Carrie Turns Fifty
This year “Carrie” turns fifty.
Carrie is not one of my friends, although I would have welcomed her as one. Some consider Stephan King’s Carrie a villain. However, since my first reading when I was 26, I’ve come to consider her a hero.
It’s a damn good thing I did not have Carrie’s telekinetic abilities when I was growing up in the late 1950s. If I’d had, my hometown would be ashes.
I was bullied relentlessly –not to the extreme that Carrie suffered — but bad enough for an 8-year-old fat girl.
The teasing, the name-calling, the taunts, the constant “Fatty-fatty, two by four” chant made a deep impression on my sense of worthlessness.
And it wasn’t just school children. My father never left a chance go by without criticizing my weight. On a Sunday drive, if a bridge sign stated a weight not to exceed, he would say, “Mitzi has to get out of the car…”
Of course, I hated going to school, but one day he walked behind me with a switch, hitting my naked legs (girls had to wear dresses to school back then), to get me to walk to the school — down the busiest street in our town. Just more humiliation.
One morning he drove me to the elementary school and watched as my second-grade teacher pulled me out of the car by my shoulders and shook me hard. He loved telling the story with a smile — “She shook her so hard that the bells on her Christmas corsage rang.”
So, telekinesis-lacking, all I could do was to pretend it was okay. Bullies were never punished, and victims just had to suck it up and, like me, grow up to be a woman who has no belief in her own worth.
So, Happy Fifty, Carrie — -and Stephen. Carrie made me believe in your magic.
