Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (5 page)

I move from Harry to John to Mark to some guy I met on the boardwalk at the shore and some guy I met on the bus and some other guys on my floor in my college dorm and more guys I meet at this party and that party. I kiss some, mess around with others, all the while wondering when they will discover that I'm not who they thought I was, that I'm a screwed-up, broken, not-very-pretty person with horrible afflictions and a much more beautiful sister.

“I'm fat.”

I am walking across the quad with three other people: a bitchy girl who hates me, a guy who doesn't care either way, and another guy who has given me his jacket because it's cold. His name is Rich, he's extremely good-looking, and he's paying a lot of attention to me. He's friends with the bitchy girl, and I can see that she's as surprised as I am at this whole jacket thing. Why would he give me his jacket? Unless he likes me, which is stupid. Also, crazy. I am too big, too lumbering, too clumsy. I run like a duck.

Smelling the warm leather of Rich's jacket and seeing the hateful expression on his friend's face, I am overwhelmed with feelings of awkwardness. I want Rich to like me, but you have to be pretty for such things. I don't know how pretty feels or what pretty does. I am not Deenie before her back brace—the Deenie who knows that Buddy Brader is watching when she flirtatiously tosses her head, the Deenie who lets Buddy hold her hand in the movies and doesn't even mind that much when her palms get sweaty. I'm Deenie after she has hacked off all her beautiful hair and left a few loose strands hanging down. I'm Deenie who can't stop thinking about her awful crooked spine, who can't stop shouting about it.

“I know I need to lose a few pounds,” I say.

Rich tells me that he doesn't think I need to lose anything. But I know he's lying.

I am at a fraternity party dancing with my friend Annika. The music is loud and bad, the room dark and smelling of Budweiser laced with just the slightest whiff of stomach acid. The fraternity brothers ring the room swigging the beer and scoping out the girls. It's somewhat humiliating, the dancing, the scoping. We dance here because we're freshmen and there's nothing else for us to do. I don't dance the way I'd like to—that is, freely, with my arms swinging and my feet flying and the sweat pooling at the small of my back. The way I move is safe and slight. I want to be noticed but not noticed. Seen and not seen. It's the same for Annika. Her sister is three years younger and beautiful. (I'm beginning to believe that there should be a club.) We dance as if we don't want to displace any air.

I won't know what to do if I get picked by one of these fraternity brothers. I won't know what to do if I don't.

This confusion permeates all of my college experiences, even the ones I'm supposed to be good at: the school part of school. I don't automatically ace all of my courses. I have to work at it. And if I have to work at it, how smart could I possibly be? And if I'm not as smart as I've been told I am, what am I?

Dave. Drew. Tim. ____ (insert name here). Rob and I circle each other for years until one day he is gone. The word “ugly” is too small.

I swear off men and take myself to the doctor—a psychologist. When you've lived with a mom who handles her anxiety disorder by threatening to have your eyeballs plucked out and you are the smart one in your family, you eventually get some therapy.

My first assignments are to interview people. I talk to my mother, my stepdad, my aunt. I also talk to my sister, the pretty one. Turns out the label wasn't so good for her, either. She was pretty, she said, but she wasn't
that
pretty. Not stunning. Not gorgeous. And if she wasn't as pretty as she'd been told she was, what was she? She tells me that she has felt stupid and unpretty all her life.

For her, I'm furious. She
is
beautiful. And she's smart, too. Why, I yell, can't she be both?

Oh.

Well.

It takes a while, but I do start dating again. Most of the men are perfectly nice people, but I must have my last hurrah. I must find one more person who will help me punish myself for my secret ugliness. I fall hard and fast for Paul, a man I meet at a party. He's bright and funny and desperately eccentric. His eyes are so wide-set and his chin so pointy that he resembles a six-foot-tall praying mantis. I think he's perfect. Unfortunately, he doesn't feel the same way about me. Doesn't take him long to start pointing out the various imperfections. My faulty logic. My pedestrian job as an advertising copywriter. My bourgeois taste in books and music.

We sit at a bar. A man observes his blond hair, my reddish hair, and tells us that we are “salt and pepper.” I turn to Paul and ask which one of us is salt and which is pepper. He rolls his flinty eyes at the stupidity, the faultiness of the question. He takes a sip of his drink and says, “You're salt, I'm pepper. Salt enhances other flavors. Pepper has a flavor all its own.”

I tell myself that this is a joke.

One day, we are sitting next to each other on the edge of my bed. I say that I've recently begun to run. So far, I've only been able to make it three or four blocks at a time, and I might look ridiculous when I'm doing it, but I'm doing it.

“You're running?” he says in a tone of disbelief.
“You?”
I am wearing shorts. He takes my thigh and shakes it, showing me how loose the flesh is.

Another joke. Isn't it funny? Ha. Ha!

Paul breaks it off. He tells me that I'm not who he thought I was. He tells me that I'm just not attractive. The irony of a man who looks like a giant insect telling another person that she is just not attractive isn't lost on me. And yet he has somehow divined my secret wound and stuck his big buggy thumb right into it just because he could. It feels too familiar to me to call him on it.

I tell my mother and she is sympathetic. She says that she has always thought I was striking.

I decide to stay in therapy a little while longer.

Another bar, New Orleans. A man has asked me to dance. He is not my type. He is not flinty or cagey or sly. His eyes are warm and friendly and open. He's just a little bit shy. There's something about him. Something comfortable. I dance for hours, my arms waving, my feet flying, sweat pooling at the small of my back. The man keeps trying to talk to me. He likes what I have to say. I speak, he listens. He wants to hear more. When I get home from New Orleans, there's a letter waiting for me. Soon, there are others.

He tells me I'm beautiful.

He is the only man I have ever believed.

I marry him.

Here at Pastis in New York City, I twirl my ring and think about what Judy has tried so hard to say: You are not any one thing. You are many. Don't let them make you believe that this is an either/or world.

It's so simple. And so hard.

But I choose to see things Judy's way, because Judy knows. I work. I think. I talk. Sometimes I flash my husband my shiny bra ('cause boys like shiny things).

A Venezuelan wants to know what I like to do besides write.

I tell him that I run every day.

I believe it doesn't look funny at all.

Megan Crane

I
found out my best friend
dumped me when she got married without telling me.

As breakups go, I would say this counted as pretty unambiguous. Clear and to the point, really. With boys, there always seemed to be that murky gray area where
maybe
he broke up with you and was seeing that other girl, but then again
maybe
he was actually in love with you and just had difficulty expressing the depth of his emotion, hence the hussy.

Or maybe that's just my pathology talking.

Like Stephanie and Rachel in
Just As Long As We're Together,
I thought T. and I were meant to be friends forever. We met in college. Maybe that was the problem. Everything about Vassar College in the early nineties was melodramatic. It was all cigarettes and intrigue, secrets and tragedies, one after the next in the course of an evening. In the significantly more boring years after college, T. and I conducted our relationship mainly over the telephone. We ran up excessive phone bills at our respective companies, and it was due to her influence and encouragement that I left the New York metropolitan area behind—where I'd spent my entire childhood and adolescence—and moved down to the New South following the 1996 Olympics.

T. had a truly delightful cackle and could roll her eyes with so much delicious expression that it could stop you at ten paces. The voices she used to tell stories were hilarious, and some of them I mimic to this day. She had beautiful skin and an addiction to the finer things in life. Very expensive makeup, for example. Good-quality clothes. She was obsessively neat (we did not make good roommates for precisely this reason), which meant everywhere she lived always smelled sweet and fragrant. She was the first person in my age group who bought her own house, without the help of a partner's paycheck. She could be surprisingly raunchy. She seemed to know intuitively how to do things like write resumes, kick ass in job interviews, and rise through the corporate ranks. Not only did she know how to do these things, she seemed to enjoy them, while I, conversely, hated every last thing about joining the workforce. She seemed to thrive once she'd made it to a position of authority. I, meanwhile, floundered and soon gave up on corporate America altogether. While I hid in graduate school, T. continued to flourish in her career.

T. and I used to spend hours on the phone. Literally, hours. Sometimes there were several calls a day. No detail was too small or insignificant to share, complete with analysis and asides. We reveled in the minutiae of our lives, which was probably why I should have paid more attention when this changed. We called ourselves sisters—family—and I know that I meant it. I believe she did, too.

And yet, as in any relationship, there were undercurrents of rage and jealousy. Nastiness lurked within us both, and it sometimes spilled out in petty, horrible ways. Snide comments about each other's life choices. Rudeness and underhanded machinations. A truly awful fight shrouded from memory in the haze of too much alcohol. There were other people, other friendships that threatened ours, or seemed to. There were incidents and problems that I thought were forgotten or solved. Looking back, I think they were actually signs that the relationship was ending.

Where does a relationship start to go wrong? Can you pinpoint it? Or do all relationships simply come with built-in life spans?

Was it my unhappiness in those years? Her tendency toward judgment? My need for her to be the adult? Her need for me to be the bratty child? The fact that maybe neither of us enjoyed our roles after a while, though we kept playing them? Or, maybe, all of the above?

But hindsight is always a narrative, leading to inexorable conclusions. Life, however, mostly just happens.

Maybe we let each other go.

Or, anyway, that's what I tell myself.

 

Here's what I know.

We hadn't really talked in a while. Which was strange in the particular context of my friendship with T. but not all that strange when you consider that I once got on a plane to Zimbabwe in the hope that a friend I hadn't seen in six years would be waiting at the Harare airport to meet me. (She was. I'm expecting an invitation to
her
wedding any day now.)

I just assumed both T. and I were busy. I knew I was. As T. and I stopped keeping in touch, I was consumed with leaving England after five years. Then with moving from New Jersey across the country to California. I finished and defended a doctoral dissertation. I sold my first book and wrote a second. T. and I were on different continents, then in different states. While I'd certainly noticed that T. and I had lost touch, I figured it was just a phase. Distance could make even the closest friendships ease a little bit, become less urgent.

After all, friendships moved in and out of states of intimacy for any number of reasons, not all of them catastrophic. Sometimes you spoke every day, sometimes you didn't speak for months, and it meant nothing. This particular friendship had ebbed and flowed before, too. There had been other periods of zero talking between us, usually precipitated by a fight, but we'd always made up in the past.

Once, we hadn't talked for months following an angry phone call. This came on the heels of our disastrous four months of living together. I resented the fact that she just up and moved out on me, leaving me to fend for myself—something I felt unprepared to do. I imagine she resented the fact that I was incapable of washing a dish or picking up after myself. In any case, tempers flared on the telephone. I hung up on her.

Then, months later, I was upset about the direction my life was going in. I was tired of the same people and places. I was tired of me. It was easy to pick up the phone, slide back into the comfort of my relationship with T.

“Hey,” I said when she answered the phone.

“Hey,” she said.

And then we tumbled into the usual rhythms of our conversation.

As if nothing had happened. As if there was never any real space between us.

I assumed it would always be this way.

During the early months of this latest silence, I remember thinking that I was too stressed out and busy to deal with it, and if
she
wanted to reach out, she could. It never really occurred to me that she wouldn't.

In those previous silent periods, I'd never taken her off my list of friends altogether. Nor had I done so this time, especially since we hadn't even gotten in a fight. Quite the contrary—we'd gone on vacation together just a few months before
the silence.
Until I received the news of her wedding (many months later from a mutual friend), if I'd been asked to make up that list of friends, T. would have been on it.

In other words, if I'd gotten married in that period of time, it never would have occurred to me to do so without her.

Which just goes to show how little I knew about our friendship.

I'll admit that it hurt my feelings. But not for the reasons it should have. I should have been upset that she let me go, that on the day she'd been thinking about for most of the time I'd known her—and one she'd always planned to share with me—she hadn't considered me at all. I should have been angry at her for drawing such a significant line in the sand. I should have wondered what I'd done to hurt her so badly that she would undergo such a radical change without bothering to send me so much as an e-mail. I should have wondered why she either (a) didn't care about me anymore or (b) thought I was such a terrible friend that I didn't warrant the sort of notification one might send estranged relatives and the local paper. I should have felt all of these things, and perhaps on some level I did. But mostly it hurt my feelings because I was faced with incontrovertible evidence that she viewed our (apparently lost) friendship in a completely different light than I had.

Which makes me wonder now: How much do any of us know about our friendships?

What makes for best friends, anyway? In the beginning of
Just As Long As We're Together,
Stephanie and Rachel seem bound together mostly by history and geography. Which you shouldn't underestimate, by any means. There's a reason people differentiate between “work friends” and “neighborhood friends.” Some people meet a new best friend every time they leave the house. Others maintain a select inner sanctum of close friends, keeping everyone else at a distance. Still others create entirely separate worlds to inhabit—one for work, one for family, one for home—and never allow those worlds to collide (those people always seem to have the most interesting weddings, don't they?). There are as many different ways of
having
friends as there are of
being
friends.

In my latest book, my heroine, Gus, is forced to confront many of the same issues Rachel and Stephanie must face in
Just As Long As We're Together
—many of the same issues T. and I were forced to face in real life. What happens if your friendships aren't what you thought they were? What do you do if your best friend no longer wants that title? What if you, yourself, aren't as good of a friend as you always assumed you were? I'm lucky enough to have truly great best friends in my life, but I've also lost best friends like T., and these relationships, good and bad, have been the focal point of my life for years. I wanted to try to address these experiences in my book.

In most of the lives of the women I know, friendship with other women plays an enormous, pivotal role. Sure, most of us have or want a significant other, but it takes a lot of time and energy to find The One. Most women need their girlfriends to travel down the road with them as they either seek out or wait for The One. For some women, the journey is more important than the end result, and therefore their companions become like family to them. For others, their companions are ditchable the moment a good-looking End Result appears.

I believe the enormous success of shows like
Sex and the City,
as well as the chick-lit publishing phenomenon, can be explained by the vast thirst women have to see or read stories that explore these relationships in their various forms. Our lives are made up of networks of women, stretching from the female relatives who initially shape us to the female friends who make us and break us, sometimes, as in the seventh grade, all at the same time.

Everyone knows what the courting stage feels like. You get so excited when you meet. The two of you can talk about anything and everything. You can't wait until the next time you get together, because you feel as if you could keep talking forever. You feel dizzy and a little bit giddy from the new intimacy and the laughter. The excited shock of recognition—the way you see yourself in a new person and how, through her, you see the world through new eyes.

Finding a new best friend is like falling in love.

 

T. wasn't the first friend I had, nor the first I lost. I wish I knew how it happens that some friends you make you just can't keep: They are everything to you for a time, and then, suddenly and without warning, they are not. Meanwhile, though I am surrounded by the friends I've kept (and who've kept me), it doesn't seem to be anything more than luck that they've stayed around. Luck and work on both our parts, that is. These friends stretch back across the years and hail from almost every place I've lived or job I've had. Women I met along the way who I've had the pleasure to share this journey with.

Because becoming a woman, it turns out, is every bit as difficult as you imagine it must be when you're trapped in that awful sex-segregated classroom in the sixth grade, watching a movie you but dimly comprehend and being forced to pass around sanitary napkins.

(Note to schools: Please stop doing this. It's traumatizing. No one—but no one—has a pleasant memory of the Period Presentation.)

I was out recently with friends when the subject of making new friends came up. My friend's significant other was finding it hard, he said, to find people she liked in her new city. He expected that when her new job started, it would get easier, but said that what his girlfriend
really
needed was girlfriends of her own.

All the women at the table nodded sagely.

I imagined all the women I'd known across the years. The girls I'd admired, who'd made me laugh and then giggle, who'd been comrades in arms in the social battlefields of high school and college, who'd been welcome relief from the dreariness of corporate life, all of whom I'd liked at some point, some of whom I'd loved, others I'd ended up hating, still others who hated me. Of them all, I'd kept just a select few. It wasn't easy to get to know another woman, to figure out if she was like you. To see if she'd become a sister.

Which was what I thought we were all looking for. Sisters, not girlfriends. Family.

But:

Women are tough,
we said, smiling at one another.
It's always a battle to find good female friends.

 

In
Just As Long As We're Together,
Stephanie and Rachel's friendship is tested and ultimately changed by the arrival of Alison, the new girl in town. Stephanie and Alison become fast friends, leaving Rachel out in the cold—or so it feels to Rachel. Rachel and Stephanie fight about all manner of other things in the course of the novel, only coming to terms with what was really going on in the final pages: