I really, really don’t like bullies.
They’re miserable, cowardly fucks, but they don’t scare me.
The year was 1981. I was a sassy, silly, headstrong, stubborn little second grader with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and bit of a dramatic streak.
As the youngest of 5, I think I must have instinctively known that I had to find a way to make my voice heard in an extremely chaotic house perpetually abuzz with activity. I had to somehow stand out in the churning seas of sibling drama, teenage angst, a rebellious big brother who was always up to something but never seemed to get into any trouble, and a sister two years my senior who was at that time, afraid of her own shadow. So I was loud, and I was brash, and I was tough as nails. I was unafraid. At least on the outside.
Our mom had left us a few years earlier, which meant that everything fell to dad. But he had to travel for work 5 days a week, which then meant that everything really fell to grandma.
My dad’s mom.
She was only 14 years older than he was.
And he wasn’t her youngest child either. As the story was told to me later in life, my grandmother was living in El Paso Texas, where her Lebanese-born father was Sheriff, and when she was very young, her mother tragically died. When her father re-married, he married, as was explained to me, an evil, horrible woman with flaming red hair who hated his children, and wanted her own, so she set to sending my grandmother and her siblings away.
In the case of my grandma, whose name was Josephine, that meant at the age of 12, that she’d be moving to Lebanon, a country she’d never been to, halfway across the world, to marry a man her father’s age, whom she had never met.
So, this innocent little girl with glorious bronze skin, golden eyes and raven hair, who had spent her entire life here, in the US, was forced to leave everything she’d ever known, to marry a stranger, an adult man, in a place where she knew no one.
And predictably, he beat her. He was a mean drunk who raped and beat her and got her pregnant three times before she was 17. And it did to Josephine what it would do to anyone who’d been subjected to all of that at such a young age - it hardened her.
But my grandmother was a survivor.
Her life was brutal. But she never let it beat her down. She was a fighter.
My aunt once told me when I asked how her father had died when my grandmother was still quite young, that grandma had killed him. That she’d had enough of the abuse and decided to make it stop. So she murdered him. (I’ve also heard that he died of alcoholism, but knowing my grandmother, it wouldn’t surprise me if she actually had killed the guy).
And that’s when my survivor of a paternal grandmother got to work. She was a beautiful woman, high cheek bones, flawless dark skin, that raven hair and those giant, deep set eyes… petite and delicate looking on the outside, but a fucking no prisoners kind of beast on the inside.
She wanted to send her children to the US. She wanted to return here. She was an American citizen, so that meant her kids were too. And she had whole cities full of family here. So she did whatever she could. Worked hard, did physically taxing jobs for long hours, saved her money, and over the span of a few years, she was able to send them, one by one — here. To her home. And then, eventually, she was able to join them.
But all of that had taken a toll on her. By the time I came around, the grandmother I knew was a woman who didn’t waste time on emotion. She did what needed to be done. And she did everything HER way. You didn’t have to like it. She didn’t have time to care.
Which brings me back to little Jo in the year 1981. You see, it was the day before the school Halloween parade, and I didn’t have a costume yet. Dad had usually taken care of it by taking me to Food Town and letting me pick one of those plastic mask costumes of Scooby-Doo or Casper the Friendly Ghost, but he was traveling. My big sisters were all being “Gypsies”, which from what I gathered at the time, was just an excuse to get away with wearing makeup. And that was NOT what a snake catching tomboy like me wanted to do.
I asked grandma to take me to Food Town.
“For what?” She asked in her thick Lebanese accent, not looking up from whatever hand-me-down pants she was hemming.
“For a costume. For the parade tomorrow.” I said.
She looked up at me, her eyes always looked so tired and she said, “We don’t buy costumes. I will make you something.” And went back to her hemming.
My heart sank. I missed dad. I was very worried.
The parade was such a big deal. We’d only been talking about it at school for weeks, and I didn’t have a costume.
A little while later, grandma summoned me into the kitchen where she was changing the garbage bag.
“I can make you a witch.” She said.
My eyes lit up! “Ok!!” I said excitedly.
I imagined grandma sewing together layers of beautiful black fabric. Maybe it would look like the witch from the Wizard of Oz, I wondered.
A few hours later, before bed she came into my room, the one I shared with one of my sisters. I thought she might be taking the garbage out, because she was carrying what looked like a rather full bag.
And then she said, “Here you go. Your costume.”
There was no glorious black fabric expertly sewn together. It didn’t look at all like the witch from the Wizard of Oz. It was a Hefty bag. With arms cut out, and a cardboard cone covered in the same Hefty bag for a hat.
My sister looked over at me from her bed. There was awkward silence. I swallowed hard, bit my little tongue and said “thank you.”
It wasn’t THAT bad, I told myself. At least I HAD a costume now (although confessedly I was really regretting not going with that whole excuse to wear makeup thing).
So, the next morning, I put that Hefty Bag witch costume on over my clothes and I headed out for school. I really didn’t care anymore if it looked funny, it was the Halloween parade and that was all I cared about.
My dad actually surprised me, and came home from his trip early just in time to snap some photos of me with my class on the blacktop. What he didn’t know as he smiled and waved at me, was that I had been the punchline to a day’s long joke. Taunts and whispers, side comments, relentless teasing and bullying. I was “the Hefty Bag hag”.
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