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…
…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.
Meg Cabot spent her childhood in pursuit of air conditioning, which she found at the Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington, Indiana. Meg has published over forty novels for younger readers as well as adults, including The Princess Diaries series (on which two hit feature films by Disney were based), Size 12 Is Not Fat, and the 1–800-WHERE-R-YOU series (on which the television series Missing, currently being broadcast on the Lifetime network, is based).
When she is not reliving the horrors of her high school experience through her fiction, Meg divides her time between New York City and Key West with her husband, their primary cat, Henrietta, and various backup cats. Be sure to check out Meg’s Web sites: www.megcabot.com and www.megcabotbook club.com.
The M Word
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.�
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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).
Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume Page 7
