Gum and Other Pleasures

I stole gum. Tons of it, over the course of years. If you weighed the total amount, it could drown you, as you slowly walked into the ocean. 

But that was nothing.

Before that, it was an Indian beaded necklace from the gift shop at Death Valley. I was twelve years old, staying in a housekeeping cabin with my family. My mother found it.

“What’s this?” my mother asked, pulling out the necklace from my bag, her voice rising.

I pleaded with her not to tell Daddy, but she did.

She knew I had no money of my own. My parents never gave my brother or me any allowance because, they reasoned, they would get us what we needed. The word “needed” meant they both had jobs, but it was a modest income. I could have asked them to buy the necklace for me, but I didn’t.

I was a good child, left with little choice in the face of my brother’s hyperactivity, tantrums, and the way he threw our parents into yelling matches.

My father sat me down in the cabin. His mouth always looked the same—square.

“You have to return the necklace,” he said.

I knew he would not hit me, but was afraid just the same, because of the way he yelled at my brother, had kicked his door in and broken his records.

Together we went to the gift shop and I handed the necklace back and apologize to the manager, who stood across the glass counter.

Later, there were clothes. My friend Liz and I challenged each other, venturing from our respective homes to meet in downtown San Francisco at our favorite department store. Liz’ dark brown hair always lay neatly down her shoulders, and she kept it parted in the middle of her pale scalp. Her large brown eyes sat symmetrically against her delicate skin. In contrast, my skin erupted in acne and greasy dryness, and my long blonde hair lay in thin strands.

We had met at S.F. State in the dorms, and partied there together. I witnessed the incident when she left her contact lenses in overnight because she passed out drunk. Early in the morning, our friend Teri drove us to UCSF emergency as I held Liz’ hand in the back seat. After a while, Liz emerged with white eye patches and the nurse instructed us to make sure she lay down for a day with them on.

Liz was there when I met Jennie’s brother at the toga party, across the room raising her right eyebrow. He and I stayed up all night talking, the first time I watched the sun come up. I had to convince most people all we did was talk, but Liz knew, in my shyness and reticence, that it was true.

Liz and I took mushrooms together with Teri, Sally, and JoAnn one afternoon in my dorm room. One girl who visited for a few minutes caught her hair on fire by a candle. That was the least of our excitement, as we giggled our way through hours of distorted shapes of my bedding, curtains, and my own artwork, as the colors astounded us.

I spent time with Liz and her boyfriend Jim, a diabetic, both when they first met, and later at her apartment, after the dorm days. Jim was an artist, drawing darkly-colored comics on a lightboard, smoking cigarettes, and staying in Liz’ room sometimes, while I slept on the living room couch. Liz’ younger brother John, who also hung around, adored me—it was written into his wide-set eyes, moisture compacting at the corners, his tall thin stature contrasting with his ample lips. Liz warned me not to lead him on, protecting him.

This was the “preppy” era, so the clothes we took from the department store were crisp cotton button down shirts with small plastic buttons, khaki pants with cuffs, and jeans with pleats. It never occurred to us that we could get caught, that the store employed people specifically to nab shoplifters and that there were security cameras. At least, we never discussed our fears. Before entering, we were calm. Afterward, we exploded with laughter, our non-purchases hidden in our bags. We had an unspoken bond in our thievery. We were outlaws. My favorite shirt, soft white brushed cotton with thin, pale pink stripes, I kept for years, even after I stopped wearing it. It was a trophy.

We would take the elevator up to the Juniors or Misses section. I hugged my canvas bag close—the same bag which the Moonies canvassing near the Powell Street Bart station would zero in on, the pattern of large geese beckoning to them. Liz’ bag was a designer model of dark blue synthetic material. We entered the dressing room without anyone noticing, and under its guise the items in question easily floated off the hangers. It was too easy.

Liz’ father was a judge who had relocated his family to San Francisco from Indiana.  Besides the one brother, Liz had one biological sister and two adopted sisters, both African American. Probably, I thought, a reason they moved to the multi-cultural Bay Area. The family, as I knew it from a few visits, seemed an unusual mix of independent thinking, idealism, and strictness, demonstrated by the warmth of Liz’ voice as she spoke to her adoptive sisters, but also by the strict tone of her mother towards Liz.

She, like me, had probably done this on her own before our joint escapades, though I never asked her. Since my theft of the necklace at Death Valley, I allowed myself to take gum whenever the mood struck. My friends, who thought of me as straight-laced, were surprised when they witnessed it, though they got used to it and even mused on it. With Liz, every time we got together, I thought we should stop, but I never said anything. Eventually, we stopped seeing each other, as friends sometimes fall away, but it was never with any definition or reason.

Still later, on my own in another department store closer to home, I found myself tempted. Liz and I hadn’t seen each other in a while. I hadn’t met my first boyfriend yet, I did clerical work I hated, and had moved back home with my parents because of an emotional collapse after living on my own. Desperate and empty, wanting something I could not afford to buy, I couldn’t resist.

I was out the door of the department store when I felt an arm on my shoulder.

“Excuse me.” The deep voice rumbled through me.

I turned around. The man wore a dark blue suit, his expression business like. No frills. We walked back through the store. My legs were numb, heavy yet weightless.

I held my head down, afraid to see anyone I knew. After all, I had grown up coming to this store.

We reached a double door. He pushed it open and we strolled into a large cold space with a cement floor, which could not be considered a room, as it had various open doors and passages coming off it. At a desk sat the manager, a man wearing slacks and a short sleeved shirt.

He asked me short-fired questions about who I was and what happened. These should have been easy to answer, but with each, there was a delay, my throat closing up and my voice nowhere to be found. When it did come, it sounded low and gravely. My name. My address. I don't remember the rest. Not close to tears, but nearer to dread, I stood there. I gave up the shirt from the goose bag. Multi-color stripes on white, short-sleeved cotton, button down. Cheerful, full-priced.

What seemed like hours later, a policeman appeared, his voice a blur. He put handcuffs on me, walked me out a corridor I didn’t know existed, there all the time in the bowels of the store.

The sun blazed outside. My eyes tried to adjust as the officer held open the back door of his squad car and motioned for me to get in. I slid onto the smooth upholstery, hands growing numb from the tight metal. I finally felt the tears at bay as he got into the driver seat and took off, this whole escapade rising to a new level of seriousness, but I would not give him the satisfaction. This felt like a mirror for my whole life, the complete disaster filling up my insides, but I didn’t want anyone to know. My eyes would have been puffy from the tears.

Then the police station desk. Cuffs removed. Signing paperwork. A court appointment the following week and community service assigned to me there. I would have to tell my mother. But she would tell my father.

I would spend a few hours each week at the Cancer Society, filing paper and learning the statistics of the disease. Lung cancer was the most prevalent. We were all volunteers except for the woman who ran the office, so I didn’t feel shamed or out of place—just doing my bit.

After a few weeks, I threw away the old trophy shirt in the garbage. I should have burned it in a fire that would encompass something deeper. At the time, I could not see what called me to steal. It wasn’t the lure of excitement, not the idea that you could get anything you wanted for free without asking, or even that you could have an elicit secret and enjoy that power. No, it was having to be “good” which propelled me into crime. Eventually, this acting out would transform into gaining agency and allow me to be the person I needed to be rather than passive, rather than the idea of good. I would no longer take such risks as with the shirt, nor entertain myself with such pleasures as stealing gum.

Gifted

My lack of motivation was born in 5^th grade at El Monte Elementary School. Mrs. Werner would announce after lunch, “Time for the achievers to leave.” They stood up and filed out the door.

The “Gifted Program” * left me ashamed. I had to stay in the classroom with the rest, studying with the new-fangled learning tools. The underlying suggestion was that the rest of us needed extra help. Tall cardboard towers stood near the front of the room. We would get up from our seats, choose which subject to work on from the many-colored options—geography, math, English, etc.—and return to our seats and work quietly by ourselves with the cards.

What happened in that room down the hall? What did they discuss? Why did they need a special teacher, all eight of them? They all lived up on the hill near the school, while I lived in the flatlands, bussed up with the kids in my neighborhood, all African Americans. Not one of them belonged to the special program either. And, coincidentally, everyone in the program were high-achievers. I didn’t know boundaries then. Did not have questions about I.Q., race, or psychological damage. I was just a child.

Until then I perceived myself as normal. My teachers were mother figures and learning was game-like, even with the atmosphere of natural competition. But school had been more than learning. The relationship I had with my teachers was central to how I received the subjects they taught. Mrs. Brown, my First grade teacher at my old Elementary school, Stege, back down in the flatlands, was the most motherliest of them all. Warmth radiated from her lovely brown skin and softly curled hair, and her thick-framed glasses spoke of intelligence. She did not hesitate to envelope a child in her skirts, nor did she have a problem with telling someone who was misbehaving to sit at the back. My parents had me bussed up to El Monte in Third grade because they were not happy about the quality of education at Stege, or perhaps because of the roughness children displayed on the schoolyard. Mrs. Emerick, at my new school, had reddish-blonde hair, also treated us warmly, and wore glasses. At the new school, I saw less African American children than at Stege, but there were now some Asian faces, among a predominance of White ones. El Monte benefitted from bussing, but diversity or special programs escaped my young eyes and ears, how adults were manipulating us into our present and future lives.

The relationships I formed with my teachers was of equally importance to those friendships I formed with my classmates. The ranking among peers took place in the classroom, where it was whether we raised our hand or knew the answer that identified us as being higher or lower in some way. We formed our own cliques at recess, away from the teachers’ eyes, each of us finding a place in the society of children which would mark us forever, as a leader or a follower, a joiner or a dissenter, as loud or quiet, pretty or plain, tough or wimpy.

If not Mrs. Werner, it would have been some other teacher who said those words heralding the secret group to go down the hall to another room, to separate, like cream from the top of the milk, the best part. I didn’t feel any different than those other kids until that moment. I played with a couple of them during recess, off in the corner of the field near the fence, right up against the school wall of the last classroom. There, we could see the steep streets the bus had driven up on, and below us, the flatlands spread out like an apron. Petite with a sweet, gentle smile, Jill had pale skin with freckles and wavy dark hair framing her face. Wendy’s frame towered over us slower developers. She would bring her Steiff animals to school, larger ones like the brontosaurus with orange, green, and purple colors. As equals, we played quietly and happily together. I did not feel different than Jill and Wendy, the gifted program sliding under my consciousness while at recess. They did not choose to enter the program, and they, along with other friends, cannot be accused of separating themselves from the rest of us let alone participating in it. Yet it changed us all. For some who were chosen, it meant getting more attention, which in turn may have helped them become clearer about their interests or learning styles.

What the program meant for me in the long term was that I would consider myself a less-than smart student for the rest of grade school, and through junior high and high school, and even into college. I dropped out of college, another indicator of lack of self-worth, in addition to lack of direction. When I returned to complete my college education twenty years later, it was with a consciousness about what I was worth. Because I had not withdrawn from a number of those initial college classes and those grades had turned into Fs, I had to petition to have those grades stricken from my record in order to restore an acceptable grade point average, in order to be accepted back into college.

That school happened to be San Francisco State. Proof of my self-worth, I did the considerable paperwork, meeting with a counselor there and then going to each department asking for signatures. At each juncture, I teetered on the bridge of humiliation and pride, not knowing which I felt at any given time or how some of these new department chairs perceived me. The music chair gave her entire support, as I wanted to apply to Mills College for the following fall, her alma mater. She said that she did not want to get in the way of my completing my degree and moving forward in life. I never even met the English chair, as the secretary disappeared into his office and then magically returned with the desired signature. The Sociology department similarly presented an enter-and-exit proposition. The P.E. teacher rejected my petition outright. Unfortunately, the same teacher still worked there, so the petition could not just go above him to the chair level. But I was shocked. P.E.? The other teacher who still remained was my Philosophy professor, with whom I took four classes, all in existentialism. She stared at me with her huge blue eyes.

“Sartre would not approve,” she said, her full lips with light pink lipstick clamped together, her short blonde hair see-through with the sun in back of her. She still wore the same pink shirt and dark knit skirt. “You know what he said about denial.”

It had taken years of working at a bookstore job where I was valued and where I benefitted from challenges to give me self worth. I grew personally and professionally. When I returned to school, it was this experience and knowledge that raised me up and gave me a voice. I could speak instead of cowering quietly as I had my whole youth. I had talent and ideas. I had traveled, read, and written. Returning to school, I became the star of all my endeavors.

The gifted program has changed, and now, in the 21^st century, at the grade school level it embraces both high-achieving and under-achieving students, with the idea that economically disadvantaged and varying cultural backgrounds are represented. Sometimes change happens too slowly. Did evolution of the program had to happen, perhaps, for this new incarnation of it to happen? Or could we just have jumped into representing more styles of learning? I still don’t understand how I.Q. is a valid assessment tool, in determining who is gifted. And then, what does gifted mean?

I now teach English at a community college, so have yet another perspective on students and their abilities. I find it clearly evident that all students have a gift of some kind or are talented in some way, whether they have advantages or are disadvantaged, whether they are “traditional” students entering from families who have already gone the college route, or from families who had been disenfranchised by higher education. How well a student does on a test or how well he or she writes does not yield any information about what could be teased out from within.

* The gifted program was authorized by an Education code in California, and therefore institutionalized. In the 1960s and 70s, when I attended grade school, the program was based on I.Q.