Rosalie Hirsch

 This was not supposed to be happening. I was in class. But that’s how it goes. Clearly you don’t always get to choose when you remember trauma, it simply appears. This time it was triggered from a short story class. The class was supposed to be fun, something to distract me from the months of quarantine. I clutched my printed copy of ‘Rubberdust’ in my hands, likely the only person in the online class to have printed out a hardcopy, and felt myself launching backward in time. The author of Rubberdust had carefully framed a story about a girl’s rotten experience in 4th grade and in so doing, she catapulted me back to my own 2nd grade mess.

I had never remembered 2nd grade as a good year, but nobody really talks about 2nd grade much. I hadn’t thought of it at all until my high school graduation party when Brian’s mom made the cake for my party. I had intentionally forgotten all about him. Or, at least that’s what I had thought. Seeing his mom did bring some of it back, but again, I pushed it from my mind and went on forgetting.

Now, sitting here in my posh study, listening to the actor read our story for the week over zoom, I found myself back in McMurry Lab School. Not at all in the present.

I started at McMurry in second grade. My parents had me on the waiting list a few days after I was born, like every other parent in town. When the entire town puts their newborns on the wait-list, it takes a while to get in. You have to wait for a current family to move out of town in order to open up a spot, and then it has to be in the right grade. Tricky business.

My spot in Rosalie Hirsh’s class opened up the summer I turned seven. I didn’t want to go, because the only thing worse than going back to the school I knew, was going to a school I didn’t know. I was painfully shy, and I mean that literally. In today’s society I would have been diagnosed with social anxiety. It physically hurt to be in school, away from my mom, away from safety, and forced to interact with people. It was terrifying.

If I could have arrived at school, done my work, and gone home without ever having to speak to another soul, it would have been infinitely better. But for anyone who has attended second grade, you know that is not an option. To make matters worse, my new classroom housed a mixture of kindergarten, first, and second graders. I found this insulting. I had already done kindergarten and first grade! Why on earth should I spend time with the younger kids now? But that was how the ‘Primary Unit’ worked at McMurry. Collaborative learning, they called it.

Rosalie, who insisted on being called by only her first name, informed us that we were lucky to be able to learn from our peers and also model our very best behavior as an inspiration to our fellow classmates. Even at seven I found her attitude childish and possibly even dangerous. To say Rosalie was an unusual adult is understating the reality I lived. She was incompetent at best.

It was 1976 and Rosalie wore her brown hair parted down the middle and falling to her shoulders. Her curls were unruly and looked like they came from spending all night in oversized curlers. She dressed in either polyester pantsuits or dresses that buttoned down the front. As a teacher though, she did everything differently.

She was soft spoken, and if she ever got upset with the class or wanted us to be quiet, she simply got quiet herself. She would turn off the lights and then go find a chair somewhere and sit down, refusing to talk until every last child was silent. Most of the time, kids would gather around her and sit on the floor, waiting for her to expel knowledge, but not always. Typically at least one kid would remain playing quietly somewhere, lost in their own thoughts or gluing something together with rubber cement.

Rosalie would then whisper, “Adrienne, why don’t you come join us? We’re getting ready to do something important and I would hate for you to miss out!”

So it was an ‘invitation.’ Can you imagine a classroom today where participation was optional and by invitation, not direction, from the teacher? Insane.

I only found out much later that not every teacher at McMurry’s was off-their-rocker. Rosalie was the only one. Just lucky I guess, that I got to have that experience. It may have been her only year there. I forgot to check.

You may be wondering if Rosalie’s eccentricities were enough to launch me into a trip down memory lane, rendering me incapable of paying attention to my online short-story class, too emotionally overwrought to think. I can assure you that while her bat-shit-oddities may have been entertaining for some, it was not what I remembered most about second grade. Noteworthy, yes, but it ran deeper than that.

These are the facts:

At some point during the year, a first grade boy named Brian decided that it was ok to come up to me and plant a full kiss right on my lips. I don’t remember much about the first time it happened because it became a daily thing. Eventually there was nothing to differentiate between incidents. Ultimately, it became a multiple-times-a-day-thing.

I’m sure that the first time he did it, my shock and embarrassment were both so overwhelming to me that I hid. And no, I did not ‘say anything’. I probably didn’t say anything at home right away either. Why? Because kids are like that. They have an incredible ability to live in the moment. Adults pay good money to their therapists to figure out how to do that very thing. Adults have to train to become mindful. Our brains are so used to multi-tasking it’s truly difficult to tell ourselves to stop and just be. We can’t let anything go. Kids however, can. And they do.

When I got home, I was so happy to be there and so happy to be away from Kissing-Brian that I disassociated completely. I was free, at home. But every day was another trauma. He kissed me by the lockers, in the lunch line, on the playground. It was wet and gross and I couldn’t stand him. Keep in mind, I didn’t want to be spoken to, let alone kissed! It was an outrageous breech of my personal space. I grew more and more afraid. I tried to hide. I tried to keep my face down. It was no use. He found me everywhere and he got bolder and bolder with each landed kiss.

My parents finally realized something was terribly wrong because I hated going to school. I was fine at home, but any mention of school brought me to open panic. There is nothing like watching a child who is afraid. I trembled, I begged, I cried. They had no idea why. I woke up every morning with a stomachache and I would cling to my Raggedy Ann doll, refusing to get out of bed.

At some point, they managed to procure my confession regarding my deep-seated hatred for school and contempt for my teacher. Somehow, they convinced me I would have to talk to her about Brian. Not only that, I would have to talk to Brian. They insisted that the first step was me telling him he had to stop. I think there was a huge part of both of them that believed if I simply told Brian he was making me uncomfortable, and that he had to stop kissing me, he would. I think they even believed that once Rosalie knew, she would intervene. She would punish Brian for overstepping the bounds so outrageously.

I could not imagine having this conversation with either Brian, or Rosalie, but I promised my parents that I would try. They were firm believers of doing the right thing, and the right thing here meant you had to speak up and tell someone to stop behaving badly - and then they would!

If only it had been that easy! It would have changed my worldview. But no, it didn’t happen that way. I arrived at school, and as soon as he could, Brian kissed me. I surprised him by talking, to be sure, and he even listened.

“Brian! You have to stop kissing me like that. I don’t like it at all and you’re not allowed to do that again.”

I was proud of that. I had strung together more words for him than I had for any person outside of my family in my entire life. I couldn’t wait to see the power of my words. I didn’t like using them, but I was looking at this as if the words were truly a magical agent, ready to set me free.

Instead, he responded with a laugh, and another kiss.

I was terrified. And he would be terrified now too. If he had done this in our current social setting, his incessant repeated kissing without my consent would fit the definition of sexual harassment, or even sexual assault.

But NOBODY was talking about sexual harassment in 1976, at least not in McMurry elementary. And truthfully, it was not the sexual nature of his action that bothered me. I didn’t feel sexually assaulted (perhaps because I didn’t have any concept as to what that even was), but I hated that he was allowed to touch me in such a gross way and nobody cared.

I was so angry that I marched over to Rosalie and told her I needed to talk to her. Not only was I mortified that Brian wouldn’t listen to me, and kept kissing me, but I was mortified that my parents advice had not worked. How could this be? Surely she could handle this.

Nope. Rosalie told me that I was a very rude young lady to interrupt her while she was working. I apologized and told her that it was important. She told me it would have to wait. I waited for what felt like forever, and she finally raised her eyebrows, looked down her nose at me and said, “Yes, dear? What do you need?”

I needed for Brian to stop kissing me! I explained how awful it had been. She listened with only mild interest and then offered me this:

“Well, that sounds like something you and Brian need to work out together. Why don’t you ask him to join you on the couch over there and you two can sort out your feelings?”

Yes. She suggested that I ask the kid who could not keep his hands off me, to join me on the couch, where we could share our feelings with each other?

Maybe you’ve never had anyone bother you endlessly. But if you’ve ever been touched repeatedly, unwantedly, and then been absolutely ignored - the rest of this tale is for you.

As you can imagine, I declined Rosalie’s advice and did not offer myself up to Brian on the couch. I went home and told my parents, and they decided to meet with the principle. He seemed completely incapable of doing anything at all to help. It does not escape me that he now works for a highly respected and experienced management consulting firm. Oh wait - he’s also a motivational speaker. Sure! But, he couldn’t get a first grader to stop kissing a second grader even when it was clear it was bothering the second grader so much it was making her sick? Interesting. It is also why he did absolutely nothing when I decided to quit school with 2 weeks left in the year. But that comes later.

Next we meet my grandmother. Maybe not every single weekend, but most weekends, my family traveled an hour by car to visit my grandma and grandpa. All of us loved to visit them. At some point, I overheard my mom and dad start to tell my grandma about the problems I was having at school. I didn’t want to hear it because I didn’t want to think about it, so I went outside to play with the dog.

Pretty soon, grandma came outside and asked me to sit next to her and just rest for a minute. She even brought me a fun-sized snickers so that I would agree to quit running around for a second. I happily plopped down next to her on the lawn chair.

“Your mama and daddy just told me about what’s been happening to you at school.”

I took in a breath and looked up at her.

“So, I’m going to tell you how to fix this once and for all. D’you here me?”

She had about the most serious expression on her face that I’ve ever seen. I agreed to listen.

“Ok. Next time this young man comes up to you and kisses you, you’re going to look at him dead in the eye and tell him, ‘If you do that one more time mister, you’ll be sorry. I promise you that.’”

I told her that I had tried that but it didn’t work - but she waved her hand and cut me off.

“I know what you tried, and believe me. That won’t work. I’ve been teaching kids for over 30 years now and I think I know a thing or two about how they think. No. You tell him what I just told you and you be ready, because he’s going to laugh and come at you again for another kiss.”

I dropped my head, horrified. This was never going to end.

“Listen missy - here’s what happens next.”

Glancing up at her, I’ll never forget what she said.

“When he starts coming at you, you’re going to haul off and kick him where it counts with everything you’ve got. You understand me?”

The problem was, I didn’t. Where does it count? I asked her, and thankfully, she did not laugh. She stood up and showed me.

“You want me to kick him in the crotch?” I thought I must’ve misunderstood.

“I do. As hard as you can. I guarantee you, he will never kiss you again.”

“But grandma, that’ll hurt him? And I’ll get in a lot of trouble!” I could not believe what I was hearing. My grandmother practically lived in a church. How could this be her advice?

“It will hurt him. You’re right about that. But it will also fix this problem. You do want him to stop right?”

I nodded.

“Ok then. This will make him stop. And as far as you getting in trouble - I can promise you that won’t happen.”

“How do you know grandma?”

“This is not my first rodeo.”

Come Monday, I was well prepared. I had gone over the plan with my parents, and they told me that if I did get in trouble, that they would come right to school and pick me up and fix everything. But they both gave me their blessing on kicking Brian. Where it counted!

For whatever reason, the dreaded kiss did not come until recess that day. He surprised me on the playground with one and I launched into my speech.

“Brian. Do that again and you will really regret it. I promise you that.”

And just like grandma said, he laughed, he leaned in again, but I was ready. My leg was swinging back, and by the time he leaned in again, I thrust it all the way forward between his legs and kicked him with every ounce of energy I had. He dropped to the ground instantly. Noiselessly too, at least for a few minutes.

Kids rushed to see what had happened, they asked me about it and I said I couldn’t be sure. I saw a teacher coming over so I went off to the swings and got back in line. Someone helped Brian in to the nurse’s office but nobody, not one person from the school ever asked me one thing about it. Brian never came near me again. Even so, with about two weeks left in the year, I decided I genuinely did not trust or like Rosalie, and I told my parents that I wouldn’t be going back to school until next year. To my shock and theirs, they never questioned that. When the almighty, powerful, yet impotent principle called to find out why, they had a conversation with him that I believe now was the driving force in him deciding to get out of education and launch a career in consulting and motivational speaking.

Thinking about it now, I realize how differently it would be handled today. Perspective is everything. Their attempt at PC didn’t work. Sometimes you gotta go with your gut.