Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (7 page)

…any more than what Shoshona was doing to me was right.

I knew that I, like Jill in
Blubber,
was going to have to learn not to punch Shoshona but to laugh off her taunts. At the very least, I was going to have to stop letting them bother me.

And that wasn't going to be as hard as it sounded. I had gotten to a point where I no longer wanted Shoshona as a friend. I no longer cared if she liked me. I found her, in fact, boring. What fun is spinning around in a chair when you could mutilate Ken (who had already permanently lost an arm in a tragic war accident) or read a book?

So the very next day during art, while Mrs. Hunter's fourth-grade class was gathered around the clay table and I said something to Erika that cracked her up—but caused Shoshona to raise her eyebrows and go, “God, Maggot, could you be more of a baby?”—I did it.

Oh, I didn't punch her in the face (though, thanks to my father, I knew how). Instead, I said the phrase I'd been rehearsing since finishing
Blubber.

“Look, Shoshona,” I said. “You be you, and I'll be me. If you think what I like and what I do is babyish, that's fine. You don't have to like them or do them. But don't expect
me
to stop liking them just because
you
don't. Because I'm not you.”

Shoshona, blinking in astonishment at this mild statement—which was, given that it had come from me, one of the shyest girls in the class, quite an outburst—said, “God. Okay. You didn't have to yell.”

It's no coincidence that Mrs. Hunter dropped the bomb later that day that she understood there were children in her class who were going together. Never, Mrs. Hunter said, had she heard of anything more ridiculous. Fourth graders, she said, do not “go together.” She added that if she heard any more reports of children going together, she would send the offenders to Mrs. Harrigan, the principal, a fate—needless to say—worse than death. When Shoshona raised a hand to protest, Mrs. Hunter looked her dead in the eye and said simply, “Shoshona.
Don't.”

Shoshona made a face to show how unfair she thought Mrs. Hunter was being, and I watched as Jeff Niehardt sadly erased his beloved's name from the inside of his pencil box. Shoshona swore at recess that when she and Jeff turned eighteen, no one, not even Mrs. Harrigan, would stop them from going together.

I'm not sure if that actually happened, because Shoshona moved back to Canada at the end of the school year, and I personally never saw her again. All I know was, after that day, no one—not even Shoshona—called me Maggot Cabbage again.

But I've thought of Shoshona—and
Blubber
—often over the past thirty years. Not even one year later, a girl named—ironically—Judy became the target of some of Shoshona's bullies-in-training, Muffy and Monique, for wearing blue eyeshadow and sleeping during social studies. When Judy didn't bother to come to her own defense, I did, making sure Judy had someone to sit with at lunch and someone to swing with at recess. Muffy and Monique, not being anywhere near as vicious as Shoshona, soon lost interest.

Middle school followed, with a whole new batch of social misfits who were targeted by a whole new batch of bullies. The tears in the girls' room flowed freely and copiously—sometimes from Muffy and Monique, who in turn became victims themselves and eventually my friends.

But I myself was never again a victim.
Blubber
had taught me how to stand up for myself and even—amazingly—how to defuse situations for others. Soon I found myself coming to the defense of R.—the girl from my previous elementary school—when we met again in high school. R. had lost none of her insufferable know-itallness in the years since I'd last seen her. She had, if anything, become worse. Brilliant academically but socially inept, not a day passed when her books weren't scattered from one end of the hall to the other by some smirking jock.

But this time I wouldn't stand by and watch as others taunted her. And I certainly didn't laugh at her. I invited her to eat with me at lunch (to the chagrin of my other friends), attended slumber parties at her house, invited her to the movies, and occasionally still see her, to this day. As with Jill and Linda, I can't say we became best friends…but I felt for her. I'd stood in R.'s shoes. I knew how it felt.

And if there was a way I could help her not sit in her closet and cry every night, I was willing to try it.

Today, whenever I need to remind myself about the massive disconnect between adulthood and childhood, I go to Amazon.com and look up the reviews for Judy Blume's
Blubber.
I can't think of another children's book that is more polarizing—parents are “appalled” at the behavior of the children in the book and at the way the parents in the book handle the situation (Jill's mother's suggestion that her daughter “laugh it off” seems to raise parental hackles, though, if you ask me, it's way better than advising her to punch Wendy in the face), while children—the ones who aren't “appalled” by the number of times Jill's mother says the D word—accept what happens to Linda and Jill as a matter of course.

Because it
is
a matter of course. I don't know if there's something that happens to some adults—especially once they've had children of their own—where they selectively forget what being a kid is really like, or if these people really grew up in such a sheltered environment that bullying never went on in their schools. I sort of think it's the former. Only Judy Blume, despite having children of her own, never lost sight of the fact that girls are
not
made of sugar and spice and everything nice.

Years after the Shoshona incident, I found comfort in a cartoon by Matt Groening (creator of the
Simpsons
) in his book
Life in Hell.
It's a simple line drawing of a group of little girls surrounding another little girl, who is weeping. The girls are chanting, “Cry, Debbie, cry.” The cartoon is called “The Cruelest Thing in the World: A Roving Gang of Fourth-Grade Girls.”

Unsensational and unsentimental,
Blubber
is this cartoon exemplified. Judy Blume understands that there have always been bullies and there have always been victims, and until the victim learns to stand up for herself, the bullies won't quit torturing her. No amount of parental or teacher intervention will save her.

She has to save herself.

That's what Judy allows Jill to do, and in doing so, she allowed me to save myself.

Lara M. Zeises

I
was seven when I
discovered the secret.

My parents had already divorced, and I spent weekends in the oatmeal box of a bachelor pad my father had filled with bland Rent-a-Center furniture. It was a one-bedroom, so I slept on a pull-out couch in the living room. Its mattress was too thin, and I could feel the metal supports poking up through it no matter which way I twisted my body. So mostly I preferred sleeping on it unconverted, even if the tweedy fabric of the cushions smelled like dust and stale cigarette smoke.

The word “sleeping” is a bit of a euphemism here. I never liked not being in my own bed, the one that had pillows broken in just so and linens that smelled like the fabric softener sheets my mother used in abundance. After my dad had retired for the evening, I'd read a book or watch some TV, trying to get sleepy, ticking off the hours before I'd be allowed to wake him up so that we could go out to breakfast.

In the dark, under scratchy eighties-style geometric-printed sheets, I'd slip my hand down between my legs, pressing the cotton crotch of my panties inward until I found the right spot. That's all I did at first, too. It didn't occur to me to move my fingers around or to remove my underpants from the equation. All I knew is that it felt good, my finger there—sometimes good enough to help me fall asleep. Sometimes so good that I'd wake up hours later, finger firmly in place, my hand hot and crampy from staying in the same position so long.

I honestly had no idea what I was doing, even though with time I did learn that panties were a nuisance I needn't be bothered with, and that if I moved my finger around a bit, I'd feel a delicious warmth run the entire length of my prepubescent body. Later, after many, many nights of experimenting with pressure and position, I rubbed long enough and hard enough and in the right rhythm to feel every muscle
down there
pull tight together, like a tiny fist, and then explode into waves of hot twitchy goodness—a surprise that left me not only breathless but decidedly awake.

So I did it again. And again. And again and again and again.

And still I had no idea what it was that I was doing. I had no names for the magic my fingers made or what those fizz-pops—now the goal of my nightly no-panty dives—were called, or if anyone else I knew was doing the exact same thing.

Until, that is, I read Judy Blume's
Deenie.

 

Deenie
is the story of a young girl who's so strikingly beautiful that people value her for her looks more than anything else—especially her mother, who is convinced that it's Deenie's fate to be a model. Those plans are interrupted, however, when Deenie's failed attempt to make the cheerleading team reveals that her “bad posture” is really the beginnings of “adolescent idiopathic scoliosis.” Translation: Deenie's spine is growing crooked, in the shape of an S.

While the bulk of the book is about beautiful Deenie adjusting to life in her new Milwaukee brace and learning that she's more than just a pretty girl, sly Blume fits in two short passages about Deenie's favorite extracurricular activity. The first appears halfway through the novel. Deenie tells the reader that she's starting a new unit in gym class—a once-a-month discussion group where girls can ask anonymous questions of their wise teacher. Deenie's question is among the first to be chosen: “Do normal people touch their bodies before they go to sleep and is it all right to do that?”

In response, Susan Minton, Deenie's “single white female” classmate, says that she's “heard that boys who touch themselves too much can go blind or get very bad pimples or their bodies can even grow deformed.” Poor Deenie worries briefly that her late-night self-petting sessions are responsible for her scoliosis, but her gym teacher soon clears up that fear.

“I can see you've got a lot of misinformation,” Mrs. Rappoport replies. “Does anyone here know the word for stimulating our genitals? Because that's what we're talking about here, you know.”

One of Deenie's classmates timidly raises her hand and says, “I think it's called masturbation.”

Finally,
my ten-year-old self thought happily.
After all those years of practice! There was a name for what I was doing!

Masturbation!

In retrospect, I realize that what I was feeling wasn't so much happiness as relief. Someone else was doing it, too. A lot of someones, it seemed. I mean, if there was a name for it, there's no way I was alone. I couldn't be, if it was in a book.

Like Deenie, though, I instinctively knew that masturbation was a “very private subject.” Not once did I try to broach the topic with any of my girlfriends, or my very liberal mother (who until I was thirteen used to pee with the bathroom door open), or my own gym teacher, a conservative male baseball coach who probably would've fainted dead away if I'd asked him about “stimulating my genitals.” Even when I was a senior in high school and a friend of a friend admitted to doing it, I pretended like I had no idea what she was talking about. I was embarrassed, though Mrs. Rappoport had assured Deenie's class—and me—that masturbation was “normal and harmless.”

In fact, I don't think I admitted to anyone—female or male—that I was a master at masturbation until I was a sophomore in college. And it wasn't because I was suddenly comfortable talking about the activity, either, but because I was going through a feminist “I own my sexuality” phase that deemed it necessary (in my opinion) for me to admit that not only did I touch myself but that I liked it. A lot.

 

Judy Blume's
Deenie
pays homage to the Natalie Wood/Warren Beatty classic film
Splendor in the Grass.
Book Deenie is named after Movie Deenie, a choice her mother made to ensure Book Deenie's beauty. Blume lets readers know on page 1 that Movie Deenie's fate is to go insane and end up in an asylum (“Ma says I should just forget about that part of the story,” Book Deenie says).

What Blume doesn't mention, however, is
why
Movie Deenie has a breakdown to begin with, or that
Splendor in the Grass,
based on William Inge's one-act play
Glory in the Flower,
is a commentary on sexual mores in the 1920s. Movie Deenie is of sound mind when she falls in love with the handsome and charming Bud. But between her mother making her feel guilty for having sexual urges (God forbid she act on them) and Bud's father advising him to break up with Deenie, as she is a “good girl” and therefore not the kind he should be getting carnal with but rather the kind he should hope to marry one day, it's no wonder Movie Deenie begins to crack—and crack up. After all, it's perfectly fine for Bud to play the field, but when a distraught Deenie discards her virginity (mostly to get back at Bud for breaking her heart), she's marked as a bad girl, unredeemable in nearly everyone's eyes.

Book Deenie has a Bud, too—Buddy Brader, a cute boy on whom she has a crush and later with whom she has her first kiss. But by the time Deenie comes into close physical contact with Buddy, she's already trapped inside of her Milwaukee brace. Blume says the inspiration for
Deenie
was meeting a young girl who had scoliosis and talking to her about her brace. But then why did Blume choose to name her heroine Deenie? Did she intentionally cage the sex parts of a girl whose movie counterpart goes nuts after intercourse? Or was it simply a coincidence?

The ending is just ambiguous enough to leave those questions unanswered. Deenie, who has begged to be allowed to go to her friend's party sans brace, is chastised by her father and told she can't go unless she wears it. Ever the sly one, Deenie decides to wear the brace
to
the party but change out of it the minute she arrives. Then guilt takes hold of her—“I thought about my father and how he trusts me,” she says. “I've never really lied to him and I don't think he's ever lied to me”—and Deenie changes her mind. She remains steadfast in this decision, even when Buddy Brader pulls her into a dark part of the basement and asks her, “Couldn't you take off your brace for a little while?” Book Deenie remains the good girl and tells him no, that she must wear it all of the time. Saintly Buddy replies, “Oh, well,” and proceeds to make out with Deenie anyway.

In the end, the brace—now linked to Deenie's father's trust—becomes a chastity belt of sorts. This might sound far-fetched were it not for a scene earlier in the book in which Deenie develops a rash due to the metal of her brace rubbing against her bare skin. She's told by her doctor that she'll need to wear an undershirt to protect her from further irritation. Deenie takes this as a slap in the face; undershirts, she thinks, are for babies. “I think what I'll do is wear my bra under it,” she says. “I'm certainly not going to school without a bra.”

Frustrated and angry, Deenie takes off her brace and climbs into the tub, which has been treated with a powder that should help clear up her rash. She's bored at first but eventually finds the hot water “relaxing.” “Soon I began to enjoy it,” she says. “I reached down and touched my special place with the washcloth. I rubbed and rubbed until I got that good feeling.”

Once again, Book Deenie and Movie Deenie have more in common than just a name. In
Splendor in the Grass,
a key scene shows Deenie bathing and arguing with her mother. In defiance, she stands up in the tub, naked and dripping wet, shocking her mother out of the room. The act is both a challenge and a statement—Movie Deenie's way of telling her mother she's no longer a little girl but a woman.

Book Deenie could certainly relate.

The scope of teen sexuality changed drastically between the time when
Deenie
was first published (1973) and when I graduated from high school some twenty years later. Yet adolescent fiction hasn't matured as quickly as its readers. While it's definitely more common to read accounts of boys flying solo, relatively precious few novels even
allude
to girls getting their groove on by themselves. (One notable exception, Meg Cabot's
Ready or Not: An All-American Girl Novel,
picks up where Blume left off; in it, Samantha's older sister Lucy not only instructs her about the pleasures to be found in a showerhead but reiterates that it's normal to have these urges, period.)

The stigma still attached to female masturbation makes me sad, not just because I am an author of teen fiction, but also because I am a girl. And let's admit it: girls don't talk to one another about beating off because they're made to feel embarrassed about the act itself. Even today, when middle schoolers are experimenting with blow jobs at the back of their school buses, most teen girls would rather die than confess they do the solo deed. After all, masturbation is supposed to be a boy's game, isn't it?

I guess this is why I always remember
Deenie
as that book about masturbation, even though proportionally the topic takes up maybe 2 percent of the entire novel. Yet just having that little bit of information—that tiny confirmation that I was far from alone—was so important to me. Not just the ten-year-old me, either. The thirty-year-old me, rereading
Deenie
for the first time in at least fifteen years, is still comforted by the knowledge that yes, it is normal, and yes, other girls do it, and no, I am not bad, dirty, wrong.

And I definitely will not go insane.