I was expelled from school in the seventh grade for starting a rumor that a girl in my class was pregnant. It was a suspension really, but the school administrators used the words interchangeably. My mother kept my expulsion secret from her new friends in the military town we'd just moved to. But she had to meet with my school principal.
"Carole's deep," my mother told the principal, Mr. Barnes on that day.
Deep. That was one of my mother's words, one of the phrases she used to explain me. Occcasionally it was a compliment. Often it meant, "You're incomprehensible, Carole." If my mother called anyone outside my family "deep," she was awarding that person the highest praise. Most people were shallow, she told me. "Poor so-and-so," my mother often said. "You have to feel pity for her. She's a dumkupf, not smart like you. She's pretty, but you shouldn't feel jealous of her, she's not deep."
"Or maybe she's evil-minded," Mr. Barnes countered, pointing out how I was always late to school and took suspicious shortcuts through the woods. "The woods is a well-known hangout."
"A hangout for what?"
"Boys. Smoking. Getting in trouble."
My mother jiggled her nyloned leg. Whoosh-whoosh, the sounds of her calves brushing together reverberated in the silent room.
"Evil-minded?"
This principal was a small-minded man who gummed his lips like my grandfather. His small-mindedness infuriated but intimidated her. (Small-minded was another one of my mother's words.) Mr. Barnes was a young man who looked old, with no-colored hair slicked back, wearing a glare blue suit, yellow socks, and a silver cross on his lapel. She knew he was a part-time preacher. So was our new next-door neighbor, Mrs. Moxley, who lived in a pink stucco house and held Holy Roller prayer-meetings late into the night.
"Maybe being 'evil-minded' is a code word for being Jewish," my mother would suggest to me later.
As I squirmed in the principal's office on a straight-backed chair on one side near the door I felt stricken, cramped, ashamed of my behavior, helpless, all this talking in school, all my daydreaming out loud, all my new and dirty thoughts this year, out of my control. I was eleven years old, the youngest in class, the only girl who didn't have her period yet.
My mother assessed the situation from another straight-backed chair opposite the principal's desk, exuding a sleepy, neurotic, but lady-like, sensuality. The office was small and dark with thick Venetian blinds drawn against the late-morning sun and heat, motes of dust swirling in a single shaft of light where a slat angled, accidentally askew. A potted philodendron trailed along the window ledge like seaweed. I watched, narcotized, as if the air was viscous and I was drowning in this treacherous element of my new life.
My mother flicked her eyes at me, considered, then glanced away.
I waited for her to defend me.
"I can't imagine why Carole is late to school," she defended herself instead. "I wake her up on time every morning. I get her clothes ready, and make sure she bathes and has breakfast. I make sure she leaves for school in plenty of time. She dawdles, she's a daydreamer, but she's a very high IQ girl. You must know that from her records. She was asked to participate in the University of Chicago's gifted child's school but we didn't want to single her out as too different."
"We're always concerned when a child is too different," Mr. Barnes said, as if her bragging was an apology for me.
This year I felt so different from my classmates that I could well have been another life form.
My mother tilted her head as if eavesdropping on my thoughts.
She said to Mr. Barnes, "Do whatever you think is right."
Betrayed! How could my mother brag about me one moment and wash her hand the next? I saw then that my world whatever it was, was inscrutable to my mother, and bottomless. Once you started to fall, you fell in, nothing could stop you. She loved me, but she was afraid to reach out to me in front of people, in case she lost her footing and I pulled her in. She was a practical woman, yet a daydreamer herself, and I'd never be able to predict her. I felt myself sinking. She was all that I had. I wanted to swim out of the room, slowly, blindly, without drawing any attention to myself, but of course I couldn't.
Some behaviors, she would tell me later, weren't worth contemplating. Some people were too deep.
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"My Mother's Defense" is an excerpt from a Close Finishes, a memoir-in-progress which explores the convergence of the writer's own aging with her mother's death.