Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (20 page)

They were like girls everywhere, and my new friend-making skills worked. Like tying your shoes, I just did it; fast or slow, sloppy, tight, neat, or double-knotted. Once I knew how, I did what the occasion called for, with no second thoughts. It's sad if you don't know how to tie your shoes and have to wait patiently for someone to do yours while you watch enviously as other kids do their own. I was self-sufficient.

There were other instances in Judy Blume's books, once I pried them loose from other readers and read them for myself, that gave me the feeling that one of the world's deep truths had been revealed. What other girls thought about their bodies, about how to talk to boys and how devastating a pimple or a divorce can be to a kid, but also that kids are a lot stronger and more resilient than adults think they are.

Tony Miglione's story was the first time that I'd ever read fiction written for me and about me. About kids, written the way kids think. And it changed my life. But it was only the beginning. Judy Blume had other things to teach me.

Later, when I read
Deenie,
Ms. Blume's controversial book about a beautiful girl diagnosed with scoliosis and forced to wear a hideous brace, I discovered that other parts of my life were normal, too. In a matter-of-fact way, with no details, Ms. Blume explained that masturbation was normal. It was excellent information. Who else wrote about it? No one I'd ever heard of.

Years later, when I was in high school, a bunch of girls at a school party talked about “doing it” as opposed to “not doing it.”

We were not talking about sex with boys. We were huddled in an out-of-the-way school bathroom, waiting for a girl to finish using the lone stall, and someone laughed and said she was probably doing herself.

In retrospect, that girl in the stall was probably like I had been and was just waiting for all of us to shut up and troop out of there so that she could pee in peace. If so, she was doomed.

The minute Diane said “doing herself,” you could have heard a pin drop on the little hexagonal ceramic tiles. We all stopped fluffing our big eighties hair and stared.

Someone else said, “That is so perverted.”

And I said, “No it's not. Just read
Deenie.
It's in the library.” So then, of course, I was labeled the perv, for volunteering that I knew about it.

It turned out
Deenie
wasn't in the school library. I looked later. And it wasn't in the little moldy-smelling public library on the other side of the volunteer fire department building. I must have read it in New York. In ninth grade, I didn't follow news about censorship. I didn't know that
Deenie
had been banned from many libraries. I don't think it was banned from ours. I think it was stolen by someone who wanted to know but was too embarrassed to check it out and get caught reading the book.

I hope those girls found
Deenie
later. I hope the poor kid in the bathroom stall was able to come out. I picture her, skeletal remains in her party dress, all bare bones except for her withered but extended bladder.

When I think back to sixth grade, I think of my period starting, of my first crush, of the nuns in their long black habits with oversized rosaries at their waists. I remember how painful it was to be invisible to the other kids. And I think of Judy Blume, whose stories unlocked the untold secrets of life and whose name will always mean friendship to me, now and forever.

Diana Peterfreund

My parents taught me to swim
when I was three years old. I have hazy memories of visits to the neighborhood pool, of splashing around in cool blue water, inflatable wings firmly affixed to my arms. By the time I moved to Florida, at age four, I loved the water. I loved playing in the gentle Gulf of Mexico surf, taking swimming lessons with my kindergarten class, learning to do handstands in the shallow end of our backyard pool. My little brothers took to the aquatic life as well, and our childhoods were punctuated by summers in which you hardly ever saw us out of our bathing suits.

Many years later, I learned that my mom was afraid of the water.

This little factoid threw me like a nasty spill on a Slip N'Slide. First of all, how could anyone be afraid of swimming? It was so much fun! Besides, we lived in Florida, where beach trips and backyard pools were a way of life. How could she avoid it? She'd always gone in the water when we were younger—hadn't she? Okay, maybe she'd stuck to the sandbars and the tide pools, or sat on the steps near the shallow end, or even hung out on the nearest chaise lounge and watched us from the edge of the splash zone…hey, wait a second!

My mother tricked all three of us. Unwilling to let us inherit her fear, the way we might inherit her love for black-and-white movies (me) or her appetite for steamed clams (my brothers), she'd sublimated her phobia and embarked on a campaign of legerdemain so thorough that we all turned into dedicated water babies. Clever woman. Sneaky but smart.

And not alone in her deception. I've since heard many stories about parents who act especially gung ho toward their progeny about activities that the adults themselves would not touch with a ten-foot pool skimmer. On one hand, props to the parents for endeavoring to make their kids better, faster, and stronger than they were. On the other hand, liar, liar pants on fire.

Though now that I'm older (and an avid scuba diver, care of my dad's insistence that all three of his kids get certified) I appreciate my mom's efforts to protect me from her own phobias, at the time I felt almost betrayed. She'd convinced me that swimming was a blast (and roller skating, too, come to think of it) only to disown the activity once she'd gotten me hooked. She'd impressed upon me how easy it supposedly was and then later let it slip that she didn't actually know from firsthand experience.

Discovering that the adults in your family don't really have all of the answers is a scary experience. If we're very lucky, we learn about little things like water phobias long before it ever comes to light that our folks don't have answers for the Big Problems. In our youth, it seems as if they just aren't willing to share the truth with us, but as we grow older, we begin to see that the truth is
they don't always know.

In
Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself,
the ten-year-old protagonist learns this while treading the dividing line between childhood and adolescence. And with the realization that her parents either don't have the answers or won't give them to her, Sally learns that she needs to find them herself.

Sally's father clearly adheres to my mom's moral imperative that it's just dandy to deceive your children in the name of saving them from your own neuroses. When his wife (who, like my mother, doesn't swim) expresses her fears about flying, he says, “I wish you wouldn't talk that way in front of Sally. How will she ever learn to be adventurous?”

Louise Freedman reveals her vastly different approach to parenting when she responds, “Little girls don't need to be adventurous.”

And Sally proves that she's our kind of heroine by butting in with, “But I want to be adventurous.”

Like Sally, I wanted to be adventurous. It was an oft-touted law in the Peterfreund household that one did not suffer wimps; my dad recited FDR's “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” speech until we'd do pretty much anything just to get out of earshot. My parents practiced what they preached. What could be scarier, after all, than sticking your babies in a pool you'd rather avoid altogether? Whenever we got scared, we faced it, and whenever we didn't know the answer, we figured it out.

Little wonder, then, that I identified so strongly with Sally. We both had daddies who wanted us to be brave. In fact, of all the fictional girls I encountered, Sally was probably the most like me on every level. I reread
Sally J.
over and over again, always marveling at the way Judy Blume had perfectly captured my life. I was growing up forty years after the events in that book took place, and the movie stars, fashions, and telephone technologies had all changed, but little else differentiated our generations. Unlike most of the heroines I'd met in books, Sally dwelled not in New York, Boston, or Prince Edward Island but in Florida, just like me; she was Jewish, I was half; and, most importantly, we had the same overactive imagination. We each worried about the health and safety of our families, marveled at the mysteries of
boys,
made friends and lost them, and tried to cope with a world that seemed to grow increasingly complex and frightening every year. Growing up isn't easy, no matter what generation you belong to.

When I first read of Sally's world, I was her age, and for all the talk of girls growing up too quickly nowadays, I shared her level of naiveté. I didn't know what “love and other indoor sports” (the sign-off Sally swiped from her older babysitter and favored for her personal correspondence) meant any better than she did. And though, as Sally's uncle says, “Little pitchers have big ears,” there always seemed to be some key word that Sally and I were missing in order to fully translate the things that the grown-ups didn't want us to hear.

And we hadn't yet figured out what was so interesting about the stuff they didn't want us to know. Sally's father has to remain behind with his dental practice when the rest of the family winters in Miami, and when he at last comes to visit them, Sally can't comprehend why he spends his first night in town at a hotel with Sally's mom. Her older brother admonishes her: “So they can do it…you're so dumb.” But just as with the “indoor sports” that Sally thinks of as dodgeball or volleyball, she can't imagine that there's anything her parents can't do just as well in their efficiency apartment, “right here in the Murphy bed.”

Of course, since my father was a gynecologist, I had a greater understanding of sex than both Sally and most of my contemporary playmates, though much of it was still lost on me. For instance, I was not privy to the humor behind my young cousin's stated intent to become an orthodontist and join my father's medical practice. The “work both ends at once” jokes never stopped, but I thought it sounded like a good plan. (As a matter of fact, I still do. I find orthodontics and pap smears equally distasteful and think you might as well get it all over at once. If anyone knows of a practice like this, sign me up!)

Unlike Sally, I knew what her mother meant when she claimed that “nice girls” only get pregnant after marriage. When Sally inquires after the unwed pregnant teen (named Bubbles, unfortunately) in her building, her mother practices characteristic avoidance: “I don't want to talk about that.” But as Sally notes immediately afterward, “Everybody else in their house was talking about it.” And at the same time, they are all celebrating the delicate condition of Sally's aunt. Forty years on, I was also mystified by the various reactions to news of pregnancy in the family. Why was it that one announcement generated merrymaking while another spawned worried whispers?

Like Sally, the social cues went straight over my head. All she knows is that it's a very shocking thing for her orthodox teen neighbor to get pregnant with a
“goy.”
Later, she fantasizes about throwing this apparently scandalous news back in the faces of her uppity neighbors, who are wont to compare her choice of playtime activities to their own daughters'. “I know all about your Bubbles,” she imagines saying. “She did it with a
goy
and got a baby…so ha ha on you.”

Of course, the true scandal of the case, and the one that stuck most firmly in my mind for almost two decades, is the fact that the girl's parents proceed to disown and sit
shiva
for their daughter. Sally's grandmother, Ma Fanny, who has until that point in the novel supported Sally's mother in most of her fear-mongering, breaks from tradition, for at last her emotions have been truly roused. “They should only know what it's like to
really
lose a child!”

Sally, always the adventurous one, asks her grandmother if she lost a child, and when it is confirmed, asks, “Is it a secret?”

So many of the complex issues in her life have been shrugged off or sidestepped by the adults that it is little wonder Sally assumes that anything she doesn't yet know is something she's not supposed to. But Ma Fanny's candor breaks down the wall. No, it's not a secret; Ma Fanny just doesn't like to discuss such a painful subject. At last, the unvarnished truth. And because she was willing to share that tidbit in such an honest manner, we can't help but feel as if she's the one with the moral high ground in the Bubbles case.

It is in moments like these, when a parent foregoes the position of “for your protection” and admits that something is difficult, or painful, or frightening to him or her, that a child begins to realize what it means to be an adult—to be truly
grown up.
There are times when, perhaps just briefly, you are treated as an equal.
You're afraid? Well, I'm afraid, too.

Judy Blume said, “Sally's world is the world as I perceived it, at age ten. A world of secrets kept from children, a world of questions without answers.” When I was a girl, the times my mom and dad dropped the parenting act and told me how they really felt were golden glimpses into this magical realm of adulthood, where every joke made sense and every worry might not have a solution, but at least you knew you weren't alone in thinking so. It was cooler than being given a wineglass full of cranberry juice to toast with, more exciting than messing around in your mom's makeup drawer. Pretending to be a grown-up was one thing; when adults actually confided in you, you almost were an adult, too.

“Grown-ups always keep things to themselves,” Sally complains to a playmate while discussing their concerns about their respective parents—Sally is afraid her father will die in New Jersey, and her friend's mom has descended into alcoholism after the death of her husband in World War II. “But it's better to share your problems with a friend, don't you think?” For Sally, sharing comes to symbolize a sense of equality. But for a family dealing with the aftermath of a war that so thoroughly devastated their Jewish community on both a military and civilian level, sharing the truth with a child is a tall order, indeed.

In 1945, Sally is seven, and all she understands about the announcement of the end of World War II is that it's a good reason to put on a dress, shoot fireworks, eat junk food, and stay out too late. Sally doesn't understand her parents' joy or their hope that the European branch of the family might have survived the concentration camps. While the war might have colored her early childhood, it didn't do so in any meaningful way. She latches on to the most dramatic of the overheard stories; lamp shades made of a Jewish person's skin and the possibility that Hitler and his cronies are hiding out in Argentina (or upstairs from her condo) provide fodder for games of make-believe but carry no more weight than the latest Esther Williams film. As a kid, I myself was dimly aware of the fact that my grandfather (who'd been in America during the war) had lost almost all of his European family in the Holocaust. Once, I met my father's cousins, who had spent the conflict in an elaborate hideout scenario, and my childlike brain subsequently confused the details of their experience with the story of Anne Frank. Like Sally, I filled in the blank spots that my folks either wouldn't or couldn't share with snippets of popular culture—though I don't think I ever imagined a scenario in which my favorite movie star saves the inmates of a concentration camp through a timely application of synchronized swimming.

As ridiculous as this seems, it is often a child's innocent attempts to uncover the truth and understand the world that reveals a more honest perspective, untainted by the indoctrination of adulthood. Truly brave parents recognize the capacity in their children for confronting questions that an older generation can't. Truly successful ones recognize when a child chooses to take a step into this unknown, beyond the paths forged by parents, and begin to grow up.

For Sally, genocide on another continent isn't half as perplexing as the injustice and racism she sees on a daily basis right there in Miami. During her first trip down to Florida, she is perplexed when a black family must leave her train car as they cross into the South. Her mother neatly sidesteps her questions about racial segregation, so Sally goes to her other expert source: her father. After a run-in at a pair of public water fountains marked “COLORED ONLY” and “WHITES ONLY,” she is determined to get an answer from him about this confusing issue and writes him letter after letter until she is satisfied. Their exchange marks one of the comedic high points in the book but also serves as an encapsulation of Sally's nascent search for truth.

“What would happen if a person with dark skin, like a Negro or a Seminole Indian, took a drink from our fountain?” she asks her father in a letter. “Do they really have different germs? Since you went to Dental College I'm sure you know these things.” After being thwarted by her mother, Sally has clearly decided that flattery is a clever technique.