by Norma Klein
Copyright © 1981 by Norma Klein
Introduction Copyright © 2014 by Judy Blume
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ISBN: 978-1-939601-22-3 (ebook)
Introduction
She was a consummate New Yorker, born, bred, and educated in the city. Her world, and the world she wrote about, was often the world of the Upper West Side of Manhattan where she lived with her husband and two daughters. She was a graduate of Barnard College. I was a New Jersey girl who’d always dreamed of living across the river and she was a city girl who had trouble imagining living anywhere else. When I moved with my family to New Mexico she was flabbergasted. She called me a pioneer. I took that as a compliment.
She was my first friend who also wrote. We had a lot in common. We were born in the same year, our favorite childhood books were the “Betsy-Tacy” series, and each of us, as Norma put it, “rushed into reading adult novels at eleven or twelve, to find an alternative to the idealized, sanitized, sentimentalized books meant for readers our ages.” For a short time, we even shared the same literary agent.
We met in the early seventies and bonded over tuna fish sandwiches at Schrafft’s on our way to a meeting of children’s book writers. I had read an advance copy of Norma’s first book for children, Mom, the Wolfman, and Me, and was charmed by the characters and the story.
A few years later we found ourselves together on the “most censored list.” Norma’s work was banned because of the nontraditional families (in Mom, the Wolfman, and Me the spirited protagonist is raised by a mother who has never married) and the fact that she accepted and often wrote about her young characters’ sexuality.
She had a gift for creating believable, complicated characters, and a keen observant eye. Her dialogue, her wit, the matter-of-fact way she told her stories, often in the first person, made them impossible to put down. She would explain to those who disapproved, “When you’re young, reading about life (and life includes sexuality) is a safe way to explore it. Reading about it is not the same as giving permission to do it.” She wasn’t a rebel, trying to stir things up just to be provocative. She simply could not believe there was anything objectionable about “telling it like it is.”
One of my favorites of her books is Naomi in the Middle, a warm story of a loving family with two small daughters. The mother is expecting a third child, and Naomi, the youngest, is concerned about being displaced. The illustrated book contains silly rhymes—“I’m going to China to see your vagina. / I’m going to Venus to see your penis.”—and a few sentences about how conception occurs, both of which make it a favorite target of the censors. A couple of years ago I was on a panel discussing censorship and Naomi when a woman in the audience stood up and asserted the book should be banned because it promotes alcoholism. (This was in New York City.) None of the panel members had a clue what she was talking about. She explained that on the night of the birth, when the father and mother go to the hospital, the grandmother comes over to stay with the two young sisters. After reassuring them that all will be well, she fixes warm milk laced with rum, to help them get back to sleep. “We don’t want anyone telling our children it’s okay to use alcohol!” the woman in the audience shouted, proving when it comes to censorship, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Norma knew writers who’d grown so discouraged, they’d given up and left the field of children’s books altogether, and others who’d backed off to escape the fallout of the censors. But she kept going full steam ahead, refusing to water down her books for children and teens. (There was no YA category then.) “I’ve never written anything I wouldn’t want my own daughters to read,” she said.
Smart, feisty, and enormously talented, Norma was a prolific writer, publishing one or two books for young readers and teens a year, plus a novel for adult readers every few years. The children’s book world was shocked when she died suddenly in 1989. She was fifty years old. I miss her friendship. I miss her voice on the page. Sometimes I’ll take down one of her books and begin to read, just to hear her again.
If she were alive today, Norma would still be speaking out on the same issues, encouraging other writers to keep going, full steam ahead.
—Judy Blume
July 2014
Domestic Arrangements
In memory of Henry Robbins
What arrangements people construct in the name of love are as formal and artful as any other product of human devotion. You figured them out as you went along, with an eye toward grace, as if you were writing a sonata, and the sense that propelled you was the goodness of the thing.
—Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter One
Daddy was livid at breakfast.
I knew he would be. What I was hoping was that he’d sleep late, which he usually does. Mornings are usually kind of hectic around our house; everyone gets up at a different time. Delia and I go to different schools—I’ve been at Hunter since I was five, but poor Deel has shifted around lots of times. First she was at Columbia Grammar, but she didn’t like it and didn’t have that many friends so Mom put her in Bank Street, which was okay except it ended in 8th grade. Now she’s at Riverdale, which she likes except she’s failing Math and getting C’s, which gets Daddy hysterical because he always had his heart set on Deel going to Harvard, like he did.
Mornings in our house usually go like this. I get up at 5:45. That sounds dumb and even crazy to a lot of people since I don’t have to be in school till 9:00, but I like having time to myself in the morning. What I do is get up, have breakfast—a toasted bagel with butter and honey and a glass of milk—and then go back to bed. By then I’m dressed, but I just kind of lie there, thinking about things. If I don’t have that, if I oversleep and have to rush off to school, I miss it. Meanwhile Deel is still in bed. She always tells me to wake her up at 7:00, but when I do, when I go into her room and poke her, she starts mumbling and grumbling and pulls the covers over her head. Deel is strange that way. She often actually sleeps with the covers pulled completely over her head. Then, at 7:30, she suddenly bounds out of bed and starts screaming at me for not waking her up early enough! Her school is way uptown—it takes her 45 minutes to get there—and mine is just across the park. The only bad thing for me is when the bus is so crowded I can’t even get on and have to walk through the park. That’s only happened a couple of times, though.
Mom’s schedule varies. Usually she sleeps late and I don’t even see her in the morning. That’s because she has an erratic schedule, d
epending on whether she has to go for a shooting or an audition or something. What she does for a living is act in television commercials. Deel thinks it’s gross that Mom appears in all these really sexist commercials like the one where she’s inside a huge roll of toilet paper with just her head and arms and legs poking out and a man comes along and squeezes her and says, “Hey, you’re softer than the one I have at home.” But Mom says she made enough off that one commercial alone to pay for one year of Deel’s school and that once Deel is out in the real world she’ll stop being such a snot nose and learn to compromise a little. Deel says she never will. Mom is quite sexy for a mother. She’s really tall, five-ten—about two inches taller than Daddy, even more with heels—and she has bright red-blond hair. I guess I shouldn’t reveal this, but that’s not her real hair color. Her real hair color is brown, but when she was doing a Broadway musical in her twenties she had to play a role called Carrot Top, so she dyed it and everyone said how sexy it looked and she’s done it ever since. Her main problem is that she has to dye her eyebrows too or she’ll look weird. Mom’s main assets as an actress are her legs, which are really long, and her smile. She has a kind of big mouth and her teeth are parted a little in the middle (just like mine) but directors like that. They think it looks engaging and natural so she’s never had it corrected.
Daddy is usually just about getting up at 8:15, which is when I leave. He comes into the kitchen in his jogging suit—it’s a leisure suit, really, which Mom’s brother got him; he doesn’t actually jog—and gets out his juice and Product 19. Poor Daddy has gotten a little bit plump—he’s always on a diet. I know what he weighs—169—and what he wants to weigh is 155 like he used to. His problem is noshing. He’s usually good until after dinner when he sometimes reads or watches TV and sneaks into the kitchen for little snacks. Daddy has an office he goes to—he’s a filmmaker and does things like figure out projects and try to raise the money, and then, if he does, he directs them. They’re usually documentaries about serious things. You might have seen the one he did about this man who was dying of cancer: Death Rites. That was on TV five years ago and it won an Emmy. Daddy’s quite a serious person in general. He takes everything very hard, which is probably why he got so hysterical last night when he found Joshua and me fucking in the bathroom at four in the morning.
“We have to talk about this,” he started saying as I was going to get my knapsack.
“Daddy, I’ll be late for school,” I said. I started getting into my coat.
Mom had gotten up, which is unusual for her. Maybe Daddy had told her about what happened. She was wearing one of her sexy nightgowns, the tiger-skin one with the plunging neckline, and her hair was all rumpled the way it usually is in the morning. “Darling, please,” she said, taking Daddy’s arm. “There’s plenty of time to talk about it this evening. Why make her late for school?”
Daddy whirled around. “You’re treating this like some trivial, irrelevant incident,” he yelled. “This is our daughter!”
“It is?” Mom said wryly. “Gee, you could’ve fooled me.”
Daddy hates it when Mom horses around about things he thinks are serious. “Okay,” he said, sighing heavily. “Nothing matters. Our children don’t matter, the state of the world doesn’t matter . . . it’s all just one big, delightful joke.”
“Sweetie,” Mom drawled in her soothing voice (she comes from Kentucky and doesn’t have a southern accent at all, except, as she says, “when it’s helpful”), “I’m just saying why wreck everyone’s day by making a huge scene at eight in the morning? Tat’ll explain everything to us tonight, won’t you, hon?”
I smiled at Mom. Mom’s my ally, she’s always on my side. I can count on her. “Sure,” I said, swallowing. Actually, I’m not sure I have a very good explanation, but maybe I can think of one during the day.
“You come right home after school,” Daddy yelled at me as I went out the door. “No fooling around. Straight home!”
Fooling around? What did he mean? Basically, they’ve been after Deel this year not to “fool around” after school, meaning go to some friend’s house and smoke pot. Some of our friends’ parents don’t mind if they smoke pot at home. Some of our friends’ parents don’t mind what they do. Like Gina’s parents. Her mother says that as long as they’re going to do it, why not do it at home? That sounds so sensible. When I’m a parent, that’s what I’m going to tell my children.
Joshua’s not in my school. He goes to Stuyvesant. Actually, he used to go to Riverdale and was friendly with some kids Deel hung around with. That’s how we first met. He came over with some of Deel’s friends one afternoon, and we kind of hit it off. The boys in my class are just not that great. I mean, they’re okay, but nothing to write home about. I guess 14-year-old boys just aren’t that, well, polished or suave. Suave’s sort of the wrong word—Joshua’s not suave, exactly. But he’s just more—you can talk to him about things. He’s more laid back. You don’t have to worry that he’s going to just lunge at you all the time. Like with sex. He says he wants me to enjoy it too. I like it when boys are considerate that way. Joshua’s such a nice person, which is why the whole thing with Daddy is so ironical. I mean, it wasn’t even Joshua’s fault he stayed so late last night. It was mine. I was the one who suggested it. That’s why I really hope I haven’t gotten him into trouble. I just pray Daddy doesn’t call up his parents or do something unspeakably gross like that.
This is what happened. I might as well tell you so you’ll know the facts because Daddy’s version will make it sound all lurid and hideous and it wasn’t at all.
The deal I have with Mom and Daddy is this: on weekdays I have a curfew of 10:00 and on vacations and weekends 1:00. Actually, it’s Daddy more than Mom who sets the rules. He’s more of a rule person, if you know what I mean. Mom always says you have to make up your own rules, which gets Daddy mad; I guess he thinks she’s setting a bad example for us by saying things like that. Last night was a Sunday so usually Mom and Daddy would have been home, but this particular Sunday Mom’s college roommate, Angela Weitzman, had invited them to dinner. Daddy hates Angela Weitzman, partly because she lives way out in Connecticut someplace, which is an hour’s drive both ways, and also because her husband is a gynecologist who breeds horses. Daddy says he’s a Philistine and a bore, and he wishes Mom would meet Angela for lunch and not force him to go out there. Mom says it’s only once a year and Angela would be hurt if she had the feeling Daddy didn’t like her. “She loves you, Lionel,” Mom’ll say to Daddy. “She wishes Herman was like you, she’s always saying that.” “Well, she should have married me then,” Daddy will say. “Why didn’t she?” “Because I got to you first, sweetie, that’s why,” Mom’ll say. Mom can usually get around Daddy and get him into a good mood, even if he wasn’t in one to begin with.
I knew that if they were going to the Weitzmans’ they’d never be back till way after midnight, so I guess I wasn’t that worried about when Joshua would leave. He stayed for dinner and we had linguine with this really good pesto sauce that Mom bought last week at Pasta and Cheese. It’s all green and garlicky, but I figured if we both had it, it wouldn’t matter so much if I reeked of garlic. Then we studied a bit and then we fucked and then we fell asleep. We both just fell sound asleep. Mom and Daddy got home around two. I was still sleeping at that point, but Joshua had gotten up and gone to the bathroom. When he heard Mom and Daddy come home, he figured he’d better stay in there till they were safely asleep. So he waited around half an hour till everything was quiet.
At that point I woke up. I saw that Joshua wasn’t in bed with me and didn’t know what had happened. I went to the bathroom and there he was, poor thing, sitting in the bathtub all wrapped up in a big orange bath towel, reading Lord of the Flies (he has to do a book report on it for school). I got in the bathtub with him and we began to kind of horse around. I suddenly realized I hadn’t even washed my hair, which I usually do Sunday night. Joshua said he’d help me wash it, so we took a shower together
. Then we got out and began drying each other off and, well, one thing kind of led to another. We didn’t want to go back to my room because we were a little scared about Mom and Daddy so we did it in the bathtub, which wasn’t that bad. We spread out a lot of towels and turned the portable heater on. It was really quite cozy and comfortable.
Right while we were, like, in the middle of doing it, suddenly the door rattled. “Who is it?” I called out.
“It’s me,” Daddy said. “What are you doing in there, Tati?”
“I’m just washing my hair, Daddy.”
“Do you know what time it is? It’s almost three in the morning! Don’t you have school tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said breathlessly. It was a little hard to talk with Joshua lying right on top of me. “I’ll be out soon, I’m almost done.”
Then Joshua got out of me. We figured the mood had been spoiled, sort of, and there’d be other times. I wrapped myself up in a towel and slowly unlocked the bathroom door. Joshua was still in the bathtub, huddled up in the towels, but the shower curtain was all around him like a tent. Daddy was standing in the hallway in his pajamas, looking angry.
“It was crucial that you wash your hair at three in the morning?” Daddy said.
“It just felt kind of itchy,” I said. “You know. It was bothering me. I couldn’t sleep.” I smiled at him, hoping to change the subject. “Did you have a good time at your party?” I said cheerfully.
Just then Joshua sneezed. He’d had a cold about two weeks ago, but was over it mostly. But I guess lying there with all those damp towels must have started it up again. Daddy looked at me sternly. “What was that?”
I shrugged my shoulders like I had no idea and hadn’t even heard anything.
Daddy went into the bathroom and pulled aside the shower curtain. There was poor Joshua, his hair all wet, cringing in the back of the bathtub. “All right,” Daddy said. “This is it. I don’t want to hear one word of explanation. I want you out of here in precisely ten minutes or I’m calling your parents right this minute.”
