by Rebecca Lee

 

            I did kindergarten twice—the first time wasn’t traumatizing enough.  When I arrived at The Shalom School, fresh off of the plane from Israel, I only spoke English and Hebrew.  Little did I know that this would be a problem at a Jewish day school because everybody else spoke Russian, which made communicating difficult.  Oddly enough this type of language barrier was worse than the one I had had to overcome in Jerusalem even though the Hebrew language contained some scary words.  The worst of which was “die.”  As a four year old in a foreign country I was haunted daily by this word and I was scared of the teacher because she used it so frequently.  It wasn’t until a few months into the school year when the only English-speaking boy in the class convinced my brother to stand in the toilet with his rain boots on that I finally learned the true meaning of the word. “stop.”  The teacher came in screaming just as my brother’s foot got stuck in the hole in the bottom of the toilet and for the first time ever, I heard her speak English.  When she saw how terrified I looked, she explained that she did not, in fact, want me to die.

            After about a month of trying to be friends with the Russian children who didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me, the principal switched me to the other kindergarten class, which for some reason had the taller kids in it so I was no longer the tallest.  The giant of the class was named Eric.  He was well over four feet and he was five and five eighths years old.  Sadly I was only four and three sixths years according to his “calculations.”  I had a while to go before I would be old enough to be in first grade so they placed me in kindergarten again, afraid that being a year younger would hold me back later in life. 

I started my second year of kindergarten with a brand new pair of white velcro tennis shoes.  They turned out to be the same pair my teacher had.  It was during this time that all the people in my class began tying their own shoes, a skill I had mastered early on in life.  With the new talent came new lace-up shoes.

There were four other girls in my kindergarten class but three of them came as a package.  Their names were Jen, Anna, and Laura and they only liked each other.  They didn’t have time to waste for the rest of us lowly people.  There other girl in my class, Karen, seemed just as out of place in this world of kindergarten girls as I was.  We became friends. 

Jen, Anna, and Laura occasionally stooped down low enough to play with Karen and me but they spent most of their time rehearsing.  They called themselves dancers and they performed dances for themselves with moves so vulgar that it was surprising that the teachers never reported their parents to the authorities.  At the time, I didn’t know what vulgar really was but even I knew that something wasn’t right about them.   

A few months later, Karen and I were playing happily in the sandbox when the other three girls in our class, came up to us all in their matching light-up Sailor Moon shoes.  “We decided that you guys can’t play with us anymore,” announced Jen, the leader of the pack.

            “Why?” I asked.

            “You guys don’t have the pretty Sailor Moon shoes,” Anna said, pointing to her own feet.  Karen and I stared admiringly at the beautiful shoes.  Apparently that was what it took to be a “cool kid.”  Then the girls skipped away laughing.

            “We have to get those shoes if we ever want them to play with us again,” Karen sounded pretty determined.

            “All we have to do is go home and ask our parents to buy them for us,” I said cheerfully.  Little did I know that those beautiful shoes wouldn’t come to me so easily.  My parents refused to buy me the shoes.  They said that my shoes were practically new and no light-up shoes were allowed.  They acted as if they were the experts of cool even though they knew little about it.  It wasn’t like they had ever had to be in kindergarten.

            I returned to school the next day with the hopes that this whole light-up Sailor Moon shoe thing would have blown over, or that at least Karen’s parents had said no too.  Unfortunately when I got to school I saw Karen playing with Jen, Anna, and Laura.  I approached them only to find that Karen had indeed gotten the shoes.  She could be one of the “cool girls” now.

            Jen leaned over to inspect my shoes.  “Still the same old ones,” she said as a cue for the other girls to start laughing, “I guess you have to play alone now because Karen has the shoes.”  They all laughed as I walked away close to crying.  Now that Karen was gone I had nobody left to play with.  The worst part was that they didn’t even leave me alone after that.  They made sure to walk by me all together with their stupid shoes lighting up in my face.

            Later that day when I was playing with the blocks, like I would normally have done with Karen, a boy in my class named Benny came over to talk to me.  “Can I play with you?” he asked.

            I ignored him at first because I didn’t want to risk catching his boy cooties.  When he didn’t go away, I agreed, happy that somebody wanted to play with me.  We sat there making towers of blocks until they fell down and we had to build them back up again.  By the time the teacher called clean up time I had completely forgotten about the whole light-up Sailor Moon shoe thing.  Benny and I ate lunch together that day.  During that lunch we discovered how much we had in common.  I had a brother named Ben and he had a sister named Rachel, which started with the same letter as Rebecca.  Benny’s birthday was June 21 and mine was June 20.  It was perfect.

            When Benny and I were cleaning up our lunches, I caught a glimpse of four pairs of sparkling lights, which seemed insignificant.  Who needed those stupid shoes anyway?  When they walked by us, they started a whole chorus of “Benny and Rebecca sitting in a tree.”  It was humiliating, especially when all the other kids joined in.

            Eventually the whole “our shoes are better than yours” thing blew over.  Karen and I became friends again and Jen, Anna, and Laura played with us when they felt like it.  Benny remained my best friend until the end of first grade when my brother and I suddenly left the school.  To this day, I wonder how everybody is doing and if they remember the traumatizing events that made up the kindergarten experience.