The Girl With Hearts On Her Pockets

Last night's dream was an unsettling one. Not a nightmare really, but unnerving somehow. I am still unsure what it means.

A winter storm was coming, a blizzard the likes of which we'd never seen. It hadn't arrived yet, but everyone was warned to be prepared. I was at home, alone. Where everyone else had gone I've no idea - it didn't seem to matter. You know how it is in dreams.

I looked around - the house was dark, and not warm, but the walls were sturdy and I figured I'd be all right if I chose to stay. At the same time, I'd had an offer - who knows how it came - from a group pf hippies who had set up a tent site on the edge of town. They were nice tents - more like yurts, really, specially insulated and heated - in which to ride out the storm.  There were 200 tents, the hippies said, and they had one for me if I wanted it.

I was doubtful at first. I didn't even know these people, and maybe it was best to keep to myself, but the hippies convinced me it was better not to be alone, especially in a storm like this.

The tents were set up in a field below mission hill, all of them bright white. All the people were dressed in white as well, although there was no obvious reason for this. It occurred to me that when the snow came we'd all be camouflaged, invisible to any predatory eye, though whether this was intentional or not, there is no way to know.

I was shown to my tent, which was indeed very nice, and put on my warm white clothes. I then went out to wander among the people in the field. All of them were strangers, and as usual I was feeling shy. Starting conversations has never been my strong point.

After making a few nodding acquaintances, I was surprised to be introduced to someone I already knew, a woman named Lori.

Stop. Wait a moment. You'll have to bear with me because here I must digress. It's not enough to just say Lori. There is a whole tale behind Lori. Well, for me, there is a tale behind Lori. For her, I do not figure into her story much, if at all.

It's the curse of being the one who remembers.

I met Lori in second grade. Probably I don't even have to describe her, because there is a Lori in every school, every class, most likely. Think back to your own schoolroom, or your children's schoolroom, and you'll see.

These days they call such girls "natural leaders" or somesuch, but to me at age 7, it was an ineffable power, a mysterious ability to control the social order simply by existing. Well, being the prettiest girl with the best grades and the nicest clothes helped, but even if I could see some of the mechanism, I couldn't see all of it. Whatever quality it was she had, I didn't have it, and I knew it.

This fascinated me.

I don't recall envying her so fiercely at first, but soon it was gnawing at my very soul. The searing pain of comparing oneself to others and coming up short.

Our characters were very different, Lori and I, but being a child I tended to see this in simple material terms. The school took a dim view of classism, but not so my family. 'Her parents are rich," my brother said, bluntly. "You can never be like her."

The type of things Lori owned that I could never have - her snoopy watch, satin jacket, spotless Keds and ribbon barrettes among them - took on even greater significance after that. And then there was the thing that I envied most of all, the point around which all my envy had begun to coalesce...her Luv It jeans.

Luv Its were the skinny, straight-legged jeans worn by the popular girls in school. Usually they had puffy satin appliques on the pockets, in all sorts of designs: hearts, stars, peaches, lipstick, ice cream sundaes like the ad above. Sometimes the less popular girls would wear cheap knock-offs but you could always tell. That little Luv It tag (with the red heart with a bite out of it) conferred great social capital in that time and place.

Having spent spent many hours sitting at my desk behind Lori's, staring at the row of satin hearts on her pocket, it was clear to me that I needed whatever power those jeans could manifest. If there was no way to swap myself out and live another person's life, it seemed the jeans might be the next best thing.

My mother nearly did a spit-take when I told her how much they cost. "24 dollars!" she shouted, appalled. "you must be crazy." It was the same conversation many unpopular girls were having that year.

I did eventually get a pair of Luv Its, though I'd have to wait until the Christmas I was 9. They had 4 stars on each pocket, like so:

I adored them, don't get me wrong, but the moment I put them on, I understood that I would only ever be an impostor. The jeans did not confer Lori-ness. I was still just a nobody wearing Lori's jeans.

...

After changing schools, I didn't see Lori again until we took driver's ed together the year we were 15. By then, Lori was busy doing the sort of things that upper-middle class girls do to prepare for the future. Rainbow Girls, Junior League, twirling lessons - you know the drill. By that time, I was modelling for a punk rock hair salon, so it was obvious to anyone with eyes that we were on different life paths. Lori would chair committees and be president of the PTA, and I would be...god only knew.

But still. I remember standing outside the temp trailer, listening to her talk about Days Of Our Lives when a sort of shudder went through me. All that potential, all of that golden light, channeled into being perfectly, sensibly and competently dull.

Perhaps that's too harsh. I'm sure people who do such things get something out of it, that there must be some worthy achievement there. It's just that I've never understood it. Garden clubs, museum boards and the like always seem to be filled with well-dressed ladies with manicured, venomous claws. But then, since that elementary school experience, social maneuvering has always left me cold.

Anyway, it does seem Lori's life has turned out just as she planned. I haven't seen her in years, but one hears things, you know. Married with 2.5 children and dog. A lovely home in a tony suburb. President of the parish council and indeed, the PTA.

So you can imagine she was the last person I'd expect to turn up among a bunch of hippies in my dream. Dream? Oh, yes, that dream I was telling you about....

I shook the now grown-up Lori's hand and said "I don't know if you remember me." She said, "oh, of course I do" and I replied "well, we have known each other since the age of 7."

Just then, though, my hand began to bleed, ghastly red dripping all over our clean white clothes. I apologized, although I couldn't quite explain it. "It's no problem" Lori was saying, but by then I had noticed that the blood had run into the lines of my palm - the left palm, the lines that mark the potential with which you were born.

That's when I woke up.

...

I still don't know what it means, though the blood in my fate lines is a probably a clue. But it seems awfully late in the day to mourn something that I never was. I've long ago given up the poisonous  envy that marred my childhood, if that was the point.Then again, perhaps I'd suddenly become stigmatic, which would mean something else entirely. And just what was Lori doing there, anyway? Unless the dream was saying that the storm we were waiting for would come for us all, junior leaguers and hippies alike.

It remains to be seen. I'm keeping my eyes open.

*It would be disingenuous to say I never had any of the things in the link above. I did manage to accumulate many of those kinds of things but it was later, after my teachers started saying I looked like Brooke Shields and suddenly out of nowhere I had some value.

The Tale of Heinrich and Peggy*

*names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the awkward.

Heinrich and me

Heinrich was a friend of mine, in part because he was friendly to everyone, but mainly because we were weird. I don't mean the benign sort of weirdness that seems to be an esthetic choice, but the deep-down, painful sort of weird that necessitated many school lunch hours spent hiding in the library.

I guess there's a special bond that springs up between those who could never fake normal long enough to blend in.

As an adult, I tried - somewhat successfully - to channel my blatant strangeness into a more genteel eccentricity. Heinrich, on the other hand, had given up any charade of normalcy and just let his freak flag fly. The first time I saw him, he was wearing a headscarf, love beads and a Brooks Brothers suit, running furiously from something I couldn't see. "it's the Nagual!" he said, desperately. "it's after me! What should I do?"

Now, if Heinrich had said something like "how are you?" I might have been at a loss as for what to say, but being weird, I was perfectly equipped to handle this one. "Well, first you have to find your center." I told him. "Do you know any yoga?"

"Yoga! Perfect!" he shouted, catapulting himself into a complex ashtanga pose in the grass next to my front porch. "Why didn't I think of that?"

So began my friendship with Heinrich.

Peggy

On the other side of the courtyard, my neighbor Peggy watched all this with a disapproving eye. "You certainly have some strange friends" she said, meaningly. I shrugged. What could I say? Peggy was a very conventional girl. Not that there's anything wrong with being conventional. Conventional people tend to have an easier time in life; they face fewer struggles achieving their goals than those who are congenitally unable to fit with the crowd. But I can't pretend to truly comprehend them. Our values were very different, Peggy's and mine. I couldn't understand why she collected cow creamers. She couldn't understand why I worried about karma. But people are people, and they are what they are.

Heinrich and Peggy

As time progressed though, something strange happened...Peggy fell in love with Heinrich. The first sign of this was when she came down to the sidewalk where we were making chalk drawings and proceeded to put the moves on him. It was so very odd, Peggy twirling his hair and saying "why don't you come up and see me sometime" like a sort of ersatz Mae West that Heinrich at first couldn't figure out why she would want him to. "Er. Well, okay. Sometime." he said, nonplussed.

Peggy did not give up, however, and eventually Heinrich got the message. They went out on a few dates. That's when the war between the conventional and the unconventional began.

One of the reasons, I think, that Heinrich and I had such a fond friendship was because I understood that in his basic nature, he was a free spirit. He was a bit like a butterfly and about as harmless. He would flit around to other places and people, but sooner or later he'd flit back. When he did, one accepted him for what he was. There was no reason to expect different from him, really. To do so would invite disappointment.

"Disappointment" is a mild word for what soon began emanating in loud shrieks from Peggy's apartment whenever Heinrich was around. "Put on some proper shoes, you can't wear sandals in winter!" "No normal person drinks wheat grass juice!" "It's Saturday night, you're supposed to be here with me, not out playing guitar for hobos at the park!!" and so on and so forth. Finally, one night, there came the topper: "You must do as I say, Heinrich, because DAMMIT, I AM OLDER THAN YOU!!"

Heinrich, feeling the iron fist of authority bearing down on him, fled from Peggy even faster than he had from the Nagual. It was no surprise, really. As I said before, Peggy was a conventional girl, and while she may have fancied Heinrich in his natural state, no sooner had she got him than she tried to make him into a conventional boyfriend. It was doomed enterprise from the start

The story does not end there, however. Of course it doesn't, tales of lovers scorned rarely do. Besides, you're probably wondering how the shoe at the top of the page comes into this. Well, I will tell you.

In which the story becomes kind of embarrassing

Peggy was not pleased at Heinrich's having fled and was determined to get him back. No such luck. He was not interested. As he explained to me, he worried that spending time with Peggy was hindering his spiritual development. Well, he didn't use those words exactly. What he said was that he was worried her negative vibes were polluting his aura. Pretty much the same difference. We both agreed that there were better matches out there and that it was best to move on. He went on his way, seeking solace among a more accepting group of friends. That's when Peggy started stalking.

She pretended she wasn't, mind you, and was just happening to turn up wherever Heinrich went, but because we lived just across the way from each other, I knew she spent hours tracking his location by phone and planning her next move. It was in this way that she scored an invitation to a party given by a friend of Heinrich's friends - and Heinrich was going to be there. I wasn't going to the party, myself, but that evening still managed to produce one of the stranger images that has ever jammed itself into my memory.

The evening of the party, about 6 PM, Peggy sailed out onto her balcony. I knew she'd been in her apartment getting ready, since music was drifting from her windows and the front door was propped open with her cow-shaped doorstop, but this was the first time I'd seen her. She'd traded in her usual pantsuit and SAS shoes for a flowing patchwork dress and a pair of lace-up witch boots. Well, this was unusual. It really wasn't Peggy's style. Something about it bothered me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps the outfit was meant to impress Heinrich, I thought. If so, it was a miscalculation, since Heinrich was more likely to be impressed if she'd woven a dress out of cornshucks than any store-bought clothes. No, something was really off here. I didn't realize what it was until she began to dance.

A Maroon 5 song had come on the radio and this must have inspired Peggy, because she began to whirl and sway with a dreamy look on her face. As she added more dramatic movements to her dance and began to pirouette across the balcony, I realized - oh, holy hell, she was imitating me!

I mean, not that I'd ever dance around in public to Maroon 5, good god, no, but I could recognize my own peculiarities of style and gesture recycled by someone else. Actually, recycled is the wrong word. It was more like a fashion designer finding a strange, random dress at a charity shop and recreating it for Bloomingdale's or something. Peggy, who had the gift of being normal, was attempting to co-opt my own weirdness in order to fit in. Well, it was certainly interesting. But it didn't work. Not even close. It was pure fakery through and through, and it irritated me.

For years now, I've pondered why I found Peggy's imitation that night so unsettling and distasteful. What was it to me, really, how Peggy chose to act? It's not as if I'm in love with my spacey demeanor or my rummage sale clothes, or any of the other things that make people look at me as if I'm an alien. It's not as if I feel any proprietorship over such things. Some of my qualities, I would have traded many times over just to not have the stigma of being different. But that's the answer, isn't it? What Peggy didn't understand is that for Heinrich and me and many of the other misfits who clung together like survivors on a raft, being weird wasn't a costume we could put on and take off when it was convenient. For people like us, being unconventional was never a choice.

Perhaps Peggy found out the hard way. Certainly she came home from the party in a foul mood sans boyfriend, and I never saw the patchwork dress or witch boots again. And Heinrich, he again went on his way, eventually flitting off to a far country where he finally felt at home. That was the end of Heinrich and Peggy, and I guess if there is any moral to this story, it's that one should accept people for who they are, and to thine own self be true. Peggy was a conventional girl with conventional ways, and it would have been better had she embraced that than pretended to be what she wasn't.

Then again, a few months later, Peggy married a burglar she caught breaking into her apartment, which is far weirder than anything I've ever dreamed of doing, so really...what do I know? :p