So with a little medical "care" from the 20th century to life away from the closed society of the German immigrant farming community, I slid into the 20th century in the 6th grade from lots of grades and one teacher to lots of students and one teacher all the same "grade" of human. The only subject of real interest was geography. The rest made not much sense to me. I still was in my farming roots and what land grew what things seemed like important knowledge. In fact, mathematics (other than adding and subtracting) seemed so unnecessary that I failed algebra because I could see nothing of importance there. It caused me to lose my status as a majorette (in spite of my club foot) because of the pass/fail requirement. I was never going to be a secretary and fell asleep in typing class until the teacher mentioned that the typewriter keyboard would be the same on the new invention called a computer. I woke up with a start and, from then on, worked hard to be proficient in that skill.
When I went to the city in actuality, it was as a secretary/clerk/female slave to others words and actions, but eventually, at least, it was on the more interesting computer.
But that same typing teacher informed my mother that I was "college material" and should have a college education so at 18 with high school diploma in hand I was to be supported through one semester of community college. But whether my genetics or modeling or my own inability to fit together my rural consciousness with the urban one, I found that in high school I had developed a taste for alcohol that kept accelerating year by year. Along those lines, I felt doomed--as a strong person like my father could not win the battle between sobriety and drunkenness, I knew that I did not have a chance. I envisioned the same life as his, struggling to endure the expected work of my societal level and battling the constant need to escape into the illegal and free world of the drunk. No matter what I did, I would be different from the others, not just by background and early life, but by my crooked foot, my orthopedic shoes, my limited clothing stock, and, alas, the English teacher asking me what my first language was. I told her it was English, but my father spoke German, although he did not teach us the language. Oh, she says, you have sentence structure that is German then. She then tried to teach me better sentence structure in my advanced English class that I had been placed (into!).
In my first semester, I rented a room in a 3 story private home where I was introduced to the joys of marital behavior as each night the couple who had been just married, living in the apartment above my room, lustily enjoyed each other with the bed thumping on the floor and the eventual crash as the whole thing crashed to the floor. Just a pause and then the resumption. This was very unlike what I heard growing up as three of us slept in the double bed next to the double bed of my parents in our 2-bedroom home. For some reason, my mother felt the oldest needed her own room and we then slept in the parental bedroom where my mother would whisper, "Here, put this newspaper underneath so the sheet doesn't get dirty." Then the tame crinkling of paper and complete silence otherwise.
So at last, I am in the city and learning the ways of the 20th century. I have already been deflowered myself in a night of drunkenness by a much older man wise in the ways of seducing virgins. It had almost happened a few years before when I was pinned to the ground by my first boyfriend and, in struggling to free myself, chipped my front teeth on a nearby rock. So far I was not impregnated, but with my need to load up on alcohol how soon would that last?
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