A “happy birthday” note to Aunt Sarah causes the Independent’s schoolteacher / diarist to reflect on rootlessness in New Haven. Also: The tragic romance of Weiner & Pickle.
March 7, 2006
For my 20th birthday, my aunt Sarah gave me a flying woman. The woman measures eight inches long and she’s suspended by a clear string. She has long flowing brown hair and wears a red and pink floral dress. She’s made entirely out of papier mache, even her hair and clothing, so she’s solid. She holds two real bird feathers in her hands. When she’s hanging up from the ceiling, it looks as if she’s soaring through the air with the help of those two white feathers, her pink flowers billowing and flowing around her as if she transcends the solid form she’s in.
My aunt explained to me that she pictured me as someone who can fly. I was in college at the time, and figuring myself out. I was always on the move, never in the same apartment or state or country for that matter. I was in Boston on Gainsborough Street, Mississippi on Hampton Circle, in Vermont on Lee River Road, back in Boston in the Back Bay, in Woods Hole in “B” House, in the Dominican Republic on the beach. I moved. A lot. And my aunt saw me as the flying woman—soaring through the air, wrapped in my own pink flowers and holding my own white feathers to help me.
The flying woman doesn’t have a face. I think that’s why it was so easy for my aunt to picture her as me, and for me to see myself in the flying woman. At times, when I felt closed in, I only needed to look at the flying woman, suspended next to a window, poised in the middle of a soar, to feel relaxed. I knew no matter how claustrophobic I felt in that moment in my life, I would get a chance to spread my arms like the flying woman and get moving again.
My flying woman is one of the most important things I have. Every new apartment I moved to I found a place for her immediately. Before moving in any furniture in my apartment in Mississippi, I hung her by the window in my new bedroom. In Rhode Island, when I moved into a new apartment during my first semester at the University, I hung her up above my bed so her flying would be the first thing I would see in the morning—reminding me I had made a good decision to move away from Boston. Her feathers helped her sway gently in my room in Woods Hole, when I left Northeastern for a semester to study Oceanography and to later sail in the Caribbean. I mostly needed my flying woman when I felt unsure and when I knew I was doing something bold. She made me feel at home.
When traveling, I kept my flying woman in a box that my snorkeling goggles came in. It’s a hard clear plastic box that fit the woman perfectly, even protecting her feathers. If I was driving to a new place, I always made sure to keep her in a place where she could see the light—on top of a box of belongings, or in the bag with my checkbook and passport in it. If I was flying to a new place, she was a carry-on item.
But for the past year and a half, since moving to New Haven, she’s been in her box on my bookshelf in my bedroom. When I lived at The Liberty, I couldn’t hang her up because the ceilings were too high for me to reach, so she rested on the bookshelf in her box facing the big window. And now in my new place on Wooster Square, she still sits in the box because the ceilings are too high to hang her properly for her to soar.
But ceiling height never stopped me before. I think it’s a matter of feeling like a place is my home that makes me feel comfortable enough to hang her up. The point is: New Haven is not my home. It’s where I live right now; but it’s not my home.
Three Christmases ago, my aunt gave me a small crystal ball. A laser had etched a dove in mid-flight into the center of the ball. She told me she pictured me that way still—flying and peaceful and crystal clear. That crystal, too, sits in its black box on my bookshelf, just beneath the flying woman. I don’t want to take either out of its box here. I want to keep both ready to move. I will move with them and I will take them out in my new place when I get there. The move I will make is a bold one and I see myself spreading my wings and soaring. I know the dove and the woman want to fly again and I’m ready to let them. But not here.
My aunt reminds me often of the flying woman and the crystal ball. She knows I belong in the air, gliding along with the wind and using that force to keep me up and to take me places. She says she’s proud of me for doing all the things I’ve done so far and she’s excited for me to do the things she down-deep knows I’ll do. My aunt is talking about me when she talks about the flying woman and the dove. She reminds me that I have wings. And even though they’ve been enclosed for a year and a half, I’m ready to use them again.
Happy Birthday, Aunt Sarah.
- * * * *
For 45 minutes in sixth grade, my boyfriend was Brian Corasaniti. He was the son of the vice principal at the local high school and we were both of Italian heritage. (This is important because there were so few of us in Vermont.) His nickname was Pickle because, in fifth grade, he referred to his mother as having a “pickle head” in front of Mr. Pedrin’s whole class. To this day, my friends and I still refer to Brian as Pickle. It was one of those nicknames that just stuck. It’s been 16 years since we were in fifth grade. It was a bad year for nicknames.
My nickname, also garnered in fifth grade, was “Weiner.” This was all due to an advisory teacher with an unfortunate Boston accent who had a loud role-call, and fifth graders’ proclivity for rhyming. “Gina” in Boston-ese sounds like “Geen-er.” The wiz kids in my advisory, namely Katie LaPier, Audra Way, and Jenny Mindell, took to rhyming my Boston pronunciation with “wiener.” Like Brian, I was referred to throughout all of my school days as a phallic food, either as “Weiner” or “Ween.” Not the most attractive of nicknames, nor the easiest to avoid laughing at. Couple the nickname with braces, glasses, and an unbelievably inconsistent growth pattern during puberty, and you have such a painful picture of a young girl that it’s no wonder I’m so sensitive to my own students’ name calling. (Needless to say, years later I was thrilled to get accepted to a college from which my nickname, upon application, was waitlisted and eventually rejected.)
So imagine being 12 years old and boy-crazy and trying to find a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. Katie LaPier got asked out by Ravi Parikh, Laurie and Andy were dating, Kate Edder and Nick were dating. All on Valentine’s Day. I just wanted to fit in. I just wanted a boyfriend and a red carnation and whatever other charm comes along with having a new boyfriend on the most love-filled day of the entire year. I wanted it.
I was in a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that sixth grade year—I was Charlie. We had after-school rehearsals and Pickle happened to be staying after, too. Maybe he had Dungeons and Dragons club. I don’t know. But whatever the case, I saw Pickle as the most viable option for a boyfriend.
“Listen,” I told myself. “He comes from a good family. His dad’s the vice principal at the high school—I could be famous if I got connected that way. He’s good in math. He wears polo shirts. He seems like a reasonable guy. I think he’ll be my boyfriend.” The more I thought about it, the more I thought we’d make a great couple. He had his sights set on Syracuse University—clearly he was college bound and I liked that. I had been thinking Skidmore—because my mom went there—so we’d at least be in the same state. Things were looking pretty good for us in the long run. I was getting excited. We might have children that could have Italian names. I’d even be able to keep my initials if we got married.
So somewhere in the middle of rehearsing Acts Two and Three of “Charlie,” I popped upstairs to have a talk with Brian.
“So here’s the deal, Pickle,” I said. We were standing in the hallway outside of the library. “Will you go out with me? It’s Valentine’s Day.”
He didn’t know I’d had our entire future planned out. And it was looking good, too.
And then he gave me an answer I wasn’t prepared for: “I don’t know. I have to ask my dad.”
Stop.
First, let me back up and say I was breaking my own parents’ rules. I was NOT allowed to have a boyfriend until 8th grade. I was two years early here. But my rationale was this: If Pickle and I were going to get married, we would need these early years together to be able to tell that great story of how we met:
No, we weren’t high school sweethearts—¬¶we were middle school sweethearts! We both went against our parents’ orders and secretly dated for two full years before we announced to our parents, in September of eighth grade, that we’d already established a fully-functioning, healthy relationship, built on mutual trust and respect. Gina and Brian: a match made in the after-school hours of Browns River Middle School. I could almost see people’s eyes well up with tears of happiness and fascination.
So he threw me for a loop when, in keeping with his Order of the World, he reminded me of Parental Permission.
But I’d had my mind set.
“Brian,” I said, using his real name so he’d know I was serious. “Come on. It’s Valentine’s Day. You don’t really need your dad’s permission. You’re in sixth grade. You can make your own decisions.”
“I don’t know,” he hesitated.
For 20 minutes I convinced him that we should be boyfriend and girlfriend.
I think maybe in the end we agreed and shook hands or something. Brian went back to D&D, and I went and told everyone I knew: Tracy Draper and my best friend Kristie (who at the time was dating Jamie Kreiger—¬¶those two were a long-term couple).
The reaction, across the board, was: “What?!” followed by a peal of laughter. This did nothing for my sense of accomplishment or self-worth.
Weiner and Pickle were a couple.
I could just hear the relish and hotdog jokes that would follow us for the next six years and well into our marriage. I spent the next 45 minutes in the bathroom with Tracy, trying to figure out what I’d just done and a way to undo it. I sat on the white sink in the yellow and tan tiled room in a state of panic. I had to end it. It would be torture for both of us.
The most humanitarian thing I could think of was to do a quick break-up. Make it fast, make it painless. Don’t draw it out. I could write a note and give it to Tracy to give to Pickle. I could also just go up and talk to him. We’d made almost a business agreement before, so we might as well just agree to end it, mutually and friendly. I didn’t like messy break-ups.
In the end—literally 45 minutes later—our relationship was over. I wasn’t proud. And I think Brian was more indifferent than anything. But it was over, and I was back to being a single girl just trying to make it in the world. My rose-colored glasses had been removed. And the world was a hard, harsh place, full of criticism and conformity.
I don’t know what made me think of this today, other than the fact that I work in a high school and am reminded every day of my own awkwardness when I see my kids. And there has been nothing in my life that has been more awkward than those 45 minutes spent in my BRMS first floor bathroom, debating how to end it with Pickle, even though our future together looked so grand.
