{"id":3520,"date":"2015-08-01T20:30:27","date_gmt":"2015-08-01T20:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=3520"},"modified":"2015-09-29T20:40:25","modified_gmt":"2015-09-29T20:40:25","slug":"the-clothes-i-wore-in-high-school-maria-mazziotti-gillan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=3520","title":{"rendered":"The Clothes I Wore in High School — Maria Mazziotti Gillan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2026were all wrong. \u00a0I have always had a disastrous sense
\nof style, and even when I followed Seventeen<\/em> magazine
\nlike a religion, I didn\u2019t know what would work on my slender,
\nawkward body—all elbows and knees so I wore clothes
\nI thought were preppy—gray flannel wool skirts
\nand oxford cloth blouses and bobby socks and saddle shoes.
\nThey looked wonderful on the models in Seventeen;<\/em>
\nunfortunately I had\u00a0thick, curly dark hair that stuck out
\nfrom my head so it looked like the beautician had deliberately
\nformed it into a triangle that swallowed my long skinny face,
\nmy big sad eyes. I looked like what I was,
\na girl who did not speak English when she first went to school, a foreign girl\u2014
\nand all the preppy clothes in the world could not change me
\ninto this person I wished I was, the upper middle class girl
\nwho lived in a big white colonial house, all graceful lines
\nand not in a tenement on 19th street that faced the brick
\nwindowless wall of Warner Piece Dye Works. The people
\nin Seventeen<\/em> Magazine would never have lived in a house
\nlike ours–with its small kitchen, its old broken down bathroom
\nwith its claw-footed tub, right off the kitchen, one large room
\nthat held the sofa bed in which my brother slept
\nand a dining room table and chairs. Two tiny bedrooms, barely
\nlarge enough for a three-quarter bed, opened off this room,
\nand on one end another door led to the living room
\nwith a cheap living room suite\u2014a sofa and two chairs,
\na living room which we rarely used. It was meant for company,
\nbut really all our company, my honorary aunts and uncles
\nand cousins, came to the back door.\u00a0 We all gathered
\nat the dining room table—the adults playing cards
\nand talking and drinking espresso
\nand the children sitting on the sofa bed or playing games
\non the linoleum floor. \u00a0In high school, I was in alpha classes,
\nthose classes meant for smart students, classes filled
\nwith upper middle class girls with their expensive felt poodle
\nskirts and cashmere sweaters in pastel colors
\nand leather penny loafers.\u00a0In those classes I learned to love
\nthe sound of poetry read aloud, love the novels we read,
\nbut then I also learned that an enormous distance separated
\nme from the other alpha class girls who came in on Monday
\nmornings to talk about the parties they\u2019d gone to or given
\nin the finished basements of their big houses in the Eastside
\nsection where the factory owners and professionals all lived:
\nI\u2019d hear them whispering together about the parties
\nto which I was never invited. \u00a0I must have seemed so strange
\nto them in my inexpensive clothes that tried to pretend
\nthey were the real thing and my cheap haircut and my big nose.<\/p>\n

I never spoke to anyone in the class but when Miss Durbin
\ncalled on me to read a poem aloud, I so loved the words,
\nsweet as a peach in my mouth, that the girls and their parties
\nvanished and I was left holding poems in my hand,
\nfeeling them rise off the page as\u00a0I read, and Miss Durban smiled.
\nHow fortunate I was that she always asked me to read how
\nfortunate that she knew I was an outsider, knew I loved
\nthe poems as much as she did, that when I read them aloud,
\nI could see the words lifting off toward the plaster ceiling
\nlike birds with glittering wings.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions). She is the Founder\/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published sixteen books, including What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions), THE PLACE I CALL HOME (NYQ Books, 2012), THE SILENCE IN AN EMPTY HOUSE (NYQ Books, 2013) and Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica). With her daughter, Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies.\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026were all wrong. \u00a0I have always had a disastrous sense of style, and even when I followed Seventeen magazine like a religion, I didn\u2019t know what would work on my slender, awkward body—all elbows and knees so I wore clothes I thought were preppy—gray flannel wool skirts and oxford cloth blouses and bobby socks and [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[185],"class_list":["post-3520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-marias-family-photo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3520"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3719,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions\/3719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}