28/8/98

The B-2 Bombers

So what did you do in school today, girls? 'Well...'

    The Orbaum triplets are about to learn something new as Grade Three begins next week: what it's like to be a singlet. The last time any one of them faced the world alone was nearly eight years ago, when Odelia experienced her one single minute as an only child.
    They emerged from kindergarten shuffling about together as an inseparable unit; by now, they're a monopolistic force. Like the American courts taking on Microsoft, we're determined to break up this power bloc.
    It may seem a bit much to compare three skinny girls with Microsoft, or the Mafia, but just ask Sisanu.
    Sisanu is a classmate who made the mistake of scuffling with a triplet -- without having the backup of two brothers in the same class. Sisanu whacked Donna on the back. Donna cried. "Was Sisanu sorry?" Mommy asked later. "No," Odelia said, "but when I kicked him in the stomach he was a bit sorry and then when Nomi kicked him in the head he was really sorry."
    This, apparently, is how seven-year-olds communicate with the opposite gender. Adults may simplify this by calling it "violence," but they just don't understand. Y'see, the worst thing that can happen in Grade Two is to be accused of being "in love." It is now beyond suspicion that my womenfolk are not in love with Sisanu.
    Interfemale relationships are a different matter. They have already reached maturity at this age, proficient at simmering resentments, devious intrigues, wildly fluctuating emotions, rejection, isolation, gang warfare, mood swings, bitchy backstabbing and petty jealousies. As I am a mere male, I do not understand the necessity for any of this, but I am learning to live with it.
    F'rinstance. On any given day, if you were selected by the triplets to be their friend, you were in; if not, you went home crying, and your mother called us and asked what the Dickens we people are up to. We had a rap session with our girls about this, and they said they understood, and promised to make amends the next day, but the next day they left out somebody else instead, and we had a different mother of a crying child to apologize to.
    The problem solved itself neatly when a power struggle developed within the triplets, and they came home crying to their mother about each other.
    Did I forget to mention fierce competitiveness?
    That's a pleasant new feature of our family life: Nomi and Donna tearing each other apart in mortal oneupgirlship. (Odelia, a softer soul, is content with her place in the trio). It can descend to downright silliness at times. The other day, Donna got in a few choice words at Nomi. "And you have a fat nose, and your eyes are too big, and your teeth are crooked." Donna was rather deflated when it was pointed out that she and Nomi are identical.
    It's not entirely a bad thing, this rivalry, because they pushed each other scholastically. They were up at the crack of dawn doing homework, and eschewed TV after school to get through a few more pages of their arithmetic workbook. It's hard to believe these are my offspring, and the irony is quite lost to them: they even asked me to help them with Torah homework, for goodness sake. (I've never shown them my report cards.)
    Ask most kids what they did in school today, and they'll answer "nuttin'." These kids?
    "I wanna tell."
    "No, I wanna tell."
    "But I'm the one who got the punishment so I should tell."
    And each one outshouting the other, they'll tell us about Natan's argument with Nitzan, the teacher throwing a tantrum, Matan forgetting his lunch, Yasmin's falling out with Donna ("I'm never going to speak to her again forever and ever"), Odelia's agony that Avishag chose to play with Nomi, a dead mouse they found in the playground, Yasmin subsequently making up with Donna ("She's my best, best friend"), Amit making fun of Orital's funny accent, "and that's what we did in school today."
    Then they'll display the day's welts, scratches and scrapes, describing in great detail the whos and whys and what-fors. It seems to have become a perverse honor in Dror Elementary School to be in scrappy, rough-and-tumble Class B-2 rather than goody-goody B-1, where the girls wear pink and the boys go home with their hair still neatly combed.
    It's a brutal environment there in B-2: my girls, who used to wear nothing but dresses, now wouldn't be caught dead in one "so the boys shouldn't laugh at our panties."
    Had there also been a B-3 at Dror, we would have been able to separate them. Instead, we're switching them to a school with four streams. That'll learn 'em.
    Or vice versa.
    The last time they started at a new school -- Grade One at Dror -- they confounded all expectations of the dread, loneliness and trepidation all children experience when they graduate from the suckling comfort of kindergarten. Nah. These kids marched into the school grounds three abreast, escorted from the front gate by a coterie of older children.
    It is not, to my knowledge, normal for kids in Grade Five and Six to hang around pitzkeles from Grade One. One gum-chomping girl, twice the size of mine, explained the phenomenon to my wife: "They're an attraction, you know."
    The principal decided this was not a good thing, and at the start of the following year instructed the older girls to cool it, and leave the triplets to socialize with their own age. My little 'uns were distraught that their old pals abandoned them, and never knew why.
    One fellow who took no crap from this buzzsaw threesome was the bus driver. My girls couldn't seem to win him over so, of course, they hated him.
     One day, Nomi came home in tears. "The bus driver shouted at me."
     "Why?"
    "Only because I called him a crippled worm."
    "But that's awful!"
    "But Mummy, he is."
    They won't miss Mr. Crippled Worm when they switch schools, but the thought of leaving Yasmin and Sophie and Yosef is devastating. At this age, friendships don't wax and wane, they soar and plunge by the minute. 
    It may have been a day or two after they swore never to speak to each other again that Donna and Yasmin vowed an eternal devotion. "We promised to do cheshbon homework together for the rest of our lives," Donna informed us.
    There could be no greater example of devoted friendship than that expressed by Sophie. Nomi dropped a tooth, her second -- but it went right down the sink drain at school. She was appalled. It was just about the worst thing that happened in her whole life, but Sophie -- who'd already lost five pearlies -- immediately pledged her next tooth to Nomi.
    Regardless of how else they're remembered at Dror, my girls have left one legacy that, according to at least one teacher, is unparalleled in Israeli scholastic history. Wide-eyed with utter disbelief, she told us that they often came to her at the end of class. "And they said to me, 'Thank you for today's lesson.' "
    Take that, B-1.