It is December 1968, and I am at my first formal school dance as an 8th grade student. My date is a nice young man, clean-cut, and polite. We are not a couple; we have never been out together before, and we have never even flirted. We are just two young teenagers on the cusp of acknowledging our attraction to the opposite sex but pausing at the sheer terror of what that involves.
I am demurely pleased about what I am wearing: a lemon-yellow satin Empire-waist gown. For reasons of female family culture and frugality, I made the dress myself. It was a challenging project. The slippery fabric repeatedly threatened to run amuck as I threaded it through my entry-level Singer sewing machine. I hand sewed an embroidered daisy chain at the top of the high waist and eased elastic into the cuffs at the end of billowy sleeves.
Even with my hypercritical eye, I loved the way I looked in that dress. The gown had a scoop neck that swooped demurely half-way between my collar bone and the top of my bosom. The skirt skimmed my trim figure and made me feel feminine and pretty.
I do not remember much about the evening. Most of the girls huddled together on the dance floor and gazed at the older, more sophisticated couples draping their arms around each other, their bodies arcing into each other’s curves. The boys hung out in another group, their conversation presumably centering on something more interesting than the girls. My date and I swayed to a couple of slow dances, our bodies as far apart as the length of our arms could accommodate.
During one of the band’s breaks, I wandered into the refreshment area outside the gym where the chaperones gathered behind tables of soft drinks. I turned past them to head to the restroom. As I passed by, I heard a chaperone, the mother of one of my classmates, remark to someone else that, “Laurin is too flat-chested to be wearing a dress like that.”
I was devastated. I rushed to the bathroom and pretended to fix my hair and make-up as I blinked back humiliated tears of shame. I was crushed and inconsolable, and the happy anticipation of the evening was demolished. My budding vestige of adult self-esteem surfaced just enough to know that the woman was heartless and cruel, and I that I did not deserve her judgment.
My tormentor needed to belittle me for reasons that I could not fathom. I did not pose a threat to her daughter’s social standing. My classmate was pretty and popular and, for a young girl, had an enviable decolletage. If the woman needed to disparage someone to elevate her offspring’s status, she should have set her sights higher. I was an emotionally fragile young person endowed with not just the standard teenage insecurities but also bludgeoned by recent tragic losses of my father and my sister. As a target, I was low-hanging fruit.
I wish I had known then what I know now: bullies come in all shapes and sizes. The need to denigrate says far more about the insecurity of the bully than the attributes of his or her target. Intimidation is a passive aggressive way to inflate an ego that is lessened by loss, dysfunction, or trauma. Powerlessness is the foundation of a vulnerable veneer of domination, superiority, and malice.
Heartlessness is grounded in broken heartedness. I understand that my tormentor harbored pain that I could not see. Her callous comment revealed more about her than it did a young girl in a homemade fancy dress. She may have ruined my evening, but she did not tarnish the soul residing in a sunny yellow dress.