Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (24 page)

It was spring but too cold to swim, even though the cover was off the pool. I saw him take a sharp turn, a little too close to the water's edge. And then, plop. He went in.

Now, my brother had taken his first swimming lessons the previous summer. He didn't learn much, though, in part because he had a habit of biting his instructor rather than letting himself be placed calmly in the water. While my brother loved toilet water, he didn't like pool water so much.

My mom was shocked that he was capable of such viciousness, but I'd been on the sharp end of those baby teeth a million times. I could've told her that Matt fought dirty. After the biting incident, he didn't get a lot of one-on-one time with the swimming instructor.

So I knew Matt wasn't a strong swimmer.

I ran over to him. The battery-operated tricycle had sunk to the bottom of the pool like a stone, tires still spinning in the water. Matt, bug-eyed and scared, was dog paddling in the middle of the pool. His mouth and nose bobbed just below the water, and everything about his face screamed panic.

Meanwhile, I was thinking
Mom is going to kill us.
Matt was wearing his “good” clothes, which were now soaked, and I was wearing a dress Mom bought especially for the party.

I leaned over and reached for Matt, holding my hand out, trying to grab him, but he was too far out. His head bobbed down under the water. He was sinking fast.

I glanced back at the house, thinking I should run to get Mom. But then I looked back at Matt and realized there was no time. His head bobbed up and then under again, and all I could think of was Mom's admonition to me: “You're responsible for your brother. Keep an eye on him.”

So I did the only thing I could do.

I jumped in.

I grabbed Matt, pulled him to the side of the pool, and shoved him out. He was wailing at his dogs-and-the-entire-neighborhood-can-hear setting.

I took him by the hand and led him into the house, where Mom found us, dripping wet.

“What on earth have you done now? I told you two not to fight today,” she shouted, angry that I'd ruined my new dress and that we were both soaked from head to toe, dripping pool water all over her newly polished floor.

“He fell into the pool,” I told her, pointing outside. Mom glanced at Matt and his panicked face, and then she realized what happened.

Immediately, she consoled Matt, whipping him up in her arms, soaked and all.

“My poor baby!” she wailed. “Are you okay? You must be scared to death.”

Naturally, Matt got all the attention, but that was okay. For once, I didn't mind. I was relieved.

Because the thing I realized that day was that I do love my brother. And I was glad to be there to look after him, because that's what an older sister is for.

Reading the Fudge books helped me understand that no matter how much of a pain they are, little brothers are worth having. Judy Blume helped me see that you can love someone, even if he or she can be annoying, because that's what family is all about. After coming close to losing him that day, I realized that no matter what Matt did, I'd never trade him for any other brother or sister in the world. Because he was
my
little brother. And although I saved Matt that day, maybe one day he'd be there when I needed him, and he'd save me back. Because that's what family does.

And I'm pretty sure Matt understood this, too. As a show of respect and gratitude for pulling him from the pool, Matt waited a solid hour before flushing one of my Strawberry Shortcake dolls down the toilet.

Alison Pace

Growing up, I enjoyed
the lucky safety of knowing I was surrounded by good people, good friends. Though never the most popular, and certainly never the best at academics or sports (definitely not sports), I can remember in my childhood the feeling of being liked and in the company of friends. There were seats saved at lunch tables, there were Ding Dongs shared. I often felt, for the most part I'd say, included and happy. The thing is, though, I didn't always feel the same. Which is where Margaret came in.

Margaret, of
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
fame, this character created on paper with such vividness and authenticity by Judy Blume, was the only person I knew, other than myself, who was almost in seventh grade and didn't yet need a bra. And, more than that, she was the only friend I had in the world who, like me, was half Jewish and half Christian. And, yes, I know it's not very often that bras and God are mentioned in corresponding sentences, but for Margaret, and for me, the two seemed to hold a very large significance.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
was one of the first books I ever loved, one of the first books that made me feel really, truly understood. And so it was Margaret who became one of my favorite and most understanding friends. Margaret knew what it felt like to be half one religion and half another, knew what it felt like to have to explain that it didn't
really
mean you were
technically
this or
technically
that, or worse than that, nothing. Margaret knew what it was like to have people ask you if you didn't believe in God, and also knew what it felt like to dread bras and bathing suits and anything even remotely up-the-shirt related.

Much in the manner of the brokenhearted, who are certain that every sad song about someone who's done somebody wrong has been written expressly for them (actually, I do that, too), when I first read
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret,
right before seventh grade, I was pretty sure that every understanding and in-tune word had been written just for me. It's a rarity still for me to feel like a book “gets it,” gets
me,
the way I felt at twelve, that
Margaret
got it.

Like Margaret, I, too, had a Philip Leroy, a crush to whom I remained somewhat unbeknownst. His name was Andy Cammaker, and he was good at sports and wore a green rope fisherman's bracelet—the kind that shrank to your wrist—for all of sixth grade, long after most other people's mothers would have made them take it off. I can still remember the looks of Andy Cammaker, who had beautiful black curly hair, who had milky white skin and freckles, and who was so far out of reach to me.

“Have a good summer, Pace,” he'd said to me on the last day of sixth grade as he walked toward his mom's car. “You too, Cammaker,” I'd said, wondering even as I said it,
did I sound cool
? And if I had managed, somehow, someway, to sound cool while speaking to him, did I sound cool
enough
? As I replayed our final words of the year in my mind, all over the entire summer, the only thing that I was sure of was that I wasn't cool. I wasn't quite sure I knew anyone would understand how hard it was to feel cool around certain people, certain boys, and how hard at other times it was to feel cool in general. And then, at the end of that summer, when I read
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
and at last met Margaret, I was sure that if I'd been invited to New Jersey to a sleepover at her house along with her slightly annoying (and bossy and untruthful) friend, Nancy Wheeler, and sat down and explained it to her, that she would have understood.

And the reason she would have understood? Because Margaret Simon, much more than anyone I'd come across, knew the deep, inextricable connection between “boobs, having them,” and “cool.” A thing I'd always felt was very much related to the lack of romantic attentions from Andy Cammaker was the fact that I, much like Margaret, was a bit lacking of bust. Unlike Margaret, though, I did not sit with my best friend practicing the “I Must, I Must, I Must Increase My Bust” exercises because my best friend was Jenny Layton, and Jenny was already a proud proprietor of a very nice-size chest. I did my chest-increasing exercises on my own, and my negotiations for the speedy and imminent arrival of breasts were admittedly more with the breasts themselves than they were, as in Margaret's case, with God. Though to be fair, my chest, in its absence, did attain such mythic proportions in my young mind that it became quite godlike in importance.

On that last day of sixth grade, I explained to my mother, “I'm giving my boobs until the end of the summer to grow.” I believe she nodded, if not in comprehension, then at least in agreement. I wanted them, reasonably so, for the first day of seventh grade. I wanted them for the first-day-of-school pictures we had taken every year. I wanted them, most of all, for the next time I saw Andy Cammaker. Andy Cammaker would ask me, and my new boobs, to go out (which really just meant we would talk on the phone). And, of course, we'd all three say yes. He'd be smitten, he would need only in life to be with me. He wouldn't think I was skinny; he wouldn't call me a Carpenters Dream. If Mrs. Cammaker ever took a group of us again to Great Adventure like she had in fifth grade, he wouldn't say that since I was the smallest, I had to sit in the way-back of the station wagon. And he definitely wouldn't turn around constantly throughout the entire three-hour car ride to New Jersey to remind me that I couldn't talk because I was in the way-back where the dogs go. He'd never decide that for the duration of the trip I was a Basset Hound. “You are a Bass-et Hound,” he wouldn't say, all elongated,
Bass
and
Et
like two separate words,
Hound
all stretched out, again and again the whole way there and the whole way back. “Bass-et Hooouuuund.”

And when the first day of seventh grade arrived, devastatingly too soon with
nothing at all
to fill out my lime green T-shirt with the bright blue E-S-P written on the front and the R-I-T written on the back, leaving me to wish I'd worn the red Benetton sweater instead, because the geometric illusion might have tricked the eye and the material would have added so much more bulk, I felt I had no other choice but to renegotiate. I told the boobs they had until Christmas vacation. But that was it. And I was sure then that Margaret would have understood. I was sure she would have known that almost as bad as not needing a bra was waiting to need one.

But cleavage aside (if it's ever really possible in this world to put cleavage completely aside), what it was, what made me read the book two times in a row and refer to it numerous times throughout my middle school years, was that Margaret, like me, was half Jewish and half Christian. Margaret's circumstances were the reverse of mine: her dad was Jewish and her mom was Christian; it was her Christian grandparents who were not accepting. For me, my mom was Jewish and my dad was Christian (technically both Episcopalian and Catholic, though he will tell you that religion isn't a heritage, something my Jewish-But-Not-Practicing mother might be pretty quick to refute). It was my nana who was disapproving, who invited me over on Passover to search for money and a matzo cracker and to tell me that my father was from the wrong side of the tracks.

Both Margaret's parents and my parents made the same decision: to raise us without religion. “Spiritual but not religious” is the way that people might describe it today, but back then, in the early eighties, growing up on Long Island, a place where it seemed so many things were separated by religion, it became not so much a designation as a recipe for a walking identity crisis. Margaret, who also felt this identity crisis quite deeply, dealt with it rather constructively by trying to learn about as many different religions as she could. I had my own variation on the theme. I tried to
be
as many different religions as I could. I slyly tried to get Nana to sign me up for Bat Mitzvah training, just as I implored Grammy to take me with her to church, even though by that point she was no longer her religion, Episcopal, or even her late husband's religion, Catholic, but a later life convert to Ethical Culture.

I didn't get very far, due mostly to a parental reminder to the grandparents that I was being raised without religion. And so I moved on to what I saw as being religious by omission. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I was very Christian, sitting in the lunchroom lamenting with all the other Catholics and Protestants the fact that we had to be in school while all our Jewish friends stayed home. There I was again, at school on Good Friday, at one with all my Jewish friends. I had, of course, suggested to my parents that in order to more fully understand my heritage, I should stay home on all religious holidays. They had not, as I believed was so very often the case, seen my point. So, to school, I went. Embraced, I very much wanted to believe, by all religions; the one-girl religious melting pot I thought maybe I could be.

Everyone was either Jewish or Catholic or some sort of Protestant. And I wanted so much to be able to say something simple like, “I'm Jewish,” “I'm Catholic,” “I'm Episcopalian,” rather than the complicated and ever-lengthy, “My mom is Jewish and my dad is Catholic and Episcopalian, and my parents decided to raise me without religion,” or the somewhat self-esteem-challenging, “No, I'm nothing.” And because I didn't have a friend to my name who wasn't fully Jewish or fully Catholic or fully something else, back then I really did take a lot of comfort in the fact that there was Margaret.

And I think then in high school I may have forgotten a bit about her. Though far from the celebrated arrival I had for so long been optimistically anticipating, I had secured boobs. I'd been long enough in my role of half-this and half-that to be a bit more comfortable in my skin so as to not be bothered so much when people would inquire, “What are you?” Or maybe it was just that I went to a pretty small school, and by high school, people just knew me and had already asked.

But after high school I remembered Margaret again. By the time I got to college, I'd been half Jewish for a while, for my entire life; I'd gotten used to it. But when I arrived at American University in Washington, D.C., a place where it seemed the entire student population was Jewish, I wasn't half Jewish anymore. Suddenly, I was
not
Jewish. At American, I was called for the first time—other than by Nana—a shiksa. I was shunned.
By my people.

Later, once people discovered that I was half Jewish and that the Jewish half was actually the mother half, I was consoled that since it was my
mother
who was Jewish and not my father, technically, I was okay. On behalf of my father, I found this insulting. And then, with the whole “technically, you're Jewish” hurdle successfully leapt over once again, Adam Silverstein, proud member of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, became my first college boyfriend.

Adam, a junior, was short in stature and had fair skin and longish, wavyish hair. He majored in political science, smoked cigarettes and pot, and drove a black Mazda RX-7. He kept his seat reclined more so than what would generally be considered normal for driving; in order to reach the steering wheel, his arm, always just the left one, had to be fully extended. I always thought he looked like a racecar driver. A really laid-back, stoned racecar driver who wore basketball sneakers and a baseball hat on backward. I've always had a bit of a thing for racecar drivers.

Adam was very popular with American University women and supposedly had dated a senior when he was only a freshman. Supposedly, people said, he'd driven her crazy. But the thing was, the driven-crazy girl in question, she was in this sorority in which supposedly all the women were crazy, so really who's to say if it was Adam who did her in or not? And also, I like to think that if you're the type of person who's going to let someone drive you crazy, you, more often than not, already have a set of directions waiting in your glove compartment.

Adam and I started dating exclusively. Previously, I'd actually always thought dating implied exclusivity. Among the things I learned at American University: it doesn't. And only a few months later, Adam attained the title of the first man to ever break my heart, by breaking up with me the night before my sorority semi-formal. And the reason he gave me for said unceremonious end? I wasn't Jewish, and he just didn't see the sense in dating me. He'd promised his parents, he'd told me, a freshman in college, he would only date someone Jewish.

I didn't explain to him that
technically
I was Jewish. I remember having a sense of foreboding right then that felt very much the way it felt when Jessica Kleinman sat me at the dorky table at her Bat Mitzvah. Even though being Jewish and Catholic and Episcopalian (oh, my) could indeed mean I could date Jews and Catholics and any variety of WASPs without my parents so much as blinking an intruding eye, I sensed that perhaps it might not bode well for me. I can remember time traveling right then, in my mind, during that breakup. For a moment, I was in my pink 1980s bedroom with the Laura Ashley bedspread, and I was wondering how Margaret might have dealt with this same issue had she faced it at whatever college she went to. Make that at Penn, because now that I think of it, I'm quite sure that Margaret went to Penn.