The X-Ray Specs

Like many eccentric children, I had often wished I could be afflicted with some kind of physical ailment, imperfection or secret status—something that would make me unique and special.

Once I fell down on the playground and convinced everyone I had broken my ankle. I was helped into the school by some interested Samaritans where I was examined by the school nurse.  I was sure the nurse would see how injured I was.  She would probably recommend I go to the hospital.

She turned my ankle this way and that and finally pronounced it “slightly strained.” I really disagreed with that diagnosis and made sure to limp around the school for several days.

In first grade, I told my teacher I was part Jewish. We lived in Utah. It was 1968, and my family had been white and Mormon for at least a hundred years. One day, I learned that my Dad’s brother’s wife—Aunt Barbara, was from New York and “Jewish.” I explained to Mrs. Robinson that my relationship with my Aunt made me at least half Jewish, because the only other half were a bunch of white Mormons.

My efforts at attention getting followed me well into the second grade.

It was the first day back at school after Christmas vacation, I was wearing my brownish-gold ultra-suede jacket. The jacket was one of the best Christmas presents I ever got, ever. I loved the Jacket. I had never loved an item of clothing more than I loved that jacket. I thought it made me look like a girl version of Donny Osmond. I loved Donny Osmond. I obsessed over him in Tiger Beat Magazine. But at eight years old, and as I said, somewhat eccentric, my love for Donny was expressed in the desire to be him rather than be his girlfriend.

I often pictured myself having to run in at the last minute and cover for Donny because he was sick or had been kidnapped or something and couldn’t be in the show. My extremely talented performance would save the day and the audience wouldn’t even know it wasn’t him on stage.

On the day after Christmas vacation, I sat at my desk happily wearing the ultra-suede jacket and waiting for class to start. Miss Parker peered over the four or five rows of second graders and fixed her gaze on me. 

I don’t know why she hated me. Maybe it was because I was a defiant brat. Maybe it was because my mom was too pretty on parent’s day. Maybe it was because of that one day when I went up to her desk four times in a row to ask how to spell the word “friend.” This was while the class was writing “get well” letters to Sheldon Jensen—a kid who really had broken his ankle. Miss Parker kept making me nervous the way she spelled it out in such an annoyed tone, and I kept forgetting to listen.

After glaring for a moment, Miss Parker said, “Lisa, could you please tell us why you need to be wearing a coat in a perfectly warm classroom?”  

This struck me as an odd concern and I looked at her frozen and confused. “It’s just that I’m, well, kind of cold.” What was I going to say? That I was pretending to be Donny Osmond that day?

“Well, just take it off and hang it up in the back. It’s not cold in here.”

It was my opinion that it was cold in there, and even if it wasn’t, how could Miss Parker know that I was not personally cold? It was also my opinion that it was an indoor/outdoor jacket and was perfectly appropriate for wearing in the classroom. I shook my head.

Miss Parker seemed startled. “Take the jacket off,” she repeated. I shook my head again. Normally, I was not defiant with grown-ups. In fact, I had never been defiant with anyone older than me except for my friend Joanne. I simply could not take the jacket off. I loved it. I loved it and it was not coming off. Miss Parker was really glaring now, tiny black eyes trying to penetrate through “coke bottle” lenses.

I was hot now, hot and cold with sweat trickling down my back. But somehow, I bravely managed to glare back. It seemed like minutes passed. All the second grader eyes were fixed on me and the interesting event unfolding in math class.

“Fine!” Miss Parker fumed, “keep it on! But it’s hot in here and wearing that jacket looks ridiculous.”

The rest of the day, I did not feel like Donny Osmond. I felt like the weird girl who would not take her jacket off.

Miss Parker and Mrs. Beeman were the two second grade teachers at Pleasant Grove Elementary School. Mrs. Beeman was someone you could count to always act like a normal adult. She was kind, she smiled a lot. She was stern when necessary and funny sometimes. Mrs. Beeman got mad at our class when we talked too much, sometimes even scary mad. But she always got over it and she didn’t hold grudges.

Miss Parker was not one of these types of adults. Miss Parker was young-ish for a teacher. She had a sweet, slightly bucked toothed smile and the physical shape of an ironing board. Her short dark hair looked like it had been subjected to spongey rollers at night and optimistic poofing in the morning.  Miss Parker wore flat heels and floral cotton jumpers. She smelled like powder. To other people, Miss Parker could seem nice. But Miss Parker was not nice.

The day I wore my X-Ray Specs to school was the day Miss Parker got me back once and for all. I had transported them to school safely in the pocket of my brownish-gold-ultra-suede jacket on a cold February morning. It turned out that the jacket was not that much of an outdoor jacket after all and my hands were frozen.

After the bell, our class began plodding through the morning’s activities: prayer, pledge of allegiance, reading and spelling, etc. All the time I thought about the specs and yearned for recess. I had only had them since last night. I had not even had the chance to see if they were really magic. I wasn’t exactly sure when I would put them on. I did not want to get in trouble with Miss Parker. I most certainly did not want that. But I did want to see if I could wave to my friend, Joanne through the wall and into the third grade. And I wanted to be the envy and worry of all the kids in my class that day.

It was almost time for recess. I reached for the glasses in my pocket, anticipating the flurry of attention they would cause. It would be momentous. It would affect the course of events at Pleasant Grove Elementary for times to come. Kids would run in fear. Everyone would want to try them, but I would probably have to say “no.”

I slipped the plastic frames over my nose and leered around the room like the guy in the ad. I could smell the cardboard lenses and feel them pressing against my eyelashes. I could tell kids were turning to look at me and my specs. Just as I was turning in the direction of the third grade to wave to Joanne, the glasses were suddenly and violently plucked off my nose. I caught the specs in self-defense and wrenched them back into my possession.

“We don’t bring toys to school!” It was Miss Parker in her most nasal tone.

“They’re not toys! They’re X-Ray Specs!” She towered over me in my little desk waiting for the surrender. I did not move.

“Give them to me right now!”

Like I said, except for the jacket incident, I was not a kid who defied authority. I was a good kid.  But regardless, that day, she was not getting the specs. Like a giant praying mantis, she towered over me and tried to snatch them away. I put my arms around the back of my desk chair switching the glasses from right to left hand and back again.

“Give them to me now!” Miss Parker flailed back and forth almost falling forward onto me in my little desk. Finally, she got ahold of my arm, and then the hand that held the specs and then the specs themselves. I could feel the cardboard lenses tearing away from the plastic frames. I let them go and then everything got quiet.

“There now,” she seethed, “You get yourself straight to the principal’s office.”

Kindly Mr. Hansen looked baffled after reviewing Miss Parker’s account of subversion, disobedience and resisting arrest.

“Now, what exactly was it you were wearing? X-Ray something or others?”

I tried to explain.

“Well, you see they’re kind of like glasses, but they’re X-Ray Specs. You put them on and you’re supposed to…”

“Do you wear glasses?”

“No.”

“Miss Parker was right to take them away,”

I sat there for a while and then got sent back to class, to Miss Parker who now looked like a giant mantis-headed gargoyle. She took on the coolness of a wise and authentic adult who had calmly dealt with a minor discipline problem. But in her tiny eyes I could see victory, and smug satisfaction. Miss Parker was superior, stronger and smarter than me. I was broken. She had won.

It took me three days to summon the courage to approach her desk and ask if I could have my X-Ray Specs back sometime soon. Or at all would be good too.

“You’ll get them back when I decide you’ve earned them” she snapped.

Every day or two, I would creep up to her desk after school. “Miss Parker? Uh, I was just wondering, uh, if I could have…?”

“No. Maybe next Friday.”

Hope! There was hope. A possibility they might come back to me.  Finally, something to look forward to. For the next seven days I was perfect or at least invisible for the benefit of Miss Parker. I thought of them constantly. I had had them for such a short period of time, they still had their magic. I remembered their swirly lenses with the feathered centers and I remembered them as truly possessing the magical properties they were supposed to have had. I really had been able to see through walls and clothes and whatever for a few seconds. I vowed that from that day forward (whenever it came), the magic glasses would be carefully protected.

The Friday finally came. I waited until the end of the day. I had been hoping that Miss Parker would come to me at some point, when our class was quietly reading or doing math or something. That she would solemnly bestow them on me with a kind smile. She would be penitent, recognizing the value of the specs and the harshness of her treatment. But the day went by and that never happened. It was 3:00 p.m. The classroom was empty and she was sitting at her desk. I approached her slowly and silently. Again.

“Uh, Miss Parker?”

“Yes Lisa, what is it?”

“Uhm. I was just wondering if I could get my X-Ray Specs back. You said Friday I could get them back.”

“Your what?”

“My X-Ray Specs. You know, you took ‘em away and you said I could get them back on . . .today. On Friday. Which is today.”

She looked at me blankly, as if . . . truly, as if she did not have a clue what I was talking about.

“My X-Ray Specs!” Again she looked blank.

“Oh yes, those silly glasses.” She thought for a moment and then a little smile crept across her face. “You know what? I think I gave those to my little sister to play with.”

I stared at her. And? Waiting. Waiting. For something more. For clarification. Further explanation. A promise to find them and bring them back to me! God forbid, an apology? But nothing came.

“Was there something else, Lisa?”

“No.” I turned and walked away.

Blindly, I ran home across the frozen fields. Smoke and ice filled my screaming lungs. Hot tears streaked down my face and then froze too. I would have cried out if I’d had the words to describe the precise evil creature that she was.

Miss Parker would be about seventy years old today. A little old lady.  I am now a mature, socially acceptable adult. Losing my X-Ray Specs was not the worst thing that ever happened to me—not by a long way. But I never forgot what happened and if I met Miss Parker today, I might revert back to that fierce, scared little kid.

If I ever met Miss Parker on the street or in the grocery store or someplace, I would probably say “Hi Miss Parker. Remember me? I was in your second grade class.” She would smile, not remembering me, but pretending to. We might make small talk and she would tell me about her grandchildren, the one on an L.D.S. mission and the one in medical school and the one with the baby, making her a great-grandmother, believe it or not! 

And then I would make the joke, “Hey, did you ever get around to finding my X-Ray Specs?” She would laugh as if she knew what I was talking about.  I would laugh and say I had to get going. I would turn to leave. But then before leaving, I would want to tell her something.   Before I turned to go, I would step a little closer, towering over her just a bit.  And I would whisper in her ear “I see you Miss Parker and I know who you are—You Liar! You Witch! You un-holy bucktoothed gargoyle.”

In truth, I hope I would not do that. I hope that such behavior would be beneath me. What I would really like to say is this: “You know Miss Parker, it was forty-eight years ago but I’ll never forget you.  You were the one who taught me that life isn’t fair, that adults can be mean and that they lie. I was seven years old and you showed me how the world could be a cold dark place. Seems as though the x-ray specs did what they were supposed to do anyway. Don’t you agree? Miss Parker?”

-Lisa W. Nagel

Lisa W. Nagel is an emerging writer. Her essay Dear Lisa was previously published in the August, 2019 edition of Herstry. Lisa lives in Salt Lake City, Utah where she writes and works as a child welfare attorney.