Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume

by Jennifer OConnell

  handedly ending World War II, I will rescue my family from danger. And knowing that I have a story, that I’ve already worked out all the details to the plan in my head, helps me feel a little better as I close my eyes and fall asleep listening for footsteps.

  Apparently a Judy Blume moment can occur at 3 A.M. and involves the use a retractable fire escape ladder as pictured on page 87 of SkyMall.

  Caitlin held her at arm’s length for a minute. “God, Vix…” she said, “you look so…grownup!” They both laughed, then Caitlin hugged her. She smelled of seawater, suntan lotion, and something else. Vix closed her eyes, breathing in the familiar scent, and it was as if they’d never been apart.

  —Summer Sisters

  We rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard for a week in August. Vicki and Vangie, my two best friends from college, and our families. Our families! We had husbands! And children! Somebody was entrusting their home to us for seven days (although their trust was backed up by a healthy $1,000 security deposit). The fact that we were staying in a four-bedroom house instead of the nylon Target-purchased tent Vicki and I shacked up in during a postcollege cross-country trip made it very clear: we were grown-ups.

  We lit the barbecue at night, drank beers, and laughed. During the day, we hit the sand and surf. And when I ran out of magazines, I explored the bookshelf in the living room, desperate for some beach reading.

  The first book I picked out had a familiar name on the cover and a photo of an Adirondack chair. It was a story about childhood friends who reunite every summer on Martha’s Vineyard. (I was on Martha’s Vineyard!) The novel followed the girls through high school, college, and adulthood. (I was with my best girlfriends from college and now we were adults!) It chronicled their changing lives, and more importantly, their changing friendship as they grew up and grew apart.

  I remember reading that book surrounded by two friends who’d known me since I was an eighteen-year-old girl, a college freshman for all of four hours. And I remember looking around me, watching our young children and husbands, and wondering if our friendship would change as our lives continued to be separated by miles and marriage and careers and the noise of everyday life. And I remember being wistful and sad and nostalgic, but most of all I remember being hopeful. And now, so many years later, our children have grown, our marriages have changed and in some cases dissolved, but we’re still hopeful. And this year we’ll be on Martha’s Vineyard in August, and we’ll light the barbecue, drink some beers, and laugh.

  A Judy Blume moment is realizing that even as we get older, even as our lives and the people around us are changing—even as we’re changing—we’ll always be the girls who play in the waves and giggle with our friends.

  There are the experiences we know we’re supposed to commit to memory, the days we’re taught to believe are pivotal—our first kiss, our sweet sixteen, the first time we thought we were in love, and the inevitable first time our heart breaks in two. So why is it that the seemingly mundane experiences are the ones we can recall with such vividness that they seem to have happened only yesterday? A baby blue nightgown. The smell of Charlie. An eighth grader copping a feel under a natty turquoise blue sweater.

  Most experiences don’t earn the recognition of a Hallmark card or an announcement in the newspaper or a notation on a calendar. They’re moments that last maybe minutes and yet remain for a lifetime in our memories, turning an experience that could be summed up in a footnote and stretching it to mythical proportions (much like I remembered the party scene from Deenie as taking up the majority of the book, only to discover recently that it was less than a single page at the end of the story).

  So why do these seemingly insignificant experiences take on such significance? Judy Blume knew the answer. They’re significant because we’re significant. They help define who we are and contribute to who we will become. They’re moments that matter because they matter to us.

  They’re not the July fourth fireworks display that you’re expected to ooh and ahh over with the other three hundred people gathered by the parks and recreation building. They aren’t choreographed to symphonic music and accompanied by parades. Instead, they’re the sparklers we remember holding between our fingers, mesmerized by the sparks spitting from the burning wire stick and how they leave a trail of light as we wave them in figure eights above our head.

  They’re girl moments. Woman moments. Human moments. And all these years later, it’s what continues to make them Judy Blume moments as well.

  Jennifer O’Connell still wears Estee Lauder Starlit Pink lipstick and has been known to light up a sparkler or two, but she no longer wears scratchy blue nylon sweaters or nightgowns with embroidered rosebuds. The author of four novels, including Insider Dating, Off the Record, Dress Rehearsal, and Bachelorette #1, Jennifer continues to live out Judy Blume moments in her teen books, including Plan B and The Book of Luke. You can find Jennifer at www.jenniferconnell.com and www.jennyoconnell.com.

  The One That Got Away

  Stephanie Lessing

  The first thing I learned from Judy Blume was that God is the wrong one to ask for bigger breasts. If I had written Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, I would have included a scene where Margaret finally visits a decent plastic surgeon. Not only for Margaret’s sake but because I had a certain body part of my own that needed a little fixing.

  The second thing I learned from Judy Blume was that I wasn’t normal. I had nothing in common with Margaret or Gretchen or Nancy or any of the other girls in her books. They were the kinds of girls I hung out with in school. They were girls I pretended to like, pretended to be friends with, and pretended to be, but I was nothing like them. I was always watching them, trying to figure them out, trying on their personas, and trying not to get caught. Judy Blume was a master at getting inside normal girls’ heads, and I was grateful for the blueprints. Without Judy Blume, I never would have been able to pull it off. Because of Judy Blume, I fooled everyone.

  I never felt like a regular girl. I had too much to hide.

  I remember all those sleepover parties where the main activity was making a list of all the boys we liked. When we handed over our little folded-up pieces of paper, all the other girls always had the same two or three names written down. They must have been surprised to see that I had written down the name of our homeroom teacher, Mr. Nettles. When they looked up at me for an explanation, I pretended I was joking even though I honestly believed he and I were both patiently waiting for me to finish middle school so that we could finally settle down. I was constantly doing the math in my diary. “When I turn thirteen, he’ll only be forty-three!” I crooned. “That’s still mobile!”

  In my fantasies, we were always riding side by side in an MG convertible. For some reason, I was always wearing a white cotton pique dress with a kerchief tied under my chin and incessantly opening and closing my purse. I’m not sure why I chose to dress up as an old woman for these imaginary wild rides through the countryside.

  My taste in men wasn’t the only reason I didn’t exactly fit in with any of my friends. There was also the issue of trying to cover up what was going on in my house and the fact that I sprouted hips when I was eleven. They weren’t sexy hips and they didn’t come with premature womanly breasts. They were just hips that showed up out of nowhere—unruly appendages that made no sense whatsoever in relation to my height, my age, or even my personality or background. Why I had hips that started two inches above my waist, I’ll never know. I was always pulling my sweaters all the way down and was forced to bend slightly forward to hide them, which threw off my gait and made it appear as though I had a backache. As time went on, the constant bending did, in fact, give me a backache. I was certainly the only twelve-year-old I knew who needed to hold on to something in order to get up. “Damn these stairs,” I used to say while the other kids were sliding down the railings and flipping over the balconies.

  When I got a little older, I noticed that Cher had the same elongated hip problem I did
. I noticed it because someone called it to my attention.

  “Hey, you have the exact same hips as Sonny!” my best friend announced at one of our late-night soirees.

  “You mean, Cher?” I asked

  “Yeah, whichever one’s the girl,” she said, chewing her hair, not a care in the world. “If you measured her hips—top to bottom—they’d probably be two feet long. Maybe you’ll grow up to look like her,” she said encouragingly.

  I looked over at my best friend, sitting in the lotus position, with her long, lanky legs that screamed this is how you’re supposed to look, wondering why God felt it was necessary to give someone legs that shot right up to her neck, and me, the hips of an aging belly dancer.

  I also couldn’t help wondering if I’d gone to a different school, where I wasn’t best friends with the tallest, skinniest, most popular girl in our class, if my status would have plummeted to that of, say, Blubber. The possibility loomed large, but the truth is, I wasn’t blubbery at all. At least not in the Linda Fischer sense of the word. I was actually quite muscular. It occurred to me, sitting there watching Cher flick her hair around, in her backless, second-skin evening gown, that my biggest problem was that I didn’t know how to dress properly for my body type. Jeans are all wrong for girls with long hips. And I must have been wearing the wrong underwear, too, because Cher had no visible panty lines whatsoever.

  I thought about writing Cher a letter asking her what type of underpants she wore and where she shopped for gowns, but I didn’t want to take the chance that she’d read my letter on TV or something.

  Because of the uniqueness of my figure, I much preferred socializing with my mom’s friends. They, too, had figure problems! When they confided in one another that everything they ate went right to their thighs, I totally understood. There I’d be, slapping my hips, yelling, “Ain’t it the truth, ladies!” But I just couldn’t muster any sort of real enthusiasm when my own friends told me secrets about their bodies. Every time one of them announced she’d gotten her period, I’d hold her hands in mine, jump up and down a few times, and force myself to do a creaky old cartwheel, all the while wondering if the blood rushing to my head was my first hot flash.

  It wasn’t only the cushy familiarity of my mom’s friends’ figures that intrigued me; it was the stuff they talked about. For instance: Mrs. Feinberg was cheating on her husband with the pool boy—two, sometimes even three times a week. Mrs. Diamond caught her housekeeper stealing right out of her wallet, and Mrs. Denberg wore falsies. These were things I wanted to know! Especially the part about the pool boy. My mom was interested in that little tidbit, too. We were both trying to figure out what Mrs. Feinberg saw in him. We weren’t nosy or anything. We were doing detective work. If we could figure out why Mrs. Feinberg no longer loved her husband, we could apply that information to what was happening in our own house, something neither of us understood.

  I used to love to lounge around with my mom’s friends, quietly nodding and yawning, pretending to smoke, drinking water out of a coffee cup. There was a rhythm in the way they wove in and out of conversation with their long, languid pauses and a certain beauty in the way they didn’t run around the house or climb on the furniture to get to the phone. I had no desire to do anything that involved sudden movements, since they made me feel arthritic. When given the choice, I always opted for a nice quiet game of canasta over a raucous sleepover. I hated jumping on the bed. I was always afraid I’d fall off and wind up in a hip cast. The last thing I wanted was to wear white.

  Unfortunately, circumstance was such that I typically had to spend more time with my own friends than my mom’s, and it was always the same routine. Just like the girls in Judy Blume’s books, they all called the same boys every time. In our case, it was Daryn Saks, Jeff Gold, and Brian Brioni. The first question was always, “Who do you like?” And the second, “Well, let’s say she just got run over, then who would you like?” Our teacher was never on the list, so what was the point? Why bother calling some prepubescent slobbering idiot to find out who he liked when I had a perfectly good man waiting for me in homeroom? But, still, I went along with it. I desperately wanted to fit in—even though I knew my mom was home alone, waiting for me to come home.

  The more I picked up Judy Blume’s books, the more I knew something had gone awry. How could I possibly have had anything in common with Margaret or Nancy or Winnie or Jill, when I couldn’t even relate to my own friends? They were all just innocent children, happy and carefree, with age-appropriate bodies and parents who were grown-ups. But it wasn’t like that in my house. My father seemed like a teenager himself, on the verge of discovering who he was for the first time at forty. He questioned everything, rebelled against everyone, and was determined to find his place in this world before it was too late. By the time I turned twelve, he was so tortured and confused that when he stopped coming home until very late at night, I used to imagine him walking the streets alone in the dark with his head down, thinking he had no place to go. For some reason, he felt home was no longer an option. None of us knew why, and I worried about him all the time. I worried that he wasn’t happy and that it was because of me and the way I turned out. He used to promise me that I’d grow up to be something special. He used to promise me that all the time. But there I was. Just an average girl with peculiar hips. I worried that I was losing him. If only Judy Blume had written a book about the male midlife crisis, it might have shed some light on my adolescent experience.

  My mother used to wait up for him with the covers pulled up to her chin, wondering what she had done wrong to make him so unhappy. All she ever did was love him, protect him, and support him while he was trying to make sense of his life. She needed someone to confide in, someone to tell that her life was falling apart, that she didn’t know her husband anymore, and that she didn’t have any idea what she should do to help him. She tried everything. I watched her try everything. Her friends’ lives were so organized and simple. Ours was a mess. How could she possibly tell anyone the truth? My sister and I became her best friends. We all knew that we would soon find ourselves alone, and I missed my father long before he left our house. I had no idea what my mother would do without him. She seemed lost. I had no idea how I could possibly save her.

  A few months ago, when I was asked to contribute to this anthology, I stumbled upon It’s Not the End of the World. Of all the Judy Blume books I’d read, somehow I’d missed this one. The one that got away. The one that finally clicked. Had I been twelve when I read it, I would have, of course, called Judy Blume immediately. I would have told her that she was the first person who ever made me realize that I wasn’t the only twelve-year-old girl in the world who already felt like a woman—a woman who already knew how it felt to be left by a man I thought was mine forever.

  I would have told her that Karen Newman was me, and I would have asked her how she could have possibly known that I, too, spent hours devising imaginary near-death scenarios that I was sure would bring my parents back together.

  There I am, on the edge of a cliff, hanging by a twig, while my mother and father desperately climb up the mountain to save me; but at the last second, just as my mom is about to grab me by my striped Danskin twinset, the twig snaps and I fall against the rocks, tumbling and flailing like a rubber doll, until I hit the ground and bounce up and down a few times, before splitting into five neat little pieces.

  And there they are.

  Clinging to each other by the side of the mountain, crying in each other’s arms, looking down at their dead daughter, each one of her limbs lying just a few inches away from her torso—although, surprisingly, there is very little blood. But then, miraculously, I stand up, and they realize it was just an optical illusion and all I have are a few scrapes and a mild concussion. We climb our way back to one another, link arms, and walk back to the car shaking our heads.

  Or the one where I’m in the hospital, badly in need of a kidney transplant. And there they are, fighting over who will be the donor, un
til they fall into each other’s arms laughing about all the other stuff they used to fight about before I woke up with a missing kidney.

  Needless to say, I wanted to kick myself when I read about Karen Newman’s plan to have herself kidnapped. I wish I’d been able to come up with something more along those lines. I liked the idea of involving the police. But just the thought that someone else was desperate like me was enough to make me wonder if, in fact, I wasn’t such an oddball after all. And was it a coincidence that Karen had an Uncle Dan who was six-foot-five and I had an Uncle Billy who was also that height? Not to mention that my family was living in Short Hills, New Jersey, at the time, and Karen lived only a few towns away. It was almost as if Judy Blume knew me.

  If only I had known there were millions of girls out there who were trying to pass themselves off as happy-go-lucky, run-of-the-mill kids while their families were falling apart. If only I had known it was normal for me to want to tell my friends that everything they talked about was boring and stupid and nothing compared to what I was going through. And it was normal that they all seemed childish to me and that I resented them for being allowed to be so immature, because my childhood was being taken away from me and I wasn’t nearly ready or able to let it go.

  Eventually, enough time passed that I gave up the idea of my parents ever getting back together. Once my father got his first black leather couch and my mom was taking courses at the New School, it was clearly over. Had I read about Karen Newman when I was twelve, it would have certainly saved me a lot of sleepless nights, wondering what was wrong with me. It would have been comforting to know that it wasn’t my hips or my taste in men that catapulted me into womanhood. I would have understood that by the time you turn twelve, you’re not supposed to feel like a little girl anymore, and that if your parents don’t split up, there’s likely to be some other surprise around the corner that will shock you into growing up well before you’re ready.