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

by Jennifer OConnell

  Deep down, I think Debbie and I both knew we weren’t black, but we loved the idea so much that we still cling to the possibility. When I recently asked our oldest living relative, Aunt Bernice, about this, she said she couldn’t be sure. “So Grandma may have been black?” I asked.

  “The term is mulatto,” she replied haughtily. The fact that she could not definitely deny that we were part black kept hope alive.

  Recently I went to see Glory Road with my eight-year-old daughter, Katie, who is a reviewer for the “Rated G” section of our local newspaper. The paper hires about a dozen kids who they send out to children’s movies, theater, and events so that they can share their unique perspective with other children. Katie was sent to review the true story of America’s first all-black starting basketball team to win the NCAA Championship. Set in the civil rights era, the film explored themes of racism in a pretty realistic way for a kids’ movie. As characters used racial epithets and verbally abused black players, I sank lower into my seat. I found myself looking around the theater to gauge the reactions of African-Americans who were also attending the preview. I wanted to give them a little “peace out” sign and show them that these two groovy white chicks would’ve had nothing to do with the nasty crackers who beat up the basketball player in a diner restroom.

  Naturally, they were all watching the movie, not looking to connect with an audience member seeking absolution for the sins of her father (who very well might have been a quarter black!). As we walked out of the theater, Katie said to me, “I feel really embarrassed to be white.” My first reaction was to tell her that I did, too, but I refrained and instead asked her why. “Those white people were so mean to those guys for absolutely no reason,” she said. “Why were they so rotten?” Katie asked. I had no answer.

  How do you explain the concept of purposeful humiliation to an innocent child? How do you teach her to live her life with integrity and not saddle herself with guilt when you are still seeking forgiveness from every African-American person you meet?

  Plenty of people don’t understand where I’m coming from on this issue. My husband says he and his family are good people and have never discriminated against anyone. That’s fine for him, but what do the Winnies of the world do with their White Guilt?

  Like Winnie challenged her mother to stand up to Mrs. Landon, we need to do the same and then some. We need to make sure our kids get off Grove Street every now and then—and not freak out when they notice race. When Katie was three years old, we went to Chicano Park Day together, where she quickly noticed, “Everyone is brown here.” The people who heard her weren’t offended, as it was the simple observation of a child. My whole body tensed as I fought back the impulse to apologize. A few people chuckled. No one seemed upset that my child noticed their skin color. It wasn’t the noticing that was offensive; it was when the awareness resulted in different treatment that pissed people off. Katie’s innocuous comments were no big deal; it was the long-winded explanation that followed that surely caused a few eye rolls. “Yes, Katie, some people are brown and some are white, but what really matters is what’s inside,” I said for the benefit of people around me. Looking back, I’m shocked that no one shoved a spicy burrito in my mouth to shut me up. It was so patronizing, I want to slap myself.

  As I reread Iggie’s House recently, what struck me was how unresolved Judy Blume left the story. In some ways, it bothered me, because I wanted to know whether the Garbers sold their house. I wanted this resolution in some ways to assuage my White Guilt. If they stayed, the happy ending gave me some solace. In real life, though, race relations is an ongoing process—one in which we don’t get a nice, neat ending wrapped in a bow.

  Jennifer Coburn began reading Judy Blume books in the fourth grade, the same year she was first called “weird” by a classmate. Her mother told her that weird was simply a word used by boring people to describe interesting ones. Both Mom and Judy Blume helped her survive adolescence. She is the author of The Wife of Reilly, Reinventing Mona, Tales from the Crib, and The Queen Gene. She is currently working on a gossip-lit book about the vile world of kids’ sports.

  A Different Kind of Diary

  Elise Juska

  I was four years old and dancing in California when I first realized I wasn’t invisible. My parents and I were in a restaurant, waiting to be seated, standing beside a massive tank of bright tropical fish. I barely spoke when I was little, spent most of life hiding behind my mother’s knees, but that night in the restaurant I was dancing with total abandon. Maybe it was the perceived shield of the fish tank, or the anonymity of being on the other side of the country, or the fact that in the past week I had seen the Disney Electric Parade, eaten a chocolate-covered banana, and petted a llama. I couldn’t help but dance. Until a woman came over, a stranger, looking at me and smiling.

  “How wonderful,” she said, and I stopped.

  Like most shy kids, I had a rich inner life, crowded with characters both found and invented. For years, I taught an imaginary class of students for whom I set up parent-teacher conferences, wrote and graded papers, devised lesson plans, and lectured passionately to my empty living room. I devoured books and felt connected to the characters I met there, fell in love with Peter Hatcher, lived vicariously through Sheila the Great.

  And I wrote stories, stories that were about me and not-me—a more interesting, more dramatic me. The narrators always had the things I didn’t: older brothers, pets, braces, and families who argued with one another. In my dinner scenes, forks were always clattering onto plates, chairs were scraping floors, and kids were bolting from their houses in fits of feeling, the back screen doors flapping like wings.

  The parents in my stories were usually divorced, unlike my own parents, who I’d never once heard fight. The concept was so alien that they didn’t even use the term “fight,” instead softening it to “raise your voice,” in the same way “hate” was diluted to “strongly dislike” and “shut up” to “please be quiet.” To not fight was, as I understood it, a measure of a good relationship; it was how a marriage was supposed to be.

  What little experience I had with divorce was gleaned mostly from studying the parents’ names listed in the Glenside Elementary School address book. I was fascinated by the single parents, mothers usually, who always seemed to have vaguely exotic names like Natasha. I imagined them the kinds of mothers who wore lots of makeup and ordered Chinese takeout. My other source was Judy Blume’s It’s Not the End of the World, in which Karen’s parents (who fought constantly) were divorcing.

  “I’m your father,” Karen’s dad said, “and I’ll always love you.” He’d taken Karen and her brothers to Howard Johnson’s, which seemed to me the kind of place kids with divorced dads went to eat. “Divorce has nothing to do with that,” he said.

  Karen’s life seemed filled with drama and secrets. She didn’t want anyone knowing her dad had moved out, that he was living in an apartment, that her brother Jeff had run away. Though I couldn’t relate with the facts of her story, there was something about it I understood intuitively: the impulse to keep things hidden.

  When I was eight, I was given my first diary. I loved it, not just because I loved writing, but because of its aura of secrecy: the leatherette cover, the pages edged in gold, the tiny toothy key on a red string.

  April 11, 1982: Today started out pretty good. Getting dressed was a real pain! I couldn’t wear either of my outfits or my new clogs! I ended up wearing something decent. For Easter I got a book and this diary.

  Now, it is January 2006, and I am in the attic trying to organize my childhood. I am sifting through the bags and boxes—grade school notebooks, scrolled posters, soft paperback books, hundreds and hundreds of typed, unfinished stories. The attic air is thick and dusty, warm even in winter. The floor is a grid of wood beams and foam insulation. A silent fan crouches by the window. As a child, this attic seemed gigantic, dangerous, site of Mom famously falling through the floor and Dad discovering her leg poking through
the hallway ceiling. Now the space feels small, lonely. Dad has moved his stuff out, to his new apartment. Mom is purging the house of everything she doesn’t need. I was charged with doing the same—an impossible task, since the same impulse that made me keep everything in the first place prevents me from throwing it away.

  I start paging through the red diary. I’m not surprised to have found it, but I am fascinated by its details: my third-grade handwriting so careful, as if accustomed to being graded, and extra straight, as if restraining itself from veering into the forbidden cursive. The earliest entries are in berry-colored ink, infused with exclamation points and capital letters, all the color and fervor I never showed on the outside.

  April 12, 1982: I have a feeling that today is going to be good! I have on a new outfit. Maybe the good thing about today is that Timmy Chun will like me.

  There’s a buoyancy in my tone, upbeat even when disappointed, like I was when I returned after school that day: DRAT! I can’t help but smile, knowing I must have borrowed this from something I’d read. Even in my diary, I wrote myself like a character in a book. Timmy Chun doesn’t even consider me for love anymore!

  To be in elementary school was to be surrounded by secrets. The most immediate were the who-likes-who’s, revealed with great drama and suspense inside the rubber tires on the playground. The school was across the street from my house, visible from my bedroom window, but on the playground I was in a different world. My favorite spot was the swings: within the long, exposed stretch of grass and concrete, they were the one place I felt invisible. I could rise up off the ground, disappear. The tires were second best, though they were an escape of a different sort; there you were hidden but not unseen. Within those fleshy inner walls I was never more aware of where and who I was: eight years old, my own wide eyes mirrored in the girls’ eyes around me, boys pressing in from all sides.

  The tires looked like a row of chubby horseshoes, cut in half and upside down. They were wide enough for up to four of us to huddle inside, our skinny backs snug against the tires’ rounded curves. If you were nervous, you could rip at loose strings of rubber like hangnails; if you were brave but not too brave, you could pen your name on the walls. Though the tires were a girls’ domain, it wasn’t unusual for a boy’s head to appear suddenly in the opening, upside down and wild haired, or for a boy’s feet to go stampeding overhead, sometimes jumping so hard the rubbery ceiling came crashing inward.

  A playground session of guess-who-I-like could be stretched to last all recess long, with the boy’s name revealed in the last dramatic seconds between hearing Mrs. James ring the bell and lining up to go back inside. In the end, the secret was less about the boy than the mystique of knowing something no one else did. Once the secret was out, it lost its appeal.

  In third and fourth grade, anything I had to offer boy-wise was strictly hypothetical. I barely spoke to anyone, much less boys, much less one A. J. Giglio, who was Italian and silky haired and funny. Though my crushes (see: Timmy Chun) might vary from week to week—based usually on some fleeting glance in the cafeteria or inadvertent brush of a jacket sleeve against my arm—I maintained a base loyalty to A.J. A few times I’d seen him laugh so hard he almost choked.

  A.J.’s best friend was Joey Healey, boy extraordinaire. Joey was beloved by all, an all-around genuinely stellar student-athlete-human being. He yelled, “Great catch, El!” after I, by some miracle, managed to hang on to his deep fly in kickball. I once heard him say he would sacrifice his life for his parents, a notion that astounded me, not so much that he would do it but that he held such a firm position on the issue. He had the emotional maturity to sign “love” on all his Valentine’s Day cards, but in fourth grade his heart belonged to Jeannie Kim. Jeannie was my friend and the envy of every girl at Glenside Elementary. Not only was she Joey’s girlfriend but, I also happened to know—had a mobile of satiny pink and purple clouds and stars hanging above her bed.

  April 14, 1983: Oh, things have changed so much! There’s so much LOVE going around. CRUSHES and BREAK-UPS. Nobody thinks much of me except my brains!

  The culture of elementary school secrets went beyond the playground confessionals. To not know things was the fundamental plight of being a kid. There were the specific mysteries, the Santa Clauses and the Tooth Fairies, debunked one by one with a kind of bittersweet pride. And, there was the show with the theme song “where everybody knows your name,” which I listened to drift upstairs as I lay in bed on Thursday nights, dying to see what this place was. And there was the secret life of adults, my parents especially, of which TV shows after my bedtime seemed a major part. All I saw of my parents’ relationship was polite, predictable. They never yelled, never cried. Their moods rarely varied. They kissed twice each day: before Dad went to work and before Mom went to bed.

  To me, this was all part of the mystique of the adult world, the prospect—part threat, part promise—of all that I would know when I was older. Though the specifics were vague, I had full confidence that at some point “real life” would start happening to me. I believed in a kind of prewritten story: I would meet a boy, probably at the age of the teenagers at Glenside Pool, who sat on one big blanket in a tangle of bikinis, gold chains, black box radios with spiky antennae. I would turn eighteen (and with that, outgoing and confident), fall in love, get married, drive a car, and have a credit card. But mostly, I would stop feeling things so much. What I observed most about adults, my parents especially, was that they were in control of their emotions. Maybe it was like getting tetanus shots; feel a thing once, then it lessens.

  But this certainty I reserved for a distant future. At eight and nine years old, I turned to books to illuminate what I didn’t know. Where Do Babies Come From, which I read the week I had the chicken pox, flushed and stressed and itching. The Your Child At series—Your Child at Eight, Your Child at Nine—which Mom read every May, then reported on what I could expect in the coming year. And any book by Judy Blume: Deenie, Tiger Eyes, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, and the handbook of adolescence, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. In the crusade for information, Judy Blume’s books were essential reading; they brought to light everything that wasn’t talked about and that I was dying to know. They demystified kissing, maxi-pads, spin the bottle, scoliosis. They revealed the nerve-racking inner life of boys, via Tony Miglione. I finished them feeling informed, sometimes scared, mostly reassured, but more than anything, grateful. At the school book fair, there existed an unspoken alliance that no kid would let on there was sex in Forever. There they sat, a pile of sex for the taking, available to anyone bold enough to carry one up to a parent volunteer. I wasn’t, of course, but would later skim a contraband copy with the relevant scenes dog-eared and highlighted. I felt guilty about this (my mother volunteered at the book fair), but as kids we had few secrets of our own, and those we did have, like the boys’ names in the tires, lost their power once told.

  “Ten,” Mom told me, “is a great year.”

  I was standing in her bedroom doorway, teeth brushed, wearing my new blue nightgown. It was the week of my tenth birthday, and Mom had just finished reading Your Child At.

  “Ten is a great year,” she reiterated. “You’ll love being ten.” I processed this information with great excitement, instantly adopting it as my new mantra—ten is a great year, I love being ten—and that entire year, even when I had a bad day, I would cling to this knowledge as truth. Yet standing in the doorway that night, I also felt a creeping sense of worry. Reassured as I was by what the book said, I also knew what it implied: as great as ten would be, it was unique, and temporary, and other kinds of years lurked beyond it.

  May 17, 1983: BIRTHDAY! TURNED 10!

  My handwriting is getting looser, the y’s more fluorishy and brazen. I even drew fireworks flinging off the tops of the letters, like a cat’s whiskers, and looking at them now I feel like crying. Maybe it’s the exuberance of it, or the memory of that long-ago worry I know I wasn’t admitting on the page. Diary in hand, I
feel now what I must have felt then: a preemptive nervousness, about what’s coming.

  Feb 2, 1984: I think I’m finally into this boyfriend/girlfriend business. I think A. likes me. He said “hi” and “see you” walking home from school today.

  Feb 17, 1984: Greg gave me a valentine that said You + Me = Valentines, and a little dog who said “Okay?” He gave Cara S. one just like it. He likes Alyssa Schiller in 4th grade. Joey wrote “Love, Joey” on his cards. I still like A.J. He likes Jackie.

  LATEST LIKES

  A.J. likes Jackie

  Rachel likes Timmy

  Kate likes Evan (little)

  Kate likes Pete (littler)

  I like A.J.

  Sascha likes Evan

  Evan likes Sascha

  Matt F. likes Jenny

  Cara likes Greg

  Jessica likes A.J.

  Laura likes Mike H.

  Greg likes Alyssa

  Alyssa likes Greg

  By fifth grade, we were spending less time in the tires. Maybe we were getting too big for them; more likely, they were starting to seem childish. Instead, the girls converged by the water fountain, or the bike rack, or in the biggest and most formal setting: the Girl Scouts meeting. Weekly meetings of the Scouts were held in the cafeteria, some suburban Philadelphia approximation of a campfire. Instead of a grove of trees and smoked marshmallows, wooden chairs formed a halfhearted circle by the hot line in the lingering haze of that day’s Philly cheesesteak w/ff or sloppy joe w/fruit cup.

  I had no interest in the outdoors, no patience for making pot holders, but the Girl Scouts felt like a duty both extracurricular and somehow personal: a measure of your moral fiber, your fundamental girlness. So I did what I was supposed to, joining hands and moving my lips to songs about trees and friendship, but my heart wasn’t in it. Until the day our troop leader announced: “For the next month, you’ll be keeping a diary.”