Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (4 page)

Now I'm sitting here surrounded by dozens of Judy Blume books. Sometimes I find myself staring at the back cover of
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret,
and I think about all the twelve-year-old-
girls out there who must have read that book, girls who were new in school or whose parents couldn't agree on how to bring them up, or girls who had no idea who to ask for help in making sense of the utter chaos that is seventh grade. All those girls who thought they were the only one in the world like
that.
I wonder how many of them felt like Blubber, or how many of them knew their friends were no different than the girls who made fun of Blubber, and if reading about it made a difference in how they led their lives from then on. Judy Blume was the first woman to look girls straight in the eye and tell it the way it is. No one had ever thought to tell us that all that strangeness going on in our bodies wasn't strange at all, and no one ever talked to us about other girls. It's amazing that we ever got along without her.

I wonder if Judy Blume really knows how many girls' lives she affected. I wonder if she knows that at least one of her books made a grown woman finally feel like she'd been a normal girl all along, and I wonder, if by any chance at all, she'd happen to know where I could find a really good girdle.

“Hey Ma…” I called. “Here's the bus.”

As we got on, the bus driver greeted me with, “Hi, Beautiful.”

Ma gave him a big smile and said, “Deenie's the beauty, Helen's the brain.”

—
Deenie

Manhattan, the trendy
meatpacking district. Pastis, the “it” bar of the moment. Beverly air-kisses the stunning man guarding the door against badly dressed invaders from Staten Island and New Jersey. I grew up in New Jersey, but it's not something you'd admit to here.

“He was voted one of the fifty most beautiful New Yorkers,” says my friend Linda.

“Who?” I say.

“The door guy.”

Beverly gets us in, as we knew she would. Beverly herself is beautiful—long blonde hair bright as a supernova, delicate features, a wide-open smile. She's dressed carefully in a flute-shaped skirt and a leather blazer that she peels off to reveal a shiny but tasteful bustier the color of champagne. It's the bustier that does it, I think. Or maybe the hair, I'm not sure. Whatever it is, the men in the packed bar step aside for Beverly as if they are making way for Heidi Klum in her teeny underwear and her enormous Victoria's Secret wings. When Beverly takes a place at the bar, they surround us, each waiting their turn for a chance to bask in her bright bombshell glory ('cause boys like shiny things).

Two Venezuelans reach her first. One of them corners Beverly and dares the other men to approach her. The other makes elaborate sweeping gestures with his arms. When he talks to you, he presses his lips against your ear. He has impossibly thick dark hair that waves back from his forehead. I like the hair, but Linda thinks it's stupid. “What's with the hair?” she says to me. “Is it alive?”

The evening has barely begun and already bombshell Beverly is text-messaging her various boyfriends while the other boys vie for her attention. Linda says a few acidly funny things and the men sense a challenge. Linda has icy Nordic eyes, a long Nordic nose, and the lush body of Salma Hayek. Her father studied physics under Oppenheimer. She is smarter than everyone in the bar. She is smarter than everyone on the planet. Her eyes sparkle like the fjords.

The men look from Beverly to Linda, Linda to Beverly. They are fascinated. They are frightened.

From the men, I get polite questions about what I do (writer) and where I live (Chicago). Do I like it? Is it really that windy? The men don't listen to the answers. This is okay, I tell myself. I'm not here to meet frightened or fascinated men. I don't have to understand Venezuelans and their complicated hair. And yet it is obvious that I'm neither the smart one nor the pretty one, and no one knows what to make of me.

And, for a moment, neither do I.

 

My youth is punctuated by two things: trips to the library and trips to the doctor. On one library visit, I find Judy Blume and I can't stop reading her books. Sometimes I read my Judy books while waiting in the doctor's office, trying to keep my mind off the intrusive and embarrassing medical things that are surely about to be done to me. Judy seems to know all about intrusive and embarrassing things.

Judy knows a lot.

I fall into my books to pretend I am someone else—I am Sheila the Great, I am Margaret, I am Deenie—for good reason. At the allergist's, my arms are abused by dozens of little needles. At the pediatrician's, it's Nurse Evil with her Pressure Cuff of Torment and Thermometer of Doom. I have a dentist who doesn't believe in Novocain when he drills my teeth and an orthodontist who wants to pull half of them out because I seem to have too many. How I ended up with too many teeth is one of life's eternal mysteries.

Another eternal mystery: why do I run like a duck?

“Laura, pretend it's a race. Up and down the hallway, okay?”

We are at the orthopedist's again. The doctor already examined me, and I'm hoping that these insane laps around the office will be the end of it. He watches me for a few minutes and issues his verdict: “Well, that has to be the funniest run I've ever seen. But I can't find a thing wrong with her.”

My stepdad and I drive home. I have the feeling that my mother isn't going to be happy with this answer. My mom also thinks there is something wrong with the way I run, but she doesn't think it's funny. She thinks maybe I need some sort of treatment. Orthopedic shoes. Leg braces. An operation to replace my knees or maybe wind up my feet like propellers. A run that peculiar couldn't be normal. It couldn't be
right.

So she forbids me to run until she gets some answers. I'm not allowed to play tag with the other kids the way I always do. Hide-and-seek is out, too. As is a perennial neighborhood favorite, monsters, which basically consists of us pretending to be mummies, ghosts, and werewolves who chase one another around, grunting and screaming.

The other kids don't understand.

“I'm not allowed to run,” I tell them.

“Why not?” says Georgie, who lives across the street and is my best friend.

“Because my mom won't let me.”

He blinks. “Why won't she let you?”

“Because there's something wrong with my legs.”

“What's wrong with your legs? Do they hurt?”

“No,” I admit. It sounds ridiculous even to me. If my legs don't hurt, then what could be wrong with them?

I sit on the sidelines and imagine what I would look like with my feet on backward.

My younger sister Melissa is beautiful. Long and lean, with sandy brown hair and eyes a spectacular shade of green that is hard to describe: not quite hazel, not quite teal. A little otherworldly. Her skin's perfect, too, with the sweetest spray of freckles that you can only see up close. If Melissa didn't have that little bulb on the end of her nose, my mother says, she could be a model. She says this all the time.

When she says it, I think of
Deenie,
the book about the beautiful girl whose mother also wants her to become a model. Deenie finds out that she has scoliosis and will have to wear a back brace for at least four years, destroying any hopes her mother had of becoming an overbearing stage mom. Deenie, of course, doesn't take her diagnosis well, but she takes it better than her mother, who is devastated by it. And this makes it that much harder for Deenie to bear. It makes her furious. The brace, she says, makes her feel like she's in a cage.

My sister might be pretty like Deenie, but she doesn't have scoliosis. Even my sister's vertebrae are lovely, her bones sound and gorgeous. I think maybe my mom would feel better if I had scoliosis, but the only afflictions the doctors can verify are bad skin and a terminal case of clumsiness. My mother holds my face up to the light, turns it, sighing at the pimples pebbling my cheek. “When you were little, I used to think you'd be beautiful.”

The trickster god Puberty had other plans. In addition to the zits, the frizzy hair, and a growth spurt that etched red marks in the skin on my hips, my right eye has a tendency to cross when I'm tired. An appointment is booked with the ophthalmologist. I may, says my mother, need surgery to tighten the muscles. I wonder if the surgeon will have to pluck out my eyeball. I wonder if I have to get a fake eye. Maybe it wouldn't cross anymore, but then it might not move at all, and wouldn't that look just as weird?

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a cage, too.

So I'm not beautiful. But I'm smart. Melissa's the pretty one; I'm the smart one. I'm the one who gets the A's in school. I'm the one who reads all those books. I'm always scribbling in my notebooks. Smart, yes, of course. Smart girls could have bad skin and big feet and fake eyeballs. Who cared about a fake eyeball on a smart girl? The world would admire her for her brain. A smart girl could
do
things. A smart girl could get a bunch of degrees and be a doctor or a lawyer or a professor or a librarian.

What a smart girl can't do is have a boyfriend.

My mother sighs. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

I've written a letter to Nick and asked my mom to mail it. (Nick is a boy I met at camp the summer I turned thirteen.) Nick is cute. And funny. I have a wild crush on him. Even weeks after camp is over, I can't stop thinking about him. If I'm so smart, then why didn't it occur to me to mail my letter on my own and spare myself this crushing pity?

“Are you sure?” my mother asks again. She doesn't have to say anything else. She doesn't have to point out the big feet and the funny run and the crossed eye and the bad skin and the mass of hair that appears as if it is attempting to take over the planet one frizzy curl at a time. Maybe the doctors haven't found anything specific, her expression says, but one thing is clear: I'm broken. Boys don't like broken girls no matter how smart they are. Boys like shiny girls like my sister. Better to accept it. Better to fall into yet another book and pretend you are someone else for a while.

I show up at my best friend Joann's house. She has not one but two younger sisters. Her littlest sister is too young to be anything but a little sister, but her middle sister is pretty. Very pretty. Everyone says so.

Joann is not pretty. She's as awkward as I am. She's also smart. She takes advanced math classes. Maybe this is why we're friends. So we can be awkward in our advanced classes together. The advanced classes are packed with awkward people who have pretty little sisters.

Today, Joann has a gigantic gash on her chin.

“What happened?” I say.

“I had a zit,” she says.

I don't understand what having a zit has to do with that gaping wound. She looks as if she's had a run-in with a pair of ice skates.

“What are you talking about?” I say.

She lifts her horrifying chin defiantly. “I cut it off.”

“You
what
?”

She tells me a story about a zit the size of a small moon and how she's always getting them and she's so angry and so tired and Clearasil doesn't work and they
lie
on the commercials, so she pulled the nail clippers out of the medicine cabinet. Snip. Like that.

“The nail clippers?” I say. I cannot think about this without getting nauseous. What is it about feeling ugly that makes you want to do something even uglier?

“You shouldn't do things like that to yourself,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Because!” I want to give her a good reason why not, but I can't think of one. I have to change the subject. I tell her that I'm going on a diet. “I'm 122 pounds. I want to get down to 118.” When I'm 118 pounds, I will reward myself with a miniskirt.

Joann and I agree that we will eat nothing but fruit for the rest of the day.

We are still hopeful. It is amazing how hopeful we are.

When I am thirteen, I read
Forever
…I marvel at Katherine and wonder how anyone could feel comfortable being naked with someone else. What if he thinks you're ugly? What if he thinks you're broken? What if he tells you?

My first boyfriend is Albert, a seventh-grade lothario from another school. Even though he lives around the block from me, I don't meet him until my friend Kristen brings me over there. She has a crush on him. But he doesn't like her. He likes me. He tells me I'm pretty. I'm astonished. Kristen has dibs—she liked him first—but the feelings are too overwhelming for me.
He thinks I'm pretty.
How this is possible I can't even imagine. Doesn't he see the hair? The big feet? The ridiculous number of teeth? When he asks me out, I say yes immediately. We break up twenty-four hours later. I'm the one who calls it quits. I don't know why.

The next boyfriend is Harry, who is nearly three years older than me and is either gay or antisocial, or both. I go over his house and we sit at opposite ends of the couch watching TV. We do this for six months. He never once tries to kiss me. When we talk on the phone, he tells me about how he likes to hunt and gives me instructions on how to properly skin a deer. I love animals—all animals—and I don't want to hear about murdering Bambi and reducing him to a jacket and a pair of boots, but I listen anyway. I think if I listen to the stories about killing animals, maybe he'll try to kiss me. I can't understand why he won't. But then I understand it better than Albert, who did want to kiss me. I don't understand why anyone wants to kiss me. I keep hoping that Harry will try to kiss me, and that will mean I'm worth kissing. I keep hoping that someone will say something I'll believe.