August 25, 2023
On Haight Street, Greenberg and I are surrounded by rosy-cheeked tourists, robust young women laughing with each other, many speaking languages I can neither understand nor identify. I picture them at home eating a lot of cheese and riding bicycles to school.
And I find that I’m looking up at them, thinking of Helaine Miller, .
She lived in an apartment house a few blocks away from us, and we were in the same class, as I remember, from second grade to sixth. And Helaine was always the tallest girl in the class. I hope she’s living a happy life, but I have not forgiven her for that.
In preparation for herding us – classes of 30 to 35 kids – from second- or third-floor classrooms down to the cafeteria, or auditorium or gym on the first floor, the teacher would always direct us to line up in size places. This meant the tallest would be in the back. Helaine was always behind me.
Front of the line, of course, would have been best. But even in my youngest years, I accepted the reality that I would never be that tiny sylph leading the migration out of the classroom. At the same time, I sensed that being tallest had runner-up prestige. But nuts, I wasn’t quite last either. That darn Helaine Miller occupied that position. The message I received from my penultimate placement was that (in that era) I was unusually tall, perhaps a Baroness of Tallness, but not quite tall enough to be the Queen.
From informal surveys I’ve taken recently – asking younger people whether they were commanded to line up in accordance with their heights – the concept is out of fashion. Younger people don’t even know what “size places” means. The only time they’ve had to consider comparative heights is for the taking of the class picture. I suppose the concept has been abandoned because in this enlightened era, we’ve learned that it’s not a good thing to group people by physical characteristics they can’t control. “Size places” would be height-ist , and putting the tall people at the back of the moving herd would be height-shaming. Maybe the kids line up in alphabetical order nowadays (I’d have been in the middle, with an “L” last name), or maybe they just move about in no particular order at all. But I grew up in an era when everything had a particular order.
After Helaine and I left P.S. 180 and went on to other schools, she was not part of my life. Maybe she joined a basketball team or had a fulfilling career picking fruit off tall trees. Or maybe (most probably) she went on to wear silk shirts and pencil skirts and be the chief financial officer of a start-up that’s now a billion-dollar company.
To me, however, she’ll always be the thief who robbed me of my place as the tallest girl in the class, at least for the time we were schoolmates, which turned out – thank goodness – to be a temporary thing. Out of her shadow, I kept growing.
My own particular height provided fodder for the exclamations of relatives and friends alike. With proper nutrition, the human race has been growing steadily taller for years; nowadays, my height at adulthood, 5’9”, is kind of medium tall. Not a giraffe but maybe a llama.
As to those exclamations, they weren’t the most reassuring messages to my adolescent self. My friends were developing waistlines and other female accouterments; my body seemed to be putting all its energy into upward expansion. Most often, friends of my mother’s proclaimed their amazement at my growth, and then offered my mother useless advice: “You’d better put a book on her head so she’ll stop growing, or she’ll never catch a man.” In the ‘50s, when I was a child and romance seemed the solution to every problem, this warning, I guess, was intended to be funny It came across as an ominous prediction. My height would determine the rest of my life.
As junior high began, I wasn’t alone. Many of the girls were taller than many of the boys, who still hadn’t entered their adolescent growth spurts. But I was taller than most all of the girls. I knew that my mother’s friend was wrong, that putting a book on my head wouldn’t have a leveling effect. But I absorbed the implication of the statement. And I determined that if being tall was going to be my defining characteristic, I would make the best of it.
Although I knew that carrying myself with back straight and head high would mean giving up any dreams of being the delicate ballerina spinning around in my friend’s musical jewelry boxes, I came to relish my size. I would present myself instead as a kind of hearty and capable woman, someone on the order of Julia Child or Annie Oakley. Cast in a movie, I would always be the stalwart best friend of the flirty heroine. I wouldn’t be morose, I wouldn’t be jealous of friends becoming faux Barbies. Instead of batting my eyelashes, I would make people laugh. I would be a tall, strong, fun-loving galoot.
That prototype, developed in adolescence, served me well. I didn’t see being tall as a detriment (and eventually I did “catch a man,” taller than I), and in fact, viewed it as an asset. I was easy to find in a crowd, I could not only reach for things on high shelves, but also wear dramatic clothes. I realized that there were some styles – kitten heels, for example – that looked wildly disproportionate to my size, but on the other hand, I was vertically suitable for capes and all manner of flowing garments.
I loved fashion, and when I shopped for clothing, I was usually confronted with pants that ended above my ankles; cute on small people, but looking like.pants that were too short on a tall person. I didn’t mind. I grew taller than my older sister (finally achieving, at least, vertical dominance), taller than either of my parents. I towered over my grandparents.
Being tall seemed a signal to the rest of the world; I’m to be set apart from the crowd. And now, everything (including me) has come crashing down, a result of an annual checkup I had a few weeks ago. I’d taken care to wear a pair of thin cotton pants and shoes easily removable, because I knew I was going to be weighed (thin pants weigh less than jeans) and measured (I’d step out of the sandals).
The nurse did the preliminaries. First, she weighed me, scribbling down a number at which I peeked. Oh, not too bad, I thought; that’s within limits. And then she stood me up against a measuring device and revealed the devastating truth. I was a little more than two inches shorter than I’d been 10 years before.
Suddenly, I understood why I’d been tripping over the hem of my favorite bathrobe, rolling a cuff on the bottom of my jeans. My cotton clothing was sanforized, but I wasn’t.
I’ve had many physicals over the years, and I usually grit my teeth and prepare myself for the weight number. I believe that healthy people come in all shapes and sizes, and at the same time I know that I have some power in this area. If I don’t like my weight, I can do something about it.
The height report, however, left me feeling literally and psychologically crushed. A woman of just under 5’7” is nothing like a woman of 5’9”. Gray-haired – and ,wrinkle-faced and veiny-legged to boot – a woman of average height is a woman who blends into the crowd. She’s a woman that no one remembers. (Furthermore, it occurred to me as I walked home, considering that I am two inches shorter than I used to be, shouldn’t I have weighed less?)
On Haight Street, which is clogged with tourists from Europe in the summer, I come face to face with many women taller than I. Dutch people, Nordic people … childhood nutrition has improved and many women are six feet tall. In shoe stores, size nine, which is what I wear, was once considered large. Now, I notice that it’s common. The Goodwill shelves are well-stocked with size nines and even tens, discards handed down from tall women to tall women. My sturdy tootsies have become, comparatively, daintified.
I walk. I drink milk and slurp yogurt. I gulp down a calcium pill every morning. I stretch while the shower water is getting hot. But still, I am getting shorter, and as I do, my identity is peeling away. I know exactly where this is going.
First I shrink, then I disappear, and then I’m gone. Poof.
.
You'll always be towering, Leah!
I remember those elementary school days in Brooklyn quite well and I was the tallest girl in class until the sixth grade and then I was next to last. Loved hearing 'size. places'! I only made it to 5'6".