As it turned out, I was good at understanding not only poetry but also serious literature. I got lost in it. I devoured works by Thoreau and Blake and I loved Fitzgerald’s novels. I read all of Steinbeck’s books. I especially loved The Grapes of Wrath.
And I excelled in writing essays and book reports, always getting an “A” along with comments like “Brilliant,” “Understanding beyond your years,” and “Great writing.”
Your life can change in one day, even in one moment. Just like my life had been changed for the worse the day Steve first molested me, my life was changed for the better because of that English class.
That year, I learned that everyone has a talent. Mine had been buried under all my shame and feelings of inadequacy; each time I was bad, each time I failed at something, I had become more and more convinced that I was worthless. Each time I compared myself with other kids and found that I came up short, I’d lost more and more self-esteem. I was always the last one picked in PE. I was the last one picked when we studied dancing. But in that English class, I decided God was fair after all. Before that I thought I’d been dealt an unlucky hand. I thought God had abandoned me by placing me in Bakers-field with all its dust and pollution and crime. By giving me a mother who didn’t know how to love me. By putting me in a family of alcoholics and know-it-alls. By giving me Pam only to take her away. By putting Steve and Harvey in my life to rape and abuse me.
But now I realized that he hadn’t just given me bad things. He’d also given me this wonderful gift—a deep understanding of and appreciation for poems and essays and stories. The gift of being able to read poetry or an essay or a story and be able to not only appreciate it but understand the meaning of it. He’d given me the ability to understand metaphors and similes. And he’d given me the confidence to be able to articulate what it was I had understood—a confidence that I had never felt about any other subject. And perhaps most important of all, he’d given me the ability to write well.
I learned something else that year in the advanced English class. Although my life up until that point had been full of heart-ache and pain and loneliness, there had been a few bright spots. And, as it turned out, one of those bright spots—my time with my mother in Ceres reading Spoon River Anthology—had had a profound effect on me. It had given me a special appreciation for poetry and how it could convey, and evoke, important emotions. My mother and I had both been moved by the poetry in that book. It had been a source of solace for us, and it had given us a way to express what we were feeling, even though we couldn’t articulate it ourselves. It helped us both feel understood—less alone in life.
I was learning an important lesson: even the smallest positive experiences can begin to balance out the negative ones.
chapter 32
The world was finally opening up for me. At the beginning of my junior year, I made a new friend named Dee-Dee and we had an instant connection, in part because we both had alcoholic mothers. In fact, Dee-Dee’s mother’s drinking had gotten so bad that she and her sister had to move to Bakersfield to live with her aunt, who happened to live across the street from Cherie.
Even though Dee-Dee’s childhood had been as miserable as mine in many ways, her aunt had money and that meant that Dee-Dee had great-looking clothes. And since she lived in Hillcrest, she became instantly popular. It didn’t hurt that she was really, really cute and all the boys flocked around her. My friendship with Dee-Dee finally gave me a new credibility among the popular girls, so between Dee-Dee and English class, I’d finally made it.
Then a couple of seniors took me and Florence aside and explained to us that before they graduated they needed to pass on the leadership of their YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) club to some juniors. They chose us because we seemed to be leaders and had lots of friends we could recruit into the club.
I said yes right away, excited by the chance to form our own club. It took Florence a little longer to come around. She wanted to know exactly what she had to do; she didn’t want to have too much responsibility.
I attended one of their meetings and became even more enthusiastic. I invited Dee-Dee and Cherie and even Pam to join and all three seemed delighted. Florence finally decided to participate and she brought several of her friends. We now had our own Y club.
Just as that one English class and Dee Dee had changed my life, another new person was to come into my life and change it still more. Her name was Yvonne and she was Bakersfield’s new YWCA Director.
The members of all the Y clubs in Bakersfield had been invited to come downtown to the YWCA to meet her. The small room was filled to capacity; all the chairs were taken and people were standing in the back. A woman in her mid-twenties stepped up to the front of the room and introduced herself as Yvonne. She was tall and lean and athletic, what some people would call a “handsome” woman. But it was her personality that made her truly attractive.
I was mesmerized. I’d never met anyone like her. She was confident and powerful. She was inspiring.
“You have the power to change your life,” she said with great enthusiasm and authority.
That’s what I’d been trying to do. I hadn’t liked the road I was going down and I’d been trying to change my ways.
