School Rules/First Grade, leparello book, 2012, edition of 20; story, paintings, and books by Carolyn Prescott
1.
I am wearing a white, round-collar, puff-sleeved blouse trimmed with red piping. It slips out of the waistband of the plaid gathered skirt and slides up along the matching plaid suspenders all the sticky hot afternoon on the first day of school. My mother made this skirt and blouse for me.
As we return from recess, outside on the wide sandy playground, I think about how I am walking, how my skirt swishes between two rows of desks, and how I hold my head—left, then right—to show that I know what to do, that I know where to go.
My hair is shorter than ever before—in tight springs, unfamiliar. Only at Easter and now, on the first day of school, are my sisters and I so shorn and permed, my mother promising us, each time, soft curls and no frizz. Enough time passes between these ritual ordeals that we forget about the sausage curls that end in splayed fried fans of hair. All through the rolling up in the early afternoon, our mother not yet tired as she takes us on one after the other like customers in a salon, we are excited by visions of our faces framed by soft movie star waves. Only when she adds the permanent wave solution--that unmistakable, astringent odor--do we remember the disappointing result. Too short, too frizzy, too tight.
And now on the first day of school, I am sweating under the round-collar, puff-sleeved blouse and at the temples, and the smell of permanent wave solution washes over me. My frilly white socks slide down beneath my heels inside the black patent leather shoes.
I reach my desk, relieved. I turn in my seat to see the children in the rows behind me, my legs stick and then pull away from the warm wood with a little sucking noise. “Face the front,” says Mrs. Harwood, and I do.
— Carolyn Prescott