Bittersweet Dreams Read online

  There was no way I wouldn’t attract unusual attention. I wasn’t looking for it, but I couldn’t help it. At three years old, I was reading on an eighth-grade level. When I entered grade school at five years old, I was already reading books meant for at least college sophomores.

  I can still hear Grandmother Lizzy’s rippling laughter when I astounded relatives with my recitations of famous speeches, world capitals, scientific facts, or math equations and then offered quotes from Shakespeare, not only reciting them from memory but also explaining them.

  “The kid’s a walking computer,” my uncle Justin, my father’s older brother, would say. He was the comedian in the family. He’d spin me around, claiming he was looking for the plug and wires. No one in my family loved me any less because I was so smart, especially not Grandmother Lizzy. I don’t think anyone hugged me more or made me feel as precious, but grandmothers can be like that.

  After I said something brilliant and Grandmother Lizzy would clap and then hug and kiss me, I’d look at my mother and see the love and pride in her face. There was nothing more protective than a real family, even for someone like me, despite what people like Julie thought. People like her thought that because you were very smart, you didn’t need support, but I thought it was just the opposite. You needed your family around you, caring about you, even more. They cherished my being gifted. Maybe it made them feel that their family lineage was special. I didn’t know, but I enjoyed their affection and soaked in their pride.

  It wasn’t that way when I was with strangers. Once you were labeled profoundly gifted in the educational system, you might as well have weird tattooed on your forehead. No one really wanted to be friends with you. Some were even afraid of you. Many thought I was like Spock from Star Trek, the one who knew everything but had no feelings. I thought they even expected me to have pointed ears or something frightening about my eyes, especially when I looked at them.

  Often, especially when I was younger, I would hear things like “Stop looking at me, you freak.”

  How this made me feel would be no surprise. When I was younger, it was always harder, of course. Despite my brilliance, I still had to develop defenses, especially social defenses. I could think of clever comeback lines, but they wouldn’t win me acceptance or sympathy. Maybe I would be feared and avoided, but was that something a young girl wanted?

  Regardless, I had to develop a harder shell. Young kids especially enjoy seeing how they can get to other students, bring tears to their eyes. I don’t know why it’s truer for young kids, but the rage in bullying today clearly demonstrates it. They tried to bully me from the get-go, maybe because of all the attention I was receiving, but I frustrated them. It got so they believed I had no tears and couldn’t cry, so they finally gave up.

  Even though I had attended a fairly big school, as far as I knew, I was the only one at my grade school who had ever been formally labeled profoundly gifted after all sorts of testing. In fact, I had the impression that there had never been any student like me in the history of the entire school district, which included four other schools, as well as in the entire county. I used to wonder if one of the eleven others estimated in the state at the time were in Los Angeles, too, and what it would be like to meet one of them.

  Would we both just know? Could we look into each other’s eyes and see some rich pool of brilliance that only we and others like us could see? Were we truly like alien creatures that had been smuggled into the human population? I dreamed that someday we would all meet or maybe would deliberately be brought together by the government or some corporation. Everyone else would expect us to take over the world or do something significant.

  According to what I had been told and what I had read, I would meet some others who were somewhat, if not exactly, like me very soon at this new expensive private school that Julie thought was much more of a reward than a punishment. But this wasn’t exactly how I had imagined I would meet them. It felt like we were being herded together, corralled and contained.

  Anyway, I didn’t want to rule the world, especially this world. In my mind, despite how we could impress teachers and others and despite what they imagined we would invent or create or discover, we weren’t really welcomed. People could tolerate us for a short period, the way they might enjoy a magician, but who wanted someone pulling rabbits out of hats all the time?

  Maybe Julie would get her wish. Maybe my new school would turn out to be more of a prison, because in the end, what all these educators and other young people, even some parents, really wanted was to keep us apart, keep us away from their precious children, as if we could somehow ruin them with our intelligence. Maybe they thought we would teach them things that would make them more rebellious.

  I had started to get these ideas from the moment the grade-school psychologist, Mrs. Fishman (I called her Fish Face because of her Botox lips), started treating me like a rare diamond and took credit for the discovery. Like that was hard to do. Whenever she could, she had me perform for teachers and administrators, defining words, reading high-school textbooks aloud, solving difficult math problems in minutes, or simply reciting some fact that others would need to discover on an internet site. Sometimes I felt like I was doing a little ballet but with facts instead of ballet slippers. I felt like a monkey performing when a bell was rung.

  After I was diagnosed as being profoundly gifted, Mrs. Fishman brought my parents in to discuss what it meant. I remember overhearing my mother tell my father, “She’s so excited about Mayfair, I thought she was having an orgasm.”

  For quite a while, I struggled with the comparison. I didn’t have to ask my mother what orgasm meant. In fact, since I had become a good reader and an expert on my computer, I rarely asked her or my father questions or definitions of words. I’ve heard people say that computers and smartphones are running our lives now. For kids like me, unless your parents put some sort of lock on what you could see and read, nothing in the world was out-of-bounds or prohibited. I knew so many girls and boys who had gone to their computers to learn about sex. I bet you did. I bet you’re doing it now.

  Few did it when they were as young as I was at the time, of course.

  But remember, I was profoundly gifted. I was one in three million. Can you even picture three million other people? Can you imagine looking at sixty thousand or seventy thousand people in a stadium and thinking, There is no one here remotely as brilliant as I am? And even if you did think that, can you imagine thinking of it not arrogantly but just as a simple fact? That might make me seem very cold, I know, but it wasn’t something I chose to be.

  Anyway, I learned that both men and women have orgasms and that it was an autonomic physiological response, which are big words for you can’t stop it if you’ve gone too far. Parents were always warning their kids not to go too far, and this was the reason. When you were very little, they warned you not to go too far from the house. Well, this meant not to go too far from your self-control.

  After I read about the word and understood the physiological activity, which is a fancy way of saying what goes on in the body, whenever I was with Fish Face, I would look for symptoms, especially something in her face to tell me it was happening, symptoms like her being flushed or breathing too hard. I even wanted to take her pulse and tried to figure out how I could get my fingers on her wrist. My intense concentration rattled her, and one day she finally asked me why I was looking at her with such an engrossed expression.

  “When you glare at people like that, Mayfair, you make them feel quite uncomfortable. What is it about me that makes me so fascinating to you right now?” She sat back, waiting for something intriguing to come out of my mouth, something she could blabber about in the faculty lounge. Her face looked like a big saucer ready to catch all my gems.

  “I’m studying you to see if you’re having an orgasm,” I said, as casually as anyone would say “to see if you are feeling okay.”

  Remember, this is coming out of the mouth of a five-year-old.

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nbsp; She turned a dark shade of red and looked like she would choke on her own saliva. Then she sat forward, entwining her chubby fingers, which made each arm look like it was holding on to a shoulder for dear life. Her lips were so tight that little white spots popped out in the corners, and her shoulders looked like they would rise higher and higher until her head sank down between them completely. I was quite fascinated with her reaction.

  “We all know you’re very intelligent, Mayfair, but you have to learn what is proper and not proper for a little girl to say,” she told me.

  “Who decides what is and is not proper?” I fired back.

  She narrowed her eyes and nodded as if she was confirming a suspicion about me.

  She had given my parents some booklets about profoundly gifted children, and one described them as “often argumentative, more like lawyers challenging words and comments.” That definitely sounded like me, but it wasn’t something I was conscious of doing. It was just natural to me to question and challenge anything and everything I heard or saw.

  “Never mind that. Just think before you speak,” she told me.

  “I always do. I have to think before I speak. Don’t you? Maybe you don’t. Maybe that’s why you say silly things sometimes.” She had a habit of saying something she didn’t mean to say and then pressing the back of her hand against her mouth as if she were trying to stop a leak.

  At this moment, she looked like she was going to explode. Her cheeks ballooned, and her face went from red to white very quickly. “You can go now,” she said.

  After that little exchange between us, she didn’t parade me about as much or ask to see me as much, and when she did, she was very formal and always on her guard, trembling in anticipation of something I might say that would embarrass her. I enjoyed her discomfort. Was I already showing some signs of meanness or disrespect?

  Anyway, she had called my parents in again, this time to warn them about me. Suddenly, it was both a curse and a blessing to have a profoundly gifted child. That excitement she had first evinced was gone. She was full of new warnings, pointing out red flags like someone from homeland security.

  “If you’re not careful,” she told them, “you’ll lose control of her. Like conniving, manipulative little lawyers, profoundly gifted children find loopholes in all the rules you lay down. If you tell her it’s time to turn off her lamp and you don’t add ‘and go to sleep,’ she might turn off the lamp but switch on a flashlight and continue doing what she was doing.”

  “What are you saying? You’re making her sound dangerous or at least like a burden,” my mother countered. “Why this sudden change?”

  For some reason, she didn’t mention my reference to her possibly having an orgasm. Maybe she really was and was ashamed or shocked that I had discovered it.

  “I’m just telling you what I know,” Fish Face responded, a bit sullenly.

  Both my parents were quite upset with Fish Face after that, and neither of them really heeded her words when it came to how they treated me or evaluated anything I did or said.

  All of it was quite a learning experience for me, but then again, just about everything in my life was.

  “The world is my classroom,” I often said. Some people would smile, but most would look at me as if I had just stepped off a spaceship. “She really is Mr. Spock!”

  I knew that calling the world a classroom sounded boring, but if there was one thing I never was, it was bored.

  Maybe if I were once in a while, I’d have been happier or, as my stepmother said, normal, because I’d look for amusement instead of information.

  “It’s normal to want to have fun once in a while more than you want to have facts,” Julie said one time. She laughed and added, “That’s been my life’s motto, Mayfair. When in doubt, have fun, and you can’t be any more normal than I am.”

  I wanted to reply, “If you’re what is considered normal, I’m signing up for Abnormals R Us.” But I wasn’t quite at the stage where I would confront her head-on instead of subtly or with words and analogies she would never understand.

  I did think, however, that something was missing inside me, something that might be necessary in order for someone to be happy with herself. It was true that I was not happy most of the time, and I was envious of girls my age who had far lower IQ scores but who looked like life was just one exciting roller-coaster ride full of screams and laughter, all happening while someone warm and handsome was holding on to you. I would think about that image very often.

  I would think about it, but I wouldn’t confess to anyone else that I lacked anything that important. I would come to realize that I was very attractive, and that bothered some girls because it seemed to them that I had everything: good looks, a great figure, a rich complexion, soft healthy hair, and brains. I was always so self-confident that I never dreamed a time would come when I would admit that anything was wrong with me, that something important was missing, especially to myself.

  I guess I didn’t know everything after all.

  Even though I was profoundly gifted.

  3

  We were on our way to my special new school, Spindrift. Somebody very creative, of course, came up with that name. Students there were supposedly the crème de la crème, the best of the best, and the purpose of the school was to get them to live up to their enormous potential so that everyone would benefit from their achievements.

  Just in case someone considering the school for his or her child didn’t understand the name, the booklet explained it: “Spray blown up from an ocean wave is called spindrift. It is expected that our graduates will spray the world with their brilliance.” Can’t you just see the faces of our proud parents? Who wouldn’t want their child to spray the world with brilliance? Every word from their mouths would be dazzling.

  From the booklet, I also knew that the motto above the main entrance read: “A brilliant mind wasted is a sin beyond redemption.” The quote belonged to Dr. Norman Lazarus, a biochemistry research scientist whose discoveries included a drug to treat bone cancer. As our school psychologist and guidance counselor had explained to me, Dr. Lazarus had donated most of his profits to educational institutions. He established this special school for gifted students, which was his favorite project. I supposed the motto was intended to make us all feel guilty if we didn’t live up to our potential. If you were brilliant and lazy, you were like a person who had a talent to play the piano beautifully but wouldn’t take a lesson or touch a key. People who lacked any talent could really despise you for that and hate the fates that wasted their powers on giving you the talent.

  I wasn’t afraid that I would enter Spindrift and fail to meet anyone’s expectations for me. I was afraid that I would enter the special school and fail to meet my own expectations. The implication was very obvious. I could almost hear my own father saying it again: “If you can’t be happy here among your own kind, Mayfair, you’ll never be happy.”

  My own kind? Even my father thought I belonged to a different species now.

  I wasn’t too happy and didn’t expect that I would be the most pleasant new student. I was never good at hiding my displeasure, which goes back to my taking after my grandmother Lizzy. I should have taken lessons from Julie while I had the chance, I thought. Maybe that was really how you got along in this world.

  I gazed out of the car window and saw that the few clouds streaming across the sky looked like white ribbons floating over a sea of Wedgwood blue. Whenever my real mother saw a sky like this, she would say something descriptive like that. She would often speak in beautiful metaphors, which were sometimes quite spiritual, even though she wasn’t very religious. We would go to church only on holidays or for special occasions like weddings and funerals, but she believed in a holy spirit in us and around us.

  She’d say, “Look, Mayfair, God is tying ribbons in earth’s hair. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “Why do you say ‘she’? How do we know the earth is female, Mother?” I would ask.

  My f
ather would laugh and say, “What a kid. Look at what she thinks of at this age.”

  But my mother would stay serious and kiss my cheek or my forehead before running her fingers through my wheat-colored hair. She wanted me to wear it long then, and she enjoyed brushing it for me. I would look at her in the mirror while she sat or stood behind me, and I would study her face and wonder, Do all mothers look at their daughters like this, with such pure love?

  I thought that as long as I had my long hair, I would have my mother’s deep love. It had grown to reach halfway down my back before she died. After that, I chopped it down to just at the nape of my neck and did such a bad job that I usually wore a hat, even when my father took me by the hand to a beauty salon for repairs.

  “We know the earth is female because of all that’s born from her,” she told me. “And you know mothers are the ones who give birth.”

  That was logical, so I accepted it. I always appreciated that my mother would try to be logical when she answered my questions, even when I was only three. She never ascribed anything to fantasy. Just as there was no bogeyman, there were no good fairies. Mothers do seem to know their children better than fathers do. She knew early on that make-believe wouldn’t work with me.

  When my father wanted me to believe in Santa Claus, I simply told him that it was physically impossible for one man to deliver gifts to all the children in the world on one night, much less keep a record of who was naughty and who was nice.

  “Not even FedEx can do that,” I said, and he roared with laughter.

  “This kid’s better than television,” he told my mother.