Free Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest by Jen Doll

slowly repeated my answer again, louder. Her frown cut deeper into her face. I squirmed in my desk. The class laughed, uncomfortably.
    “Jennifer,” she said, waving her hand with the chalk still in it, her fingers gnarled like those of witches. “In my classroom when you address the teacher, you say ‘ma’am.’ Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. This is the answer, ma’am. Do you understand?”
    The class stared at me. Some of them were still laughing; others looked plainly horrified. “Yes,” I said. It came out in a whisper, and she jabbed her chalk at me, accusingly.
“Ma’am.”
    I hadn’t even known
ma’am
was a word, much less something I needed to say in school, and when I went home, I explained what had happened and cried. My mom called the teacher to tell her I was not intentionally rude; we were simply from another part of the country. I don’t know that that helped.
    The next humiliation came at the hands of my own classmates. People were pantsing one another on the playground; it was a phase, and I was desperately afraid it would happen to me. I thought about it when I put on my clothes in the morning. If the underwear I picked for the day was going to be seen by twenty kids, it better not have something embarrassing on it, like cartoon characters or hearts and stars. Better stick with solids, preferably in dark colors, and definitely, definitely make sure there were no holes or raggedy spots. The pantsings were generally done by the popular girls, who probably picked the game up from the popular boys, who may have done it to one another congenially for a day before moving on to playing dodgeball. With the girls it was less game and more psychological torture, a form of bullying that escaped being called that because,
ha ha, wasn’t it hilarious?
No one got hurt; it was kids being kids! When the teacher sent us out for recess in the afternoon, the most awful part of the day (
she
got to stay inside), I clutched my hideously uncool pants, which had been fine, even hip, in Illinois—stone-washed jeans or Z. Cavariccis—tightly to my waist, wary of other girls, dressed in matching brightly colored outfits with brand names like Benetton and Esprit, getting too close. When it did happen, I was prepared. Oversized Coke-bottle lenses can come in handy. I saw my attackers reflected before they pounced and held tight enough that my high-waisted bottoms did not give. The other me, the Illinois me who had never struggled to keep her pants up on a playground, felt a long way away.
    The adjustment to the South wasn’t so hard for the other members of my family. My dad, who’d received a raise and promotion in his move to this new town, had a whole set of coworkers who had to treat him well since he was the boss. As for Brad, from the moment we arrived he had a host of new friends, including some who lived just doors away. His afternoons were spent running through the streets, playing in the creek, and terrorizing the nearby cul-de-sac in the way of prepubescent boys,more mischief than malevolence. There was a bunch of second-grade girls who wanted to marry him, he’d complain. My mom was more like me, ill at ease in this strange land of buffets and sweet tea and neighbors who said “Bless her heart” when they really meant “What an ass,” though she at least had the safety net of being the boss’s wife. No one would dare pull down her pants on a playground or make her say
ma’am
; she’d get all sugar and Southern hospitality, at least to her face. Meanwhile, behind her back, her use of multicolored Christmas lights instead of the neighborhood-approved white-only ones caused a stir for several seasons among certain ladies of the town. Those who were too young to know better were more upfront with their opinions. Mom volunteered for a field trip with Brad’s second-grade class, and one of the boys, hearing her thick Chicago accent, asked my brother what planet she was from. We might as well have been from