Gawky

by Margot Leitman

  I searched the beach. I looked for something—anything—that people could possibly smoke crack out of. I found empty snack-size bags of Doritos, most likely discarded by some lucky kid whose mom let him eat that kind of stuff. I found used straws, Popsicle sticks, pennies, and even a few nickels. Then, after about a half hour of boring G-rated beachside findings, finally I landed on it! A plastic tube, about four inches long, was buried in the sand under a pile of fly-covered seaweed. It was caked with sand and sun-bleached, but it looked as if it was once a light shade of pink. It had a weird claw-like end to it on one side, and on the other it had some pretty ridges, apparently for traction. Jackpot.

  “Stop! Everyone stop! I have found another crack pipe!”

  The cleanup crew all froze in terror, as I stood up taller than ever, ready to be congratulated for saving the day. I couldn’t wait to give a presentation on the dangers of beachside drug use at my school’s next assembly. As our fearless leader walked over, I knew the damage I had caused to Paul the tiny bank teller and the Newly Hot Hair Girl I had nearly kissed would be washed away when I saved my town from the dangers of crack cocaine.

  Beach Cleanup Lady held the plastic tube in her latex-gloved hand. She twisted and turned the tube, tapped the sand out of it, then held it up to the sunlight. It seemed she was verifying exactly what it was. Then she got a look on her face as if to say, Aha, I know exactly what this is! She smirked a little to herself, and being that there were no other grown-ups there to share whatever grown-up conclusion she had just come to, she launched into a seemingly forced performance, faking her ignorance.

  “Hmm . . . I’m not sure what this is,” she said. “I don’t think it’s for drugs. But I’m not sure, so I’ll take it for now. To be safe.”

  She inspected the tube one more time for safety. “This could be very dangerous, Margot. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.”

  She put the thing in her plastic bag and everyone went back to cleaning up the beach. I knew she knew what it was. Why wasn’t she telling us? Why did she let the bucktoothed kid get all the glory and leave me to the boring pennies and Doritos bags? I was devastated. I had wanted to be a hero, like the bucktoothed kid. He’d get to tell the story over and over of how he’d found the pipe. Was it so wrong to want attention for something noble, instead of my size? I didn’t mind all eyes on me if it was to congratulate me for saving schoolchildren from the dangers of the white rock. Instead I felt like the girl who cried crack pipe.

  I spent the rest of the cleanup dragging my feet and hanging out with the practically-out-of-the-closet-musical-theatre-loving kid. I don’t think he was truly all that interested in making me his #1 BFF after all, but at least he was polite. I found a few Rolling Rock bottles, but I had seen my parents drink those at their wild New Year’s Eve parties each year; they were nothing to get excited about.

  The rest of the afternoon was just as uneventful, and I went home disappointed.

  The next few times I hung out with Amanda, I refused to watch Airplane! and insisted we work on our homoerotic dance routines instead. Amanda liked Airplane! because her mom had it on VHS and it had real boobs. But I couldn’t handle it anymore; the horrible letdown of the beach cleanup had made watching Airplane! with its Beach Cleanup Lady-esque female lead nothing but misery.

  A few months went by. Then, one day in school, I felt an unusual pain in my stomach. It was almost the end of the day, and I didn’t want to go to the nurse’s office because she always took my height and weight even if I just needed a Band-Aid. With stomach cramps like this, the last thing I needed was to learn that I had grown even one-quarter of an inch more since I had been there last week for a much-needed ice pack after hitting my head on the classroom bookshelf. I toughed it out until the end of the day and slowly walked home. When my mom came home about an hour after I did, she quickly deduced that I had gotten my period for the first time.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t bleed all over your peach pants,” my mom said. “I know this is difficult for you, Margot. Probably none of the other girls in your class have their periods yet, but I think you’re more mature. Aren’t you lucky to be tall?”

  My mother, at five foot nine, was always reminding me how lucky I was to be tall. All her reasons were equally sucky—You’ll always look older than you are. You can wear men’s pants! Shop in Big N Tall stores! No need for a stepladder! But none were as sucky as pretending that it was a gift to get your period before your classmates. I sat in the wicker chair unable to hide my pout. My mom looked at me and said with compassion, “Well, sweetie, what do you want me to say?”

  I suddenly realized that my mother, who had spent a lifetime crying over nonsense like season 6, episode 113 of Laverne & Shirley, didn’t quite have the perfect recipe to make me feel better when something upset me. While I could quell my mom’s tears by telling her that Laverne and Shirley would always be best friends at heart even though their lives were going in a new direction, my mom did not have quite the same knack for succinct, calming words of wisdom. Instead she kept trying her best, saying, “It’s fine. You’ll be fine, sweetie.” She put the kettle on, as she always did at 4:00 PM, her all-American New Jersey version of high tea. Contrary to what various Maggie Smith characters had told her throughout the years, tea did not solve everything. My father had now been reduced to an all-hot-chocolate hot-drink diet in a protest against my mother’s tea addiction. He was a little old to fake being allergic to tea, but I could tell he wished he could. When my dad’s mother passed away, I had never seen so many used tea bags lying around the kitchen sink. My mother downed the tea like an Irishman downing whiskey at a wake.

  The teakettle whistled, as she slowly and methodically prepared the black tea in her sterling silver Cartier teapot engraved with someone else’s initials, another of the free castoffs we got from my grandmother’s job. She looked over at me, her too-tall daughter sulking in peach pants at the kitchen table. “Well, is there anything I can do for you?”

  I looked up, trying to discern whether she was being genuine. She seemed desperate to make me happy and I knew it. This was my window. What did I want? Ice cream? A Kaboodle? New pants? Then it hit me: I had seen ads on TV for 1-900 numbers and desperately wanted to call. After what happened with Paul and the phone-dating hotline, I had grown fearful of getting in too deep on the telephone. What if I called the New Kids on the Block 1-900 number and inadvertently seduced one of them using my Octopussy voice? The prospect was both thrilling and terrifying.

  At the time, 1-900 numbers were the latest invention, and definitely one of the most high-tech. For only $4.95 a minute, you could call anyone from He-Man to Grandpa Munster, from Paula Abdul to hunky hair metal band Warrant. I wasn’t sure how exactly they worked. Was Grandpa Munster just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring in full stage makeup and costume at all times? Were all five members of Warrant constantly together in case of a call, or was there some sort of high-tech hookup that could conference them all in? And how did He-Man speak directly to anyone, considering he was a cartoon? Thinking too much made my head want to explode. Calling and talking to a drawing seemed like a total rip-off, but calling and talking to a live band of hot guys seemed like a good investment of my mother’s side money from her jewelry-making business. I had never been allowed to call one of these numbers before because of the price. And I could never sneak and call one because the tan clunky telephone was in my parents’ bedroom, where my mother was often rearranging her stringed pearl collection.

  But this was my chance; very rarely did I have my mother in a position where she actually felt sorry for me. She thought because I was tall like her that I truly had it all. But right now, in this moment, I had her in the palm of my hand.

  “Well,” I began in a soft, purposefully childlike voice, “I have always wanted to call the NKOTB hotline.”

  I was a fan of New Kids on the Block but not a superfan. There were girls in my class that had NKOTB curtains up in their bedrooms. That wa
s taking it too far. I had ugly curtains with dainty old-fashioned ladies on them that my mother had sewn herself. As much as I hated those curtains, I thought they tied the room together a lot more than cloth patterned with images of Donnie Wahlberg. But I had been to one New Kids concert, where I was positive Joey McIntyre waved directly at me from the stage (probably because he could see my towering head over the crowd of normal-size girls), and I had also slipped a copy of Amanda and my Jersey Girls demo to a security guard to pass along to the New Kids’ manager. If anything, a chance to chat on the 1-900 number would be a good networking opportunity and a way to follow up regarding our big-time music career that was just waiting to get off its feet.

  The New Kids were older than me but not as much older as Grandpa Munster, so I figured my mother would have to say yes. And she’d be glad that I wasn’t asking to call who I really deep down wanted to call . . . those bad, long-haired, leather-pants-wearing boys from Warrant. She hesitated for a moment, stirring her tea, clanking the spoon against the walls of her bone china rose teacup from England.

  “Fine, Margot. Just call it. Anything to wipe that puss off your face.”

  Wincing at the word puss, I thanked her and ran upstairs to my parents’ bedroom so I could seduce a New Kid in privacy (after all, I was a woman now). I shut the door and dialed the number with shaky hands on our clunky tan telephone. As I dialed I debated whether or not to use the same approach I had used with Paul the tiny bank teller on the phone-dating service. I could give them all my relevant stats, just leave out my age, lack of boobs, mouthful of baby teeth, and current gross status of being on the rag.

  It rang once, and before I could even take a deep breath and ask to speak with Jordan, then Donnie, then Jonathan, a recorded message from all five New Kids, including gross Danny, began to play. They kept using their song titles in their sentences, “Thanks for calling, ‘We’ll Be Loving You Forever.’ You’re our ‘Cover Girl.’ What, do you have to go so soon? ‘Please Don’t Go Girl.’” I slammed down the phone, completely disappointed. I knew I should have called 1-900-909-JEFF for the DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince hotline instead.

  I was about to storm down the stairs when I made the bold choice to call Amanda and tell her my big news. Of course I’d pretend everything was fabulous. Getting my period was the one thing I had over her, even though it was painful and messy.

  “Hey, Amanda, guess what? I’m a woman now, if you know what I mean. And my mom felt so bad she let me call the New Kids on the Block number!”

  “No way,” Amanda said.

  “Oh yes. I spoke with Donnie Wahlberg for a while. Jordan couldn’t come to the phone. He was recording in the studio.” I chose to play up my second-favorite New Kid; that way it was more believable.

  “Wow! I wish I got my period. You. Are. So. Lucky. NKOTB? For real?”

  For once I was cooler than Amanda, even if it took a painful shedding of my uterine lining to accomplish it! I wanted the moment to last, but Mom was calling me from downstairs, so I told Amanda I’d talk to her later, and walked back to the kitchen for my first lesson on maxi pads and tampons. I found the last remaining unripped wicker chair and sat in it, leaning into the wooden table. I hoped my Girl Supplies 101 lesson would be slightly less traumatizing than that nightmare-inducing birthing video from health class. It would be impossible for this to be worse.

  “Okay, Margot, as you know, this is a maxi pad,” my mother said, daintily sliding a maxi pad across the kitchen table as if she were a hand model in a Lee Press-On Nails commercial. She seemed to really be enjoying this. My grandmother always had perfectly manicured long red nails so she could elegantly showcase the items she was selling at Cartier. She used to say the secret to keeping your nails long was “How you use them.” My mother seemed to be using her medium-length nails with chipped beige nail polish to the absolute best of her ability while displaying this maxi pad. My grandmother would be so proud!

  “Aaand . . . this is a tampon.” She delicately removed the tampon from the wrapper, careful not to damage her two-week-old home manicure any further. “And this is the tampon applicator.” She separated the tampon into two pieces. The applicator looked very familiar to me. My mom continued, “Some girls, older girls, prefer this to the pad. We’ll worry about that later.”

  I looked at the applicator. It looked familiar. It was a four-inch-long plastic tube with a claw-like top and some ridges around the bottom . . . Hey! I knew where I’d seen one of these before! The beach cleanup! The poor man’s Airplane! lady had duped me—that bitch! Beach Cleanup Lady was in her forties; she knew exactly what a tampon applicator was. Why did she think it would be more appropriate to suggest a tampon applicator might be a device used to smoke crack? Why did she pretend not to recognize it? Why couldn’t she just pretend it was a crack pipe and let me have my moment for once in my life?

  “That’s a tampon?” I seethed.

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s a tampon applicator?”

  “Margot, I just said that, yes.”

  “So why did the woman at the beach cleanup tell me she had ‘absolutely no idea’ what it was?”

  “Well, maybe she was trying to protect you,” my mother said, fiddling with a Carefree pantiliner wrapper.

  “Protect me from what? Menstruation?” I was disgusted. “Can I go now?” I asked, desperate to get out of there before my mother busted out a birthing video from her private stash in the same manner my health teacher had sneak-attacked us. I slithered up the stairs to my room and opened up a pack of candy cigarettes, channeling my grandmother. I was sure that in her Manhattan neighborhood everyone was discussing tampons with great vigor and honesty. The highlight of my decade so far was calling the NKOTB 1-900 number as a result of getting my period. I really needed a fresh start. And worst of all, that bucktoothed kid had stolen all my glory with his golden-ticket crack pipe, while I made the world safe only for squeamish Jersey teenagers and perhaps a seagull or two.

  I was done with being a little kid in an oversize body. I just wanted to be a true teenager, not a giant child. I wanted my equivalent of coming to America on the boat from England like my grandmother had. She must have been so inspired and excited for her totally new life in a new place filled with new opportunities. Maybe middle school would be that place for me.

  CHAPTER 5:

  Sticking Your Neck Out

  I couldn’t wait for this stupid time in my life to end. I had heard that teenagers were allowed to pick out their own outfits, and the wild ones got sent away to boarding school. If only. Getting my period was the first sign that I was becoming a teenager—my age was slowly matching my size. I couldn’t wait to kiss troubled boys and have artistic happenings à la John and Yoko with the new kids in public regional middle school. I couldn’t wait to feel normal. Hopefully seventh grade would be everything new and different I was waiting for.

  Middle school began, and there were, in fact, many changes. No longer did I have to walk home from elementary school alone while mean Sharika Jackson yelled “Margot Fargo farts a lot” out the window of the school bus at me. I didn’t even fart a lot. I did trip and fall down a lot, but I guess “Margot Fargo is really klutzy” didn’t have the same zing.

  Sharika was a heavyset girl with a huge personality. Despite her being in special-ed classes she was confident and popular. I don’t know why Sharika Jackson had it out for me. She seemed like such a fun girl except when she was screaming at me out her bus window. During elementary school recess she would stand on the sidelines listening to her Walkman while the rest of us played stupid sports that I was constantly getting injured during, like kickball. Kickball was always a perfect opportunity for a ball to fly directly at my head, as it was always the highest target on the field.

  One day, during a kickball game, our old Russian principal Mr. Luskavitch, or as Sharika called him, Mr. Luck-a-vitch, came out to observe. Sharika was busy listening to her En Vogue cassette tape as usual when she saw him across
the field. She called across the kickball game, “Hey, hey! Mr. Luck-a-vitch!” He looked over at Sharika and waved. She continued, “Man, I love this song!” And then she began to serenade Mr. Luskavitch with En Vogue’s biggest hit, “Hold On.”

  Her plus-size body swayed along with every lyric that she sang perfectly on key across the kickball field.

  Ooh!

  My first mistake was

  I wanted too much time

  I had to have him morning noon and ni-i-ight.

  Mr. Luskavitch shook his crooked fingers in the air, dancing the best he could at his age to the music, and then called across the field, “You sing it, Sharika!”

  “Thanks, Mr. Luck-a-vitch!” she shouted back as the rest of us played our boring game of kicking a stupid red ball around a dirt field. “God, I love this song!”

  Mr. Luskavitch smiled and went back to the game, unembarrassed by being serenaded by a big-mouthed twelve-year-old girl. I was almost envious of Sharika and Mr. Luskavitch’s friendship. They seemed kind of close. Why was she so fun-spirited with an old Russian man and so taunting of me? And why did Mr. Luskavitch allow her to listen to her Walkman at recess while the rest of us were forced to play dangerous kicking games?