Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (6 page)

What strikes me when I reread this book, the one I first read long ago when I was navigating best friendships with girls I only dimly remember now, is how very much like romantic relationships these female best friendships are. They require so much care. So much interest in another's details, thoughts, and emotions. So much effort and attention. The lasting forms of these friendships ease into something like family. The other ones flare and then disappear.

These days, I don't have a best friend. I have close friends but no all-encompassing best friend. I suspect that now, having found The One, there's no longer a space for that kind of relationship. I only have so much emotional energy, after all, and if I were to expend so much of it on the maintenance of a friendship like those breathtaking ones of old, what would be left for my partner? My work? Me?

But I don't mean to suggest that you can't have both a Significant Other and best friends. I just don't think you can have a Significant Other and
A Very Best Best Friend,
with whom you are far too close, in a toxic sort of way.

As you grow older, I think the emotional dependency of that kind of Best Friendship has to ebb away or there would never be any space to form the sort of emotional attachment you need to have with your life partner. Or the sort of relationship that now, in my thirties, I am pleased to have with myself. (Note to teenage self: It's true, you can
like
yourself. Really.)

But knowing that this ebbing is probably inevitable makes me wonder if some of the tensions in those vibrant, heedless, wondrous best friendships come from the fact that they aren't The Real Thing. Seventeen hours of discussing mundane details on the telephone won't take the place of a lover or a spouse, though perhaps they help fill a space. No wonder these relationships contain as much darkness as they do light—they're saddled with an unbearable weight. No wonder it's so rare that we maintain them in the same form forever.

The best sorts of friendships are the ones that adapt. The ones that flex to fit you both as you need them. That seems like common sense, but it's very hard to find, because not everyone changes at the same time or in the same way. Sometimes friendships are meant to end the moment circumstances change.

Maybe this is what T. discovered as she met and fell in love with her husband (whose name I don't even know). This was always her unapologetic goal, no matter her success: to locate her husband and make her own family. Maybe she discovered, years before I would, that things have to change when that happens. That these partings are inevitable and perhaps even necessary, and because I could not have understood why this was so at the time, she neglected to tell me. And then just disappeared.

But all of this supposes that T. was the one to make all the decisions, as if I had no part in what happened. When, in fact, I knew I was letting go of her. As each day passed, as each week became a month and I failed to act, I was making a choice. As I look back over the other best friendships I've had that also ended, I wonder if, in addition to simply having a finite amount of room for such intimacy, we also have certain periods in our lives in which we seek out people who seem to embody the things we lack. Then, when we gain those things for ourselves, we no longer need that friend in the same way, which causes a serious dissonance in the relationship. Perhaps this is why these particular friendships burn so bright and then disappear so completely.

What I desperately admired about T. was her strength in worlds that confused and scared me. She was so capable. Successful. Alternatively, I was a complete mess and decidedly unsuccessful at anything that did not involve lying on my couch eating chocolate and watching
Buffy.
As I climbed my way out of the depression of my twenties, I found that I wasn't as messy as I thought. And that as it turned out, I had the chance to be successful in my own right. When this happened, I think the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction for our friendship. The last thing I needed was a friend who seemed to treat me as if I was the same person I'd been before. That messed-up, ruined girl I'd finally put behind me. And I think one of the things T. needed very much was to be needed.

I think we simply outgrew each other.

 

When I was in high school, I had a best friend who was closer to me than members of my actual family. J. and I were ridiculously, disastrously close. We called each other the Death Twins, to indicate both our bond and our oh-so-jaded outlook on life. (Which is hilarious when I look back at my preppy self, complete with pegged jeans. I was about as jaded as a wide-eyed singing and dancing Disney cartoon.) J. and I were so tight that when we drove around with her boyfriend, he was banished to the backseat so as not to disturb our bond.

Then college intervened. We separated and found other friends in our separate colleges. We fought bitterly (and one night, memorably, with our hands) and didn't speak for a long time. Years, I think.

And here's the difference between Best Friendships and Actual Romantic Relationships: In the former, you really can have space. Years of it, if necessary, and then sometimes, if you're lucky, you can find your way back.

J. wrote me a Christmas card years later, and in so doing, reactivated our friendship. We will never be as claustrophobically, suffocatingly close as we were in high school. Instead, we can be friends. At last.

I think about this a lot when I think about T. and wonder why our relationship followed the trajectory it did.

There are things that I know about myself that I would never have learned without T. in my life. Some of those things are incredibly unpleasant, it's true, but that might be what friends are for. There were times when she seemed to be the only thing between me and a great darkness I feared I might get lost in. We were silly together in a way I have never re-created with another friend and don't imagine I ever will. I miss the stories that only she knows, the jokes that only she gets. As I wrote somewhere else, losing a friend is like losing a language, and I miss the one we spoke together. I loved her with the whole of my heart, and I can't regret that. There is no reason not to imagine that some day one of us will reach out, the other will be receptive, and we will reaccess that intricate, secret world that we shared.

Although, let's hope, in a less all-consuming fashion.

It is also possible that T. and I will never reconnect, never so much as speak again, and that's fine, too. I don't wish her ill. Quite the opposite. I like to think she's out there wielding that smile of hers like a weapon behind lush MAC cosmetics. I hope the husband she chose is worth the wonderful woman I knew once, whose fierce defense of those she loved was awesome to behold.

Reading Judy Blume taught me this lesson long before I would have to learn it for myself. You can't hold on to people. Sometimes you have to let them go. Rachel knows that Stephanie and Alison are closer to each other than to her, and in
Here's to You, Rachel Robinson,
she finds a way to come to terms with it. As we all must do.

I believe that people come into your life for a reason, and it's up to you to learn the lessons they can teach you. I believe best friends teach us how to be better people, and to do that they sometimes have to leave you to do it yourself. T. taught me a great deal—much of which, I imagine, will take me years to fully understand. That's the gift of friendship. It changes, even after the friendship ends. I don't need to speak to T. again to keep the memory of her—both good and bad—in a special place in my heart.

I like to think she's out there, happy, remembering me in the same bittersweet way.

Meg Cabot

She had big brown eyes,
an elfin smile, soft, curly brown hair, and go-go boots…the kind of boots Julie on
Mod Squad
wore. The kind of boots none of our mothers would get for us, no matter how much we pleaded, because they were too expensive and too grown up for us. Even her T-shirt was new and different—
TNT,
it read across the budding mounds of what were destined (possibly at any moment) to become actual boobs:
Talent, Not Talk.

Her name was as exotic as the place from which she'd moved—Shoshona. And she'd transferred into Mrs. Hunter's fourth-grade class at Elm Heights Elementary School in Bloomington, Indiana, all the way from Canada.

And she was about to make my existence a living hell.

I didn't know it, of course. And if someone had told me, I wouldn't have believed it. Everyone knew that bullies didn't come in four-foot, sixty-pound packages, with brand-new solid gold post earrings and Goody barrettes.

Everyone, that is, except for Judy Blume.

Too often in books, schools are depicted as nurturing, caring environments where bullies either don't exist, or on the rare occasions when they do crop up, they come from troubled homes. They're “victims,” just like the children they've terrorized. Eventually, when the child the bully has been tormenting comes to understand that her bully doesn't have a daddy or lives in a trailer park instead of middle-class suburbia, she forgives and even eventually befriends the bully, and everyone gets along.

Yeah. Right.

Judy Blume is careful not to give
Blubber
that kind of
After-School Special
ending. True to life, the victim and the bully in
Blubber
do
not
become friends, the bully is never even punished for her crimes, nor is there any obvious lesson learned. While the protagonist, through becoming a target of bullying herself, comes to understand that by tolerating the bullying of others, she did something wrong, this is portrayed subtly, so subtly that the careless—or youthful—reader might miss it entirely.

Still, even if in the fourth grade I'd known there was such a thing as pretty female bullies, I was hardly the victim type. Like
Blubber
's heroine, Jill, I was as average as a kid could be—not too smart but not too dumb; not too fat but not too skinny; not too short but not too tall. I was completely normal…a little shy, maybe, but I got along with all my peers and had a tight group of friends, some of whom I am still in touch with today, thirty years later.

Sure, my family wasn't the most well off, and my mom made a lot of my clothes. But I attended a school populated by children of academics—college professors who valued books over designer jeans and had successfully shielded their children from the knowledge that they might be missing out on current trends, as the Internet hadn't been invented yet, and the only channels any of us got were the three major networks and PBS (and
Cowboy Bob
on local station 4).

There was nothing physically to set me apart from my peers—just as Judy Blume is careful to point out there is nothing physical that sets her bully's victim, Linda, apart from the other children in her class. Linda is slightly overweight. But there are other children in the class who are larger—who could even be classified as fat—and Wendy, the book's antagonist, doesn't pick on them. Perhaps because of the title, I've often seen
Blubber
categorized as a book about a fat girl who gets tormented by her peers. But the discerning reader soon realizes that the reason Linda is picked on has nothing to do with her weight (although her weight is the subject about which Linda is most sensitive and therefore the subject on which Wendy chooses to focus the majority of her taunts) and that the term
blubber
doesn't have as much to do with Linda's size as it does her personality—or lack thereof.

No, Linda is picked on by Wendy for the same reason that my bully, Shoshona, picked on me.

We, the victims, allow it to happen.

Oh, yes. I went there. I, like Judy Blume, am putting the blame—well, part of it, anyway—on the victim herself. In today's society—thirty years post-
Blubber
and Shoshona—it may be considered politically incorrect to say these girls asked for it. But Jill's mother's suggestion—that her daughter “laugh off” the taunts that are making her life so hellish—is still the best advice a parent can give to a child in such a situation (although obviously a call to the teacher who has allowed such bullying to go on under her very nose is also recommended). Judy Blume herself, when describing
Blubber
on her Web site, writes:

Bullying is about power. And those who wield power can quickly turn on others, even those who once considered them friends—especially those who lack the inner resources to laugh at or stand up for themselves. I considered Shoshona a friend, although truthfully we had nothing in common. At ten years old, I still considered playing with Barbies the height of amusement, a pastime Shoshona looked down upon, although she didn't seem to have any better suggestions as to what else we might do while playing together. Drawing, reading, and board games were all “dumb” to her. One memorable playdate included Shoshona asking me to sit in a desk chair that spun, then twirling me around and around in it until I begged her to stop (true to form, when I asked her to stop, she wouldn't…until I threw up, that is. Shoshona, disgusted, stomped home, not even apologizing for making me sick…or, as my parents later discovered, for breaking the chair).

You might think an afternoon that ended in vomit would have dampened my enthusiasm about pursuing a friendship with a person who disdained the pursuits I enjoyed yet could think of no alternative activities, save those that caused me to lose my lunch and ruined my parents' furniture.

But that was the power Shoshona held over me—the same power Wendy, in
Blubber,
holds over Jill. I was shy. Shoshona was not. I was willing to let others have their way in an effort to get them to like me. Shoshona was not. I, along with the rest of the girls in my class, worshipped Shoshona the way Jill, in
Blubber,
worships Wendy—the way any ten-year-
old worships a natural leader—even though it turned out her T-shirt had lied: Shoshona had no discernible talents. She couldn't sing, for instance, like my friend Becky, or do backflips, like my friend Erika, or do fractions in her head, like Barbara. In fact, Shoshona was almost
No Talent
and
All Talk.

The desk chair incident was devastating to me. Shoshona had come to my house, and she had a bad time! How would I ever live it down? How would I get back in her good graces?

I felt even worse when my attempt to redeem myself in Shoshona's eyes by having a “cool” birthday party with a
Freaky Friday
theme—everyone was to come dressed as their mother—fell flat. My friends Becky, Erika, and Barbara arrived dressed like me, in long trailing gowns with white gloves, loaded down with rhinestone jewelry, giggling like mad. Shoshona, however, didn't dress in her mother's clothes. She wore an exact replica of her mother's clothes—but in her own size: business attire for the busy ten-year-old executive. She narrowed her eyes at the rest of us in our floppy hats and too-big high heels and told us we looked like a “bunch of babies.”

We were only too ready to agree with her. Being Canadian, Shoshona seemed hopelessly cosmopolitan. She had some very fancy ways compared to us Hoosiers. It was Shoshona who introduced our class to the titillating concept of “going together.” She and Jeff Niehardt were going together by the end of Shoshona's first day at Elm Heights. It didn't take much longer than that for most of the rest of the class to pair up.

Everyone except for me and my friends. Like Becky, Erika, and Barbara, I didn't want to “go with” anyone.

Still, most of the talking Shoshona did was about boys. Though I had no particular interest in boys at the time, it was clear from the way Shoshona carried on that the interests I did have—Barbies and
The Boxcar Children
—were babyish and that I needed to “grow up.”

This was news to me. Things had seemed to be going swimmingly for me in Mrs. Hunter's fourth-grade class until Shoshona came along and pointed out that in actual truth they were not. My friends—particularly sensitive Erika, who cried when her science experiment involving glucose didn't turn out, and beanpole brain Barbara, whose main offense, according to Shoshona, was that she was good in math, a trait that would certainly never win her any dates—were as babyish as I was. If I ever wanted to grow up, I needed to be more like Shoshona.

And I needed to get a boyfriend, pronto.

It was my reluctance to go with anybody that really horrified Shoshona. She suggested I go with Joey Meadows, a fifth grader, and even got him to ask me to go with him. Nice as I found Joey, I wasn't ready for that kind of commitment. So I gently turned down his kind (read: terrified. He was as scared of Shoshona as the rest of us were) offer.

Little did I know how this simple act would enrage Shoshona. The very next day when I arrived at school, I was no longer Meggin Cabot. According to Shoshona, I was now Maggot Cabbage and would remain so until I changed my mind, stopped being so babyish, and accepted Joey Meadows's request to go with him.

Suddenly I had gone from being Shoshona's “friend” to being the object of her scorn and antipathy. I was mortified.

I didn't cry in front of her. I had more pride than that. But I spent plenty of hours in my bedroom closet weeping as if my heart would break. I didn't want to be called Maggot Cabbage for the rest of my life. But then, I didn't want to go with anybody, either.

It didn't take long for my parents to catch on that something was wrong, primarily because most nights I wouldn't come out of the closet. Finally, one evening my father crawled in there with me and asked what was the matter. I explained about Maggot Cabbage and Shoshona. I listed the myriad ways Shoshona had taken over the class—swinging classmates Muffy and Monique (the only names that have been changed in this essay are those of the innocent) to her side; making faces at me and rude remarks, if when the class split into groups, I tried to join my old friends Becky, Barbara, and Erika, who liked and accepted me just the way I was; calling me a baby when I wouldn't play “chase the boys” on the playground at recess; making fun of my homemade clothes and nondesigner jeans; laughing at the fact that I was forbidden from watching
Starsky and Hutch.

My father, a computer science professor who was the first in his family to go to college—on a basketball scholarship, no less—was not particularly versed in psychology, let alone child psychology. And he seemed to know next to nothing about women, having dated exactly one in his entire life—my mother.

His desire to help with my situation, however, was heartfelt. He showed me—right there in the closet—how to make a fist (never tuck the thumb on the inside. You might break it) and always to aim for the nose (if you aim for the mouth, you might cut your knuckles on your opponent's teeth).

Yes. My father advised that the next time Shoshona called me a baby or Maggot Cabbage, I should punch her in the face.

I was horrified. I had never punched anyone before in my life (not counting my brothers. But I had never hit them in the face, preferring the more sisterly practices of “Indian rubs” and pinching).

The situation had clearly progressed to a point where something needed to be done. But what, to my father, indicated a need for fisticuffs, to my mother showed a need for something else entirely. Always a woman of action, Mom placed a single phone call and purchased a single book. The phone call was to my teacher (though I begged Mom not to tell Mrs. Hunter what was going on, certain that word would get out that Maggot Cabbage was such a baby, she couldn't handle her own affairs), and the book was for me. The book was called
Blubber.

I don't remember if I recognized myself in its pages. Certainly I, a timid child, had never been so bold as to egg anyone's house (whether or not they deserved it) as Jill, the narrator, does. Nor had I ever participated as actively in tormenting another student as Jill does at one point in the novel.

But there had been a certain girl—I'll call her R.—at a school I'd attended previous to attending Elm Heights, whom I, along with everyone else in the class, had found insufferable.

And though I myself had never joined in on teasing her, I had certainly never done anything to stop it, somewhat relishing R.'s comeuppance (she was incredibly bright, and like many bright children, came off to those of us who were of more average intelligence as a horrible know-it-all).

What I took away from
Blubber
during that first reading, at the age of ten, was that doing nothing to stop the tormenting of a classmate was, in its own way, every bit as bad as if I had been one of the ringleaders. Certainly Linda was as obnoxious and deserving of mocking as R. had been, but that didn't make what had been done to her or to R. right…