When he handed me an envelope, I expected the usual check with “Merry Christmas” written on the comment line. Lifting the small slip of printed paper out of its enclosure, my gaping mouth revealed absolute surprise. “This is too much,” I breathed automatically. My parents had never spoiled me. While Carole and I had all of the basic necessities of modern life, we enjoyed few extras. We had nominal allowances until the age of sixteen, when we were expected to find part-time employment after school. This philosophy was not uncommon in the community where we lived. Of course, plenty of wealthy kids received shiny new cars on their sixteenth birthdays, but the majority actually looked forward to the independence associated with working. “I can’t accept this,” I continued.
“I want you take more skating lessons or buy new skates or something.”
My boots were not significantly worn, though they had never become ‘bedroom slipper comfortable’ as Pete had promised when I ordered them. I would have certainly loved to take a longer weekly lesson, develop a new routine, and maybe even buy a fancy skating dress for my next performance opportunity.
“I’m sorry you didn’t have the chance to skate as a kid,” my father continued.
I looked at him, but he avoided my glance.
“I’m sorry about that, Katherine.”
Unable to speak if I had wanted to, I remained motionless and silent, ready to listen to whatever he felt a need to say. I never expected my father to apologize for that afternoon when I was fourteen years old. I did not expect him to remember it at all. Over the years, no matter how close we became, I never brought up that monumental event in my development. That day, along with the first time I saw Peggy Fleming on television, were landmarks in my life. They defined the person I wanted to become and the one that I would never be.
“This wasn’t a happy house then,” my father continued. “Your mother’s and my marriage had deteriorated, and neither one of us was very happy. Unfortunately, you and Carole were victims of that unhappiness.” He lit his pipe, disguising emotions under a puff of billowing smoke. My father was not an outwardly emotional person, and I inherited his stiff upper lip. However, there are times when expressing one’s self becomes necessary as well as desirable. He had obviously given this situation serious thought, possibly for a number of years, and finally decided to broach the subject.
“You should have been able to take a few lessons. We didn’t have enough money to train you for the Olympics, but we could have afforded a few lessons if you wanted them. None of this is an excuse, and I know you understand basically what the circumstances were when you were in high school. I just wish I had done more. You were always a good girl, Katherine. If you wanted to skate a couple of times a week, you deserved the opportunity. I’m sorry I didn’t do more when it might have meant something to you.”
Although I did not elaborate on how denying me skating lessons translated, from my perspective, into their lack of love and respect for me; my father apparently had reached a similar conclusion. If not in fine detail, he realized that decision had caused me great pain and instigated a vicious period of defiance and confusion. It cost him a relationship with his eldest daughter for several years. The fact that he could ask for my forgiveness thirteen years later was as meaningful to me as if it had happened the next day. Unfortunately, for all practical purposes, I was too old to pursue a career in the skating arts.
Whether I possessed the talent and potential to achieve sufficient mastery over skating skills to work as a coach would forever remain unknown. Even under ideal conditions, my parents may not have been able to afford bringing me to that level. As an adult, I only cared that my father loved me enough to share his feelings and regrets about these issues. The damage to my childhood had been done, but my life was not over. I no longer had to feel valueless, at least not to my father.
“I had actually wanted to give you skating lessons for your fourteenth birthday,” he began.
I folded the check lovingly and slipped it back into the envelope with the foil Christmas card.
Otthilde Northcott dropped her make up brush disgustedly into its case and turned to eye her husband of eighteen years. “Don’t be ridiculous, Phillip. Why on earth does Katherine need to take skating lessons? And who will have the honor of driving her to the rink twice a week when you are working? I will,” she replied hotly to her own pointed question. “I’ll have to sit in that rink and wait while she’s in class and practicing. Then I will have to drive her back home. It will consume my whole afternoon off.”
“I’m sure there are things you could do while Kate skates. Maybe you would enjoy meeting the other parents,” Phillip suggested diplomatically.
Otthilde rolled her eyes. “The other parents will have six-year-old daughters. She’s only fourteen, but Kate could practically get served in a bar. I will look like a fool bringing such a grown-up girl to a beginners’ skating class.” The woman was more concerned with her own self-consciousness than the emotional and developmental needs of her eldest child. Appearance meant everything to Mrs. Northcott, and Kate often fell short of her ideals. Kate was too tall, too mature, too big, too athletic, and too tomboyish. A petite woman, Otthilde wished her daughter had inherited her more ladylike characteristics instead of her husband’s height and musculature. Carole, on the other hand, was smaller and daintier, decidedly more feminine. The last thing Otthilde needed was to take Big Kate to a roller rink to stand full-busted alongside a group of scrawny pre-pubescent children.
“If you want to chauffeur Katherine back and forth to that rink, you are certainly welcome,” Otthilde dismissed indignantly. “Kate is too old for that anyway,” she added in conclusion.
Phillip knew he could not regularly drive his daughters anywhere in the afternoon. His work schedule was too unpredictable and demanding. He could be gone all day or only for a few hours. Kate could not count on him to be available to take her to the roller rink at a predetermined time. His first priority was to support his family, and he relied on his wife to make allowances in her agenda to accommodate Kate’s lessons.
“Let’s just buy Kate some new clothes, like every other year. The way she’s growing, she needs clothing more than skating lessons.”
Like her husband, Otthilde was a child of the Great Depression and World War II. She came from a poor family and shared a bed in a dingy room with her sister. Ottie’s younger sister wore her hand-me-downs while she inherited her cousins’ cast-offs. They had very little as children except a roof over their heads. The small house was rarely the right temperature, too hot in the days before air conditioning and drafty and cold during the winters. Kate and Carole’s childhoods looked like utopia by comparison. Otthilde and her sister never considered taking lessons for anything. There was simply no money in the household for nonessentials, especially for two little girls during an era when children were to be seen and not heard.
Being seen favorably became a focus of Otthilde’s existence. Women rarely attended college when Otthilde came of age and most filled their secondary school timetables with courses designed to improve their homemaking skills, but Otthilde hated sewing and cooking. She wanted to be someone important, a career person, a person who made decisions and accrued wealth. But Otthilde Vicini was born too early and into the wrong type of family. She took a job as a telephone operator and married the first Italian Catholic who proposed, and also met her appearance criteria. The man had to be handsome in order to produce attractive children. The Vicinis happily pushed their daughter forward into married life hoping for grandchildren within a couple of years.
But Otthilde had not finished living the bachelorette life. She maintained her job as an operator and later took a secretarial position with a legal firm. She longed for the power and earning potential of a law degree. Like many ambitious young women of her time, Otthilde could only hope to marry a lawyer, and not to earn a diploma of her own. Her husband worked as a clerk for the local government and did not meet Otthilde’s growing demands for excellence. She spent increasing amounts of time at the office and later with one of the partners, a married man who lavished beautiful Otthilde with gifts. He offered to rent an apartment for her where they could rendezvous. Otthilde eagerly accepted the proposition and legally separated from her mild-mannered husband, eventually flying to Mexico for a divorce.
Otthilde’s beauty secured her position as a legal secretary and won her a wealthy, though unavailable, boyfriend. Had she been big, muscular, or plain; she probably would have never even married the nice, but thoroughly ordinary, county clerk. Appearance opened doors for Otthilde; who had no education, social status or wealth to create opportunity in her life. She merely possessed a shapely figure and pretty face that she fastidiously maintained into old age.
Following the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, women enjoyed opportunities as educated members of the workforce. Women attended college and held degrees and positions similar to their male counterparts. Many females endured discrimination and personal hardship to secure their equality, and some may argue that women are still not paid equally for their efforts. Regardless of demographic details, Katherine and Carole had opportunities that were never accessible to Otthilde. Unrestricted to traditionally female careers, Carole chose to become a doctor rather than a nurse, and Katherine wanted to be a university professor instead of a kindergarten teacher.
When Carole declared her intention to pursue premedical studies at Northern California State University, her mother could barely contain her delight. Katherine had already abandoned her respectable foreign language major for a flight of fancy into fashion design. No matter how Otthilde meddled and tried to convince Kate that she possessed no talent as an artist, the stubborn girl continued to enroll in textile courses.
In early childhood, both girls were identified as mentally gifted students through a series of tests performed at the elementary school. Mrs. Northcott swelled with pride. Both of her children were smart, not just one, but both girls! Of course, Carole scored a few points higher on the intelligence scale, enough to merit statistical significance. Over the years, those few points expanded, in Otthilde’s imagination, opening a great cerebral chasm between her children. Carole was the smarter one, though she never disclosed this directly to her daughters. Otthilde began to expect more from Carole and less from Kate, hoping Kate would merely manage not to embarrass her mother with her substandard abilities. Ironically, the actual difference in the two girl’s intellectual potential may have been real or could have varied with the type of testing instrument administered. However, armed with inexact information, Otthilde contorted the results to the ultimate misfortunate of her eldest child. She began to see Kate as the “less promising one” or the “less intelligent one”. All of Kate’s behaviors registered to her mother as by-products of her unintelligence. She rebelled because she was not as rational as Carole. She wanted to skate because she could not earn perfect marks in school. She studied fashion because she lacked academic proficiency. Her fashion sketches were shoddy because even a good designer has to be smart. Poor Otthilde, uninformed and weakly educated herself, misconstrued data about her children’s mental aptitude and created a negative self-fulfilling prophesy for Katherine.
Otthilde feared distracting her less capable, scatterbrained daughter from the world of impressive career prospects that still lay within her grasp if she applied herself in high school, earning admission to the state college. At fourteen, Katherine was already too old and too large to hope for success as a skater or dancer. She did not consider her daughter’s happiness when making this decision, only the foolhardiness of an unwise investment. No matter what type of extracurricular activity a child undertakes, the likelihood of that activity reaping financial and professional success is infinitesimally small. However, these hobbies yield other benefits as the child learns sportsmanship, social skills, time management, self-confidence and discipline. Athletics keep children healthy and physically fit, imbuing exercise habits that carry over into adulthood. Unfortunately, Otthilde viewed the skating lessons in absolute terms. Katherine had no chance of going to the Olympics; therefore, she did not deserve lessons, and ultimately missed out on the other rewards the experience could have provided. Most importantly, Kate interpreted her parents’ actions as rejection of her worth as a person. In a quest for practicality while guiding her daughter in directions that were unavailable during her own youth, Otthilde alienated Katherine. From Kate’s perspective, her parents saw her as an individual incapable of success, for whom the simple act of trying was a futile waste of money.
Phillip did not instigate an argument with his obstinate wife over the skating lessons. He merely thought they would be a special treat for Katherine, as she so obviously enjoyed roller skating in the garage. When Kate asked a couple weeks later for lessons, Phillip was still agitated by his exchange with Otthilde over the subject. He had grown tired of their prolific quarrels and her relentless need to win. He quickly dismissed Kate’s request, echoing some of his wife callous comments. He could not admit to his children, or even to himself, that Otthilde ruled the household and he oftentimes preferred to succumb to her will, whether he agreed or not. Ottie could fight all night and remained viciously unpleasant for days following a critical disagreement. Phillip did not know how dearly Kate loved skating or how adversely this conflict would affect her adolescent life. Had he known, he might have pursued the topic further.
Although I tried to digest the story my father related about my mother’s difficult childhood and her misappropriation of our aptitude scores, I found little room for understanding. My mother’s failures were not limited to her opinion of my future prospects or dissatisfaction with my physical dimensions, but with how she communicated with me. She was often blunt, rarely kind or gentle, never thinking of how her words would affect a vulnerable child. Dealing with other children’s cruelty on the playground may be a normal part of youth, but enduring similarly harsh sentiments from one’s own mother can catastrophically affect a child’s self-esteem.
Having studied developmental psychology, I have some appreciation for intelligence testing and the different talents people possess. I also realize that tests are instruments that can be biased or entirely inaccurate. Recalling the seemingly random assortment of questions posed when I was a second grade student, I wondered how anyone could interpret anything meaningful from such an odd battery of queries. While the examination may have had some value for placing my sister and me into appropriate reading groups, divulging the numerical results to our mother probably did more damage than was off-set by mentally challenging classroom assignments. My mother had no background in psychology. She was not an educator and graduated from high school with unremarkable grades in homemaking. While Otthilde Northcott eagerly bragged about her children, she possessed little scholastic knowledge to enrich our lives through understanding of our intellectual gifts. Although the school administrators informed her that both girls were mentally gifted, they made the mistake of producing actual results basically declaring one child more gifted than the other. Our mother, who was ill equipped to place the numbers into perspective, forgot that we were both capable young people and focused on the statistical documentation suggesting Carole was the brighter child. She sought out and created evidence from our daily lives supporting the outcome of that test, proving that Carole was indeed the more intelligent one.
I wondered how many other children’s lives had been adversely effected by intelligence testing. Regardless of her hard-edged, unsympathetic personality; much of my mother’s behavior stemmed from her own ignorance. If she had summoned the humility to admit her mistake, I would have been able to forgive her. However, my mother was always right, no matter the consequences. She would never even imagine that she might make a mistake. That was part of her obsession with appearances. Being wrong looks bad.
My father and I never made a big ritual out of holidays and birthdays. Most often, we merely talked over the telephone and exchanged warm wishes. Since I planned to be home for Christmas, I bought a handsome “Carolina Tech” sweatshirt that I fortunately found on sale in a college town shop. I picked up a similar item for Howard. My father did not like shopping and usually offered me a check for a polite amount of money that in recent years went toward skating.
Chapter 43 posted 12/18/01
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