The Crinoline As Life Preserver
GRADE ELEVEN WAS a turning point for me and for a lot of people I knew. Would I, like many of my friends had done, simply fade out of school? In my crowd, there was never any big announcement about quitting. We just simply … stopped … going. Dropping out was a process that started in grade eight and, for many, finished in grade eleven.
On the other side of the academic scene was the one group in our school who were absolutely certain to graduate. They were the kids who took a program called Directed Studies, developed and run by Mr. Lee. Directed Studies was designed to allow the gifted students to explore their many and varied talents; it enabled the smartest kids in the school to mingle with other similarly gifted young people (as though they didn’t already huddle together like the last survivors of some anti-intellectual rebellion). Anyway, in Directed Studies, or DS, as it was known, students got to choose a field of study and develop their own curricula. They went on retreats, presumably to discuss the trials and tribulations of being brilliant: “It’s gotten to the stage where particle physics (neuroscience, nanotechnology, etc.) simply isn’t enough of a challenge for me any more” or “I am so smart it’s actually sort of painful.” At the end of every year they gave a public presentation to show the school and larger community what they’d learned. At least, that’s what I’d heard. I’d certainly never gone to a DS presentation or given the program much thought. It was like the chess club, reserved for academic overachievers, the intellectual “haves and have mores,” as the second Mr. Bush might have put it. I was too busy murdering brain cells on the weekends with a combination of alcohol and pills and cocaine to be contemplating such a foreign country as Directed Studies.
As previously noted, I was not a member of the academic elite. My friends and I hung out in the smoking area; many of us had boyfriends who drove large trucks and loud cars and hadn’t appeared in any graduating class photos. I had permed, feathered hair and a strong preference for black eyeliner and clothing with extra zippers. When I wasn’t sleeping during class, I was talking.
In spite of my status as a waste of space in a classroom setting, Mr. Lee was pretty nice to me. As well as Directed Studies, he taught English. Maybe he had a bit more tolerance for me than did the other teachers because we shared an enthusiasm for reading. I read everything on the assigned reading list in the first month of school and, unlike most of my classmates, I actually loved the books chosen. And I liked talking about them in class, even though my comments were usually less than penetrating.
“Can anyone tell me the theme of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four?” he’d ask.
I would raise my hand into the deafening silence.
“Yes, Susan?”
“It’s about when the whole world becomes like school. It’s a drag. You can’t get any privacy and stuff. Total fascism, man.”
“Hmmm, yes. I see,” he’d say, diplomatically.
The difference between Mr. Lee and the rest of the teachers is that he actually called on me when I raised my hand. Few others dared.
Our agreement on the general excellence of books didn’t mean I was producing top-notch work or anything. I wasn’t scoring straight A’s in English, belying my otherwise abysmal performance in school. Any hopes Mr. Lee had that my interest in the class readings would translate into academic success were dashed when I produced mediocre, last-minute papers. But Mr. Lee didn’t give up or treat me like the C student I so obviously was. And even though I wasn’t about to show it, that meant a lot to me.
Even so, when Mr. Lee came up to me after class one day and asked if I was interested in taking DS my jaw nearly hit the floor. Me! In Directed Studies! With all the chess club people! Surely he meant Detention, Special. No, he assured me, he actually meant Directed Studies.
My first instinct was to say no. After all, particle physics was not my bag. My math studies had stalled somewhere around grade eight or nine. (To this day I require one of those tip calculators when I go to a restaurant: let this be a warning to all those young people who don’t feel math is important.)
“What would I do?” I asked him.
“Well, what are you interested in?” I’m sure part of him must have been worried I was going to propose a course in dating minor drug dealers. But I didn’t. I was too astonished by his question.
What was I interested in? The truth is that the worse I’d done in school and in life, the less I was interested in. I’d given up riding and writing, my two main passions. The chess people, the ones who discussed the latest articles from Harper’s and The Economist in hushed tones in the hallways at lunchtime, now they had interests. Even I knew that “partying” and drinking were more like avocations than hobbies.
Mr. Lee told me to go away to think about it and that afternoon, I did.
I was interested in clothes. A passion for fashion didn’t have the same “getting above myself” quality that an interest in, say, microeconomics or golf course design would have. I could bring up the topic of fashion out in the smoking area without hitting a wall of blank, fish-eyed stares that told me I’d crossed yet another line. In fact we often had lively discussions out there about topics such as how acid wash denim was really made and shared the latest news about innovations in curling irons.
So the next time I saw Mr. Lee I announced I wanted to study fashion.
He nodded gravely.
Then I surprised both of us. “Historical fashion. Nineteenthcentury costume design,” I blurted, thinking of a book I saw once in the library and had glanced at for a minute or two.
His eyebrows rose a bit and he nodded.
“Okay. Write it up.”
I spent the evening writing up a proposed course of study. It was the first night I’d spent doing homework in my entire high school career. It was as though merely being asked what I was interested in made me want to come up with something good. It was even sort of fun. Not as fun as getting wasted on wine coolers, obviously, but not bad, either. I proposed spending one term researching nineteenth-century fashions and one term actually making a reproduction of a ball gown from the era. The fact that I (a) had no research skills whatsoever and (b) couldn’t sew didn’t stop me. I was going to be in DS! We DS types were not afraid to take on a challenge!
Our first DS meeting consisted of me on one side of the room, reeking of cigarette smoke, low self-esteem, and perm solution, and all the smartest kids in grade eleven on the other. I was sure my presence rattled them. What kind of meritocracy allowed a smoking area C student into the ranks? The DS kids weren’t mean to my face. By that time, I’d moved fairly solidly into the ranks of the “fairly popular.” I went to all the parties and had pretty friends and dated older guys. Instead, they adopted a cautious, slightly soothing manner with me, as though I was an unpredictable and none-too-bright animal, like a young badger or a yearling moose that someone had very inappropriately brought to a party.
Among themselves they had considerable camaraderie. Mark, a tall, dark-haired, round-shouldered boy, teased Samantha, the serious, white-haired editor of the student paper, about her plan to study bias in the media coverage of the federal election. He teased her about her fondness for “soft science.” I was appalled. These people made jokes about soft science? What in the fuck was soft science? And what were they going to think when I announced I wanted to study fashion design for a year?
Mark, emboldened by his flirtation, actually spoke to me. “I hope you’re pursuing something a bit more quantifiable,” he joshed. The people around him shrank visibly, probably concerned that I didn’t know what quantifiable meant and, maddened by frustration, would physically attack him. They weren’t far off.
But before I could say anything, Mr. Lee took control. He introduced each of us and described our projects. Art would be studying neuroscience; Tina: Japanese calligraphy; Samantha: media studies; Matt: astrophysics. Christopher was going to put Wordsworth in perspective. Bing: economic recovery in postwar Germany. And Susan: nineteenth-century costume design and its social relevance.
As he mentioned my topic, I looked from face to face. No one appeared all that impressed by my intellectual ambition, but no one laughed out loud either. It was as though my self-esteem, thirsting through a desert of alcohol-related escapades, had been administered a life-saving sip of water.
Over the course of that year I read about the insane yet telling history of fashion and what it reveals about women’s roles in society. I struggled to learn basic sewing skills and spent every extra penny (other than those needed to keep my hair in a state of advanced permed-ness and to buy enough booze to get started on the weekends—boyfriends always provided the booze to finish us off) to buy the equipment and materials to make my enormous reproduction ball gown. I enlisted the help of a whole host of women, from the local seamstress to the public librarian, all of whom became quite fascinated by the subject.
I also got to know my fellow DS students and soon began to appreciate the fact that I didn’t have to dumb down my vocabulary around them or pretend to be stupid to amuse them. That was something I’d learned to do in my early years at middle school to avoid the dreaded accusation: “Why do you always got to use such big words?”
The Directed Studies kids were so far outside my social circle they might have been my parents’ friends. But I grew to like several of them and they seemed to like me.
During the presentation at the end of the year, Christopher put Wordsworth into perspective (turns out he was pretty important). Tina gave a demonstration of Japanese brushwork. Matt talked about what he’d learned about astrophysics. And I came out on stage in a reproduction of a nineteenth-century ball gown complete with velvet bodice fastened by dozens of tiny buttons. The skirt was held out by a crinoline the size of a two-man dome tent and had a hidden pulley system to raise and lower different layers of jewel-toned satin. I talked about how upper-class women were put on pedestals as untouchable symbols of femininity and how their fashions made them literally remote. (I thought, but chose not to mention, that my tendency to projectile-vomit during benders had the same basic effect.) I discussed how during the Extravagant Period, fashion influenced architecture. Doors were made wider to accommodate the giant skirts. Women at the time wore dead birds and insects in their hair as decorations. I talked about how women drank vinegar to increase their pallor and did all kinds of other unhealthy things that made them fit a senseless standard of beauty. It was all very understandable in the eighties milieu. When the talk was over, I had an A in Directed Studies (the only one in my high school career) and had decided to go to fashion design school after I graduated.
The dream of going to college and the entire experience probably kept me in school. It made me realize that even though my lifestyle was fairly out of control, I could still relate to people who didn’t party like their lives depended on it. And the fashion school goal was actually achievable, unlike a goal of going to university. I learned this from Mr. Lee’s wife, who was the guidance and career counsellor. She helped me find an institution with achievably low standards. The best thing of all was that the school was in Toronto, which, I was fairly sure, was big enough to cure me.