Like an angel

By Fayza Hassan
Grownups are seldom aware of the lasting impression their words can leave on children. Many adults, feeling awkward around the young, will rack their brains to say something nice, but instead come out with platitudes and ineptitudes which are unfortunately taken seriously by the young person they are addressing.
I remember having been acutely sensitive to the impression I made on my teachers and my parents' friends. Meeting me for the first time, one of my mother's acquaintances innocently wondered aloud if I was the intelligent or the pretty one, probably having been told that my parents had two young daughters, one beautiful, the other doing better at school.
I immediately translated her words as a confirmation of my suspicion that I was ugly. Constantly mocked by my schoolmates about my hefty appearance, I had not yet interpreted their jibes qualitatively. Now I knew that I was not only fat but unattractive as well, a thought that increased my natural timidity exponentially. I no longer blamed my companions for disliking me, but perversely encouraged them to make jokes at my expense. I pretended to be even clumsier than I really was, apologised constantly for the amount of space I occupied and convinced myself that I was not invited to birthdays because the hosts feared that I would eat them out of house and home. Soon I was walking heavily, swinging my arms in a graceless fashion, tripping over every object in sight and generally acting like a bull in a china shop. By this time I could no longer tell the difference between what I did on purpose and what happened accidentally. When the school instituted ballet lessons, I went around telling everyone that the teacher took one look at me and wailed, "not you, I can't teach elephants to pirouette." This was an utter lie, since I had chosen to do extra Latin instead of ballet and had never attended any of the dance classes, but had been inspired by the comments of a little girl on the skating rink. Pointing to me, I had heard her say to her sister: "Look, an elephant on wheels!" The comment had stuck and, after I put away my skates forever, I could not wait to inform all and sundry that I was a huge beast.
When I was 13, a new French teacher took our grade over. Although I was the youngest in my class, I was also the tallest and largest, and was assigned a desk at the back of the classroom. Since I was very quiet, it took the newcomer a few days to notice my existence. She did, however, and asked me to stand up. Having tripped over my bag and made my desk creak violently, I finally rose, trying to keep my knees bent to appear a little shorter. "You are so young; you look like an angel," she said kindly, "I have been going over your grades, why don't you ever speak up? From now on I want you to sit in the front row." Her words had been drowned out by my companions' irrepressible giggles at hearing me compared to an angel, and I was thus dispensed of answering, but her words bewildered me.
Was she making fun of me? I knew that teachers were never supposed to use sarcasm with their pupils, but did that apply to academic performance only or did it extend to our physical appearance as well? How could I possibly have looked like an angel? Angels were slight, with hardly any body to speak of. I had never seen a stout angel in churches or in artistic representations. Angels flew like birds, for heaven's sake; they did not trip over their own feet. They were light as feathers, and only drank the morning dew and ate the nectar from flowers. I drank Ovaltine and wolfed down huge sandwiches during recess, not to mention the three enormous meals I had at home. Angels, however, had chubby cheeks, and maybe mine had reminded her of theirs. Anyway, I mulled over the comparison for a long time. I examined myself in the mirror. Nothing in my looks was remotely reminiscent of heavenly creatures. Maybe she had been referring to a moral quality. Maybe I looked kind. But I wasn't; I knew that. I harboured wicked thoughts and spoke with a forked tongue, as my grandmother often said.
Then it occurred to me that in bed, with the covers drawn over my body and with only my face showing, I might possibly look like a sleeping angel. I practiced angelic positions . They were not very comfortable but I forced myself to lie in a foetal position with one hand on my cheek and the other gracefully stretched out on the pillow. The cramps in my arm usually woke me up and after a while I decided that since no one was there to see me, it did not really matter.
Still, the whole business had a positive side at first. I set out to impress the teacher with my impeccable performance in class. That at least was a trait I could control. I studied like never before and she duly acknowledged my efforts by constantly comparing them to those of her own son, who went to the boys' Lycée and who, she claimed, was a whiz kid. We both seemed to be doing equally well, until at the end of the year, I passed my exams with far better grades than him. From that day on, she never mentioned my angelic aspect again and when the fall term started, she told me to sit in the back because I was preventing the smaller students from seeing the blackboard. "You don't think you are transparent, do you?" she asked with a giggle. I knew then that I had fallen from grace.
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