We had two or three weeks after getting home from camp to get ready for school, which started later than public school. In between shopping for our uniforms and school supplies, we spent days at the Belcrest pool or North Shore beaches; I met my friends in the parking lot for our usual games, but a summer away had created some distance between me and them. After we’d learned how to sail and shoot archery, our games of red light, green light and hide-and-seek had lost some of their charm.
Trump Management owned box seats a few rows up from the first-base line at Shea Stadium, home to the New York Mets, my favorite team. In the late sixties, my grandfather used them to curry favor with business associates or as sops to his cronies, but in the two years since winning the 1969 World Series, the Mets had made a long, quick slide and were widely considered the worst in baseball. Tickets had gotten harder to give away, so my grandmother gave us the leftovers, of which there were plenty.
There were a lot more day games back then, so on a random weekday Fritz and I, sometimes with Mom or Dad, sometimes on our own, took the 7 train to Flushing, baseball gloves in tow just in case a fly ball landed in our vicinity. I loved Shea. It was small and intimate—and usually more than half-empty. As the mellow summer afternoons softened gently into twilight, there was no better place to be on a late-summer day in New York, Sabrett hot dog in hand, than in a box, six rows up from the dugout.
I was excited about first grade but ambivalent about going to Kew-Forest. I had wanted to go to a school in the neighborhood, like all of my friends. Kew-Forest was a twenty-minute drive without traffic. During rush hour it could be considerably more. My parents told me the reason I couldn’t go to the elementary school that was only a couple of blocks away was because it backed onto the campus of Hillcrest High School, which, they’d heard, had frequent stabbings.
Either way, my attendance at Kew-Forest was preordained, not because Fritz and my cousin David were already students and all of my aunts and uncles had been, but because my grandfather was on the board of trustees at the school. There was no choice to be made.
My grandfather’s reputation preceded me. Very few people outside of New York City were familiar with the name Fred Trump, but within the five boroughs, especially Brooklyn and Queens, he was famous—a phenomenally wealthy real estate developer who probably had more money than everybody else at Kew-Forest combined. I never learned why he became a board member there. He had no interest in education and Forest Hills was far from his usual stomping grounds. Yet all of his children, except for his oldest son, went to Kew-Forest. After eight years at public school, my dad had attended St. Paul’s, an all-boys private school on Long Island. Donald’s time at Kew-Forest had been ignominiously cut short.
The trouble with Donald had started long before he entered school. At home, he tormented his little brother, Robert, a year and a half younger, and seemed to have nothing but disdain for everybody else, including, and perhaps especially, his mother. The kids in the neighborhood alternately despised and feared him; he had a reputation for being a thin-skinned bully who beat up on younger kids but ran home in a fit of rage as soon as somebody stood up to him.
Nobody liked Donald when he was growing up, not even his parents. As he got older, those personality traits hardened, the hostile indifference and aggressive disrespect that he’d developed as a toddler to help him withstand the neglect he suffered at his parents’ hands—from his mother because she was seriously ill and psychologically unstable, and from his father because, as a sociopath, he had no interest in his children outside of Freddy, who, at least initially, was being groomed to take over his empire. Even so, the interest wasn’t love—Fred Trump was incapable of loving anybody.
Donald’s reputation at school also preceded me. By second grade he was already known as a troublemaker who contradicted his teachers and resorted to physical violence when he didn’t get his way. He treated students who were smaller and weaker than he was, and his teachers, with the same contempt with which he treated his family. After he finished seventh grade, despite my grandfather’s place on the board, the school administrators made it clear that other accommodations had to be made for Fred’s obnoxious middle son.
Instead of fixing the problem, moving Donald to another school only transferred it elsewhere. At the time my father was mystified by the fact that Fred couldn’t control Donald, but I suspect my grandfather didn’t want to waste his time trying. He was happy to delegate the responsibility to the staff at New York Military Academy, a boarding school in central New York State that was essentially a rich kids’ alternative to reform school. Everybody in the family, especially his mother, was relieved when Donald was sent away.
At camp, my brother and I, separated as we were by that half-mile stretch of beach, might as well have been on opposite sides of the planet. At school, my brother’s classroom was diagonally across the hall from mine. Everybody knew who he was; there were only 350 students in the whole school, and only twenty students in each of grades one through six. Fritz was funny, athletic, and cute. Everybody loved him. Kew-Forest was not going to be a blank slate. At camp, almost nobody knew about my grandfather, and I was “Trump,” on my own terms, free of preconception or expectation. At school I would be Mary, my brother’s sister and, more significantly, Fred Trump’s granddaughter.
Having already been away from home for two months, I felt little anxiety about starting school. Our teacher was sweet and gentle, and I already knew how to read and write pretty fluently, so I wasn’t worried about the schoolwork.
But even though I loved the work, and I came to love my friends, some of whom would remain my friends for decades, there was always a tension in the background, aside from or adjacent to the issues with my family (and I wouldn’t understand that until much later). Even at the beginning, I felt like I had one hand—and sometimes two—tied behind my back. My asthma was getting worse. I missed a lot of school, and when I returned after having been in the hospital, I often felt depleted, with nothing to show for my time away but dark circles under my eyes. The knots in my hair continued to get bigger—or maybe it just seemed that way because the older I got the more self-conscious I became about them, as if they were a reflection on me and my lack of worth.
I lost touch pretty quickly with most of my friends from Jamaica. Fritz and I still spent most weekends at my grandparents’ house, and by the time I got home it was usually too late in the day to hang out. Plus, two days a week I took ballet and tap at a second-floor dance studio in South Jamaica with the daughters of my mother’s friends. I didn’t mind dancing, although I had no interest in it. I preferred ballet to tap, but I wasn’t particularly good at either, and I instinctively knew that even if I put a great deal of effort into it, I never would be.
I didn’t mind the girls, either, it’s just that we had nothing in common, something that became more obvious the older we got. We’d been going to each other’s birthday parties and hanging at the park with our mothers since we were little, but the dance classes had less to do with nurturing our friendships and more to do with our mothers wanting to take the adult class, and enrolling us made that easier to justify.
I remember the adult recital number—a cancan in a speakeasy set to “Big Spender,” the women in black-and-gold costumes, complete with feather headdresses and matching boas, mesh stockings, and high-heel tap shoes—much more clearly than anything I did at that school for the six years we were there, with one exception.
In order to participate in the recital, I had to wear a bun for the ballet performance. I didn’t want to. It was such a small thing, but the more my mother insisted, the more I dug my heels in. I didn’t object to the bun because I was a tomboy. I had been fine with it when the camp nurse had put my hair in a bun after she’d spent so much time detangling it. I had no problem wearing the tights, and the leotard, and the ballet slippers— I understood uniforms and what was required to participate in a discipline whether I was interested in it or not. And I wasn’t testing boundaries—I was usually a very obedient child, and though I stuck up for myself when I felt I’d been wronged, I never talked back.
But I drew the line at the bun, because giving in to my mother would have felt like relinquishing control over myself when I didn’t have to. The more adamantly I refused, the more she tried to force me; the more she forced me, the more adamant I got.
It meant so much to her, and she seemed so hurt by my refusal, that it made me angry. This was my first glimpse into the possibility that my mother didn’t see me as a being separate from her, with my own needs and preferences. She wanted to be the child who took ballet and got to wear the bun, but since that hadn’t happened, she wanted a daughter who wanted those things—and that wasn’t me.
I came back from camp stronger and more coordinated, and decided I didn’t need the training wheels on my bike anymore. The weekend before first grade started, Luca Lombardi removed them from my old-fashioned Raleigh, which weighed almost as much as I did. He and Teresa and I walked to the top of a hill that sloped down from the park entrance to the pond. They stood on either side of me, gripping the handlebars and back of the seat. The plan was for them to hold me until I found my balance and then give me a push in the hope that momentum and the sheer terror of falling would force me to stay upright. Fritz waited at the bottom of the hill in case I fell.
Luca’s cigarette dangled from his lips. Through a cloud of smoke, he said, “OK, stay on the bike and don’t crash into Fritz. Keep pedaling until you get to the bottom of the hill and then slowly step on the brakes. Otherwise, you might land in the pond.”
I nodded, suddenly not feeling as brave as I had when I agreed to this. “Hey, Fritz,” Luca yelled, waving to my brother. “You ready?”
Fritz gave a thumbs-up.
“Are you ready?” Luca asked me.
I was not ready. I nodded again.
“OK,” he whispered. And they let me go.