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Jodi and I had been friends since kindergarten, so she was used to this kind of mix-up. As sweet and loving as my mother was, she had the organizational skills of a sea lion, and could never remember to make me lunch. So every morning, I had to tell my father to make it for me. He in turn, had the culinary skills of a sea lion, and no matter how many times I repeated the phrase “peanut butter and jelly,” he always somehow managed to f**k it up.
“Do you want half of my sandwich?” Jodi asked, offering me the other half of her ham and cheese. Had I not kept kosher my entire third-grade year, I would have dove into it headfirst.
“Just forget it,” I said, skipping the sandwich and taking a bite out of one of my Ding Dongs.
The day grew more and more insane as well-wishers and new fans were approaching me left and right, prying for information. One first-grader even asked me for my autograph. By the end of the day, not only were we filming in the Galapagos, but Soleil Moon Frye, a.k.a. Punky Brewster, would be playing my sister in the movie. Then I realized that her dark hair and freckles were in stark contrast to my blonde hair and blue eyes and quickly made her my stepsister instead.
By the time school let out, everyone who lived in my neighborhood was racing to get one-on one time with me, and I walked home with eight other children. The great thing about this attention was that it was coming from all the older kids, who I always believed were my core demographic. I always felt older than the kids my age, and I would get so frustrated when the other third-graders showed no interest in trying to help me figure out what really went down during the Nixon administration a decade earlier. I remember having this feeling early on, during my second day of kindergarten. It became apparent to me that all of my classmates had the necessary faculties to play a serious game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but had no designs on how to forge a late note from their parents.
I constantly had visions of skipping a grade or two, becoming a trailblazer of sorts, and possibly inventing something along the lines of Cabbage Patch Kid “Plus.” Once patented, it would look and feel like a regular Cabbage Patch Kid, but would also be able to help you with chores around the house. It would be able to speak different languages like Spanish and Farsi, and if you poked it in the eye, it would sh*t out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on rye.
I walked into my house that cold December day floating on air. “Hi, Mom!” I said, as I triumphantly threw my backpack on the ground and skipped into the kitchen.
“Chelsea, sweetie, your father just got off the phone with your principal, Mr. Hiller.”
“What kind of meshugas is this, Chelsea?” my father asked, using one of his two favorite Yiddish phrases. “You’re shooting a movie with Goldie Hawn and flying to the Galapagos?”
My whole day deflated in a matter of seconds. “Mrs. Schectman was making a big deal about me not doing my homework and the Goldie Hawn story was the only thing I could think of,” I told them.
“Well, why didn’t you do your homework?” he asked me.
“Because, Dad!” I wailed, bursting into tears and stomping my left foot. “It was the season premiere of Charles in Charge! Are you out of your tree?”
“Chelsea, sweetie, you don’t have to make up such far-fetched lies,” my mother said in her ultracalm tone. “Couldn’t you have come up with something a little more reasonable?”
“I know,” I told her, defeated, and walked over for a hug. My mother was always a softie, and once I got over to her, I knew my father would cease being such an immediate physical threat. “But everyone started to believe it and all the older kids were asking me about it and I got carried away.”
“Well,” my father said dismissively, “you’re just going to have to go back to school tomorrow and tell everyone the truth.”
The problem with being the youngest of six children is that my father had me when he was forty-two years old, resulting in what I like to refer to as “severe generational gappage.” That, coupled with the fact that he was born without the embarrassment gene, left us little in common. It would have seemed completely appropriate to my father for me to hold a press conference in the school’s auditorium the next day, wearing a helmet with a maxipad stuck to my forehead while announcing into a microphone that I’ve been a “bad, bad girl, and I’ve also been known to sh*t in my pants.”
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