Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (15 page)

Elise Juska

I
was four years old
and dancing in California when I first realized I wasn't invisible. My parents and I were in a restaurant, waiting to be seated, standing beside a massive tank of bright tropical fish. I barely spoke when I was little, spent most of life hiding behind my mother's knees, but that night in the restaurant I was dancing with total abandon. Maybe it was the perceived shield of the fish tank, or the anonymity of being on the other side of the country, or the fact that in the past week I had seen the Disney Electric Parade, eaten a chocolate-covered banana, and petted a llama. I couldn't help but dance. Until a woman came over, a stranger, looking at me and smiling.

“How wonderful,” she said, and I stopped.

 

Like most shy kids, I had a rich inner life, crowded with characters both found and invented. For years, I taught an imaginary class of students for whom I set up parent-teacher conferences, wrote and graded papers, devised lesson plans, and lectured passionately to my empty living room. I devoured books and felt connected to the characters I met there, fell in love with Peter Hatcher, lived vicariously through Sheila the Great.

And I wrote stories, stories that were about me and not-me—a more interesting, more dramatic me. The narrators always had the things I didn't: older brothers, pets, braces, and families who argued with one another. In my dinner scenes, forks were always clattering onto plates, chairs were scraping floors, and kids were bolting from their houses in fits of feeling, the back screen doors flapping like wings.

The parents in my stories were usually divorced, unlike my own parents, who I'd never once heard fight. The concept was so alien that they didn't even use the term “fight,” instead softening it to “raise your voice,” in the same way “hate” was diluted to “strongly dislike” and “shut up” to “please be quiet.” To not fight was, as I understood it, a measure of a good relationship; it was how a marriage was supposed to be.

What little experience I had with divorce was gleaned mostly from studying the parents' names listed in the Glenside Elementary School address book. I was fascinated by the single parents, mothers usually, who always seemed to have vaguely exotic names like Natasha. I imagined them the kinds of mothers who wore lots of makeup and ordered Chinese takeout. My other source was Judy Blume's
It's Not the End of the World,
in which Karen's parents (who fought constantly) were divorcing.

“I'm your father,” Karen's dad said, “and I'll always love you.” He'd taken Karen and her brothers to Howard Johnson's, which seemed to me the kind of place kids with divorced dads went to eat. “Divorce has nothing to do with that,” he said.

Karen's life seemed filled with drama and secrets. She didn't want anyone knowing her dad had moved out, that he was living in an apartment, that her brother Jeff had run away. Though I couldn't relate with the facts of her story, there was something about it I understood intuitively: the impulse to keep things hidden.

When I was eight, I was given my first diary. I loved it, not just because I loved writing, but because of its aura of secrecy: the leatherette cover, the pages edged in gold, the tiny toothy key on a red string.

Now, it is January 2006, and I am in the attic trying to organize my childhood. I am sifting through the bags and boxes—grade school notebooks, scrolled posters, soft paperback books, hundreds and hundreds of typed, unfinished stories. The attic air is thick and dusty, warm even in winter. The floor is a grid of wood beams and foam insulation. A silent fan crouches by the window. As a child, this attic seemed gigantic, dangerous, site of Mom famously falling through the floor and Dad discovering her leg poking through the hallway ceiling. Now the space feels small, lonely. Dad has moved his stuff out, to his new apartment. Mom is purging the house of everything she doesn't need. I was charged with doing the same—an impossible task, since the same impulse that made me keep everything in the first place prevents me from throwing it away.

I start paging through the red diary. I'm not surprised to have found it, but I am fascinated by its details: my third-grade handwriting so careful, as if accustomed to being graded, and extra straight, as if restraining itself from veering into the forbidden cursive. The earliest entries are in berry-colored ink, infused with exclamation points and capital letters, all the color and fervor I never showed on the outside.

There's a buoyancy in my tone, upbeat even when disappointed, like I was when I returned after school that day:
DRAT!
I can't help but smile, knowing I must have borrowed this from something I'd read. Even in my diary, I wrote myself like a character in a book.
Timmy Chun doesn't even consider me for love anymore!

To be in elementary school was to be surrounded by secrets. The most immediate were the who-likes-who's, revealed with great drama and suspense inside the rubber tires on the playground. The school was across the street from my house, visible from my bedroom window, but on the playground I was in a different world. My favorite spot was the swings: within the long, exposed stretch of grass and concrete, they were the one place I felt invisible. I could rise up off the ground, disappear. The tires were second best, though they were an escape of a different sort; there you were hidden but not unseen. Within those fleshy inner walls I was never more aware of where and who I was: eight years old, my own wide eyes mirrored in the girls' eyes around me, boys pressing in from all sides.

The tires looked like a row of chubby horseshoes, cut in half and upside down. They were wide enough for up to four of us to huddle inside, our skinny backs snug against the tires' rounded curves. If you were nervous, you could rip at loose strings of rubber like hangnails; if you were brave but not too brave, you could pen your name on the walls. Though the tires were a girls' domain, it wasn't unusual for a boy's head to appear suddenly in the opening, upside down and wild haired, or for a boy's feet to go stampeding overhead, sometimes jumping so hard the rubbery ceiling came crashing inward.

A playground session of guess-who-I-like could be stretched to last all recess long, with the boy's name revealed in the last dramatic seconds between hearing Mrs. James ring the bell and lining up to go back inside. In the end, the secret was less about the boy than the mystique of knowing something no one else did. Once the secret was out, it lost its appeal.

In third and fourth grade, anything I had to offer boy-wise was strictly hypothetical. I barely spoke to anyone, much less boys, much less one A. J. Giglio, who was Italian and silky haired and funny. Though my crushes (see: Timmy Chun) might vary from week to week—based usually on some fleeting glance in the cafeteria or inadvertent brush of a jacket sleeve against my arm—I maintained a base loyalty to A.J. A few times I'd seen him laugh so hard he almost choked.

A.J.'s best friend was Joey Healey, boy extraordinaire. Joey was beloved by all, an all-around genuinely stellar student-athlete-human being. He yelled, “Great catch, El!” after I, by some miracle, managed to hang on to his deep fly in kickball. I once heard him say he would sacrifice his life for his parents, a notion that astounded me, not so much that he would do it but that he held such a firm position on the issue. He had the emotional maturity to sign “love” on all his Valentine's Day cards, but in fourth grade his heart belonged to Jeannie Kim. Jeannie was my friend and the envy of every girl at Glenside Elementary. Not only was she Joey's girlfriend but, I also happened to know—had a mobile of satiny pink and purple clouds and stars hanging above her bed.

The culture of elementary school secrets went beyond the playground confessionals. To not know things was the fundamental plight of being a kid. There were the specific mysteries, the Santa Clauses and the Tooth Fairies, debunked one by one with a kind of bittersweet pride. And, there was the show with the theme song “where everybody knows your name,” which I listened to drift upstairs as I lay in bed on Thursday nights, dying to see what this place was. And there was the secret life of adults, my parents especially, of which TV shows after my bedtime seemed a major part. All I saw of my parents' relationship was polite, predictable. They never yelled, never cried. Their moods rarely varied. They kissed twice each day: before Dad went to work and before Mom went to bed.

To me, this was all part of the mystique of the adult world, the prospect—part threat, part promise—of all that I would know when I was older. Though the specifics were vague, I had full confidence that at some point “real life” would start happening to me. I believed in a kind of prewritten story: I would meet a boy, probably at the age of the teenagers at Glenside Pool, who sat on one big blanket in a tangle of bikinis, gold chains, black box radios with spiky antennae. I would turn eighteen (and with that, outgoing and confident), fall in love, get married, drive a car, and have a credit card. But mostly, I would stop feeling things so much. What I observed most about adults, my parents especially, was that they were in control of their emotions. Maybe it was like getting tetanus shots; feel a thing once, then it lessens.

But this certainty I reserved for a distant future. At eight and nine years old, I turned to books to illuminate what I didn't know.
Where Do Babies Come From,
which I read the week I had the chicken pox, flushed and stressed and itching. The
Your Child At
series—
Your Child at Eight, Your Child at Nine
—which Mom read every May, then reported on what I could expect in the coming year. And any book by Judy Blume:
Deenie, Tiger Eyes, Then Again, Maybe I Won't,
and the handbook of adolescence,
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
In the crusade for information, Judy Blume's books were essential reading; they brought to light everything that wasn't talked about and that I was dying to know. They demystified kissing, maxi-pads, spin the bottle, scoliosis. They revealed the nerve-racking inner life of boys, via Tony Miglione. I finished them feeling informed, sometimes scared, mostly reassured, but more than anything, grateful. At the school book fair, there existed an unspoken alliance that no kid would let on there was sex in
Forever.
There they sat, a pile of sex for the taking, available to anyone bold enough to carry one up to a parent volunteer. I wasn't, of course, but would later skim a contraband copy with the relevant scenes dog-eared and highlighted. I felt guilty about this (my mother volunteered at the book fair), but as kids we had few secrets of our own, and those we did have, like the boys' names in the tires, lost their power once told.

 

“Ten,” Mom told me, “is a great year.”

I was standing in her bedroom doorway, teeth brushed, wearing my new blue nightgown. It was the week of my tenth birthday, and Mom had just finished reading
Your Child At.