Kirsti Sandy
I was at work.
But you’re 12, Leslie insisted. It’s not a real job.
I was too young to know what a real job was, and I also knew that Leslie could afford to go through her entire life without ever having a real job, so I didn’t know what to say to that. I was getting paid $1 an hour which involved making “light meals” for four children, getting them from the bus stop after school, some laundry folding, and making sure no one died.
“Well, come to the mall Saturday,” Leslie said. “Can’t your mom drop you off? I think Nella can pick you up.” Nella was their nanny or maid. She was their family’s me.
You can probably tell by now that it was in the early 1980s, so early that the Disco station in Boston, KISS 108, still played only Disco. My family lived in Andover by way of Lowell, which you can probably tell only if you are from the area.
You can probably tell that, of the two of us, Leslie was in charge.
I was using my parents’ hand-me-down binders for school. One was raincloud gray, with the cardboard underneath the vinyl pressed up at the sides, from water damage, and the other was red and had the hand-drawn Van Halen logo on the front, though I secretly preferred Olivia Newton John and the Muppet Movie soundtrack.
There was no logical point, they assured me, in buying school supplies when there was an abundance of abandoned three-ring binders, practically new, clogging up the supply rooms and closets of the Lowell public schools where they worked, my mother as a fourth-grade teacher and my father as a school psychologist and part-time college adjunct. School supplies were there for the taking. All my drawing paper was the back of mimeographed quizzes and worksheets, and I will never forget the shame of my father realizing I’d drawn and written a story on an actual stack of quizzes. He had to hand them back like that, which the college students thought was cute and my father and I found mortifying.
So this is when learning to separate what is usable and what is not became really important.
This is what I wanted: a Trapper Keeper, the brand name securely printed in the upper right hand side, with either the chestnut horse in the green field or two fluffy gray kittens with a green background. The difference between an actual Trapper Keeper and a regular three-ring binder was significant. It was hard to explain to my parents (though I tried) why it mattered that you could keep everything in one place and not have everything mix or fall out while you were working. The commercial helped—that one where a bully knocks a boy’s binder out of his hands and papers go flying. Trapper Keepers were bully-proof. A note, a secret, a paper with a bad grade on it—that stayed hidden until you undid the Velcro as you would a constraining undergarment.
“So what did Cathy say today?” Leslie asked. I was straining boiled hotdogs to serve with carrot sticks for dinner but who were we kidding? The kids ate food with cartoon names: Dingdongs, Combos, and Wacky Wafers, before and after dinner—dinner was the snack.
Leslie had learned to call the house where I babysat instead of my actual house. The parents didn’t know, and the boys were too young to care about me tying up the line. The Cathy she referred to was the only other girl in our circle who didn’t have money—and Andover had all kinds of money. In Lowell, I had thought there was only one kind, but I knew now that there was old money, new money, tech money, and pretend money. We were “no money,” but Andover poor wasn’t poverty or even close. If you were truly poor you lived in Lowell or Lawrence. Andover poor was Cathy and me---the girls whose parents were thrifty, who lived in modest ranch houses or split levels, who cut coupons and couldn’t afford private school. Leslie and Kelly lived in pristine mansions in subdivisions with sidewalks, on the edges of golf courses. They had garages and Kelly even had a vacation house on an island.
“Oh, she said that Kelly was always complaining about Rob and that Rob was saying he was going to break up with her anyway,” I said, almost too quickly.
“That bitch,” said Leslie. “I can’t believe her. What did she say Kelly complained about? Was it the whole thing at the arcade?”
“How’d you know?” I answered, not missing a beat.
My second job, for which I was compensated in friendship with two rich, popular girls, even though I was neither pretty nor rich, with my greasy hair that wouldn’t hold a feathered style, freckles, and thick thighs, was to provide regular and detailed intelligence on Cathy. Cathy was peripheral. She had other friends, but those friends were one rung down on the social ladder and didn’t matter. Like me, she wore generic Levis and the cheapest cloth Nikes they made, which were blue and yellow rather than the hipper white leather with navy blue. Like mine, Cathy’s body was ungainly, not athletic, but unlike me, she made errors I would never have made. She revealed too much about what she did and didn’t have, about what she wanted. She and Kelly had been best friends in elementary school, until Leslie came along and convinced Kelly of her worth. Leslie, with her ringleted hair, real diamond earrings, and Fair Aisle sweaters, was the ringleader and Kelly, tall and ponytailed, was her sidekick.
Leslie would call and ask me, every few nights, for a report on what Cathy had said about her and Kelly that week. And then we would talk about Cathy, and how she was the problem, and what Leslie had heard about her. That Cathy had stained a chair in math class when she first got her period, and hadn’t covered the stain with a book when she went off to the bathroom. That she had made up a boyfriend at another school. That her mother’s new husband was a janitor at the high school.
“And she talks about us!” Leslie huffed. We’d have these long conversations, me commiserating about how wrong Cathy was to talk behind Kelly’s back. Leslie was grateful, the understanding between us that I was helping her protect Kelly. I was loyal, a good friend. She depended on me.
One thing I forgot to mention, just now: I was lying about all of it. Almost everything I reported Cathy had said was a lie.
It’s strange to think that my lying could have something to do with innovations in the world of school supplies, but I am convinced it did. The inventor of the Trapper Keeper, E. Bryant Crutchfield, had the idea when he read a demographic report about changing trends in education—bigger classes, less time between classes, more loose paper to keep track of. Trapper Keepers let kids be organized—in the words of one often-quoted preteen market subject, it “helps me keep track of all my shit.”* You had removable folders for each class, and everything remained secure as you moved from class to class. When Kelly or Leslie would pass a note in class I’d stick in my binder pocket and hope for the best. Usually the notes were harmless. Love Ya Lots with one of the L's starting both “love” and “lots.” Or “Who do you like” with three boys’ names, and you had to circle one. Sometimes something about Cathy’s clothes or something she had said. They were still friendly to Cathy’s face at that point.
You might guess that the story will end with something falling out of my binder, something that was found by Leslie, or Kelly, or Cathy, or someone who would share it with them. That would be the better story, probably.
But remember, I had a job. Which meant income, which meant I could just buy my own Trapper Keeper with the horse on the cover, a secure place to store all my papers and all the notes passed to me in class. When I needed a folder for a class, I’d pull it out, but I had to organize it all correctly in the first place for this to work. This mindset was useful. I could be a sympathetic friend for Cathy when needed, I and an informant to Leslie, and as long as I kept it all straight, it would work. I managed a household of four kids—how hard could this be?
The phone call, when it came, was made to my own house, when I was home.
I was on my blue and white gingham canopy bed, listening to the Beatles on my turntable. I shut the music off.
“So what did Cathy say today?”
I don’t remember what I told her. But she was strangely silent as I went on and on.
“You know I didn’t say that,” Replied a voice that was no longer Leslie’s. It was Cathy.
The three of them were sharing the phone.
After forty three years I still don’t understand why I stayed on the phone for two hours while the three of them proceeded to call me a liar, a backstabber, and a betrayer. But it didn’t stop there. I was ugly, low-rent, and no one liked me. I had been lucky to have been accepted by them, and this was how I repaid them.
I tried, weakly, to defend myself.
“I did tell you that Cathy wanted to be closer friends with you again,” I said.
“But all the lies!” Cathy was outraged.
Suddenly Cathy was in their good graces again. And I was out.
My mother could hear me crying and had picked up the kitchen phone to listen in.
“Girls,” she said. “Time to hang up.”
I was so distraught I couldn’t go to school or work the next day. My mother called my babysitting family and told them I was sick with a sore throat. More lies. I felt little remorse for lying to Leslie, because it seemed justified given an already uneven playing field. And it’s not as though I hadn’t expected it—I had read Judy Blume’s Blubber, but the girls in that story seemed meaner, and the main character still had her best friend. As I lay on my bed, in the room that my mother transformed twice a year by moving the furniture around, I felt unmoored, adrift. I needed a way to reorganize my life, and fast. My mother, no stranger to reinvention, her Lowell accent already barely perceptible, was already on the case.
What was usable, in the end, was that feeling of plumbing the depths. I never spoke to Cathy or Leslie or Kelly again, and when I thought of them the memory seemed more like an after-school special than an actual lived experience. One year later, it was as though I’d been plunked out of one Hollywood middle school television show set and right into another: a Catholic school uniform, concrete playgrounds, tiny classrooms with forward-facing desks, a view of the city instead of a groomed soccer field. When my friends came over, they marveled at my house, my yard. In my backpack was my Trapper Keeper, the one with the horse on the cover. You could drop it and everything stayed inside, but you had to stay organized, put each piece of paper in the right place or start all over each time.
Each story in its own place, the girl in it trapped inside like a ladybug in winter. Finding her, letting her out before she starves and desiccates: that’s the work.