Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (8 page)

Laura Caldwell

Catholic schools are not exactly
the model for frank discussion about sex. At the Catholic school I attended in the far suburbs of Chicago, sex was explained in one sentence by my fourth-grade social studies teacher: “When a man and woman fall in love, the man puts his penis inside the woman.”

Upon hearing this, I glanced around at my classmates. Blank stares. No one seemed impressed, freaked, or intrigued. And I guess I wasn't, either.
I don't get it,
I thought. But no explanation was forthcoming, and the fact was I didn't get a lot of things. I didn't get why the state of New York had a city in it with the same name. I didn't get what it meant that my father was an attorney, although I knew I sounded marginally cool saying that.

One mysterious morning that same year, the girls in my class were suddenly taken and shuttled into the basement without explanation. I'd recently read a book about the Holocaust, and I remember having the irrational fear that we were being led to the gas chambers. The darkened cafeteria where they herded us didn't help matters, nor did the way we were silently seated in rows. But then a projector whirred and a movie sprung to life against the cement block wall.

The film was roughly fifteen minutes long, and it explained menstruation in such a complicated, scientifically sophisticated way, I'm sure it's the same film med students see during their OB Gyn training. Again, there was no discussion at the end of the film. Again, I thought,
I don't get it.
A quick, mumbled conversation on the playground later revealed that none of my friends understood much, either.

So the girls at my school did exactly what girls around the country were doing in the 1970s—we turned to Judy Blume books for the real scoop.
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
taught us about training bras and puberty.
Deenie
informed us about masturbation.
Forever
educated us about losing your virginity, and if you believed the book, instantaneous orgasm. We felt informed after reading the books. We felt wiser, older. We understood the world.

But then the book
Wifey
was released when I was in seventh grade. Unlike the other Judy Blume books, this one wasn't targeted for children or teens. It was, as my mother told me, “Absolutely, 100 percent, for adults only.” I had a high-level reading capacity and I'd been reading, “adult” novels since I was in first grade, but I was also the type of kid who followed orders. So I shrugged, said, “Okay,” and forgot about it.

Until one afternoon in Ms. Hutchinson's history class, the book was surreptitiously slipped to me like a baggie of cocaine. It was
Ms.
Hutchinson, by the way, not Miss or Mrs., a distinction that wasn't lost on me. In retrospect, Ms. Hutchinson was a staunch feminist. This only became important later, when I stopped to wonder why a group of girls were allowed to pass around and read
Wifey
during class. Surely she'd seen us. We held the book under our desks. We thought we were reading it on the sly, but I can't imagine we were that successful. So maybe she knew clearly what was going on; maybe she thought,
They'll learn soon enough anyway.

And did we learn—about body parts and bodily fluids, about sexual positions and sexual deviancies.
Wifey
tells the story of Sandy Pressman, a deeply dissatisfied housewife in Plainfield, New Jersey. Sandy's husband, Norman, isn't interested in her talks about why she's unhappy, nor is he even remotely interested in changing their sex life. He absolutely requires the missionary position (which was unlike any “missionary” I'd ever heard about) or nothing. He tells her that if she'd just make friends with the women at their country club and if she'd just take up golf and really give it a go this time, they'd all be a lot happier. Sandy tries. She signs up for lessons and makes efforts to be more social, but the disconnect from her husband and the attempts to lead a life that feels false send her into despair.

A book about a suburban mom should have been boring as hell for a twelve-year-old, but my friends and I soon found out that Sandy was anything but dull. When her kids leave for summer camp, she gets her own summer vacation—one of sexual awakening. A motorcycle man in a stars-and-stripes helmet periodically appears on her front lawn and whacks off. She has a one-night stand with her sister's husband (who also happens to be her gynecologist). She very nearly gets pulled into sex with the husband of her best friend, who is gamely trying to go along with his wife's desire for an open relationship. She starts an affair with Shep, the old boyfriend with whom she'd been utterly smitten.

Sitting in Ms. Hutchinson's class, I was shocked and I was titillated. It wasn't just the fact that the character in the book was having sex. (Since I'd been reading adult fiction for a number of years, I'd come across some generic descriptions of sex before.) Rather, the shock came from the frank way the book dealt with sex, anatomy, and desires. At one point, when Sandy's old boyfriend draws her outside a party and kisses her, she thinks how grateful she is for the Tampax she's wearing and for how it's “holding in her juices.” Sandy talks about douching with vinegar, sometimes with wine vinegar for variety. Genitalia is described in exquisite detail, including its colors, scents, and sounds. The sex is rough, awkward, acrobatic, and sometimes downright unpleasant-sounding. And yet everyone seemed to keep wanting it.

If I'd felt informed after reading Judy Blume's other books, I now felt completely stumped again. Was
this
how adults thought about themselves and their bodies? Was sex not a sweetly physical act à la
Forever?
Was it something more sinister and much more raw?

I started watching my mother and father for signs that some of the acts in the book were taking place in our idyllic ranch house. This seemed impossible. I studied our neighbors during block parties, wondering if they were cheating on their spouses or having furtive sex in the study. I stared at Ms. Hutchinson during class. What was she like in the evenings when she was at home? Did she have a husband with whom she did all sorts of crazy things? Did she
want
to do those things? (In the book, Sandy hadn't always seemed too sure.)

My friends were no help in figuring out these matters. We giggled over the descriptions and read earmarked pages over and over. No one appeared as bothered as me by the thought that this sexual activity might very well be going on around us. And the truth was that I wasn't necessarily bothered by the
thought
of the sex—it was simply the thought of all these adults I personally knew having the sex. The concept was entirely too intimate. I couldn't look at the bus driver without blushing. I couldn't look at my dentist without imagining him naked with his wife. The only adults I could talk to without the pain of this knowledge were the nuns at our school. I knew they'd taken vows of celibacy. I knew they'd never have anything to do with the sexual world, and that was a relief, because since reading
Wifey,
sex seemed to be everywhere.

Sometime during this heady period, I began to think about Judy Blume. The
real
Judy Blume. Before this, I'd given no thought to the person behind the curtain when it came to books. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Carolyn Keene? Those were simply names on a spine. They meant little to me. In our small pocket of suburbia, we had doctors and lawyers and plumbers and policemen. When dinner table discussion turned to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” my parents offered suggestions like
astronaut
and
president of the United States,
but never
author.

Who was this Judy Blume? I wondered. What in the hell was her life like? Where did she come up with these ideas? For the first time, I began to think about what it meant to be a writer or an author. Did an author have to experience something in order to write about it? Was Judy Blume off somewhere having sex with her brother-in-law during a party? Had she watched a man in a motorcycle helmet masturbate on her lawn. These questions confounded me. They did not, however, propel me toward my own writing career. Actually, I wasn't much of a dreamer. When people asked what profession I'd take upon adulthood, I usually threw out a halfhearted, “Maybe a teacher?” which I knew would please my parents. But I never really thought I would actually grow up one day, much less get a job.

Eventually, I moved on from
Wifey
and from all the questions it brought. But after life dragged me into adulthood and through a law career and eventually left me with a book contract, I thought about the novel again. I knew by now that authors certainly did not have to
have
an experience (especially one like sex with your brother-in-law) in order to write about it. I knew this because I'd written a book called
Burning the Map
about a woman whose trip to Rome and Greece with her girlfriends changes everything in her life. And who gets a fair amount of action in the process.

I'd written one scene in particular, in which the character spends the night in the Roman Coliseum rolling around with an Italian man. The scene was a hot one, and the minute the book came out, I began to get questions about it: Had I been in the Coliseum after hours? Had I actually fooled around with someone there? The answer to both questions was yes, but I felt hesitant to admit that for a few reasons. The first was the fact that my experience hadn't been exactly as I'd described it in the book. Not even close. Yes, I'd met a guy in Rome, and yes, he'd snuck us into the Coliseum at night, and yes, I'd kissed him there. And that was about it. We did not spend the night. It was not a sexual watershed moment.

The other reason I felt uncomfortable was my surprise that people were asking such questions. The book clearly said
A novel
on the front, and although I'd taken a trip to Rome and Greece with my girlfriends, I truly had written a work of fiction. I'd labored and toiled to craft every character from scratch, to make the book move along based on the development of these characters and for the sheer fun of the reader. If I'd written about the actual trip I'd taken to Europe, it would have read something like this:
I went to Greece. I drank too much. I got sunburned. The next day, I drank too much. I got sunburned. The day after that, I drank too much. Oh, and I got sunburned.

In short, I felt uncomfortable with the thought that people were thinking of me instead of my characters. And this brought me back to
Wifey.
What had Judy Blume gone through with the publishing of that book? When I met Ms. Blume briefly at the Key West Literary Seminar, I nearly asked her, but then I chickened out. I never learned the answer until recently when I picked up
Wifey
(with its new exuberant chick-lit-style cover) and read it again. In her introduction, Judy Blume describes the “uproar” that was caused by the release of the novel. Some people, she says, congratulated her on having written a
real
book at last, while others were angry that she hadn't used a pseudonym, and still others were pissed off that she'd even had such thoughts at all.

Blume also concedes the similarities, or lack thereof, with her characters. “No, I'm not Sandy, although many of the details of her life come from mine—her exotic illness, her failure on the golf course, her fantasies. And I was never married to Norman, but I knew plenty of guys like him.” She discusses how fearless she felt in writing about sexual fantasies and escapades. “I just remember this burning inside, this need to get Sandy's story on paper. I was, after all, raised to be Sandy. I still identify with her. If I sat down to write
Wifey
now, I wonder if I'd be able to let go the way I did then. I'm not as filled with angst today (angst is good for writers). I'm as content as I've ever been (contentment is bad for writers), though I can always come up with something to worry about.” Blume concludes, “Maybe I just didn't know enough then to be worried. Maybe I really didn't care what anyone thought.”

Rereading
Wifey,
I expected the book to be screaming with sex, the way I remembered it. But as an adult, I didn't see the novel that way. There are some delightfully saucy passages, that's for sure, and the language is often blunt, but I saw more of the
story
this time. I saw Sandy's anguish upon feeling unfulfilled, leading a life she is somehow not connected to. I saw the trap many fall into upon adulthood—doing what you're supposed to do, not what you want to do. I felt for Sandy's husband, even though he's a horse's ass, and I felt for her ex-boyfriend, Shep, who can't leave his wife, because he simply can't leave that life. The ending, which I won't spoil, is a wrenching and honest one.

When I'd written my first novel, I, like Judy Blume, didn't know enough to be worried, and I really didn't care what anyone thought. Because in the same way I couldn't imagine growing up and working for a living, I hadn't actually imagined that the book would ever be published. I was much more cautious when it came to the novels that followed. I kept the sex clean or I kept it out all together, afraid of the confusion that could result between me and my characters.