Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (10 page)

It was around then that a trainer at my gym caught my eye and my funny bone. A sweet, cute guy, with one of the best bodies I had ever seen, he was also smart and quick-witted and made me laugh. We had a casual at-the-gym-kibitzing friendship, and I never considered him for dating. But one day, when he was filling in for my regular trainer, he asked if I wanted to hang out sometime. I thought about it for a minute. He was younger than I by a few years, but I enjoyed his company and I did find him attractive.

Okay, he had a fifty-two-inch chest and a thirty-inch waist and gen-u-ine six-pack abs and an ass like a peach. I mean c'mon. Like I'm gonna pass that up.

Besides, he seemed like he fit the profile. Fun. No pressure. I said yes. We hung out a couple of times, watched movies or went out to a bar, and finally,
on the third date,
we slept together. It was fine. No fireworks, but it was fun. There was certainly no pressure. It lasted a couple of months, but I was bored and had to end it, which didn't sit as well as I would have hoped. Apparently a desire to date someone who didn't have three roommates and did have a car was shallow. My belief that a date could involve food that didn't come in cardboard containers and a movie in a theater instead of on DVD made me materialistic. I sort of regretted the whole thing. We agreed to stay friends and fell into a “here's the highlights of my life” e-mail every once in a great long while.

This wasn't working. I was back in the dating business, but it wasn't really going according to plan. I'd figured out how to go to bed with someone, just not someone who was really good for a decent relationship.

I needed help.

I needed to go back to the source. The guru. Judy Blume.

And the bible,
Forever.

I remembered Katherine's dilemmas from
Forever.
First, she didn't know if she was ready to sleep with her boyfriend Michael and to take on the responsibility of a sexual relationship. Then she didn't know if sex had become the defining element of their relationship or if there was enough beneath it to maintain a relationship when they left for college. Then she met someone new who she was drawn to and had to decide whether she should move on without Michael and pursue the new guy.

Why was I feeling so connected to a fictional seventeen-year-old when all my actual thirty-something girlfriends were supporting me? I thought it was because they had all dated in their twenties. I thought it was because of my long stint of celibacy. I realized it was because Kat wasn't going to actually give me specific advice and then berate me for how I chose to interpret it. Kat could only lead by example. Her tale of love and loss could only be a parable for me to glean what I needed—she was a silent partner. And she wasn't going to say one frigging word about third dates, that was certain.

I returned to the text. Before Kat gives up her virginity, her mother, fearful that she and Michael are becoming too close, gives her an article about sexuality. In the article are four key questions a person should ask herself before moving into a sexual relationship:

1. Is sexual intercourse necessary to the relationship?
   
2. What should you expect from sexual intercourse?
   
3. Have you thought about how the relationship will end?
   
4. If you should need help, where will you seek it?
   

I thought about my own recent experiences. I thought about the questions.

1. Is sexual intercourse necessary to the relationship?

Well, I had a great time with all three guys in the initial stages, but the sex didn't really add anything to the bond we had created. We were definitely better before the sex in all cases.

2. What should you expect from sexual intercourse?

I'd always had fairly high expectations of sex, and in none of these cases had I been blown away. Maybe I needed to stop thinking that it was going to be fireworks right out of the gate. I know that I didn't give either of the first two guys a real chance to become anything more than a one-night stand.

3. Have you thought about how the relationship will end?

I'd never thought about the endings in any of the situations. But if I had stopped to consider the likely ending of each connection based on what I knew of them and of myself, I probably only would have slept with bachelor number one. After all, I didn't know the second guy well enough to even anticipate what would happen, and I knew from the get-go that I would probably not be able to go the distance with a younger man.

4. If you should need help, where will you seek it?

At least this one I knew. My girlfriends. My stiletto-wearing, cosmo-drinking, third-date-rule-following, Judy Blume-reading girlfriends. My endless source of support, advice, encouragement, and wisdom. The first place I could always turn for the answers I couldn't find on my own.

And, of course, to Judy. Who, even thirty years later, still has more insight into the nature of relationships than Dr. Phil any day.

I won't say that this triumvirate of “first times” were the last mistakes I would ever make. In fact, I'm quite certain I am far from the end of my mistake-making days where men and sex are concerned.

But I know one thing.

I'm far more likely to recognize Forever when it arrives.

Melissa Senate

The summer I turned twelve
was the “summer of Sam”: 1977 in New York City. We lived in Flushing, Queens, where David Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam, was on a murderous rampage.

“He's shooting girls with dark hair!” the kids in my sixth-grade class yelped in those final days of school, looking around with dropped jaws at the brunettes. At me, for instance.

And so that crazy summer, my mother gave her boyfriend—a well-to-do businessman who for some reason (it might have been love) fell for a welfare mother of three with no child support from their dad, who hadn't been seen or heard from in a few years—an ultimatum. Which was:
Marry me or it's over. My kids need a father. And we have to get out of here.

We did have to get out. Son of Sam aside, at every sighting of me, the apartment building bully, a skinny kid named Mike, had begun yelling, “Melissa's growing titties! Melissa's growing titties!” Mortified, I walked with my arms crossed over my chest, until my friend Leslie pointed out that (a) it was true and (b) it was a good thing.

My mother's boyfriend, who slept on the pull-out couch every Saturday night, wasn't so sure he was cut out to be a father. “I'll put you up in an apartment in Manhattan!” he pleaded.

“It's marriage or nothing!” my mother insisted.

He chose marriage over nothing. The actual marriage would have to wait, though, since my father was God knows where and therefore not available to sign anything, like divorce papers.

While my sister (then fourteen), my brother (then ten), and I were sent to sleepaway camp for a few weeks, my mother and her fiancé went house hunting in the suburbs of New Jersey. One day at camp (Jewish Federation in the Catskills), instead of making macramé bracelets or inadvertently squishing slugs on hikes up Bald Mountain, it was deemed Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was really in April. (The Powers That Be at camp also pushed the clocks ahead an hour to give us an extra hour of daylight, so we were used to altered reality.)

We lined up single file in front of a tent and were told to go in one by one. “What is it?” we asked the kids who came out. There were shrugs. There were solemn expressions. There were awed expressions. But no one was talking.

I went in. The tent was completely empty except for something hanging at eye level, covered by a black sheet. A sign above it read:
Lift the sheet.
I lifted. It was a mirror. Along the bottom of the mirror was another sign:
You are a survivor of the Holocaust.

I freaked out and ran screaming from the room. I couldn't handle being a survivor of the Holocaust on top of everything else going on in my life. I didn't want my mother to marry her boyfriend, who didn't think he was cut out to be a father. I was confused by my own father's disappearance from our lives, which I knew involved another woman who was pregnant with his baby. And I was scared at the idea of moving to some strange town in New Jersey. I was scared, period. And since the Son of Sam had been caught weeks ago, couldn't we just
not
move?

No. We were moving. Camp was all I had, a vaguely familiar stopover between my old life and the new one, and now even camp had pulled a fast one on me.

I broke down, screaming and sobbing. Once my counselor got the whole story, I was excused from whatever activity was next and treated to extra cookies that night at Snack. Any kid who'd ever moved, who'd ever dealt with divorce, who'd ever had a stepparent, was urged to tell me it would all be okay. I mostly got long-winded stories about how it wasn't okay. But talking helped. And in those last days at camp, someone—and I have absolutely no recollection who—gave me a book to read. It was
Then Again, Maybe I Won't
by Judy Blume, the only Judy Blume novel I
hadn't
read—because it was about a boy. I'd heard about the book, famous among kids everywhere for the main character's wet dreams and penchant for using his binoculars to stare through his teenaged neighbor's window. “Read it,” I remember being told. “It's about a twelve-year-old named Tony Miglione who has to deal with a lot of stuff when his family moves.”

So I read it. And reread it. By the time my mother and her fiancé picked me and my siblings up from camp and drove us to a split-level house in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, an upper-middle-class suburb twelve miles but light-years away from Flushing, Queens, I had a context for imagining my new life, which had some remarkable similarities to Tony Miglione's.

And context helped. Overnight I had a new almost-stepfather, a new town, a new home, a new school, a new lifestyle, a new body (thanks to puberty), and confusing new thoughts, which included: Will I ever see my father again? My paternal grandparents? My old friends? The me I was before? But I had no idea what to expect, what to even imagine. What I did have was Tony, who knew how to handle things. Well,
sort of
knew how to handle things, since there was the matter of his shooting stomach pains, for which he was ultimately prescribed a shrink.

The similarities:

Tony: At age twelve, he moves from a cramped two-family house in streety Jersey (aka “Joisy”) City, New Jersey, to a hoity toity suburb when his dad strikes it rich.

Me: At twelve, my family moves from a cramped two-bedroom apartment with orange carpeting, peeling linoleum, and fire escapes to a nice house with a finished basement and a yard and impatients lining the hedges. There is no more welfare. No more food stamps. No more need to stand on long lines in government offices to prove that we exist so that my mother can receive assistance. My mother no longer has to work a minimum-wage job. There is no more after-school daycare. My brother gets his own room because he's a boy. My sister and I share. We cannot agree on rock star posters and therefore put up none.

Tony: He worries about fitting in and making friends, but a boy his age lives next door. They have a pool. This is the first time Tony has seen a pool in anyone's yard.

Me: The same, except the next-door neighbor is a girl named Carol. She's exactly my age. My mother pushes me to knock on their door. I'm welcomed up to Carol's room. She's pretty and nice and has long brown hair with perfect Farrah Fawcett wings. I can see the outline of a bra through her tank top. I haven't yet gone shopping for a training bra, so Carol is in the know. I want to be her friend, but she gives me a test and I fail.

“What kind of music do you like?” she asks.

“Olivia Newton-John and John Denver,” I tell her. I see from her expression that I've said the wrong thing. She likes Aerosmith. Heart.

“I like KC and the Sunshine Band, too,” I tell her hopefully, but it's too late. In the six years that I live next door to Carol, I'm never invited to swim in the pool. In fact, in those six years, I see her only twice in passing.

“Just wait till school starts,” my sister tells me. “You'll make your own friends. Don't worry. I'm sure there are other girls who like Olivia Newton-John,” she adds. And then I'm pretty sure she added a “yeah right!” when she thought I wasn't listening.

My mother's fiancé, whose name is Neil, by the way, is exceptionally generous, even if he doesn't think he's cut out to be a father (which he's not, also by the way). Labor Day weekend, the entire family piles into the car (something we never had in Flushing) and heads to the mall for a back-to-school shopping trip at Bamberger's, compliments of Neil's credit card, something my mother also never had before. I am let loose in the junior department. I have no idea what I'm doing. My sixth-grade wardrobe consisted of hand-me-down nylon shirts and blue corduroy pants, and I can't recall ever being aware of what I wore. I bring what I see the most of into the fitting rooms, like gauchos. And bras, size 32 double A, which I don't yet need, but which seventh-grade gym class requires.

“Look who's getting underarm hair!” my mother shouts out as I raise my arms over my head to test the fit of my new bra the way
Teen
magazine said you should.

“Mom!” I yelp, slamming my arms against my sides. But I'm pleased that she noticed. My mother has been applying to the local community college as a freshman. She's been busy furniture shopping. Changing kitchen wallpaper. Planting bulbs in the garden. I like the sudden attention.

That Sunday, I get my period for the first time as I'm trying on my new gauchos, which I've decided on for the first day of school.

“Don't tell anyone!” I order my mother.

“Guess who got her period!” I hear her telling Neil later. I also hear her telling my grandmother on the phone. I'm sure people can tell anyway, which makes me embarrassed to leave the house, but Tony's got it worse. He gets unexpected erections while solving math problems on the blackboard and can't turn around without using his textbook as a shield. At least I don't have to worry about that.

My brother and sister and I are each attending different schools. My brother is in sixth grade at the elementary school. I'm starting seventh at the junior high. My sister is starting high school. I'm a nervous wreck about going to junior high all alone on the first day, so my mother arranges for me to meet up with two older girls, eighth graders. I wait on my corner. Five minutes. Ten minutes. They never show (there's never an explanation). I fly down Saddle River Road on my new bike with its rainbow stripes to my brand-new school, which is smaller than my elementary school but nonetheless scary as hell. As I lock up my bike, I'm immediately the subject of a point and giggle. I'm not sure if it's the rainbow stripes on my baby blue bike or the green gauchos.

Tony's first day goes a lot better. He makes a few good friends right away, which gives me hope. During the first week of seventh grade, a popular girl named Laurie invites me to her house after school. We walk home with her friends, who walk ahead or behind us. They eye my gauchos (I have them in three colors, all corduroy) and give Laurie “stop being so nice to strays” type looks. Inside her house, we have absolutely nothing to talk about after “So how do you like it here?” We talk about her cat. My cat. I have no idea how to do this, what we're supposed to talk about. It's finally time to go home, where I throw up from nerves. My tryout for the popular club is over and I didn't make the cut. This is where having an MIA father comes in handy. What slight could ever hurt as bad?

I do make one friend, though. A very good one. Her name is Cara. Every day after school, we go to her house (hers because she has her own room). We spend our after-school hours listening to Elton John and Bruce Springsteen (Carol would approve). We memorize the words to
Stairway to Heaven
and sing it at the top of our lungs. We have everything to talk about, from boys to our bodies to our classmates to our families. Cara also has a stepfather. Her own father lives with another family in Fair Lawn; they have a daughter our same age who goes to our school. I am blown away by this. It's almost as strange to me as my own situation, my MIA father. I wonder whose situation is stranger: mine or Cara's.

My stepfather tells me and my siblings not to talk about our family business, which he considers private, like the fact that he and my mother are not yet married. Or that he's not my father. Or that my father is somewhere in the world, probably twenty miles away, living with another family, like Cara's dad. I'm not sure if Neil thinks people will talk or if he's just a private person.

Much, much, later, I'll read somewhere that our stories are our own, but at twelve, I didn't know. And I was dutiful. I didn't use the word “stepfather.” I didn't talk about my absent father, who I wondered about constantly.
I have a father somewhere,
I wanted to scream in the front yard.
Just because he's not here doesn't mean he doesn't exist!

My grandmother, my mother's mother, says during every visit, “You are all so lucky! Neil is a wonderful man! He took you out of the gutter. You should be grateful. Are you grateful?”

It's hard to learn that your story is your own when important people in your life are telling you what your story needs to be.

I said I was grateful.

I reread
Then Again, Maybe I Won't.
Tony's struggling with this, too, with being “silenced.” The “perfect” boy next door, a rich kid foisted on Tony by his social-climbing mother, shoplifts, which Tony can't understand and can't talk about to anyone. Tony's older brother has “sold out” from teaching school to joining the corporate world. His mother allows her snooty neighbor to call her Carol instead of Carmella because “Carol is easier to remember.” And his grandmother, who literally cannot speak (her larynx was removed during surgery) and who only communicated through cooking for the family, is banished from the kitchen to suit the new rude housekeeper.

Here, there are differences between me and Tony. But the conflict is the same. I keep it in. So does Tony. Until he finally explodes and is told to shut up. All that shutting up causes debilitating stomach pains that land him in the hospital. The cure: a therapist. Tony talks. The pains go away.

I don't talk. Instead of telling my almost-stepfather that it's my right to tell people what I want about my own self, I say nothing. Tony is not someone who says nothing. He tries so hard to hang onto himself as he was, as he
is
throughout
Then Again, Maybe I Won't.
It comforts me. But I don't know how to do it, if I'm doing it, if I'm still me.