Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (9 page)

Now, after six published books, I'm back to not caring as much. I'm back to focusing on what a
character
would really think or feel or do, even if it involves handcuffs and a bottle of Kahlua. (Although I still draw the line at having someone sleep with her gynecologist.) I let the characters fight, even if they sound petty. I let the characters mope around the house in a bathrobe, even if it's the ugliest bathrobe in the world. I let them feel something strongly one minute and change their minds entirely the next. And in my real life, I try to let myself do the same. So maybe that's the best lesson à la Judy Blume—write honestly and live honestly.

Erica Orloff

The pinnacle of life, of glamour,
of all a girl could want or aspire to in seventh grade was Jordache jeans. When I moved to America, after living abroad with my family for a few years, I returned to a world in glitter-dusted chaos. The sixties were over, Vietnam was fading in memory. And in its place were drag queens with false eyelashes like furry caterpillars, the Bee Gees, leg warmers, the Village People, Studio 54, disco balls, and skin-tight Jordache, Sasson, and Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, their labels sewn across the rear pocket. But my mother didn't understand that.

In fact, my mother, a woman well read and seemingly perfect, understood nothing about being a teenager. My father forbid makeup and dating, and my mother believed denim was…well, blue cotton denim. Who cared what name was sewn across your ass? While my peers were perched on Candies and spending up to eighty dollars on jeans, I was trying to figure out how to be cool with a budget under twenty bucks. It wasn't that we couldn't afford designer jeans and high-heeled clogs—my mother just didn't see the sense.

“You'd break your neck in a pair of those!”

“But
everyone
has Candies.”

“If everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump off, too?”

Well, I might.

Then came Farrah. “Wings” and “feathers” were the buzzwords when you went to get your hair cut. Mom didn't understand what was wrong with my perfectly stick-straight, wear-it-in-a-ponytail plain old brown hair. When I got a curling iron, my very hair conspired against me. I seethed. All the Dippity-do, Aqua Net hairspray, and heat-barreled torture devices used to tease my hair into something mildly, remotely cool were a failure. My hair could be seared by a curling iron until it smelled like burned flesh and cemented into place with enough aerosol hairspray (yes, I helped destroy the ozone), and
still
within forty-five minutes I looked like Morticia Addams. All I needed were Lurch and Gomez.

And if Mom didn't understand what was wrong with perfectly fine limp hair, she most especially didn't understand the mothers who dressed like their daughters, shared the same lip gloss with them, and tried to be cool. My mother didn't believe in being “friends” with her daughter. Not even a little.

“I'm not here to be your friend. I'm your mother.”

I understand that now, but her philosophy, a sort of parental “don't ask, don't tell” policy, also excluded any discussion of sex or boys or even the complexities of my first bra. All I knew was that I was a geek, and life was hell. And what was left after coming to this lonely assumption was a simmering anger and a hatred for all the ways in which I would never have Farrah hair and jeans with a label that said I was…someone.

And then I read
Deenie.
In my oppressive household (my father was a brilliant but volatile Russian who forbid dating until sixteen and thought lipstick was whorish—Bonne Belle Lipsmackers were about as seductive as I was going to be allowed to get),
Deenie
was akin to reading Karl Marx. Downright revolutionary. I hid it under my bed, having borrowed it from a friend, and read it secretly. It was subversive, scandalous. And it perfectly captured the roller coaster of adolescent life.

I still remember when oh so beautiful Deenie chopped off her hair. She did it in anger and rage and fury and rebellion. She did it in a moment when her emotions got the best of her. Its lopsided ugliness was an external sign of how she felt inside. And I, straight A's, always striving for perfection for a father who loved me but demanded brilliance, thought Deenie was the most audacious, courageous character I had ever read about. After that, I devoured
Forever,
also hiding that book beneath my mattress, certain my father would send me to the threatened convent if he knew I read about S-E-X.

But while all of junior high was abuzz about the realistic depiction of teen sexuality in
Forever,
Deenie was the heroine who spoke to
me.
Hell, I was lucky I knew what a kiss was.
Forever
was as far away as forever. I had to get through first kisses and fumbled second base, not full-blown sex. Deenie felt my pain. She was me. But it didn't make it any easier to accept my flat hair and awkward adolescence.

I remember the cover of Judy Blume's wonderful book was a girl staring into a full-length mirror. I imagined she was like me. Staring at that mirror, hoping for some kind of wisdom to lift herself out of her anger, out of the parts of her life she hated. I would find myself wishing I could talk to her—a living, breathing character who knew me better than I knew myself. But even knowing how much anger Deenie felt inside didn't dissipate how I felt. Being a teen girl, for most of us, meant hating our hair as too curly, too straight, too mousy, too frizzy, our bodies as too fat, too thin, too muscular, too short. Or in my case, too tall. In a harbinger of things to come, our breasts arrived in accordance with the luck of the DNA draw, and they were either too flat or not perky enough. Or in my case, embarrassingly buxom.

But, like the artifacts of adolescence—class notes and hair clips, lip gloss and leg warmers—I grew up and left Deenie behind. I went to college. I married. I had a child. I divorced. I married again. I became a novelist. I got sick. I nearly died. I forgot about Deenie. Until I spent a winter in a hospital bed.

When I was thirty, I found out that my lifelong agony and stomach pains were actually an immune disorder called Crohn's disease. I lost thirty then forty pounds on an already thin frame. And then I nearly died. In the emergency room, the doctors told my new husband to call my parents because I might not pull through. My mother mentally planned my funeral on the plane ride to my bedside (she had long since turned into a friend). My hospital stay was measured by weeks, not days. The doctors tried to help me, but nothing worked. One treatment option, at that time, was chemotherapy drugs. Another option was high-dose steroids. I opted for the latter so that I might be able to have more children.

I entered the hospital a size 8, thin, five-foot-ten. After my treatment, I noticed that when I smiled, my face obscured my vision—my cheeks puffed up so much from the drugs that my eyes were swelling shut. I gained about sixty pounds in three weeks.

When they finally let me look in a mirror, I honestly thought of Deenie before her reflection on the cover of Judy Blume's book. Forget a choppy hairdo. Or even a brace. How was a woman supposed to feel pretty or whole when she looked so very sick?

For once and for all, I had to make peace with the girl in the full-length mirror. No jeans or Farrah 'do was going to fix what was wrong with me. Chopping off my hair would change nothing. This would have to be an internal fix. I'd have to learn to love my insides—who I
was
—so that the misfit on the outside didn't matter. I didn't have Deenie's awkward brace. But I was now overweight and swollen beyond recognition. I felt like an awkward, seething, sad adolescent all over again. I could almost hear the chorus of my ex-husband ringing in my ears, telling me, “Nobody will want you.” And now, who would? I had gone from being so sick that my ex called me a “bag of bones” to someone who was unrecognizably plump.

Nobody will want me.

Wasn't that Deenie's lament? Who would want a girl with a brace?

Luckily for me, my new husband wanted me. It's fifteen years later, my health is much improved, and much to our
four
children's chagrin, he still chases me like I am a sixteen-year-old hottie. I do wonder about him. But more astoundingly, my inner self evolved. If the eyes are the window to the soul, I learned to face the mirror bravely and really
see
myself, the me inside, my soul, my fearlessness, myself. Whatever the mirror reflected, sickness or health, like Deenie, I made my peace. I love who I am. As my inner world evolved, my imaginary universe expanded. I've now published fifteen novels, and my brain never shuts down as ideas come and I get to create whole worlds at my computer. I write for teens, and it's easy to remember that world. The outsider world, the Deenie world.

Who am I? I am not my disease, nor my weight, nor even my children. I am not my clothing labels, my bank account, my car (an unglamorous “mom van” anyway). I am not the ugly words spoken to me by a man who wanted to hurt me. I'm not my books or even my beautiful marriage. It's all illusory. I am, instead, this essence inside. I am the courage to fight back from near death. I am the dignity of learning to love my inner self. I am the
love
I create with my four children. I am a mother nursing a baby. I am a person who prays. I am God's child. I am part of the ever elegant and evolving universe. I am peace. I am serenity. I am blessed with compassion because of my suffering. I am grace through pain. I am kindness. I am laughter. I am all these things.
I am.

And I like to think that if I met Deenie, she would be all those things, too.

Stacey Ballis

Shakespeare wrote comedies,
tragedies, histories, and romances. Oscar Wilde wrote plays, novels, and poems. Stephen King writes scary stuff, and
really
scary stuff, and stuff so goddamned ultra-creepy that it makes you want to sleep with the lights on. Judy Blume, if you asked her, would probably say she writes for adults, young adults, preteens, and children. But growing up, the Judy Blume fans I knew tended to fall into one of two categories: the “After-School Special” camp, the ones who were most devoted to
Blubber
and
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
and that ilk, and the “Sunday Cartoon” camp, those who had the fondest memories of
Otherwise Known As Sheila the Great
and anything starring that Dennis the Menace-esque Fudge. No one inspired loyalty like JB, and whether you liked your books serious or humorous, you waited impatiently for the Troll Book Orders to arrive, to see what new Blume delights accompanied your new poster of a chimp with a kitten in its arms.

But regardless of usual preferences, no JB fan could deny that there was one book that stood out. A one-word title, from the woman who wrote
Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself.
A couple on the cover who were clearly not in the fourth grade. An electric buzz around school, overheard snippets of shocked conversations from even the most jaded eighth graders.
Forever
was the book that got passed reverentially from older sibling to younger, usually with key passages highlighted and essential page numbers listed in the back. It was the book that we read aloud at slumber parties, whispered about in the back of the school bus, and was the single most likely item to be stolen from a sixth-grade desk. Well, that and the box of Nerds candies.

I mean, this was the book that had a penis in it. And the penis had a name. And the characters had actual sex not once but a bunch of times. And they came, whatever the heck that meant.
Forever
was the single most illicit read for almost everyone I grew up with. (At least until eighth grade, when we discovered
Flowers in the Attic,
which frankly made
Forever
look more like it should have been called
Tales of a Twelfth-Grade Nothing.
) At the time, what resonated with me the most wasn't the feeling of being in the know or the illicit content but rather the clear and beautifully rendered image of falling in love, and falling back out, and being okay. I mean, at the time, no one ever talked about anything but true love. Lifetime love. Even crushes were “I'm going to totally marry him when I grow up,” not “I think he'll be a lovely few months someday.” Judy Blume opened a door for me by simply depicting something real and not overly romanticized, which seemed to make it even more, well, romantic.

Today, when the subject of Judy Blume comes up with my girlfriends, everyone gets that wistful look in their eyes, recalling the rainy Sundays, packets of Lik-M-Aid or Razzles, the burgeoning love of literature, and then the look changes. The eyes go from wistful to wicked, the smiles from subtle to smirking, and pretty soon we are talking about
Forever.
The conversations we had about that book some twenty-five years ago and the questions it either answered or elicited about boys were the precursors to our eventual Carrie/Miranda/Charlotte/Samantha conversations.

As a young girl, I devoured that book, deconstructing every sentence containing reference to S-E-X. That was what preteen girls did, and I was certainly no exception. But I never would have expected that years later this book would become as important and relevant to me in my thirties as it was to me in the delicate time before I became a teenager.

I was the last person who expected to fall in love in college. I saw myself as the adventurer, the one who was most likely to take a year off and travel after school, the one who already knew she didn't want kids and did want a career and would probably not get married until she was in her mid-thirties at least. So when I found myself in the beginning of my junior year of college happily cohabitating with my boyfriend and thinking about the future, it was a surprise to everyone, including me. He proposed shortly after my graduation; we had a two-year engagement and a lovely outdoor wedding. I was a young wife and eventually became a young divorcée. Not so shocking. We grew apart, in different directions, and after eleven years together, seven as husband and wife, we decided to end the marriage. I found myself suddenly single at thirty-one, nearly a dozen years since my last date. Scary. How did it work? How was I going to meet someone? And what the heck was I going to do with him once I met him?

Even worse than not having any clue about the dating world was not having a clue about sex in the real world. Sex in college is one thing, fueled by alcohol, hormones, freedom, and curiosity. Sex as a married person can be about deep emotional connection and safety and sometimes even obligation. But sex as a single woman in her thirties is a whole new arena, and frankly, I was terrified. Not in the least because, as often happens when a relationship begins to sour, the first thing that had gone south in my marriage was the passion, and when we made the painful decision to split, I'd been celibate for nearly two years.

Now, divorce hits everyone differently. Some jump into their newfound freedom with all the exuberance of a cannonball off the high dive, bound and determined to make as big a splash as possible. Some rack up enough dates and bedfellows to negate the years they skipped in matrimony. Others are so devastated by the experience that they completely avoid new relationships, not even willing to stick a toe in the shallow end in case it is too cold.

I fell somewhere in the middle. I was intrigued and excited by the possibilities inherent in the adventure of dating, making new connections to new people. After all, I'm a social animal, I can talk to anyone, I make friends easily, and I'm a really skilled flirter. I'd always had the “if only you weren't married” guys hanging around, and now I could take advantage of their attention. This was going to be a piece of cake. I daydreamed about the interesting ways I might end up meeting my prospective dates, fantasized about magical early connections and the fireworks of a first kiss. Mmmm. First kisses. And those tingles all up and down the spine, and hands on the side of my face, the firm hold on the lower back, the touch sliding up the rib cage, the, um…shit. There's going to have to be nudity.

Wanna talk about really being scared? How about being a size 28 recent divorcée about to consider getting naked with someone new for the first time in almost twelve years? The idea was almost enough to keep me firmly ensconced on my couch, with my go-to boyfriends Ben and Jerry. I mean, I watched
Sex and the City.
I knew that sex was pretty much a given for a girl in her thirties, third-date rules and all. And in theory, it was really a wonderful notion. Meet a guy. Go on a date. Like him, he gets a good-night kiss. Go on a second date. Still like him, fool around. Go on a third date. Still hasn't turned into an idiot, sleep with him. Perfect timing. Long enough to get to know someone a little bit and feel trusting, but not so long that if the sex doesn't work it becomes difficult to extricate yourself. All my girlfriends swore by it. And I'd never been shy about sex, usually considered it a very pleasant pastime, and once upon a time, I'd been considered pretty good at it. But
theoretical
sex is one thing, and
actual
sex is something very, very different.

I tried not to think too much about it. I waited the designated three-month mourning period and then did all the stuff the newly divorced are supposed to do. I signed up for JDate. I signed up for Match.com. I put a personal ad in the Chicago alternative newspaper. I told all my friends that I was officially on the market and available for appropriate fix-ups. I started making eye contact at parties. And as I began to get through the e-mail communications and phone calls, I started actively dating.

It wasn't so bad in the beginning. After all, the one thing that all of those dating opportunities provide are a lot of first dates. I went on more first dates in those first few months back on the scene than I will probably ever go on for the rest of my life. At least I certainly hope so. I dated nice guys, assholes, sweethearts, and liars. I dated short guys, tall guys, thin guys, and heavy guys. Bald, befurred, intellectual, gray-matter challenged, testosterone driven, and a couple who I am quite certain are gay, even if they don't want to admit it. I dated fascinating guys, boring guys, and guys with ADD. Potheads, alcoholics, and teetotalers. Liberals, conservatives, and non-voters. Lots of Jews, several Christians, a couple of reformed Catholics, one Buddhist, one cantor, and a pastor. White guys, African-Americans, Latinos. For six months, I dated everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

Here's who I did not date: anyone who was remotely attractive to me in a sexual way.

Now, I have a terrible habit of wishing for things so hard that I directly affect the movements of the universe. Here is an example: I got divorced in September. By October, the frigid Chicago winds began to blow, and I began to worry about the snow. For I was a girl who had gotten very used to having my own resident shoveler in the household. Eleven years, I never had to worry about slipping on the stairs or digging out my car or finding a clear parking space. My ex was actually one of those sick guys who loved to shovel, it made him feel strong and manly, and I wasn't one to argue. I was in charge of hot chocolate with extra marshmallows, and that suited me fine. When I thought about the coming winter, I had a feeling of dread deep in my bones. That led to the fervent wishing and hoping and praying for a winter without snow. And that winter, drumroll please, turned out to be one of the lightest years for us, snow-wise, that we had ever seen. I only had to shovel twice.

Twice.
In
Chicago.
I single-handedly broke the weather.

So when I realized that none of the guys I was having my endless first dates with were making it to a second date, let alone a third date, whereby I might have to deal with the ubiquitous third-date rule, I realized that perhaps my powers of wishing had backfired. I was subconsciously hoping to not have to deal with sex, and therefore the universe had only sent me guys I wouldn't want to sleep with. I realized that I was scared about what would be essentially another first time. I was revirginized. At thirty-one. What a pain in my abundant tushie!

I started trying to think happy thoughts about sex. After all, I loved sex, at least what I remembered of it. I tried to put positive sex images into the ether. I watched romantic comedies. I meditated on my classic celebrity crushes and read Colette for sensual inspiration. Thinking perhaps that the fault rested in my bed itself, once the marital resting place, I bought a new mattress and box spring, threw out all my pillows and linens, and created a bed worthy of romping upon with no residual husband aura.

I figured it had started to work when I got reconnected to a friend of a friend. We'd met a couple of times and always had pleasant exchanges. I'd always found him attractive, but I was a married woman back then. Not anymore. To my delight, he noticed my lack of a ring, and we began a careful and slow courtship. He understood my need to build some trust before jumping into bed. I abandoned the third-date rule and ended up accidentally creating the third-month rule. He was patient. He wooed me. We talked on the phone and e-mailed like mad. We held hands and kissed for long stretches on my couch. We laughed and joked and ate and drank and eventually we went to bed together. He was very sensitive to my situation, and it was fine. No fireworks, but fine. Until he fell asleep and I had an attack of the regrets, which gave me gastric distress to a degree that sent me to the couch to watch infomercials all night while he snored in my bed. A few days later, having run out of excuses to avoid him, I finally confessed that I probably still wasn't ready, and we agreed to go back to just being friends. Luckily, that worked and we stayed happily in touch.

My girlfriends told me I had waited too long, invested too much, put too much pressure on myself and on him. That third-date rule was there for a reason. It was strongly recommended that I get back in the saddle sooner rather than later. I went back to dating. Then, in an instant message on one of my online sites, I was approached by a man who I recognized as someone who worked with a couple of acquaintances of mine. We began a lovely communication, purely e-mail and phone, as he was out of town for a few months working. It was fun. And we made plans to get together on his return. We met for a drink. I wasn't really attracted to him, but I didn't find him repulsive, so when he kissed me, I let him. And when he invited himself over, I let him. And when he wanted to go to bed, I couldn't think of a good reason not to. So I let him. It was fine. No fireworks, but fine. Only not so fine that I was eager to let it happen again. He agreed that we shouldn't pursue anything further and should go back to being friends. We never spoke again.

My girlfriends told me that not being repulsed isn't the same as being attracted and that it would probably be better to try and think of reasons
to
sleep with someone in those situations. And that long phone calls didn't count as dates, and was I really not listening to them on the whole third-
date
rule business? I need to go out with someone three times,
then
sleep with him. How hard is that? They also said that I should find something that could be fun and no pressure. Okay. Fun and no pressure.