Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (19 page)

Berta Platas

I
was the wienie girl,
way back when. I've changed a lot. People who know me today can't believe that I was once a timid, geeky kid, but thirty years of living will do that to you. Okay, so it's more like thirty-five.

In elementary school I was so shy that I never raised my hand in class or talked to anyone new during recess. Ask questions about a math problem I didn't understand? Forget about it. I was doomed to count on my fingers. Judy Blume changed that for me. Not the counting on my fingers part. I'm still a math moron. Judy Blume taught me how to make friends.

Shy doesn't always mean lonely. The friends I had until fifth grade were imposed on me by the nuns at my parochial school in Pittsburgh, where Catholic Social Services sent my family after we arrived in Miami from Cuba. I sat next to girls who were supposed to help me learn to speak English, and even with the language barrier, we got along well. I played Barbies with my sister and wild games of tag and hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids, all the while picking up the language rapidly, as only little kids can.

But disaster struck at the end of fifth grade, when I found out we'd be moving all the way to New York City. I thought I'd never have a friend again. I'd had enough change in my young life to know everything would be alien in New York. I said good-bye to the neighborhood I knew and loved. Our landlady had lent me her copy of
Wuthering Heights,
and in total drama queen mode, I bade wistful farewells to our blue-collar Irish/Polish neighborhood, envisioning the moors, whatever those were. I wafted up and down the steep hills of my neighborhood, thinking
I'll never see this rosebush again,
and
Mr. Szyklow's dog will never follow me to school again.

I even sighed over Randy, the guy in homeroom who had a crush on me and gave me my first Valentine ever. I read it so many times that I can still recite the little Hallmark poem inside, and the signature, “Your friend forever which is Randall.” Sigh.

We arrived in Manhattan in the summer, which gave my sister and me a little time to get used to the area before school started, but we were miserably lonely. The days were hot and sunny, and we could hear the neighborhood kids playing stickball outside, but we weren't allowed out while our parents worked. It wasn't long before we were bored with each other, and this was in the bad old days of daytime television, before the Cartoon Network.

The day our mom first took us to the public library was a thrill I'll never forget. I'd never been to one before, and the building seemed huge. The smell of mildewed paper hardly registered as I walked, amazed, through room after room lined with books and filled with rows of double-sided, freestanding wooden bookcases. The sight was as thrilling as the first glimpse of sand and water on our yearly trips to the beach.

We'd heard scary warnings about the city's dangerous streets, but the children's section was deep in the center of a building full of books. What bad guys would go there? My sister and I felt safe, hidden in the stacks. The public library opened new worlds, though I never talked to the other kids we encountered there, heeding the warning of the so-called dangerous people who were out to get children and newcomers.

I'd drag home bags of books at a time, giddy with the sheer number available, the loneliness lost in stories about other places and other times. I loved most books, with the exception of any story set in the late twentieth century that featured a girl with friends. As I'd feared, I was friendless, and heroines like Nancy Drew drove me to despair. She had
two
best friends (although I always wondered if George had ulterior motives).

There weren't any self-help books on friend-making that I knew of, and when I asked my mother for tips, she said, “Just go up to people and introduce yourself.” Right.

I thought about how I'd done it once before, but that was in kindergarten. Who remembered that far back?

By now, school had started, but everyone at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, my new parochial school, seemed to have known one another forever. I sat alone in class feeling as if everyone was looking at me, feeling like an intruder. Recess was held in the quiet residential street in front of the school, and when pedestrians walked past, I would stand near the groups of laughing girls, smiling and nodding as if I was one of them, and then hurrying away, afraid that they'd noticed what I'd done. I stood alone, the alien dork. The wienie girl.

They'd jump rope and play games that I didn't know, including deliciously complicated hand-clapping rhymes that I couldn't possibly learn. It was like watching a show, and I was the only audience.

At the end of the day, as we rushed out of the building, the girls would chatter about after-school activities: playing in Fort Tryon Park, going to Girl Scouts, music lessons and dance. My sister and I went straight home, under orders to stay inside until my mom got home. When we weren't sick of each other's company, we played elaborate games of make-believe with our Barbies.

I'd left behind my tiny plastic cowboys and Indians and Tonka trucks in Pittsburgh, thinking I'd outgrown tomboy stuff. When I missed them, I wondered, what next? Thumb-sucking? I needed to move ahead. I needed a plan. I was clueless.

I pictured myself kidnapped by aliens. Maybe one of them would be totally cute like Bobby Sherman. Maybe I read too much science fiction and watched too much TV.

My mom saw us struggling and tried to get us to be more outgoing. One year she signed us up for baton twirling. We spent most of the time marching in formation. I learned then that I wasn't cut out for a military career. Another year it was swimming lessons in what seemed like a huge municipal pool with peeling aqua-colored paint. My favorite part? The dead man's float. I used it with glee at the swimming pools of motor courts up and down the eastern coast on our annual trips to Florida, freaking out the tourists.

Mom's efforts broadened my horizons, but the skill I longed for, the one that eluded me, was how to make friends.

One cold, rainy autumn afternoon, I was at the library filling my bag with fantasy novels and threw Jane Eyre on top to reread because we were having English weather. I was also looking for a book I'd overheard a classmate recommend to her friend.

It was
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
by Judy Blume, the book that all the girls on the playground were whispering about. The nuns said it wasn't for the likes of us. I was looking forward to knowing what all the buzz was about—not that I'd have anyone to discuss it with. I was disappointed that it wasn't on the shelves that day. There were lots of other Judy Blume books, though, and I grabbed one. Testing the Blume waters, so to speak.

The chance I took paid off.
Then Again, Maybe I Won't
changed my life. It wasn't my first choice, since it was told from a boy's point of view, and who wanted to know how boys think? I was very young.

I was hooked from the first page. The hero, Tony Miglione, was moving, and boy, did I understand about moving. He felt many of the same emotions I had when we found out we were leaving Pittsburgh and moving to New York City—fear, excitement, resentment, and nostalgia for things that still surrounded me. Tony could have been my brother.

I knew those awful fears he described, that you'd never see anyone you knew again, that you wouldn't know where the best candy was or the place to buy a magazine or what TV channels to watch.

Tony's family had gotten rich and moved to a mansion, while we'd moved from a big house to a tiny apartment. Of course, we weren't alone.
Everyone
in New York lived in tiny apartments. I wondered how people could stand to live in the city. I had to walk to school every day with my sister, and our parents hammered the “no eye contact” rule into us. Eyes on the sidewalk and you'll do okay. Those bad guys were supposedly lurking everywhere. So I didn't look up except to see if the streetlight had changed. This was before the 1978 pooper scooper law, and there were other, more immediately disturbing reasons for keeping your sight on the sidewalk.

Vidrio inglés,
English glass, was what my father euphemistically called dog poop, which was pancaked on every sidewalk and street surface. So I dodged doo and schlepped (a new word—these New Yorkers had their own language) to school and back every day.

Not everything about our new neighborhood had been upsetting. I was delighted to find that OLQM had lots of Latinas and thought it would help my chances of making friends. Dead wrong. Two girls in my class were friends with each other, and though I wanted to be their friend, they teased me constantly. Bullied, actually.

Once when I was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet, I was desperate to go, but extreme bathroom shyness dictated that I couldn't start to pee until absolutely everyone had left the restroom. This usually made me late getting back to class, but I didn't care, even though Sister Regina Miriam gave me the evil eye as I walked to my desk. She never scolded me, though, so she must have understood.

That day, when I was finally alone, my poor bladder at last got some relief. Just as I let go, I heard giggling from above. I looked up, and there were my tormentors, looking down at me. They were standing on the toilet seats of the stalls on either side of me and were looking down at me over the top—and I was on the toilet. I don't know what I thought they could see around my pleated tartan wool skirt or why they'd care.

They laughed when I looked up. I wanted to scream, but if I did, the nuns would come running, and then they'd see me, too. So I yelled “get out” over and over until they finally left, still laughing. They never got into trouble, and I don't know how I avoided a urinary tract infection because I swear I didn't pee in a public restroom for a year.

On that rainy October weekend when I dove into
Then Again, Maybe I Won't,
I lived with Tony Miglione as he moved, and I wished that my family's reason for moving was that we'd suddenly gotten rich.

Then I read the astounding chapter in which Tony made friends with the kid next door. Somehow, in all of the other books I'd devoured before then, I'd never read an account, told from the point of view of someone my age, of someone walking up to another kid and making friends.

Tony had spotted his neighbor Joel playing basketball. They avoided each other; they nodded nonchalantly. I knew all of those steps. I was trapped in them.

And then Tony walked up to his neighbor and said, “Hi.” And then they started hanging out together.

I remember sitting up and thinking, that's it? Hi? How could I have missed that? Never mind that my mother had given me exactly the same advice years earlier. This was in print. This made it click. I read on. Surely something awful would come of it. They'd get into a fight or something. Nope.

Tony was a good friend but not a wuss. He didn't lie to keep Joel out of trouble when he shoplifted. Aha, I thought. A good friend stands up for herself. I wished that Tony was a girl and lived in my building.

As I read, I picked up boy knowledge that I never thought would be useful, though it was certainly interesting. Boys liked to watch girls undress. They had thoughts about sex, just like girls.

What stuck with me, though, was those five lines of text where Tony Miglione made friends with his next-door neighbor, those five lines that changed my life.

I had a new modus operandi now. When I returned to school after the weekend, I watched kids in action. These were all people who thought I was invisible. I watched them as if I were a scientist studying ants run little errands to and from their mound.

One kid had the basketball. He threw and missed. Another kid caught it on the rebound. Can I play? he asked, holding the ball. Sure, the kid with the ball said. And then both of them played, until another kid showed up and blocked one of the throws. No one got mad at him. They played around him, and then he got the ball. So now three kids were playing. Interesting.

Nearby, the toilet twins were skipping rope with a whole crew of girls. I was no pro at skipping, so I think it would have taken less courage to jump out of an airplane than it did for me to walk up to those girls. I knew what to do. I had Tony's Rules of Order.

I remember my first words to them, “Hi, is this the line? Can I play, too?”

The girl waiting in front of me turned and smiled. “Sure,” she said. And the girl twirling the rope on that side said, “You're named Berta, right? Is that a nickname?”

She knew my name. I wasn't invisible after all. Then it was my turn to jump, and thankfully I didn't trip over my feet like I did when I skipped rope alone. They sang a song about the name of the boy you'd marry. When they got to the S's, I skipped out. I had a crush on a boy named Sergio. Everyone wanted to know the name of the boy. They guessed all the wrong ones, and I laughed and said no, and then realized that we were actually talking. I was one of them.

I didn't know the names of the girls I was talking to, but we all ran inside when recess was over, and the next day at lunch they waved me to their table when I entered the lunchroom. My friends.

I ended up being close to my toilet tormentors, until we moved again, this time to Charlotte, North Carolina. It was bad enough to leave the big city I'd gotten used to, but now we were headed to the Deep South. Totally different, I thought. What would they be like?