Tommy was his name. His father made millions of, and in, matches with which to light a fire or a cigarette, packed in those little boxes we all had in our kitchens.
The Match King’s princeling was blond, loud and at age eight, overweight. He was my very first bully.
I, too, was eight. Both of us were students at Roosevelt, an elementary school in New Rochelle, New York. But Tommy had standing; I had none. It was in May of that year when my family moved from the Bronx to Westchester, so I entered that school as the New Kid in a nipped-off school year which would end two months’ later.
Have you ever been the New Kid? There’s nothing romantic or cute about it. Not at age eight. Because third-grade kids are rotten creatures, cultish and highly selective. Sneery, icy rejection was the eight-year-old’s instinctive modus operandi.
No one broke rank, not one. I was ignored, even by the girl whose desk was next to mine. When any attention was paid, it came from small clutches of girls whispering and glancing my way at recess, out on our large playing field.
Then, too, the elemental entry test I took showed the New Rochelle school system that I was seriously deficient in math. So during the first weeks of my new life I had to attend an after-school remedial class. For some reason, the teacher looked down upon me with a cold face and spoke cold words. Seemed I was not only a new kid but a delinquent one, too, labeled an arithmatic flop, possibly dangerous.
My mom, hoping to help me generate a couple of friends, filled out a membership application to a local Girl Scouts troop. We paid a visit to a charming cottage where the troop gathered. There they were, a clutch of brown uniforms and an adult leader. The girls gazed at me impassively.
Rejection followed via a letter to my mother: the troop was too full. (In July, 2017, the New York Times had an article about a NYC Girl Scout troop founded for homeless girls. As I read it, I teared up.)
At eight years old, I had attained the status of pariah.
In a far corner of our big playing field was a swing set. There, at recess and after school, I sought and found solace, swinging away into fantasies of triumph, stardom or, at least, acceptance.
Then, in mid-June, I was given reason to hope. A rumor reached me that Tommy, the rich kid, was giving a big party at the end of the school year and everyone in our class would be invited.
The swing fantasies now coalesced into a moving tableau. I’d go to Tommy’s party, wearing a new yellow dress my mom had bought for me. I’d walk into that party and everyone would turn to look at me but instead of whispering among themselves, they’d smile and say hi. Immediately I would be popular.
Magical.
But where was the invitation? Every afternoon I’d go home from school to see if it was in the mail, but it wasn’t, not yet.
One sunny day at recess, when some kids were playing softball on the diamond, I was standing at the chain link fence behind home plate. Next to me was Don, a red-headed, freckled, shy kid who wore glasses. Don was the other New Kid at school. Neither of us had had the wisdom to combine our dual rejection into a defense, or friendship, something, so we stood silently.
Then Tommy, the Match King’s son, approached to issue a proclamation: “I invited everybody in the class to my party…except you!”
What happened then?
I walked home, down a sharply hilly and rocky dirt path through a ragged woodland strip. (Where, the following school year, I and a friend — yes, my social life gradually improved — saw a man exposing his penis to us. Pink and white. We thought it was a hankerchief, and ran to my house, giggling uneasily, and told my mom. Who, out of our earshot, made some phone calls.)
Why did I remember my hurt, insignificant in comparison to what I now know can happen to children who were not me? Because it is what happened. It isn’t to be disappeared or made epical. And although I didn’t have the psychological foundation at age eight to evaluate its meaning and apply it as a life lesson, it did its job without my awareness.
Like a microscopic cell, it floated into my unformed self and latched itself onto my inchoate conscience. It could have urged me to become a resentful bully. Or a social climber, desperate to be part of the mean girls’ clique. Or rich, with the illusory power over others rich kids feed on at their parties.
No. I became a Brooklyn Dodgers’ fan.