Chapter 12
LIFE OFF SEASON IN MONTREAT WAS QUIET AND SLOW. WEEKDAYS meant school, and on Sunday the mornings were spent in church at Gaither Chapel. I don’t remember socializing with our neighbors our first year there, sensing my family was conspicuous and a source of gossip.
I’d catch people cutting their eyes at Mom and making judgments behind her back. No doubt my second-grade teacher had heard a few stories. Her husband, William Hickey, was the vice president of Northwestern Bank’s Black Mountain branch where my family had accounts.
I enjoyed accompanying Mom to the low brick building with white trim on East State Street.
She’d dress up, looking elegant, reminding me to be quiet and polite inside the bank.
Mr. Hickey would take care of Mom’s transactions, afterward giving me a lollipop.
I was aware that he sometimes called our house.
Usually, it was to inform Mom that she was overdrawn, on one occasion by a dollar.
I can still see her sitting at the kitchen table with her big checkbook open and an array of invoices neatly ordered by priority.
I’d hear sighs and the sound of her carefully tearing out green checks along their perforated edges.
She struggled to pay our bills, hoping for enough left to buy groceries and other necessities.
I’d wish I could do something to earn a lot of money.
Maybe then she wouldn’t seem so worried and unhappy.
I noticed her begin to implode when Dad was late with his check.
It was her only means of keeping a roof over our head and food on the table.
I knew when the check was due to arrive each month, and if it was so much as a day late, Mom would become agitated.
Several days late, and she was paranoid, about to freak out.
She would start in with her suspicions. Dad was playing a sadistic game, forcing her to call his law firm to ask about money.
The last thing she wanted was to talk to his secretary.
It reminded Mom of the one he’d been sleeping with before walking out on our family.
If the check arrived with a trace of lipstick on the envelope flap, Mom thought it was deliberate.
Day after day she’d walk or drive to the post office, despairing when the legal-size white envelope wasn’t in our mailbox.
As I’d watch her anguish over money, I’d connect it to her mental state deteriorating.
I was desperate to fix everything wrong and felt helpless because I couldn’t.
Mrs. Hickey never alluded to our financial woes and embarrassments.
Like many teachers I’ve not forgotten, she was a lighthouse in dark, troubled waters.
She encouraged my creativity, praising my efforts, seeming to appreciate my curiosity and imagination.
I don’t recall a single instance of her being anything other than kind and patient.
During the first few weeks I was in her second-grade class, she gave me a red, white, and blue pencil.
I’d commented that it was pretty, probably when I was chatting her ear off before the bell rang.
To my surprise and delight, she presented the pencil to me with a smile, and everyone in the classroom saw her do it. I’m sure I was beaming.
At recess, I left the pencil in the groove on top of my desk before filing out to the athletic field.
When I returned to the classroom, the pencil was gone and I couldn’t find it anywhere.
Questioning my classmates, I was answered by shrugs or nothing at all.
I decided that someone was resentful because Mrs. Hickey gave a special pencil to me and no one else.
It’s natural for me to assign motives and land on suspects.
Often, I’m right. But not always. I didn’t trust the boy who sat behind me, small for his age and always squirming.
Joey Cort (as I’ll call him) would kick my chair whenever Mrs. Hickey wasn’t looking.
He reminded me of the cover boy for Mad magazine, right down to the missing teeth and mischievous eyes.
“Did you borrow my pencil?” I whispered to Joey during quiet period when Mrs. Hickey was grading papers at her desk.
“Why would I want yer stup-hid pencil?” he retorted with a sneer.
“Because it’s better than yours.”
“I didn’t tetch hit…!”
“Patsy! Joey! That’s enough. Hush!” Mrs. Hickey was quiet but stern, peering at us over the rims of her glasses.
That afternoon when I got home from school, I retreated to my bedroom closet in hopes I might have a chat with my secret friend Mr. Owl.
I don’t know his origin. He wasn’t a character in any story I was aware of, including those I wrote.
The Mr. Owl in the Tootsie Pop commercial didn’t exist at the time.
My Mr. Owl was unique, and I believed he was real.
As I would feel when writing novels someday, it didn’t seem he was my idea or invented.
One day he fluttered into my mind of his own volition.
It was as if he discovered me and not the other way around.
Decades later, I’d feel the same way about my medical examiner protagonist Kay Scarpetta and other characters. Also, Jack the Ripper.
Mr. Owl was magical like the winged fairies Miss Craig told me about.
Maybe he was spiritual like an angel. He was large with mottled brown feathers, a curved black beak, and tufted ears.
Wise with big yellow eyes, he lived high up in a tree in some other dimension.
Or maybe he was from a faraway planet and needed me as much as I needed him.
He would have recognized that at the age of seven I had little in my life.
I was lonely and often viewed as a nuisance, my future not promising.
I thought of myself as a broken toy that doesn’t work as advertised.
I was aware of deficits such as my dreadful sense of direction.
It’s as if I’m missing an inner compass that others take for granted.
Out of necessity, I developed habits to compensate.
As a teenager playing tennis tournaments, I’d leave the house an hour earlier than needed for fear of getting lost no matter how many times I’d driven wherever I was headed.
I have no instinct that leads me in the right direction and don’t always recognize faces, including those of relatives.
I realized early on that I can’t spell, some of my attempts so bad that spellcheck and Google don’t recognize what I’m trying to say.
I can carry a tune but not harmonize. Eventually I would fail at playing the piano, the guitar, the drums. I was hopeless in ballet, the teacher recommending that Mom not waste her money.
I flunked the Singer sewing course. Baton twirling lessons were another disaster.
When my class marched in the Asheville Christmas parade, I kept dropping my baton, and it would bounce end over end into the crowd while people pointed and laughed.
The year I was a Girl Scout, I hated every minute except selling the most boxes of cookies, not letting on that I solicited over the phone.
During my stint as a cheerleader my senior year of high school, I was out of sync when shaking my pompoms. Worst of all and perhaps related, I can’t do math.
Even simple arithmetic was challenging during grade school, and in later years I was lost in space when taking algebra and geometry.
Other than drawing and storytelling, it seemed nothing I did was noteworthy.
But I tried hard, and maybe that’s the attribute Mr. Owl looked for when I was in the second grade.
I took it seriously when he’d summon me to meet where we wouldn’t be disturbed.
If I initiated the encounter, he didn’t always respond as if on a different frequency and unable to answer my call.
When he appeared, it was in a thought, rather much like sensing a presence I can’t see.
I didn’t know what telepathy was, but that’s how we communicated.
It was important no one could hear us as we conferred in our cone of silence, usually the bathroom where I’d lock the door and sit on the closed toilet lid.
Or I’d hide in my closet, the overhead light bulb glaring, a chain dangling from it.
“Today was a bad day,” I told Mr. Owl about my pencil being pinched.
“Why do you think someone took it?” he asked.
I replied that Mrs. Hickey had singled me out, and taking my beautiful pencil was an act of retaliation. My top suspect was Joey Cort. I couldn’t prove it. But he’d accused me of being the teacher’s pet.
“And you are,” Mr. Owl wisely answered.
At least this time, I reminded him. Certainly, I wasn’t Mrs. Gordon’s favorite the year before, but I didn’t know Mr. Owl then. He didn’t enter my thoughts until my family moved into the Warrens’ house and I started school.
“It’s important for you to be the teacher’s pet. And you do what you can to make it happen,” he went on, and that was true too. “But when you get special attention, it chums the water, attracting the green-eyed monster.”
I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded scary like the green snake that startled me in the ficus tree.
Mr. Owl said to be careful when someone treated me special.
Don’t let others know about it or they’ll summon the green-eyed monster to put you in your place and steal what you have like the red, white, and blue pencil.
I told Mr. Owl how much I liked talking to him. There was no one else. Dad was gone. My mother had little emotional energy or attention to spare. The kids at school were mean, and I relayed some of what they’d say.
“Patsy talks funny!”
“Ha! Ha!”
It was true that my brothers and I didn’t talk like everybody else. Our vernacular didn’t include expressions such as…
Y’all sit down.
You-ins is in a heap of trouble.
Go fetch the shopping buggy over yonder.
The young’uns is fussing.
We got us a flat tar, better call the wrecker.
Stop hollering! Mr. Neilan was always yelling.