In Which The Requirements Are Dismal

This Was The World

by Yvonne Georgina Puig

Every once in awhile a person admits you into their private world, the world in which they piddle and think and dream, presumably after a period of courtship or friendship. Trust established, we open our lives to the trusted. These days, Facebook seems to have blurred this custom, so much so that the other day I found myself double-clicking through the doorways of a former classmate from junior high and high school, Kourtney Kachler.

Kourtney Kachler. Say it three times slow, not fast, relish the alliteration. Kourtney was one of the queen bees, if not the queen bee of my grade's "popular" crowd. OUR HOUSE AT CHRISTMAS reads the album's title, and I proceed into her TV room and den, white-couched and symmetrical, and on to a living room with a white painted brick fireplace. The Christmas tree is aglow with white lights. Onward to the master bedroom, behold the creaseless white duvet, and finally to the nursery, a small pillow resting on a twin bed, a brown cross sewn to the front.

My memories of Kourtney Kachler are few. I can't recall having a single conversation with her. I admittedly know next to nothing about her. Just that she is married, friends with Jenna Bush, has a baby, resided in an ostentatious mansion built of red brick during high school, and that she often appears in my Facebook newsfeed as a bridesmaid or guest in the weddings of the other queen bees. Because I know so little about her, I can project on to her anything I wish, and I do. So let's all see Kourtney not as the actual, individual living person but instead as an idea, a representation of the things we dwell upon in our collective adolescence.

We all have this girl. Imagine her now, hold her up in your mind in all her 10th grade glory. Remember how it felt? Sore.  Through the years, she has come to represent many things: the general misery and injustice of high school, the Platonic ideal of straightened hair, and in particular, the satisfying validity of the notion that it's possible to envision the life trajectories of classmates, even at sixteen, and hit it right on the nose.

We not-popular girls were supposed to emulate the popular girls. That's how it works. But I wanted nothing to do with it. Not that I didn't want to be popular; on the contrary I would have loved the attention, but my idols were so predictable, and the requirements dismal. A few of these requirements included having Republican parents, loving Jesus Christ and football (or at least enjoying the social activities revolving around others' love of Jesus Christ and football), and drinking cheap beer. Something which always struck me as incongruous was the effort the queen bees put into their appearance coupled with the Bud Lites they drank once the effort was complete. (Sophistication is up for interpretation in the suburbs.) It also helped if your parents were friends with the parents of popular children; this implied that they, too, had been popular. The result of all this was a whole set of Jewish girls and too-smart-for-it girls trying to squeeze themselves into the mold. Some succeeded, most failed. Same old story.

At the time, I didn't realize it was strange to attend a public high school where it was not uncommon to see boys driving F-150s with confederate flag stickers affixed to the bumpers, where teenagers went to bible study and then liberally called one another "faggots." Somehow I thought this was normal, that this was the world, and that beautiful women were cheerleaders. I knew better, I had been to Europe! but Paris is a long way from Houston.  The formula for success I was taught at home, to be passionate, to work hard and believe in art, did not apply. For what purpose? Those who thought otherwise were invisible. The dream had been pre-selected, and believing in art had very little to do with it.

Looking back, it seemed so unattainable. Attending college for your MRS., working the requisite two-year position in a public relations/event planning firm, and then settling in, for good, with the babies. Now, it's too simple. The problem at Memorial High School was a hostility toward the intellect, and a sort of denial that people are dynamic, that beauty is dynamic, and that success is dynamic. Kourtney Kachler, for one, is probably very happy and content.

So it went for me: In eleventh grade I met Macon, my VW-driving, wooden-tie wearing, orange-cape donning first love. With him it was easier to remember there was a wide world out there. And today, thanks to Facebook, it's even easier. Not to see how wide the world is (that is best experienced), but to remind myself how small it can be.

Yvonne Georgina Puig is the contributing editor to This Recording. She has written for Variety, GOOD, Los Angeles Magazine, and the Texas Observer, among others. She lives in Los Angeles. She tumbles here.

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