Israeli Girls Writing Hate Messages on Artillery Shells
This time I have to change the names to protect the innocent.
I used to ride the bus when I attended kindergarten. We’d all meet at the intersection of Mayfield and Evergreen around 7am. There were about eight of us, all in various grades. We’d play there to burn the time, barely keeping off the neighbor’s lawn as we were warned. Two of us there were from the LaSalle family, an older brother and younger sister who was my age of five.
The LaSalle’s lived about three blocks over. Once I describe the house and lot, you’ll immediately get just what kind of family they were. Walking down Constitution street where they lived, the homes were mostly Capes, with small front yards that were well kept, that until you came to the LaSalle yard. The LaSalle’s had no front yard to speak of really. There was no lawn save the open dirt and some ratty looking bushes. The gray bare wood porch leaned far too forward to seem safe to stand on. The house was a faded yellow color that flecked chips of paint to the ground. There were times you could walk by the house and hear shouting inside from Mom or Dad…and then a loud THUMP of something, followed by screaming. You didn’t know what just happened but could imagine it with all your will.
The five year old, Jen LaSalle, was a tiny, skinny girl with an unfortunately too narrow looking face. For her size, she seemed easily breakable. The dark eyes and hair suggested a trace of foreign-like gypsy in her. She wasn’t an ugly kid but she didn’t fit in with the typical Irish or Polish pedigree that was our neighborhood. While at the bus stop, she didn’t speak up too often like the more gregarious kids did. When she did talk, it was usually one on one.
For the time I did know her, Jen had a perpetual, dirty looking cast on either her right or left arm. When asked how she broke it, she had a short curt answer that killed any further attempts at learning why. Being curious, we asked her older brother who confessed that she “fell a lot.” Now, this was 1969, DCYF probably would not be alerted to that. It was true that kids fell all the time then. You’d have to have the burn marks of iron on your chest to get the school or State suspicious.
Jen sported, I swear, the same three potato sack dresses girls her age wore then. It was either the yellow, blue or pink one she constantly wore to school. I suppose her Mom cycled which color to wear every few days. Jen wasn’t dirty but the filthy cast, the same clothing and her barley brushed out wild hair didn’t give you the impression she was all that hygienic either.
Kids, even five year olds, have a pecking order. They ape their parents, older siblings and friends on how to play that game. Kids learn very quickly about the rules that allow you to climb on that ladder, or to push others off of it. Jen and her brother didn’t climb too high on that ladder. Her older brother, being more contentious, had little problem fighting for one more step that many though he was usurping, but Jen rarely fought.
One time at our bus stop, the other girls had learned of something and teased Jen to show her butt. “C’mon, Jen, let us look, c’mon!” Jen protested, “No! Go Away!“ The girls ganged up on her and yanked her dress up, panties down. On her butt and part of her thighs you could see the red marks of a belt.
I usually sat behind her when we rode to school. At most times we didn’t talk too much but my curiosity took over and I asked, “What happened?” She shot around in her seat and said, “None of your business!” She coupled that with snarling face that shut me up. She was still stewing about being pants-ed and ill treated by the girls. As we got to school and got up to leave the bus, she turned around and told me, almost apologetically, “It doesn’t hurt anymore anyway.”
A month later, Jen disappeared from our neighborhood and class. Her brother said an aunt came to get her and was going to live with her from “now on.”
That wasn’t the only family I knew of around here that was a mess.
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