Growing Up As A Girl Child In America: Part 4
The summer I rode the short bus and was in a special needs class
After my grandfather Bampy died, I lost who I was.
My best friend ran away.
The regular school year ended and it was time for summer school.
I didn’t always go to summer school. Sometimes I spent summers in Milwaukee with my cousins.
I think my aunt didn’t want my grandmother Nana to be by herself after losing her spouse of 50 years, so I stayed home and went to junior high summer school.
Because we lived in the rural outskirts of town, I was assigned to attend summer school at Clement Junior High in Northside Redlands. This was the poorest of our town’s three junior highs, located in the neighborhood where the poor, brown, and black families lived.
The 10-acre orange grove I grew up in was on the Northside: now it was gone, replaced by a huge mobile home park.
They put all of us into orientation classrooms during the first week.
I only knew a few kids at this school.
I don’t remember what misbehaviors I did, but I could tell that the young teacher in my first classroom disliked me. After a couple of days, I got called to the principal’s office. It wasn’t Mr. Nease. I don’t remember his name. He had bad 70s hair and wore a clip-on tie.
He told me that my teacher had determined I was “hyper.” Therefore, I’d be in a special needs class for the summer.
The next day, a short bus came to pick me up. There were two kids already on it. One of them was a talkative girl with cerebral palsy, Jeanette. The other was a boy in a wheelchair who didn’t speak.
When we got to school, an aide was waiting to push the silent boy in the wheelchair. She asked me to push Jeanette.
Jeanette talked the whole time we were on the way to class and only stopped when one of the two teachers took roll.
There were about 20 kids in the class. Several were in wheelchairs. Others had poor vision or hearing. I could tell that several kids were slow.
My heart sank. There was little education going on in this class. Most of the kids seemed like they couldn’t even read.
I went to lunch and saw a girl from my elementary school, Cindy.
I sat next to her and the first thing she said was, “Why’d they put you in the room with all the MRs?”
In 1975, that’s what everyone said, including teachers. MR is short for “mentally retarded.”
I said, “I don’t know,” when one of the aides spotted me and pushed Jeanette toward us. She waved and smiled. With a toss of her hair, Cindy got up and left.
I finished lunch with Jeanette, who talked the entire time.
After a couple of days, the two teachers in our special needs class realized that if I had any special need at all, it was because my grandfather had died and my grandmother hadn’t said more than three words to me per day since.
She had stopped cooking and shopping, and I soon learned from the mailbox, stopped paying any bills. She spent most of the day sitting in Bampy’s rocking chair, staring blankly out of the window.
By coincidence, one of the things the special ed teachers covered in class was household management and paying bills. I told the nicer of the two teachers what was happening at home and she said, “Bring your grandmother’s checkbook and the bills. We’ll make them out together and then you can get her to sign the checks.”
I never told these teachers, Jeanette, or any of the other kids that when we ran out of food, I got in the Firebird and drove it to the grocery store nine miles away, then drove home. I think my grandmother did know I was doing this, but it had no connection to her not wanting me to take Drivers Ed or drive three years later. She’d moved on from major depression after my grandfather’s death to a different phase of mental illness.
One day I was pushing the silent boy, Billy, around at recess and I saw a slim, dark girl sitting alone on the edge of a tree ring. She had a pretty white ribbon in her hair and was wearing a nice pink dress. Too nice for that school, I thought.
I’d already adopted my teen uniform: Levi’s 501 button fly jeans and a white t-shirt. Sometimes I wore one of those 70s tops with the butterfly shoulders. Of course I didn’t have the very best kind, and it would be a couple of years before I had a pair of Dittos jeans like the most popular girls had.
I pushed Billy toward the girl and did something I’d rarely done before.
“Hi, I’m Amy,” I said. “What’s your name?”
She looked up at me and said, “Estrellita” in a voice so quiet I could barely hear.
For the rest of that summer outside of after-school softball and dance class, Estrellita became my only friend. Most of the kids called her Star because they couldn’t pronounce her name.
Estrellita’s father was a professor at the University of Redlands. She was very slim, very shy, very frail, and very smart. She was teased by the rich white kids from “the hill” even though she lived there too, because she was brown, wasn’t athletic, and wore old-fashioned clothing.
Because I’d been branded one of the MRs at that school, there wasn’t much I could do to help Estrellita with the teasing except stay away from those kids. I could name one of them —
She was particularly mean not only to Estrellita but also to my soon-to-be-lifelong best friend Cathy. We’ll call her Tina S. and she was a piece of work whose parents, I think, bought her way onto the cheerleading squad in Junior High and onward.
Estrellita also didn’t fit in with the Chicano kids, many of whom I’d known all of my life, and a few of whom I’d grown up playing with even before kindergarten. They saw her as a snob.
I was grateful to have her as a friend.
When summer ended and I went to my real junior high, Moore JHS, Estrellita attended and we did remain friends, although not as close as during that summer.
Mr. Nease, my elementary school principal, became the principal of Moore that year. He knew I didn’t need to be in a special needs class.
I quickly made new friends there, including Cathy, who has remained my best friend throughout my life. I started working on the school newspaper, joined the band, played tennis, and watched my friends starting to have boyfriends and girlfriends.
My friends, two sisters who lived a few miles closer to town from me on Highway 38, both got boyfriends, and one sister disappeared for a few weeks. Everyone whispered that she’d gotten pregnant and had an abortion.
I was in several classes with my friend-boyfriend Brian (also known as B-R-A-I-N from my woodburning project). He played oboe and I played clarinet.
I joined a friend-triad with two other girls that I’d known from the gifted program, Ann & Diana. Continuous drama ensued with both of these girls throughout the rest of my school years as one of the two wasn’t “best friend” material and it wasn’t Diana.
I made friends with Marty (Martha), who had numerous brothers and sisters, lived in a big house with all of them, and raised animals for 4-H, including goats that chewed my pants and a tiny pig named Henry.
Estrellita faded into the background.
I look back and I realize now that all of the kids I just described were white and nearly all of them lived either on “the hill” or had nice homes with wealthier parents in other neighborhoods.
Already by this age, we were separated. In our classes. In our home lives. In our pastimes: there were no black or brown kids on the tennis team. There were already kids playing prep golf, and yes, one of the kids from our school went on to a PGA career. Diana’s father was a well-known doctor. Ann’s parents were scientists. B-R-A-I-N’s dad was a chemist.
All I was trying to do was survive each day, hoping that maybe the next day my grandmother would decide to talk with me.
I tried to spend nights away at my friends’ houses as often as possible.
Things were getting worse, not better, at home. Mr. Long was my counselor and he tried to help. Mr. Nease was my principal: he did the same.
One day, Nana grabbed my arm and held my hand down on the stove burner because she refused to believe I was at Cathy’s house, not hanging out with my other best friend Cheryl (who had already run away). No one at school noticed my left palm was burned.
The blisters had broken a few days later and I was folding the laundry. Nana was working silently beside me. I asked her if we could go shopping for white shorts because I needed them for both band and tennis.
She screamed and lashed out at me with a bundle of hangers.
I ran into the back yard and buried my head in my dog Freckles’ neck and sobbed.
When I quit crying, I went back into the house and called my dad from the kitchen phone.
“Dad, I want to come live with you,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. And he and my stepmom came and picked me up.
I lived in Hollywood with him and my stepmother and half brother Danny for a year.
I have a lot of social media friends that I went to school with, though none from Hollywood, only from Redlands.
One of them was Estrellita, Star Alonzo.
She told me of many times that the snobby kids from “the hill” teased her. She had other stories of the “dark side of Redlands.” Theft. Mysteries. Murders.
She found newspaper clippings about my mother, Sterling Sturtevant, that I had never seen before.
“Star, thank you,” I said. “You make me cry, you are so kind.”
We talked about how vain and stuck-up some of the girls were that teased not only Star, but also many others, including my best friend Cathy, and on a few occasions, me.
“I always thought you were prettier than those girls,” Star said. “And much nicer.”
It doesn’t get more ego-crushing than to be told you need to ride the short bus. That you’re one of the special needs kids. Maybe pushing them around school and helping them do their school work did make me nicer.
It took me a lifetime to understand how although our school was divided to the finest degree by social, racial, and economic strata, we were all so emotionally impoverished and stunted in growth and experience.
Beautiful Estrellita died of cancer last year. Her son let us know via social media. I know she would be glad that I wrote this.
Our town had and still has a self-image of being the best small town in America.
The truth is different.
A modern note: my husband Bruce has struggled with severe arthritis for the past year and has had cervical spine surgery and a hip replacement. He hasn’t walked without help for almost a year. He just walked on his own from the kitchen to our spare bedroom where I work.
And I just walked back to the kitchen with him, holding his arm.
It reminded me so of that long-ago summer riding the short bus.
I'm still in touch with someone I went to middle and high school with. Both their parents died when they were in their early 20s, essentially from complications of mental illness. In one conversation, I think they said something like: I really wish more people understood mental illness in the 70s and 80s, and there had been real help for us.
The abuse you describe was so common. I didn't realize it until much later that most girls were mean and surly to nearly-silent me likely because of abuse at home and at school.