In Memory

My best friend in second grade was Susan Proudfoot. She was golden of hair, and hilarious and kind. We went everywhere together on the school campus, and she was a strong light in my life. (This was during the Bad Stepfather era I wrote about the other day.)

One day we decided to trade math books. Our workbooks had tear-out pages, and because we were both bad at remembering to write our names before tearing out those pages, we’d written our names on all the pages, so had to erase our each others’ names and write our own in. We did this in a state of giggling frenzy — eraser gribblings flying everywhere. It was an act of devotion, though we didn’t call it that.

Very soon after, my mother came to my door one night and looked at me for a long time. “What?” I asked. “I’ll… I’ll tell you tomorrow. Sleep tight.”

I am still not clear on how it happened, exactly, but Susan had drowned in their family’s pool.

When you are a child and grownups don’t talk to you very much about important things — under the impression, no doubt, that the conversations should be “child-led,” which is BS a lot of the times — you rely on your learning and instincts to that point to make sense of the world around you. My learning was from books of fairy tales, and my intuition was one of survival.

My mind went to this: Because we had switched math books, the fates (though I didn’t call them that) had been mislead, and gotten Susan instead of me. It made sense since *I* was the one who spent the most time in the water, that they’d be waiting for me by the drain of a pool. But they’d gotten the wrong address. The wrong girl. I apologized every time I went near the drain of our pool.

Oddly, I kept swimming. But I stopped math. I just would not do it. For years I was stuck at a second-grade level. I got a C in eighth grade, but that was the last math class I passed until I was in my 40's.

Trauma does not follow rules. If it did, I would have quit swimming, never surfed, and maybe stopped bathing. “Weird reactions” are more the rule than the exception, and can be alienating if people around you are not making the same (often unconscious) connections between trigger and reaction.

I do not have a graceful way of ending this, so I will just stop there.