Betsy

At fifteen, I emulated the dress of those ten years older than myself, and lusted after a lifestyle twenty years past—the hippies of old, life magazine stills of longhaired boys with flowers and tattered sweaters, closed eye sway girls with breezy skirts and skinny arms. I appropriated the floral, barely within dress code, gauzy skirts that ripped easily and oriental Mary Janes. On my pear shaped body, I looked more like a middle aged frump than a flower child—I suppose I could have aimed for Earth Mother—but due to an unpleasant attempt at teenage escapism the preceding summer with accompanying drastic haircut—I lacked the necessary bountiful hair. (I also lacked the attitude, but that’s a whole other story.)

Betsy was a senior. I thought she bore a scant resemblance to a character from Twin Peaks (of which, the season before, I had been a huge fan)—I think Laura Flynn Boyle—but in retrospect, her behavior was considerably more David Lynch than her looks. I tended to watch her. She was a smartass, clever, nonchalant. I don’t know if she smoked cigarettes—I was not cool enough to be accepted by older students, let alone be allowed in their company while they indulged in forbidden activity—but I like to think she did. Cigarettes would have fit my image of her. Cigarettes and a fifth of vodka well hidden.

Like most female Asheville School students in the early 90’s, Betsy dressed like an office temp for a trucking company. But on weekends, I’d spy her in black leather and fishnet stockings—wearing red velvet and combat boots to haul crates of music from the radio station to otherwise ordinary school dances.

Betsy was from DC. I think we spoke three times. The most memorable of these conversations occurred during break one morning, as I stood beside the scarred wooden table beside the mailboxes in the basement of Anderson. She flipped through a copy of Spin Magazine with Perry Farrell on the cover.

A silly recollection, significant only in that, at that time, Spin Magazine seemed radical and avant-garde to me, and certainly subscriptions were reserved for the loftiest of the (angel-headed?) hipsters. She spoke offhand of some stranger, met on the street in Georgetown, who offered her a discounted subscription—“So, I took it. It’s okay to read. Pretty cheesy, you know?”

I did not know. Excepting REM and The Smiths, my music collection at the time was so thoroughly unhip that my parents used to complain of me putting them to sleep. “If you’re going to listen to old stuff, at least buy the Rolling Stones or something,” my mother’s boyfriend (and future stepfather told me). Consequently, my knowledge of popular culture was so embarrassingly scant.

I had no remark at all. All I knew was that Spin Magazine seemed edgy and way cooler than me, and if Betsy was too cool for Spin, then it seemed fair to assume that I could never be her friend.

Fifteen year old logic . . .

As means of ducking the indignity of required athletics, I served as manager for the softball team. A choice position as I merely kept books and sat on the grassy hill overlooking the hockey field for the spring semester. I watched Betsy’s hair—a curious auburn, Clairol Black Cherry—while I muddled over math homework, and spun stories of unrequited love (a popular theme even then, especially then, but once again, that’s a whole other story—one in which Betsy does not play a part.)

She graduated. I obsessed over other members of her class for the remainder of the summer and the bulk of my remaining years at Asheville School. I did not think about Betsy again for a long time. Occasionally bits and pieces of her life filtered down my direction—I heard she sat up with Mr Bonner and talked music or that she had a passion for English history. When I was called upon to cite scenes of past Asheville School greatness, Betsy always surfaced, and sometimes, nostalgic, as I thumbed through my yearbook, I’d land on her picture and invent fictions. She was a sardonic wit with a streak of romantic nihilism, an amateur dominatrix, a DC scenester with spotless credentials, an elegant revolutionary, a another self-conscious loner who used Asheville School to reinvent herself, or just an eighteen year old girl at a mediocre prep school who never saw me staring.