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

by Jennifer OConnell

  “Look who’s getting underarm hair!” my mother shouts out as I raise my arms over my head to test the fit of my new bra the way Teen magazine said you should.

  “Mom!” I yelp, slamming my arms against my sides. But I’m pleased that she noticed. My mother has been applying to the local community college as a freshman. She’s been busy furniture shopping. Changing kitchen wallpaper. Planting bulbs in the garden. I like the sudden attention.

  That Sunday, I get my period for the first time as I’m trying on my new gauchos, which I’ve decided on for the first day of school.

  “Don’t tell anyone!” I order my mother.

  “Guess who got her period!” I hear her telling Neil later. I also hear her telling my grandmother on the phone. I’m sure people can tell anyway, which makes me embarrassed to leave the house, but Tony’s got it worse. He gets unexpected erections while solving math problems on the blackboard and can’t turn around without using his textbook as a shield. At least I don’t have to worry about that.

  My brother and sister and I are each attending different schools. My brother is in sixth grade at the elementary school. I’m starting seventh at the junior high. My sister is starting high school. I’m a nervous wreck about going to junior high all alone on the first day, so my mother arranges for me to meet up with two older girls, eighth graders. I wait on my corner. Five minutes. Ten minutes. They never show (there’s never an explanation). I fly down Saddle River Road on my new bike with its rainbow stripes to my brand-new school, which is smaller than my elementary school but nonetheless scary as hell. As I lock up my bike, I’m immediately the subject of a point and giggle. I’m not sure if it’s the rainbow stripes on my baby blue bike or the green gauchos.

  Tony’s first day goes a lot better. He makes a few good friends right away, which gives me hope. During the first week of seventh grade, a popular girl named Laurie invites me to her house after school. We walk home with her friends, who walk ahead or behind us. They eye my gauchos (I have them in three colors, all corduroy) and give Laurie “stop being so nice to strays” type looks. Inside her house, we have absolutely nothing to talk about after “So how do you like it here?” We talk about her cat. My cat. I have no idea how to do this, what we’re supposed to talk about. It’s finally time to go home, where I throw up from nerves. My tryout for the popular club is over and I didn’t make the cut. This is where having an MIA father comes in handy. What slight could ever hurt as bad?

  I do make one friend, though. A very good one. Her name is Cara. Every day after school, we go to her house (hers because she has her own room). We spend our after-school hours listening to Elton John and Bruce Springsteen (Carol would approve). We memorize the words to Stairway to Heaven and sing it at the top of our lungs. We have everything to talk about, from boys to our bodies to our classmates to our families. Cara also has a stepfather. Her own father lives with another family in Fair Lawn; they have a daughter our same age who goes to our school. I am blown away by this. It’s almost as strange to me as my own situation, my MIA father. I wonder whose situation is stranger: mine or Cara’s.

  My stepfather tells me and my siblings not to talk about our family business, which he considers private, like the fact that he and my mother are not yet married. Or that he’s not my father. Or that my father is somewhere in the world, probably twenty miles away, living with another family, like Cara’s dad. I’m not sure if Neil thinks people will talk or if he’s just a private person.

  Much, much, later, I’ll read somewhere that our stories are our own, but at twelve, I didn’t know. And I was dutiful. I didn’t use the word “stepfather.” I didn’t talk about my absent father, who I wondered about constantly. I have a father somewhere, I wanted to scream in the front yard. Just because he’s not here doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist!

  My grandmother, my mother’s mother, says during every visit, “You are all so lucky! Neil is a wonderful man! He took you out of the gutter. You should be grateful. Are you grateful?”

  It’s hard to learn that your story is your own when important people in your life are telling you what your story needs to be.

  I said I was grateful.

  I reread Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. Tony’s struggling with this, too, with being “silenced.” The “perfect” boy next door, a rich kid foisted on Tony by his social-climbing mother, shoplifts, which Tony can’t understand and can’t talk about to anyone. Tony’s older brother has “sold out” from teaching school to joining the corporate world. His mother allows her snooty neighbor to call her Carol instead of Carmella because “Carol is easier to remember.” And his grandmother, who literally cannot speak (her larynx was removed during surgery) and who only communicated through cooking for the family, is banished from the kitchen to suit the new rude housekeeper.

  Here, there are differences between me and Tony. But the conflict is the same. I keep it in. So does Tony. Until he finally explodes and is told to shut up. All that shutting up causes debilitating stomach pains that land him in the hospital. The cure: a therapist. Tony talks. The pains go away.

  I don’t talk. Instead of telling my almost-stepfather that it’s my right to tell people what I want about my own self, I say nothing. Tony is not someone who says nothing. He tries so hard to hang onto himself as he was, as he is throughout Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. It comforts me. But I don’t know how to do it, if I’m doing it, if I’m still me.

  My first major crush obliterates most other thoughts whirling through my head, which leads to the next big similarity between me and Tony (as well as a similarity for every adolescent in the world): Tony develops a major crush on his neighbor’s sixteen-year-old sister, whose window he can peep into with the binoculars he gets for his thirteenth birthday (his parents are so clueless that they actually believe he wants the binoculars for his new hobby, bird-watching). The sixteen-year-old is nice enough to him but of course not remotely aware of him as anything other than her little brother’s little friend. Tony is busily lusting, busily having his first erection, his first wet dream.

  My crush is a seventh grader like me, but not in any of my classes. His name is Rob and his last name rhymes with Miglione. Only the first letter is different. I see this as even more reason that we belong together. I am crazy about this boy despite never having said a word to him. He is a slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed boy who has captivated me on sight. I once heard the sound of his voice and spent hours closing my eyes to hear it again.

  A girl named Amy who has a few classes with Rob offers to ask him if he likes me. I say yes because I’m twelve, and this is what twelve-year-olds do, as evidenced by the girl in Tony’s class (Corky) who is madly in love with him and goes to embarrassing lengths to show it. To Tony, she barely qualifies as a nuisance. That’s how little she registers on his radar as a girl. It was important to know that you can, like Corky, love a boy with all your might, and that said boy will not even think of you for a single second of the day, even if you do everything in your twelve-year-old power to get him to notice you. I understand this when Amy reports back that Rob’s answer was no.

  I walk around the halls, my heart bursting with something I’m not allowed to talk about. In the cafeteria I see Cara at our table and I break down in sobs like I did on fake Holocaust Remembrance Day.

  “I’m really sorry about Rob,” Cara says, squeezing my hand in the girls’ bathroom.

  And then finally, I say it. “No boy is ever going to like me. My own father doesn’t even love me.”

  “You don’t know that,” Cara says. “I’m sure your father still loves you. He just can’t deal or something.”

  It feels good to talk. It feels good to know that my story is my own, even if I’m pretty sure I will never see my father again, never hear from him again, as though he never existed at all, like the old me. (I turn out to be right about this, by the way.)

  Then Again, Maybe I Won’t said in black and white and gray areas that you can hold on to who you are even when your lif
e is turned upside down and then sticks sideways. I did that without realizing it at the time, and it’s thanks to Tony. It’s thanks to Judy Blume.

  Melissa Senate is the author of several novels for adults and teens, including the best-selling See Jane Date, which was made into a TV movie. A former book editor, Melissa writes full-time from her home on the coast of Maine. FYI: Those corduroy gauchos are in a “what were you thinking?” box in the attic along with some other seventies gems, but her copy of Then Again, Maybe I Won’t remains front and center on her bookshelf.

  Vitamin K, Judy Blume,

  and the Great Big Bruise

  Julie Kenner

  When I look back over the course of my life (not that it has been so very long so far, mind you), three important influences shine crystal bright as if from a beacon: my family, my friends, and the books I read in my youth. Their individual influences ebb and flow, sometimes my family taking precedence, sometimes friends, and sometimes books, mixing like currents in a river so that I’m never quite sure what had the greater impact on me or why; I only feel the influences pulling me along and holding me up.

  On occasion, though, I can see as well as feel the effect of these influences, and it’s interesting to stand back, almost as an observer in your own life, and say, “Yes, this I owe to the books I read or the family I love or the friends I hold dear.”

  With regard to the books I write, for example, I owe a huge debt to writers such as Edward Eager, E. Nesbit, and Madeleine L’Engle, who brought magic into my world and made it real. Their work has influenced my own work in so many ways that it would probably be impossible for anyone except a graduate student to analyze and decipher (assuming any graduate student felt inclined to study my books). The positive influence of those books represents a huge debt that I can only hope to pay forward.

  But it’s to another writer that I owe an even larger debt. Judy Blume. To her I owe not only the intangible imprint that surely paints my own craft but something even more dear: my health, my self-respect, and my confidence in my own imagination and intelligence.

  Sounds lofty, doesn’t it? But it’s true. At the time, I never thought, Wow, these Judy Blume books sure are keeping me grounded. But that was in fact the case.

  It started simply enough during the summer after my freshman year of high school with a bruise and William Shakespeare. I was fourteen. The bruise was on my thigh, and the play was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Appropriate, I think, since so much of what happened seemed to be like wading through a dream (not a good dream, mind you, but a dream nonetheless).

  All these years later, I don’t remember what my exact involvement was with the play other than that I was a crew member and that I was required to slink along the various levels and crawl over and under the stage in order to place and retrieve an assortment of props. I used to fantasize à la Sally J. Freedman that one of the actors would drop out or lose her voice, and the director would be in a tizzy, wondering who could take over. And since I had been there through all the rehearsals and have an excellent memory, I would stand up and say, “I can do it.”

  The director, of course, would be concerned. I was (and am) shy, and that was certainly no secret. But since she had no other choice, she would give me the part. And I, of course, would overcome my fear and excel, garnering rave reviews and being discovered by a Hollywood agent, who would whisk me away to become the Next Great Star. In the process, that pesky shyness would vanish. Life would be grand.

  In case you’re wondering, this never happened. But the fantasies never stopped. I’d been living in a fantasy world all my life, and I can remember being thrilled when I read Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself. There was a girl like me, despite the different era and the different cultures. Judy Blume and Sally J. gave me permission to lose myself in those fantasies, and I have been doing just that ever since.

  During my freshman summer, though, I was limited to that one Hollywood fantasy. I was too busy listening for cues and doing my stage job to lose myself any more deeply in my imagination. Not at first, anyway.

  The summer play was being rehearsed and performed in an outdoor venue in Austin, Texas. That means, to anyone not familiar with central Texas, that I spent my time sweating in shorts and tank tops, thankful that I was on the crew and not one of the actors forced to wear yards and yards of thick muslin, tights, and velvet.

  One day, after slinking and crawling around the set, a friend noticed a bruise on my thigh. I didn’t think much about it—I’d been banging around the stage—and went on about my life. (Later, when I reread Deenie after knowing the true cause of those bruises, the similarity struck me: Deenie had been told her posture was “off” by the modeling agency, but that hardly caused a life revelation, as she seemed perfectly normal.)

  A few days later, the bruise was larger, and there were others. Each had a hard spot underneath, and the original bruise had expanded to about the size of a baseball. It even protruded somewhat from my skin. Frankly, I looked a bit as if one of those tennis ball-serving machines had spewed forth hundreds of balls, each whacking me on my thighs and calves and occasionally on my arms. I was a mess. And when my friends began to express worry, I realized that I was also scared.

  I did what I always did when thrust into a scary situation—I fantasized my way through it. This time, though, the scary situation seemed more real. I wasn’t faced with giving an oration in front of twenty-five people or even auditioning for the school play. This time, I was faced with a body I didn’t understand, doing things that didn’t make sense. Bruises, I knew, were supposed to appear after you banged against something. They weren’t supposed to appear out of nowhere. Something was wrong, and I distinctly remember turning for comfort to my own imagination and the familiar friends who lived in my books.

  I think I reread every Judy Blume novel on my bright yellow bookcase over the next few days, but the Blume character who gave me the most comfort was Sally J. I’d first read the book several years before, and though I’d moved on to much more complicated texts (that summer, I was reading several of Shakespeare’s plays along with Crime and Punishment and several Edith Hamilton books on mythology), Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself drew me in, giving me permission to lose myself in possible scenarios about the odd things going on with my body. Sally J. was a friend; we understood each other. And when my fantasies started turning dark with thoughts of mysterious illnesses that would erase my life, I knew that she (whose happy fantasies had ultimately been tainted by the horror of the Holocaust) would understand.

  Like Sally J., I made up scenarios in my head. And my friends helped me act them out. In our case, though, we acted them out in reality, casting ourselves as brilliant doctors with a mysterious case to solve. (My mother has always been physician-phobic, and while she was aware that my legs were somewhat bruised, I was careful to not let her see the full extent. Stupid? Yes. But I had the foolish confidence of youth and was certain that I could solve this mystery, both in real life and in my fantasies.)

  With my friends Kathy and Cindy at my side, we traipsed to the library and hauled down medical texts, reading about blood and bruises, and ultimately deciding that my blood wasn’t clotting properly. This was, in fact, correct, but our self-prescribed treatment—vitamin K as recommended by the skinny college-aged kid at the original Whole Foods Market on Lamar Boulevard—was both foolish and naive. And not just in retrospect; I knew it at the time. But I was a scared kid, determined that my fantasies would become reality. I should have known better. Sally J. had to live in the real world despite her fantasies, and so did I.

  That lesson came more swiftly than I would have liked, simply because the largest of the bruises kept on expanding. What had once been as large as a baseball was now the size of a Texas grapefruit. My theater friends—who saw me in nothing but shorts—were concerned. I was concerned. And I knew I couldn’t hide it from my mom any longer. Suddenly, I found myself in the doctor’s office, faced with scary words like “specialist�
� and “hematologist.” Words that were all the more scary, since I knew my mom’s tendency to hold out going to the doctor until the last possible minute. Clearly, I must have hit that minute.

  Something, I knew, was wrong with me. I just didn’t know what. And in the days before my appointment with the hematologist, I remember pulling down Deenie. I’d read the book several times before and loved it. But I can’t say that I’d ever fully empathized with Deenie.

  Now, though, I did. And I wanted the comfort of reading about someone else who’d looked into the dark unknown of a medical issue and come out of it okay. I spent hours curled up on the couch, ignoring schoolwork and taking comfort in Deenie’s nervousness when she knows that she has to go see the doctor but hasn’t yet had the appointment. And, yes, I took comfort in knowing that she was cured by wearing a brace. She wasn’t going to die; she just needed a treatment. So there I sat, miles and years and pages away from my friend Deenie, and hoped for a simple prescription. Five pills, I thought, and I’d be fine.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t blessed with my hoped-for outcome. Instead, I ended up undergoing a painful medical test and then being at the mercy of a doctor who apparently believed that a young girl had no brains whatsoever since he essentially avoided my questions (like Deenie’s doctor often did) or patronized me (like Deenie’s doctor often did).

  What in fact happened was a very long wait in the waiting room followed by an even longer wait in the examining room. Between the two waits, a nurse drew my blood. After the second wait, a distracted doctor came in, examined me without talking, pulled my mother into the hall, and then returned to tell me to pull my jeans down and lie on my stomach. I wanted to ask my mom what was going on, but she looked too scared, and the doctor himself was too scary.