Go Ask Alice

My daughter is being bullied. Suddenly I understand how that woman in Texas could take out a contract on the mother of one of her daughter's cheerleading rivals. Remember that one? There but for the grace of god. And there is no god, so that leaves grace. And I'm not talking about the Airplane.

What is grace anyway? Christians yammer on about it. All I can think of is that pre-meal mandatory muttering where you got the words all wrong because you were seven years old and faint with hunger. Not to mention the nightly prayer routine, Our father Art, in heaven, Halloween be thy name. Art Halloween. Could be worse names for a dad.

It's important for the jury to know this particular girl has been bullying my daughter since they both landed on the same gymnastics team, back at the ripe old age of nine. Now they've both landed in the same middle school, and it's no more Mr. Nice Guy. This girl means business. It's also important to know this girl is fat, ugly and stupid. And I'm not just saying that.

This stupid ugly fatty has a posse with similar traits, and they've zeroed in on my daughter for reasons I can only surmise. Not that my daughter is blameless -- contrary, opinionated and controlling are a few adjectives which come to mind -- but she isn't mean. She isn't cruel. A mother knows these things. Especially this mother. Who learned Mean and Cruel at an early age.

My family, the Halloweens, grew up next door to The Devil. That statement has a certain symbiotic ring to it, don't you think? And right here, right now, for the first time ever in print, I'm going to officially out The Devil: ALICE COMER. The Devil's name is ALICE COMER. ALICE COMER lived next door to me when I was growing up. ALICE COMER taught me Mean and Cruel. No, make that Evil. ALICE COMER taught me Evil. And when a kid learns that lesson at the ripe old age of ten, it plants itself deep. It grows roots. You can't yank it out. It's there for the duration.

The Cliff Notes version goes like this: ALICE COMER hated the Halloweens. Hated us with a passion. This hatred had something to do with my mother's father, my grandfather, a Story in Himself, but that's a tale for a dark and stormy night and a large bottle. The point being, ALICE COMER's hatred metamorphosed through various stages until it finally transformed itself into One Great Abiding Hatred, her hatred of cats. My cats, to be exact. Which explains how, following a series of progressively more disturbing incidents involving ALICE COMER and my beloved first cat Archie, I came to be crouched at the top of the basement stairs one autumn evening listening to Archie die from strychnine poisoning down in the rec room. It took one hour. Sixty minutes. Three-thousand-six-hundred seconds. I was ten. If I let myself think about it, I can still hear him screaming. A sound I have yet to hear again. So I don't let myself think about it. A large bottle helps.

Archie was the first. Because kids want to believe. So do parents, in the beginning. Skip to the Epilogue, which provides a slightly more uplifting arc: Ditto, the last of my childhood cats, eventually went into the witness protection program at a nice home out in the country (he sent us a Christmas card every year for many years), and ALICE COMER died in agony after a decade of raving dementia in a local nursing home. The in agony part is wishful thinking. The rest is true.

I have wishful thinking about my daughter's tormentors. It has to do with my jumping in the car some dark and stormy night and tearing over to the crappy part of town and banging on the door of a two-bit rambler with a couple of crappy snowmobiles in the driveway and a crappy American flag dripping from a crappy eave. I cringe to think what happens when someone opens the door, not for their sake, but for the sake of my family, who will have to figure out a way to smuggle earplugs and large bottles into the State Women's Correctional Facility where I'll be residing for the next two-to-five. No doubt in a manner none too graceful. And there's that word again.

So last Friday the school nurse calls. My daughter isn't feeling well, she has a slight fever. When my daughter gets on the phone, she wants to come home. She's crying. Make that whimpering. Nazi Mom that I am, I tell her to Gut it out! Only a few more hours! Hang in there! When she calls back twenty minutes later, I know. I pick her up and bring her home and she sleeps until nightfall. Eventually she tells me. She didn't feel up to gutting it out after another run-in with the posse. And it's one more instance of that subtle emotional-bullying which is the bailiwick of girls. And I'm in the throes of a full-scale attack of wishful thinking.

The day before all this, my daughter's science class played host to a human brain. The brain was in a jar, a local TV station showed up to film it. Later one of the neighbors called to say he'd seen my daughter on the local news, looking at a brain in a jar. The camera had lingered on a close-up of her face, her beautiful beautiful face. And I'm not just saying that. When I picked her up at gym that night, I told her about being on the news. She said that was cool, then complained about not feeling well. Which didn't surprise me. Looking at a human brain is enough to make anyone ill. Go ask ALICE, I think she'll know.