Suddenly everyone was standing up, and I snapped back into the discussion, forcing my brain away from my fantasy of going to visit a preppy girl named Tabitha in the country, to discover that the skanky counselors were making us all get on horses. It was assumed if we all went to a camp exclusively for riding horses, that we would all have a strong interest in actually riding said horses. I resented the assumption. My time on a horse was short-lived anyway. Before we even took off for our first trot, I showed my true equestrian abilities by falling off a horse that was standing still. A permed brunette counselor, noticing I was not quite at the horse camp entry level, abruptly separated me from the group and told me, “You gotta sit out.” As I explained that I was just clumsy because I was so tall and not fully adjusted to my never-ending growth spurt, I saw Alyssa galloping away with the rest of the advanced riders, not to be seen again until her mom picked us up seven hours later. I was reduced to beginner’s activities such as cleaning out horse’s hooves, brushing horses, and learning how to put on a saddle.
It turned out sitting out at horse camp was much better than participating in horse camp. Sitting out meant I got to be a fly on the wall to these whorish teenage girls running the show. I listened intently to every single detail of their very active sex lives.
“Yeah, so we were gonna do it, but then Ritchie didn’t have a condom so I was like, ‘I’m not gonna raw-dog it with you just so you can give me AIDS and make me die instantly.’ Right? I mean come on!”
“Yeah, who does he think he is?” said one counselor through her perfectly glossed lips.
“I mean it’s not 1980 anymore, we’ve gotta protect ourselves,” said the counselor with the biggest boobs.
“Totally,” I agreed, munching on a greasy grilled cheese from the lunch truck.
I loved horse camp.
The next day, I automatically sat with the counselors. Right away we had a mutual understanding that riding horses really wasn’t going to be a part of my summer at horse camp. I was too uncoordinated to even sit on a horse properly. Despite the modern dance, my inner thighs still had zero muscle tone, making it impossible for me to grip around the horse with enough force. There was no way I would face the humiliation of falling off another stationary horse. Forget horseback riding. I was there to learn all about sex from real women.
To keep up appearances, the counselors tried to find appropriate activities for me, like grooming horses. It was just an effort to save face. I was so gigantic I could have passed for a counselor, without the self-esteem and sex appeal. “So, like, when you made out with him, was it all sloppy?” I asked my counselor, desperate for a much-needed break from brushing some dumb horse’s mane.
“Yeah.” She snapped her gum. “Real sloppy. Like wet and all.”
“Wow,” I said, as my eyes widened and my horse brush dropped into the dirt.
And if that wasn’t good enough, while Alyssa galloped and trotted her way through the week, I sampled the hot lunch menu from the lunch truck: grilled cheese, grilled cheese with bacon, cheeseburger, cheeseburger with bacon . . . which was all much better than my mom’s usual packed lunch of melba toast and cottage cheese. This was so much better than every other summer of my life, spent learning amateur dance routines to cliché show tunes. This was teenage stuff.
When the weekend came, I got bored. I wanted to continue on my transition into cool teenager, but there were no trashy teenagers around to guide me. I slipped back into the old me: I found out what songs they were featuring in that summer’s musical review and cast myself as the lead singer in all of them in my fantasy production. Alone, in my mother’s full-length mirror, I sang along to the show tune recordings I found in my father’s record collection and made up my own dances. Summer theatre workshop was so much better when I was in charge.
When I returned to camp, I rejoined my BFFs to gossip and sweep hay. “So, Lisa, how was your weekend?” I asked, totally proud to be one of the girls.
“Well, it was good. Frankie wanted to go past third and I was all like, ‘I only do that with guys I love.’ And he was all like, ‘Well, do you love me?’ And I was like, ‘I dunno. I always pictured losing it somewhere else besides your brother’s pickup truck.’ So I think next weekend he’s gonna put a mattress in the back as a compromise. I’ll probably do it to him then. How was your weekend?” she asked, trying to be polite, while staring off pondering if giving up her v-card on a mattress in the back of a borrowed pickup truck was truly the right choice for her.
“Oh, it was awesome,” I said. “I learned all the words to ‘Let Me Entertain You’ and figured out a killer dance routine to it. Want me to show you?”
The counselors collectively stopped sweeping their hay and stared at me. I knew right away that I had blown it. In that one summarization of my weekend, these girls all had a simultaneous realization that even though I was the same size as they were, I was not one of them. I was five foot eight, I wore short-shorts and T-shirts with the neck cut out, but I was no high school senior. I was a dorky middle schooler who spent her weekends doing very immature activities. I continued to sweep, trying to ignore the whispers.
Luckily, that same day, another girl arrived at camp named Katie. She also sat out frequently, as her horse activities were limited because she was so short that her feet couldn’t reach the stirrups. Katie and I hit it off right away. She was also really into the foods with hot cheese on them from the lunch truck and I’d always felt a closeness to anyone whose size holds him or her back in any way, hence my brief telephone relationship with Paul the five-foot-tall bank teller. I couldn’t participate in certain games as a kid because I was so giant—riding tiny carts for “crab soccer” in P.E., pony rides, piggyback rides. Katie and I sat on the sidelines every day, eating Cheetos (crunchy not puffy) and having heart-to-hearts. Katie was a tomboy who didn’t like school. I was certainly no tomboy—I couldn’t even ride a horse—but I understood not fitting in. I didn’t care that Katie was only six and I was thirteen. She was a cool chick and a true friend. I told her about the middle school social cliques that were as hard to break into as Studio 54 in its heyday. Katie told me about how she was struggling with cursive. I left that summer feeling as if I had made a lifelong friendship in Katie, which eased my paranoid fear that Alyssa would be ditching me soon after, now that she knew I was so clumsy I couldn’t even participate in a sport in which I was essentially a passenger. So at the end of the summer when Katie asked for my phone number to stay in touch, I was elated. I had accomplished my goal for the summer—to make a new friend!
Then, a few days later, Katie’s mom called me . . . to find out if I would babysit her daughter.
Babysit? Did she not understand the true bond, the true connection we had? We both loved hot cheese, for God’s sake! How many times in a lifetime would I be able to find someone I had that in common with? Babysitting cheapened the whole thing. It’s not like I was going to discipline my best friend. We were equals, damn it! However, I said yes, because it was an excuse to spend time with Katie before we both got busy with the distractions of school. I knew that in the fall my demands in eighth grade would be more than hers in first grade, and Katie might have trouble understanding if I didn’t always have time to chill out with her.
The night I was scheduled to babysit, my mom dropped me at Katie’s place a few towns over. I was feeling a little better about it by then. After all, given the countless weekend evenings I’d spent babysitting those wretched twin girls down the street, I was anxious to revise my clientele. The last time I watched them, their parents had gone out for the night with friends who had triplets, leaving me and some other teenage twit alone with twin five-year-olds, triplet toddlers, a yippy Pomeranian, and a howling Beagle. Again, we watched Look Who’s Talking. I wanted out. Katie could not have come at a more perfect time.
When I arrived at Katie’s, I was shocked to discover her mom was only slightly older than the Jersey-trash horse camp counselors. When she turned her back, I mouth
ed to my BFF Katie, “How old is your mother?” To which she mouthed back, “Twenty-five.” Wow. I had never seen a mom so young before. Then Katie’s mom introduced me to her husband, who was, at the youngest, fifty. He looked like a present-day James Taylor: bald with a dark ring of hair circling his skull and a face that said “I used to be hot.”
I wanted to ask Katie’s mom what was up with the age difference but decided to just ask Katie after her parents left. Then, instead, I drew my own conclusion: Katie’s mother was probably a former babysitter herself who had an affair with the father of the very kids she was babysitting. Then she got pregnant out of wedlock and the man left his own family for the babysitter. Now I was the new babysitter and maybe she feared I would have an affair with her wrinkly husband and continue the cycle. How exciting! This house already felt like a Jackie Collins novel instead of the dirty kennel I was used to babysitting in. As I listened to this teen mother ramble on that “Katie goes to sleep at exactly eight thirty every night” and “no more than two Oreos” and “absolutely no television—books only!” I pondered how much money Katie’s father’s former wife must be getting in the divorce settlement.
The parents left, probably to go to some swingers’ party, and I proceeded to disobey every single one of Katie’s mother’s rules. First we ate the whole package of Oreos. I couldn’t stop myself. My mother only had Lorna Doones and Pecan Sandies in our house. Even when the Girl Scouts came she would order boxes and boxes of the toast-like Trefoil shortbreads and was the sole customer keeping the Lemon Chalet Cremes in business. If my mom ever ended up in a nursing home, she would be delighted with their cookie selection. But I would have killed for a peanut butter Tagalong, Thin Mint, or Samoa. A chance to eat Oreos unsupervised was something I had yearned for since I started eating solid food.
Then Katie didn’t want to put on her pajamas. Who was I to make her? And if Katie didn’t want to brush her teeth, so be it. I was only a few years younger than her mother was when she had her, so I was sure breaking a bunch of household rules was nothing compared to getting knocked up by a forty-four-year-old at age nineteen! I couldn’t risk Katie thinking I was some stick in the mud when she was basically the only person who thought I was supercool at this point. I needed this friendship.
Katie wanted to stay up late, and I had become accustomed to watching Saturday Night Live every Saturday and was not excited about breaking my routine just because Katie was a little young for it. I could look at this as an opportunity to expose her to real culture. My brother was already recording The Treasure of the Sierra Madre off of TCM that night, so I couldn’t risk missing an episode of SNL. What if Julia Sweeney debuted a new “It’s Pat” sketch and finally revealed whether Pat was in fact a man or a woman? I needed to know for certain if an “It’s Pat” sketch played so I could wear my “It’s Pat” oversize T-shirt to school Monday as a conversation piece. What if I missed Rob Schneider’s hilarious antics as “the Copy Guy”? I loved the Copy Guy so much: I even had a Rob Schneider Copy Guy refrigerator magnet to prove it. Really I had no choice but to let Katie watch it with me.
It was a funny episode, as usual. Kevin Nealon’s “Weekend Update” nailed a joke about Socks the Cat. Then there was a sketch that used the word condom. Katie asked me what a condom was, and thanks to my horse camp counselors, I now had a very clear understanding of how sex worked. For once, I was the cool older girl with all the answers. It didn’t even cross my mind that she was too young to hear this. I was so consumed with finally feeling like an all-knowing, experienced teenager that I couldn’t control myself. Even if I had, there was no need to shelter this little horse girl from the Wild West. I muted Chris Farley’s antics and words just started spraying out of my mouth. I was the Tampax operator, I was the horse camp counselor, I was all-knowing Alyssa, and I was the sexy backup dancer from Bobby Brown’s “Every Little Step” video. I began straight-talking to Katie as the wise, worldly teenager I knew lived somewhere beneath my layer of dorkiness.
“Well, Katie, a condom is something a man puts over his penis when having sex to prevent him from getting a woman pregnant or getting AIDS.”
“What’s AIDS?” Katie asked, her eyes wide.
“Well, Katie, AIDS is something you get when you have sex without a condom and then you die instantly.” I was proud of myself for my honesty and for knowing the facts.
Katie continued, “What’s sex?”
This was going to be a long night. I regurgitated all I could remember from my horse camp counselors. I told Katie about first base, how “If you don’t need to wipe your mouth after, it’s not a real French kiss.” Then I moved on to second base and grody sloppy second base. Meanwhile, I kept quiet on my theory on how her parents met; I figured I should save that for next weekend when they asked me back to babysit after Katie told them how much she enjoyed spending time with me.
At some point during this discussion, I suddenly felt we were not alone. I turned around, and standing in the doorway were Katie’s mismatched parents. I didn’t know how long they had been standing there—hopefully they had just walked in and only heard about “sloppy second,” which without careful listening could have sounded like a discussion about leftovers, not putting one’s mouth on a boob. Then again, Katie’s parents’ relationship was clearly one of sloppy seconds, so either way it wasn’t good.
“Hi, guys!” I said, doing my best impression of someone who had not spent the last ten minutes traumatizing their first-grade daughter. “You’re home early.” I gave them a big smile, flashing my underdeveloped mouth still containing a few too many baby teeth. “How was your night?” I asked, desperately trying to derail them into talking about the grown-up stuff like wine tasting and fondue eating that I imagined they had done on their wild adult night out.
“Katie, go to bed,” said her father, in a stern tone I was sure his laid-back look-alike James Taylor had never used. Katie waved a timid good-bye to me and walked up the stairs to her room, too terrified to look back. I sat in silence, desperate to confess all. I wanted to tell them that everything they heard me say I learned at horse camp from my slutty counselors. I wanted to explain that I just wanted to feel cool like those girls for once in my life, rather than an awkwardly oversize preteen. I tried to get up the courage to explain that the only reason I heard all that sex stuff from them was that I was too uncoordinated to ride a horse and if I hadn’t fallen off that horse that was standing still because my legs were too long for my body, I would have never been sitting out in the first place. I wanted to tell them that I was indifferent to horses. I only went to that stupid camp because Alyssa invited me and I thought I’d make some new friends. But Alyssa and I were separated into different groups as soon as the counselors discovered she was ready for the Belmont Stakes and I couldn’t even sit on a horse. And that’s how I met Katie. I shouldn’t have even met Katie in the first place.
I didn’t even like horses!
But the father simply said, “Ready to go, Margot?”
I grabbed my vintage suede fringed purse and slumped out the door, not making eye contact with the young mom. As I got in the car with bald Humbert Humbert, I wondered if this was how it all started with Katie’s mom. Maybe all it took was a long, late-night ride home with the babysitter of his kids from his first marriage, ending in a smooch. Maybe I was going to be part of an exciting scandal and I would have a great story to impress my classmates with about the older man who totally had the major hots for me.
Much to my disappointment, he did not try to continue the cycle by having an affair with me. Instead, he said, “So Katie’s mother and I won’t be needing you any longer.”
I wished he had waited until the end of the ride to say that. He chose to lead with the termination, so we were left with fifteen minutes of post-firing silence. This was not my finest moment, fantasizing about a fifty-year-old bald man putting the moves on me. I wasn’t even attracted to him, yet I was insulted that even I was too repulsive for this letch.
CHAPTER 8:
Sneaking Off to Church
The rest of summer passed uneventfully, and I entered eighth grade hanging on to Alyssa as my closest ally. Sadly, Jonah Hertzberg was a year older and had gone off to high school without me. I tried not to replay the untimely walk-in by Katie’s parents over and over in my head, but to no avail. This summer had been a total bust. I had traumatized a six-year-old and had retained absolutely no equestrian skills. I was right back where I started: depressed, stuck, and remarkably unathletic, despite my size and stature. I didn’t go through some ’80s movie change where I got made over and came back to school cool. In fact, nothing had changed physically about me—even my growth had slowed a bit. I was holding tight at about five foot eight and hoping that my journey of awkwardness would end there.
I tried to keep a positive attitude as school began, but the White Lipstick Posse ruled the school even more than ever, and my fashion sense was getting more and more extreme. The Black Crowes had just emerged onto the music scene, and they were a different kind of rock. They weren’t hair metal; they were more classic rock ’n’ roll and they dressed the part. I immediately Manic Panicked my hair a darker color and invested in some cowboy boots to poke out under my flared jeans. I didn’t care that lead singer Chris Robinson was a man. I wanted to look just like him.
Without Jonah Hertzberg around to distract me, I became more and more aware that I was a magnet for weird dudes with long, dirty hair who played guitar. There were two kinds of long-haired, guitar-playing guys—the weird dudes and the scuzzes. The basic difference was that the scuzzes always had girls (albeit trashy girls) around and the weird dudes didn’t. The weird dudes were socially awkward, a little overweight, had unattractive pubescent facial hair that really should be shaved, and chain wallets. The scuz guys were left over from my brother’s generation—borderline metal heads who chain-smoked, came from broken homes, and were always getting action in the school bathrooms from skanks. I do admit there were a few of these guys I found desirable; their broken homes seemed much richer with color than my parents’ uncomfortably happy marriage. (I could do without hearing about their love life ever again.) But I would never think to act on my secret scuz desires for fear of catching an STD surely lurking in the inseams of their black leather jackets. But the few guys who liked me were the rejects of the scuzzes. They were too unattractive to hook up with skanks in the bathroom. They didn’t come from broken homes; they were fairly decent students. These invisible, average-looking dudes, who would never be antiestablishment enough to drop out and go to vocational school, seemed to find my height desirable and my taste in music even more appealing.
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