While my father had no fear of death, I did—though I’ve come to realize that it could be more accurately described as a death “despair.” And I know the exact day in my life that it began—Valentine’s Day of my fateful sixth-grade year.

By then I knew two children who’d died, Peter Wright, my crush in first grade, who’d drowned in a lake, and my cousin Michael in California, who’d been buried alive. He’d been playing in a trench where new sewer pipes had been laid down when a dump truck came and dropped a load of dirt on him.

For my Valentine’s Day slumber party, I’d decorated the dining room, where my friends and I would sleep. I’d strung red crepe paper streamers from an old light fixture in the middle of the room—like spokes—taping them to the walls, then I’d hung large red paper hearts from them with thread. Sometime in the night, under this festive canopy, I woke up and looked around at my sleeping friends and thought, “One day we’ll all be buried and decaying in coffins in the ground.” Immediately I was overwhelmed by a feeling terrible beyond words to describe it—an agony so deep that my mind immediately closed over it like water over a dropped stone, and I was left with my heart pounding wildly in my chest. (This was only a few months before Mr. Main would call me “an arrogant little snot.”)

Since then I’ve experienced other feelings painful beyond words to describe them—anger and grief so intense, it has felt as though my mind must crack irrevocably. This emotional trove of pain was the legacy of my childhood, I understood at the time, which didn’t come unlocked until I was betrayed by a boyfriend who impregnated a younger woman—I was in my forties by then and too old to have children. I remember a night when I woke up repeatedly, feeling such anguish that I scrawled messages on sheets of paper and hung them from drawers so that I would see them the next time I woke up: messages like “They are only feelings, they can’t destroy you”—because it felt as if they must—and “They are only feelings, they will pass.”

My death despair was in the same category of seemingly unendurable emotions and was to revisit me often throughout my adolescence. In the moments it did—usually at night—I was liable to throw myself against a wall before my mind could close over it again and blot it out.

When my brother, as a child, asked my father what happened to you when you died, he said, “They put you in the ground and you rot.” I don’t remember the moment I asked my father the same question, but, of course, that’s the answer he would have given me too.

Above is another of Kathy’s entries in my Bluebird autograph book after we’d learned cursive. It’s written so lightly on a blue page that I had to use Photoshop to make it legible.

As I wrote in “Cheater, Cheater…” in the fifth grade I had a teacher who didn’t like me. And in the spring, while we were taking a standardized reading test, she admonished me, “Cathy, why do you feel the need to cheat?” But Mrs. Koehler didn’t stop there. She also, apparently, convinced the principal to remove me from the class I’d gone all through elementary school with and place me in the “other” class for my sixth-grade year, taught by the only male teacher in the school, Mr. Main. At the time I believed this was because I wasn’t smart enough to remain in the gifted group with my friends Wolfy, Margie, Mary and several others. Actually, there was a range of abilities among the kids in my class—but, to me, they were all my school family.

My sixth-grade year I would work so hard not to fall into further disgrace that I soon became visible as the best student in Mr. Main’s class. The second semester I was even elected class president…and wound up teacher’s pet— something I never wanted and that made me uncomfortable; all I wanted was not to fail. And, anyway, none of this was enough to make me feel smart again or restore my confidence—I simply believed that I worked harder than all the other kids. Though I had one friend in the class—Kathy—I still felt like an outcast, a feeling that has never entirely left me.

Nevertheless, I gave a little lesson on drawing cartoons in class one day and held a cartoon contest. I had learned to hide my feelings, intuiting—correctly, as it happened—that my parents’ “love” was conditional and depended upon me being a model, trouble-free child: mature, independent, and seemingly well-adjusted. (In my father’s case, he was so judgmental about “weakness” that I strove to avoid any behavior that would invite his scorn and derision.) Mr. Main also allowed me to head up a team to draw, in pastels, the sorcerer’s house—scenery for the school musical. And for the space of a few days, I felt like I was in my element.

All the while, my parents were going through an acrimonious divorce. Because my dad considered himself the primary parent, he bitterly resented the fact that mothers were generally awarded custody of their kids at the time. Actually, he only agreed to the divorce—this was before no-fault divorces—on the condition that my mother never take Doug and me out of state. For her part, Mom resented all the money he started spending on himself, including buying a new car while she was left to drive our old one, which was freezing in winter because the floor had rusted through.

In school that spring we were assigned to do a comprehensive report on a country of our choosing. I chose Australia, and I still remember poring over books in the library and drawing meticulous maps for hours—another exercise in obsessiveness.

In addition to the written report, we had to give an oral report. On the day I was supposed to give my presentation, I was beside myself because I hadn’t managed to memorize it all yet. I asked Mr. Main if I could do it the following day, but he said no—whereupon I went and hid in the girls’ bathroom. So he sent Kathy to bring me back. But I was so afraid of humiliating myself that, not knowing what else to do, I walked out of the school and home. The next day I delivered my report without a hitch.

But Mr. Main wasn’t about to forgive me for defying him. A week or two later he used an inadvertent mistake I made to reassert his authority. He called me an “arrogant little snot” and told the class he was keeping them inside for recess that day because of me.

Then two things happened: The first—Kathy dumped me. As I said in “Bub,” we’d gone to camp together every summer, to Lake Cheewin as Bluebirds, then Lake Ojekita as Camp Fire Girls. We’d planned to do the same thing that summer after sixth grade, but when we filled out the registration forms at a meeting, I found out that she’d signed up to be cabin mates with my friends Margie and Mary instead of me. I was necessarily excluded because you could only choose two cabin mates. I was so hurt, my mom called Kathy’s mother—to no avail. Forever after that Kathy kept her distance—with one exception that was years in the future.

Also, shortly before the move from the Raymond apartment, WoIfy and I had gone down to Margie’s house to play one day, and for the first time in all our outings, I’d had to walk home alone. Wolfy had a crush on Margie and wanted to stay behind. What’s more, because my family had been evicted by Davona and Lou, Wolfy and I no longer walked to school together, nor were we in the same class, now that I’d been transferred. I lost my two best friends that year and wouldn’t have another best friend until I was an adult.

The second thing that happened was that I would go into hiding in seventh grade and beyond—at school, at least. Never again would I seek recognition in the classroom, sit near the front of the room, raise my hand when I knew the answers, demonstrate my knowledge. Instead I would hunker down at the back, trying to be as invisible as possible. (I proved so adept at this it took my French teacher in California two years to realize I was the best student in her class.)

In the end, I didn’t manage to finish the written part of my report on Australia by the deadline—and forever after that I was haunted by doubt that I could complete any kind of ambitious project.

As for cheating, if Mrs. Koehler had hoped to cure me of it, she didn’t succeed. I have a vivid memory of sneaking back into my English classroom after school in seventh grade—to change the “can nots” I’d written in the Gettysburg Address to “cannots.” That I would take such a big risk to correct such a small mistake speaks volumes, I think, about my precarious emotional state.