Stretching the gum band: Rejection in ’70s Pittsburgh steeled me for later success

“Do you have a gum band?” blurted the lanky, long-haired blonde sitting on the slatted bench near the end of the row of lockers as we dressed for swimming.

“A what?” I replied, puzzled by her question.

“A gum band,” she repeated a little louder, as if I couldn’t hear.

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“Um, no. I mean, I don’t think so. I don’t know what that is,” I responded, flustered and embarrassed.

She looked at me like I had dropped in from outer space. She rolled her eyes, pursed her lips and flounced away, making that clicking sound with her tongue and lips — the one that drips contempt and makes one feel stupid.

I froze for a moment, wishing I could disappear as my eyes filled with tears. Blinking them away, I finished changing into my standard-issue navy blue swimsuit, then braided my long, dark hair. No other student spoke to me during the entire class period. Maybe I really had become invisible.

Like thousands of families do every summer, my family had moved a few weeks before school started. Previously, I had spent my life in small mining towns in Utah and South America. Just beyond those towns, where the roads ended, were mountains filled with coal or iron ore, much of which ended up in steel mills in Pittsburgh. We ended up in Pittsburgh, too, just before my sophomore year in high school.

My new school had 3,200 students, more people than the entire population of the town I came from. I knew one other student at this school: a freshman, my brother.

When we came to Pittsburgh from Venezuela in 1972, life couldn’t have been more different. We traded year-round summer for Pittsburgh winters. Our friends, horses and dog stayed behind. In Venezuela, we had attended a small school staffed with American teachers hired by U.S. Steel, our father’s employer. I had just one classmate throughout middle school; I now had 803.

Banished to the Bethel Park school halls

Though I could read a map and find my way around Bethel Park’s campus-style high school, I clearly did not belong. I had never worn jeans to school. My Spanish accent was better than the Spanish teacher’s. She banished me to the hall to read books in Spanish, alone.

Further confirming my misfit status, I took ninth grade biology, a requirement I’d missed at my former school, and 10th grade geometry. Other students looked at me askance, wondering, I was certain, whether I was a flunky sophomore repeating biology or a brainy freshman taking geometry ahead of schedule.

I knew nothing about current movies, television shows or American football, though I now lived in the city where the Steelers were busy collecting Super Bowl rings. And I had no idea what a gum band was.

Eventually, Nancy, a kindhearted girl in my geometry class, approached me, and soon became my closest friend. She had moved to Pittsburgh a couple of years before I did and she was homesick for Texas, while I pined for Venezuela. Somehow, we also became friends with Bob, a perpetually hungry, beanpole freshman who started hanging out with us in the cafeteria. Not our finest moment, we christened him with an unflattering nickname reflective of his appetite, but started packing bigger lunches so we’d have plenty to share.

Gradually, I found my way, despite spending most of those three long years feeling like a lost child standing frozen on the sidewalk, peering wistfully into Kaufmann’s beautifully decorated Christmas windows. I swallowed the hurt inflicted by the girl next door who had made it clear she didn’t want to be my friend. I convinced the head librarian of Bethel Park Public Library to hire me, despite her long waiting list of teens seeking part-time work. I think I wore her down. My family found a church and I made friends in the youth group, though many of them lived in other school districts.

In the end, it made me stronger

From this side of it, I’m thankful for those lonely high school years. They shaped and changed me. When I left home, heading to Penn State in 1975, I decided to be a different person. I found the courage to introduce myself to strangers every day, eating with people I didn’t know. By Christmas, I knew the names of half the people in my dorm area.

Returning to the United States as a teen gave me empathy for the newcomer, taught me to be a friend to those trying to find their way, reminded me to make space in my heart and home for international students and immigrants. Since I had lived it, I learned to see the lonely around me. Still now I look for ways to help people connect and belong. And, no matter where I live, I am always thrilled to meet a Steelers fan.

Despite my influence, it surprised me when my son settled in Pittsburgh after college in the late 2000s, a generation after my brief sojourn there. His prior connection to the Steel City had been childhood visits to his grandparents that included high-speed elevator rides to the 64th floor of the U.S. Steel Tower.

He benefited from the passage of time and my experience. The steel mills had closed and the air was cleaner. The community had become more diverse and welcoming. And I had shared with him my lesson from high school: You can make it through anything if you have a couple of true friends who will sit with you at lunch and let you in on the secret code, opening the cultural door to the uninitiated wandering in from afar.

Even so, before he left home, I made sure he knew that, where he was going, the Steel Curtain is more historically significant than the Iron Curtain; it’s “pop” in Pittsburgh; and a gum band is a rubber band everywhere else.

Capi Cloud Cohen writes stories, sews quilts, and decorates cookies in southeastern Tennessee, where the winters are much milder than Pittsburgh’s. Her stories have appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul books and she is working on her first novel. She can be reached on Instagram at @capicloudcohenauthor .

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