our tormenting peers. Ronnie’s face looked slightly grey, and his frown made me wonder if somebody had died. My grandma had died a while back and my mom looked like that for months. Gazing at the ground, he started talking once we settled our backs against the big rocks that boarded the school playground. “My parents said that you are a Mormon. I’m not supposed to talk to Mormons. My parents said that you aren’t safe to be around. We aren’t supposed to like Mormons.”

I had heard about things like this in church during Sacrament meeting. Persecution of God’s people. I had a picture in my head of angry men carrying guns, yelling and threatening violence of some kind, but not Ronnie, not a person I considered to be a friend, someone I talked to daily, someone with whom I shared ideas and dreams. I sat baffled, almost unable to comprehend what that really meant. He thought I was a bad person. No, by the look on his face, his parent’s thought I was a bad person and he simply stood in the middle of an identity battle as religions fought for the title of right and wrong. He reached in his jean pocket and brought out a small pink candy heart with type written letters that spelled out “BE MINE" across the surface. More than a week away, Valentine’s Day had barely crossed my awareness. Ronnie held the little heart out in my direction and then placed it softly in my open palm, a statement of silent defiance against the battle of the Jehovah’s Witnesses against the Mormons. “Thanks for being my friend.” Then he stood up, carefully climbed over the rocks and slowly zig zagged toward the school building, defiance hiding somewhere in the balance of childhood need for companionship and dependence on parents for survival.

Sitting on the rocks, confusion and elation grew inside me at almost equal rates. Confusion at the dramatic ending to our friendship, a friendship stolen by a religious battle fought by adults and the quiet excitement of actually having received a Valentine. In 4th grade, you weren’t required to give everyone a Valentine, you could dole them out however you saw fit. The pretty rich kids got significantly more than the rest of us and the quiet ones, like me, happily made it home with 3 or 4. I slipped my Valentine into my pocket and, feeling empty, slowly shuffled toward the school. When I sat down at my desk there was no nod or acknowledgement from Ronnie of any kind. He followed the rules as if an angry god leered over him ready to strike him dead at the moment of the slightest infraction. I slumped back in my chair sensing the death of the friendship that had made 4th grade bearable. Although the Valentine represented a gesture of friendship and genuine fourth grade companionship, I knew it would now be only a silent thought as our togetherness had ended.

When I walked home from school that day with my hand in my pocket, I carefully touched the heart candy with just the tip of my finger so it didn’t get dirty or sweaty. My thoughts bounced from the delicate pleasure of having received a valentine to the gnawing dread of returning to school without my friend. I didn’t quite understand what made us so different except he went to church in a building with no windows and couldn’t celebrate his birthday and I had to endure 3 hours of church every Sunday where everyone talked about love but one step out of line and discipline quickly and painfully replaced love. I silently questioned the religious definition of love. It seemed to me that rules and obedience trumped love in the church world, those who were good were loveable, those who didn’t follow the rules were punished rather than loved. And now to add to that a battle between churches; it didn’t seem to me that love could be real.

I opened the front door of my house to see my dad sitting in his chair. He wasn’t usually home this early in the afternoon. I jumped, surprised to see him. Normally I would have dropped my backpack on the floor by the door, plopped on the couch and turned-on the TV to watch Tom & Jerry cartoons but instead, I headed straight up to my room. His deep voice stopped my footsteps. “What did you learn today?” He might as well have asked me what I saw on Mulberry Street as my thoughts raced just like Dr. Suess’s. I had done ordinary schoolwork, tolerated the stupid kids in my class as they laughed together at their desks and lost my only friend. None of these examples would be an appropriate answer. I refused to share with anyone the painful events of the day as they wouldn’t understand the significance of the loss. My parent’s especially, as they would solve the problem by saying “just go make another friend.” Special painful memories wound tight in my head; my fist closed over them to protect them, the few things that were truly mine. If I were to share with anyone, they would have to be like a character in one of my books, someone who understood the importance of fragile 4th grade friendships, the delicate connection of childhood affection and how the loss of that relationship pushed me even more to the outskirts of elementary society where I already knew I would never truly belong.

I turned around in the doorway and looked at my dad, trying to think up an answer. He often helped me with my math homework, so I said something about addition. We had been adding multiple rows of 5- and 6-digit figures during math time, it had been easy for me, kind of fun actually. I waited to see if the answer would be sufficient to buy my release when he looked at me more intently and asked, “What’s in your pocket?” I realized I still had my hand in my pocket and my fingers flipped the little heart over and over in a nervous expression of being cornered.

Dread filled my body as if a faucet with cold, murky water had been turned on inside me. I knew the only way to freedom would be through obedience. I couldn’t lie and I knew he had seen my hand move. I drew the heart candy out of my pocket and set it on the table in front of my dad. The words “BE MINE” glowed too brightly on the surface of the little candy, a spotlight on my sin. His eyes rose sharply to my face. “Where did you get this? Who gave this to you?” he demanded.

“Ronnie, a kid in my class.” I spilled out, though managing to let no other details leak through.

“Did you give him a Valentine?” my dad accused.

“No, I don’t have any.”

I didn’t know how this day, this moment, could get any worse. I stood in silence, steeling myself for what would come next, not knowing if it would be a punishment of extra chores or a spanking or added time reading my scriptures. I felt empty and powerless, dark and alone yet willing to pay for my freedom with whatever sentence he passed. I knew how this worked. Say “Yes Sir,” take the consequences of my actions in silence and then I would be left alone. My dad finally ended his quiet pause, “You take this back to school tomorrow and give it back to that boy.”

My heart sank. The one bright piece left from a devastating day now being snatched away. “It’s not okay for you to have a boyfriend. You know better than this. You are too young to understand what love means and this is not right. I expect more from you. You need to be a better example for your sisters.” The sentence had been given, the judge and jury justified in the giving as he sat there watching me.

I never thought of Ronnie as my boyfriend. Maybe I loved him as a friend, all I really knew was that we just felt safe together. We were friends, allies in a world of 4th graders when growing up had started to define the popular kids, the poor kids, the smart kids, the jocks and those of us who didn’t fit in anywhere, like Ronnie and I who didn’t belong in any group; constantly peering in from the outside wondering why we were so different.

“Yes, Sir.” I said flatly and turned, head lower than usual, to walk to my room.

None of the books in the stack by my bed could unravel the knot in my stomach, no story strong enough to move my attention from what just happened. Reality glared too brightly in my face: I would be alone at school again; the church I had to go to represented something bad; my desire for connection and friendship erroneous; my relationship, however innocent, with a boy in my class a mistake; and I, nothing but a disappointment to my dad. How could I be so bad, so unlovable, so wrong? How could wanting to love someone be wrong? I sat down in a dark corner in my bedroom, squeezing myself into the tight space, drawing my knees to my chest, pressing my back hard against the wall. I didn’t fit in at school, I didn’t fit in my family and now trying to fit my body in a corner not made for a fourth grader I wondered if I would ever fit anywhere and why was something so wrong with me when everyone else seemed to be okay. I stayed in the corner as night darkened the room letting my forehead rest on my knees, feeling the lid of the box being lowered over me. The lid had shiny silver hinges made of obedience and righteousness and a lock with no key, a box I would never be able to escape.