Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (16 page)

“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.

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.”

Our leader, Mrs. Beasley, had jack-o'-lantern teeth and took in stray cats, both of which struck me as earthy and immaterial. She also wore a kerchief that tapered to a point at the nape of her neck; to me, the ultimate qualification for being leader of the Scouts.

“For the next month,” she said, “I want you to write in it every day.”

I went home eager to get started. I would approach the diary like any other written school assignment—book report, letter to my Danish pen pal—adapting my tone to suit the form. In a marbled copy book, I wrote unabashed passages about staring in my bedroom mirror willing my chest to grow, wondering when I would get my period, and hoping a boy would kiss me, preferably A. J. Giglio. It was mostly truth, with a notch of exaggeration. Though I might not ordinarily have written about bras and periods, this was an assignment, and these were the kinds of details I thought a diary should contain. I was simultaneously acutely aware of writing for an audience and unaware of that audience except in the most abstract sense. It didn't once occur to me to censor myself. Writing was the one thing that made me feel completely safe.

We turned in the diaries, and the following week, after dragging our chairs into a circle, Mrs. Beasley announced: “I have something I want you all to hear.” Like a jack-o'-lantern's, her smile could swing from goofy to frightening in seconds. “This,” she said, and to my horror, my diary emerged from her bag, “is what I'm looking for,” and then she began reading from it out loud. She didn't name the author, but it was obvious who'd written it. I felt my face redden as my mournful ruminations about bras and boys were unleashed in the warm, stagnant cafeteria air. Worse, they were unleashed in the voice of Mrs. Beasley, who was reading them with extra poignancy and emphasis, leaning on particularly embarrassing passages as if to say:
These are the kinds of private thoughts you should all be writing.

I knew, even through the fog of my humiliation, that Mrs. Beasley wasn't mean-spirited, just misdirected. She was hoping the other girls would be inspired to the same level of excruciating intimacy, that my secrets would be the key to unlocking all of their hidden selves. It even occurred to me, sitting there, that maybe I was being selfish for feeling upset, that this kind of sharing was what being a true Scout was all about. But the longer I listened, the more her praise made me feel paralyzed, exposed, the written equivalent of dancing in front of the fish tank. The other girls shifted and giggled, no doubt relieved they'd had the good sense to keep their secrets to themselves.

More than twenty years later, as I gaze around the attic at the still-unopened bags and boxes, I know the Girl Scout diary isn't among them. That afternoon, after the meeting, I went home and threw it in the trash—not just the kitchen garbage but the metal can outside. If I destroyed it, it never happened. If I didn't talk about it, it didn't exist.

The year I turned eleven,
Your Child At
ended. I was about a week into my eleventh year when, still having heard no report, I asked Mom if she'd read the next installment. It was nighttime and I was standing in her bedroom doorway, the same spot I'd stood one year earlier, but now my bedtime was a half hour later, my nightgown replaced by my dad's old oversized St. Joe's T-shirt. When Mom broke the news that there was no
Your Child At Eleven,
I felt a mild panic. Though I'd never had any delusions about eleven being as great as ten, it hadn't occurred to me that I might have no information to go on. Maybe this meant I wasn't a child anymore; after ten, life gets too confusing for even the author to explain.

From what I knew so far of eleven, this seemed possible. I was already recalling the previous year like some distant golden age. Not only had ten ended, so had fifth grade and Glenside Elementary. We were moving on to the far more complex playing field of Elkins Park Middle, the confluence of four different elementary schools, buses, locker combinations, changing classes, algebra, foreign languages. Our little universe, in which Joey Healey was heroking, would soon dissolve into unfamiliar faces, into designer labels, and boys and girls who clung to each other's hands and back pockets in the halls.

Here I would be confronted with things I couldn't have predicted, revealed at moments I couldn't have foreseen. Like the morning I saw no less than fifteen hickeys covering the neck and chest of Lisa Furst when changing in the locker room before gym. Like the Saturday my mom and I were shopping at Gimbels and I looked up to see Mrs. Wilson, my fearsome Home Ec teacher, in whose class I had labored anxiously over one misshapen lightbulb pillow for weeks, standing behind the register. We didn't acknowledge each other. Her name tag said Debbie.

In retrospect, it seems an act of providence—or maybe perceptiveness on the part of a knowing aunt or family friend—that I was given
The Judy Blume Diary
that year.

“This is a different kind of diary,” Judy Blume wrote in her introduction, and I saw instantly that this was true. Instead of feeling covert, the diary had an aura of openness. It was bigger than a paperback and the cover was rainbow striped, like my favorite shirt.
The Place to Put Your Own Feelings,
it said—not just A Place but
The
Place, like some formal admittance into adolescence. It was spiral-bound, keyless; to write in it, I realized, would require a degree of trust.

“Sometimes,” Judy Blume wrote, “just writing down your feelings makes them easier to understand.” The presence of her voice inside the diary felt comforting, as did the chorus of quotes from her characters filling the margins at the bottoms of the pages: Karen, Deenie, Sheila, Sally, Margaret. Black-and-white photos of other kids, real kids, were sprinkled through the seasons: playing in leaves in October, swimming in July. In June, a girl wearing hoop earrings rested her chin on both palms, eyes sliding to one side of the camera, as if uncomfortable getting her picture taken. In November, a girl with long brown hair sat on the ground with knees pulled to her chest, head buried in her folded arms. I recognized these kids; they reminded me of me. Still, the sensitivity of the diary was intimidating. If Judy Blume's books were places to get answers, seek clarity, it seemed her diary was the place to admit confusion and lay your feelings bare. But to me, just the word “feelings” sounded raw, embarrassing.

“I hope it's an interesting year for you,” Judy wrote at the close of the introduction. “A year of challenges and choices and changes.” I was sure she was right, but I didn't want any of these things. I was with Karen, who said in January: “I wanted everything to stay just the way it was.” I wanted to be ten again—
ten is a great year, I love being ten
—but the changes and challenges were coming whether I liked it or not.