It was my mom’s belief that nothing was more important than learning about one’s roots. She, herself, took great pride in having savored the sickeningly sweet taste of kolacky alongside the nasally accordion melodies of the Beer Barrel Polka as a young girl and believed that I should too.
But, deploring the idea of becoming my mother, I decided that if ‘priceless ethnic experiences’ had shaped her life, then I would have absolutely nothing to do with them. However, my resistance to cultural expansion, it seemed, fell on deaf ears.
Throughout my childhood, my mom tried to relive her past numerous times; I was forced into sausage-making seminars, egg painting classes and maypole dances, each with the same inevitable result: expulsion. But by the time the idea of Czech School popped into her head, it wasn’t a question anymore; I was going to be force-fed culture and I was going to like it.
The threat of enrollment didn’t faze me much, though. After all, I was proud of my activity discharges and if there was one skill I had honed throughout my childhood, it was how to get out of dismal situations. At the pork plant, I faked fainting; while embellishing eggshells, I knocked 57 yokes on the floor; during the basket-weave dance, I accidentally pulled too hard on my ribbon and knocked the giant pole onto the choreographer’s car. And getting out of this, I presumed, would be no different.
But while my mother mandated my attendance, another strange force broke down my escape plan and kept me there, amidst foreigners and the lingering odor of meat. This was TeeYukYuk.
At the age of ten, I became the first of the Lehmann girls to be “privileged enough to have the opportunity to learn about her heritage,” as my mom deceptively phrased it. Or rather, I was the first to in my family to be kicked out of the car in front of Wilson Elementary, English to Czech dictionary in hand. Either way, though, I was a Czech Schooler.
My first day of class lived up to all of my expectations; the kids recited lines from The Lord of the Rings, the foreign teachers smelled strangely of bologna and lonely old people littered the hallways, ready to smother unsuspecting children with unwanted affection at a moment’s notice. I held my breath, hoping to recreate the pork plant incident, but unfortunately, it was to no avail; I was stuck there.
To make matters worse, I quickly discovered that I was not a natural at foreign languages and my mail-order teacher’s frustration toward me was obvious. “Can you not make smart?” she would demand in fragmented English. “Cesky so same as English! I learn perfect fast, so too you should!” There was obviously no use in pointing out that her funny odor clouded my brain.
Compounding the whole situation, my desk neighbor, Isaac, would loudly agree with her, in the way that only a serious brownnoser is capable. “Geez, you’re right, she does suck at this!” he would holler. Then, turning to me he would pompously declare, “I can do all of this work, but don’t expect me to help you. You had better start crutching on your looks to get by anyway.”
“Oh, thanks,” I would disdainfully reply. I wanted to tell him not to be bitter because I had the option of using my looks, but I remained silent.
Isaac’s nickname, TeeYukYuk, was of my own creation, based off the sound of hillbilly laughter. I classified him in a strange variety of people: a dweller among the creepy, and apparently putrid, confines of Dungeons and Dragons that one would expect to mature into a Peeping Tom, at best. An unfortunate-looking boy, Isaac was bug-eyed and pale; he consistently looked as if he had come straight out of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. And completing Isaac’s whole package was his uncontrollable jittery and hyper nature, like a nine-year-old ADHD patient on crack. And for this, he was ostracized by the entire school, especially me.
I would mercilessly taunt his bizarre behaviors, hide his Star Wars lunch box and throw his prized Pokémon cards at small children, hoping to prematurely end my Czech School experience. But by the time I had learned my first phrase, ‘My parents force me to come here’, my mockery had proved to be a lost cause. And soon enough it came to bite me in the ‘osel’, as it seemed all of my decisions made at Czech School eventually did.
Within a week of acquainting myself with Isaac, he had latched on to me like a sunburn, the kind that throbs when you’re not thinking about it, and then stings even worse when you finally force yourself to acknowledge it. Every morning, he would slide up awkwardly close to me, still bouncing up and down from, I imagined, his morning caffeine fix combined with a troubling lack of Ritalin. Then he would proceed to say, “You can pick on me all you want, but I’m not going to tell. I know it’s just because you like me.”
Each time this happened, I threw up in my mouth a little and the entire class would look at me sorrowfully as I tried to pawn him off on someone else. “Why don’t you go sit by Triangle-Hair,” I would suggest as I directed his attention to the chubby girl across the room whose black, curly hair looked as if someone had smooshed a piece of geometry right onto her head. “I hear she’s really desperate for a boyfriend!”
Drat, of course he knew that even she wouldn’t settle for a boy that smelled faintly of rotten meat.
“Then maybe you could move by someone, anyone else,” I would plead. But alas my ailment remained loathsomely, exasperatingly loyal.
As the summer wore on, my sunburn became more of a skin cancer, and I was increasingly irritated with each passing day that I was woken up at dawn and subjected to cultural torture. However, it wasn’t until Isaac began singing me show tunes in Czech that I finally snapped.
That morning began like any other: TeeYukYuk jumped beside me, bouncing around in his queer manner; a pop-up book from Hell. Then, the madness began: “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, / a tale of a fateful trip. / That started from this tropic port, / aboard this tiny ship,” he bellowed in Czech while skipping in circles around me. “Emma, I have a question for you-oo-ooo,” he chanted.
“Shut up, you little weirdo!” I quickly barked. “You bug me so much! Why won’t you just tell on me so I can leave this loser school?”
“Oh Emma, the only way you’re getting out of here is by graduating. So, for now, tell me, don’t you think that song is romantic?” he replied, apparently heeding little attention to my rant. “I was thinking, and I wanted to tell you that I like your face. Will you marry me?”
I was fuming, yet poised to fight back laughter at this absurd question if it came. But Isaac pulled out a paperclip, crafted into a ring from his pocket and I couldn’t help myself anymore; I kicked him in the crotch and cackled in his face.
Every girl dreams of being proposed to, and while it was flattering, even at the age of ten, I was expecting something more than TeeYukYuk pulling out a paperclip ring in the middle of an elementary school after verbally trapping me in Czech School.
Just as another guffaw was about to leave my lips, the bell for class rang and I hurriedly made an attempt to salvage the situation. I looked at Isaac writhing on the floor, “Yeah, like I would marry you. Where do you think we are anyway, Podunk, Alabama?” I mused, my words dripping with sarcasm. But as he crawled to his chair, he threw me the sharp, metal ring with a menacing grin on his face.
Isaac had apparently recovered by noon though, “…and it’s only another nine years before we can make it legal, seven if we have parental consent,” he proclaimed to our classmates. I tried vainly to dispel the rumors, but Isaac had already handed out verbal wedding invitations to everyone he knew; as far as they were concerned, I just had cold feet.
But by the next week, all the chatter had stopped; Isaac hadn’t spoken so much as a word to me. I took advantage of his silence as a sure sign that he was ready to break. So, I tried vandalizing under his name, throwing his books through the windows and eventually found myself exclaiming, “Tell on me you little brat!” but he remained silent.
Over the next four years of Hell, Isaac continued planning our wedding. “What color should our placemats be? Is a Star Trek ice sculpture all right with you? Do you have your ring on?” he would query. Each time he asked an absurd question, I would silently stick my middle finger in the air to signify my frustration with him, and Czech School. However, he seemed to falsely interpret them as a sign of affection. “You will be so proud of yourself when you graduate, so don’t be bitter. Plus, we need this time to plan our life,” he would attempt to comfort me. The finger stayed in place.
I continued to test Isaac’s patients for the next four years, expressing myself primarily through hand gestures. But, eventually, the day that Isaac had promised did come; the night that he had promised would get me out of Czech school (and away from him): graduation.
Walking across the stage to receive my diploma that fateful evening, I was elated and flashed my pride to the audience. I was amazed at myself for making it this far, I had never imagined it possible to finish five years of Czech School, and all without murdering TeeYukYuk. Locating his face in the crowd, I got a nauseous feeling. I stuck my middle finger in the air, ring on, and mouthed the words ‘thank you’.
(my only surviving photo of TeeYukYuk)
(my most prized drawing...a masterpiece from the day I first met Isaac)
(a typical love note)
(a more elaborate love note, with a How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days theme, notice Crawl the warrior king and our love fern)
(a last ditch proposal...too bad its not legal)
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