The back of the bus

 

I had never been so alive as I was over that winter. I had friends who understood me, who grasped my hidden European soul which was ready to leap from its cage and run around the basketball court. We were a core group of four girls but not exclusively-- we loved everybody in Miss Brown's home room. We were all a big family of mostly darkhaired dark eyed immigrants who had landed together in this experiment- that's what they called us. We were the "Latin-Science" class who were meant to emerge as hybrids with a dead language and new formulae fighting for dominance in our future. We also sang -- our class choir which was 85% girls won the school competition that year and went on to be best in the city. Nothing could stop us.

 

Plus we had the Stones, backed up by the Beatles, playing in our heads, fuelling excited conversation by our lockers between classes where teen magazines were shared and pored over for the latest scandals over in Britain involving our heroes

By now we knew Mick had a girlfriend he was often seen fighting with in the clubs so there was still hope there. We knew John Lennon was clever and had written a book while the Stones were animals who pissed on walls. Mick got arrested for driving without a license, and appeared in court with that angelic sneer and we were in heaven! We sucked in the gossip before heading into class to absorb more knowledge from our teachers most of whom were young that year and struggling with their subjects - 

One day Irene showed me the headline in some magazine called Teen or Fab: "Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?"

I thought of my old nearly bald broken dad sitting at home in early retirement and I knew the answer .

Besides, I had secret problems too disturbing to mention. The school had a visiting doctor who diagnosed me with a heart murmur -- this meant I got dropped from the volleyball team.

I was too tall. I didn't have breasts. I hadn't started menstruating since my first "period" at age 8 in Toronto in 1959 at the "summer school."

I was not exactly bucktoothed. My nickname in gym was "Spiderman" - a reference to my legs. My eyes watered and were often pink due to late night reading, or allergies.

The school Librarian, Miss Osler, descended from famous McGill eugenist Sir William Osler, took an interest in me and recommended John Wyndham who wrote young adult fiction about psychic children born out of experiments. I floated in and out with armloads of books including The Communist Manifesto and To the Finland Station, a biography of Lenin. Due to Ilya, I was very interested in the Russians. I read Dostoevsky and Gogol, whose sharp sense of humour reminded me of my new Jewish schoolmates.

On the 80 bus heading up Park Avenue after school, my girlfriends and I held loud witty dialogues from our seats at the back or hanging off the handrails. We were probably obnoxious - my former friends from the suburb where I had grown up kept their distance, thought I had gone insane and only talked to me after we changed buses to cross the river to our dormitory lives. I wanted to be Jewish and live in a two story duplex with no lawn and noisy neighbors on both sides but once across the bridge I was home in our desert of low roofed bungalows and empty streets, where nothing ever happened.

After much thought, I decided I would learn Russian, join an organization connected to the United Nations, and move to the Soviet Union. For my 14th birthday I asked for a set of Russian language records.