At the start of my senior year, I was serving my class as vice president for the third year in a row and was also elected president of the student council. The Cosby Show debuted on NBC in September. With the show’s father, Cliff Huxtable, being a doctor like Daddy, and the middle daughter, Denise, looking kind of like me, there was finally a fictional family on the TV screen that resembled mine. I was glued to it every Thursday evening, reading it for guidance about how to be someone like me.
I turned seventeen that November, a few weeks after the presidential election that reelected Ronald Reagan. My best friend, Diana, made me a huge birthday locker sign filled with words and images cut from the pages of Tiger Beat, Seventeen, and other teen magazines. She’d woken up extra early to get to school in time to tape it to my locker before my arrival. We did this kind of thing for each other. Her birthday was earlier in November and I’d festooned her locker just two weeks before.
Something about turning seventeen made me want to look like the woman I was becoming. Getting ready for school that morning, I’d pulled the curling iron through my hair over and over again, and smoothed it into a nice, sleek, low ponytail that would hang from the nape of my neck. I’d spent a few extra moments on my makeup, carefully drawing the charcoal eyeliner across my lids, swishing the black mascara along my lashes, contouring my cheeks with chestnut blush, and painting my lips raisin. I’d selected a beautiful black wool dress to wear, a professional cut with long sleeves, a round neck, and the shoulder pads that were the fashion at the time. I’d pulled nylons over my strong calves and thighs, and, to finish the look, I wore a pair of black patent leather pumps that made me three inches taller. Decades later I would read a short story by Julie Orringer that described a middle-aged woman as “no longer ripening but not yet deteriorating.” Back at my house in Cherrywood on that November morning, I was ripening. Beautifully. And I knew it.
I drove the snowy route to school, pulled my car into a spot in the far parking lot, got out, and walked on tiptoe toward the main building, deftly avoiding the permanent fixtures of ice and lumps of hard snow that clumped on the asphalt in wintertime in Wisconsin. As I walked up to the main entrance of the school, I saw my reflection in the glass doors, my dark figure silhouetted against the bright white snow behind me.
I entered the school and headed left toward my locker, which was located in the bank reserved for seniors in the central hallway near the administration’s offices, conveniently close to everything. Even above the din of student voices and slamming lockers, I could hear my heels clicking with precision on the shiny cement floor.
I could already see the birthday locker sign fifty lockers in front of me, with its five sheets of white paper taped one to the next to the next in a sort of vertical column with shimmering silver ribbons taped to the top and sides spiraling out into the hall. I felt a surge of anticipation of the attention I would get that day. A friend shouted “Happy Birthday” as I made my way down the hall, and I nodded, smiled, and shouted, “Thanks!”
When I got to my locker I stood and admired Diana’s creativity, reading from top to bottom all the bits of language and imagery she’d gone to such trouble to cut out and glue on there for me. I opened the locker, put my backpack inside, and pulled out the books I needed for my first two classes. Then I turned and smiled at someone else saying “Happy Birthday,” clanged the locker door shut, and twisted the combination lock a few times. I strode down the main corridor toward my first class feeling like I owned the place.
Some unknown minutes later, someone took a thick black marker and wrote “Niger” in three places on my birthday locker sign. Even spelled incorrectly, I knew what they’d meant. I spotted it in late morning during the passing time between classes and immediately my mouth went dry.
I stood with my back against my locker, affecting casual, as the other students opened and shut their locker doors. After an excruciatingly long three minutes of metal scraping on metal and the roar of chatter and movement, and a few more “Happy Birthday’s,” the hall began to empty as kids went off to their next class. The bell rang, signaling the start of class.
I walked quickly toward the school office, which sat at the crossroads of this hallway and the other main hall. The hallway ramped up just before the intersection, and at the top of it I paused, my chest heaving, my mouth still dry. I had to get my shit together. The glass-walled office was around the corner to the right. I took a deep breath, then drew my spine up straight, smoothed my ponytail, straightened my dress, plastered my most pleasing smile on my face, and strode with casual confidence over to the glass door of the main office and flung it wide open.
As President of the Student Council I knew all the secretaries. Marie sat at the main desk and didn’t bat an eyelash over why I was not in class. I asked her if I could borrow a black Magic Marker. She fished around in her drawer. “Will this do?” I took the marker from her with a smile, thanked her, pushed the door open, and walked out of the office. At the intersection I scanned all directions, then turned left and walked quickly back to my locker. When I reached it, I looked down the long hallway once more to make sure no one was coming, and then, as the silence pressed down around me, I took the cap off the marker and began to draw neat black lines over each iteration of the word. I now had three black boxes where the words had been. I turned around and pressed my back into my locker, still clutching the marker, my knees sinking a little bit toward the floor.
At day’s end I took the sign home. In the privacy of my bedroom I pulled my senior year scrapbook from the bookshelf above my desk and opened it to the first blank page. There, I pasted my birthday locker sign accordion style, so that it could be completely unfolded to resemble what it had looked like hanging on my locker. Before closing the scrapbook, I took a pair of scissors and, like a surgeon excising tumors, removed the three iterations of the shameful word, then threw them in the trash. I closed the scrapbook and returned it to the shelf containing the recorded history of my childhood.