My First Love and Other Disasters

To my parents, Kate and William Rubin

When I think about all
the time I wasted last year moaning about how gross it was to be thirteen, I could kick myself. Thirteen turned out to be fantastic. It had to be. I mean, you finally make it. You're in the graduating class, and even if it's only the top of a bunch of little kids, it still makes you feel really special. Yes sir, thirteen was definitely first-rate. But fourteen? Forget it. It's the pits.

There are so many horrendous things about being fourteen that I'd have a fit if I had to name half of them. Just think about it. One day you're the biggest big shot in the entire middle school (among the girls anyway) and the next you're little Miss Nobody, which is exactly what everyone else in the whole high school seems to think about
freshmen. At least that's the way they treat us.

Another drawback is how long it takes. Growing up, I mean. Except for times like Christmas vacation and summer, it seems like the years take forever to drag by. And for the plans I'm making I absolutely have to be fifteen practically instantly. Especially seeing as how the person I happen to be madly in love with is seventeen. I'm definitely nowhere, sitting around being only fourteen, but it's absolutely hopeless—I mean, there's nothing I can do about it until I'm fifteen. Oh, sure, I'm getting there. But it's going to take me two more enormous weeks. I don't know how I'm going to stand the wait.

I probably forgot to tell you that there's another small problem aside from Miss Sweet Sixteen, and that is that the love of my life has absolutely no idea that I even exist. But no sweat. I've arranged for our beautiful meeting to take place Tuesday at Howell's. I guess a shoe store for the orthopedically fashionable doesn't sound like the most romantic place for an encounter, but that's where he works on weekdays after school. The only other choice was his Saturday job—digging cesspools. Anyway I'm not worried, because I've worked out every single detail, so it can't miss. Theoretically. Of course in the real world, the one where practically everything I touch bites me, not only can it miss but it'll probably
boomerang and come right back and hit me in the face.

No doubt it'll fail in some simple way, like I'll trip on my shoelaces. Big deal, so what if I'm not wearing shoelaces. I can always trip on somebody else's.

Or worse yet, I'll do what I did when my class went backstage at
I Love My Wife
last year and we met the whole cast. I was so nervous and excited I thought I'd faint. Somebody said, “Victoria, I'd like you to meet Tommy Smothers—this is Victoria Martin.” I smiled and said as sweetly as possible, “Hello, Victoria,” And everybody cracked up.

Or what if it's something even more horrible? Suppose I'm standing there meeting the love of my life, and I'm smiling, and I don't know it but I have this black smudge across my nose, or worse, a crumb is stuck to my lip. Everything would be absolutely ruined. You know how it is when something like that happens, you can't even hear what the person is saying—all you do is stare at the crumb. But I think I may have that one beat because I'm bringing my best friend with me and she's going to be my crumb spotter, which will work out perfectly unless she starts laughing. We both do that at the most embarrassing times—crack up, I mean. But she's much worse than I am.

Anyway, about that dream guy of mine: After we get past that first meeting and we come to know each other, then I get right to work dumping the competition. But I don't do that here, in New York City—I do it on Fire Island. That's this super fabulous beach resort on Long Island where absolutely all the action is in the summertime. Anyway,
he's
going to be there for the whole summer and
she
isn't.

The first part is ready to move, but the Fire Island stuff could be sticky. I've got to get my parents' permission to be a mother's helper for the summer. For my parents that's the equivalent of asking them to let me hitchhike through Tasmania with the janitor. Still, I'm not discouraged because I know that the first time you try to get permission for anything new from your parents it always looks impossible, but if you keep at them long enough (and I've been at it all month long) they finally wear down.

So let's just say that I do get to meet him and somehow I convince my parents to allow me to go to Fire Island, then there's one more little side thing that I have to take care of.

There's this other boy, Barry. He's a complication. You see, I don't really know him, but he likes me. Which sounds peculiar, but it's one of those things where you can tell somebody's got a crush on
you because they always turn up wherever you go, and you catch them staring at you all the time, and crazy things like that. Anyway, I have gotten friendly with him because it just so happens that he's a friend of Jim's, and he has a house on Fire Island, and I understand that Jim hangs out there a lot. I haven't figured out how to handle getting to be Barry's just-plain-friend-not-girlfriend yet. But I will.

Anyway, the first thing I have to pull off is the big meeting this Tuesday.

Now that you got that all straight, let me tell you a little more about the most important part—Jimmy.

The first time I saw
Jimmy I thought, what is everybody making such a fuss about? I mean, so okay, he's gorgeous looking, so what's the big deal about that, and why is practically every single fresh-person (I'm getting very heavily into women's lib lately) at Cooper High bug-eyed about him?

Actually I figured that with all those girls dropping at his feet he had to be the most conceited, egocentric, me-me-me-type goon around. The kind I stay far away from.

Well, that was nearly ten months ago, and it's incredible but I think he gets better looking every day. All I have to do is catch a quick peek at him in the hall or even from halfway across the gym and I'm positively knocked out. I don't know, maybe it
has something to do with that number he does to keep his gorgeous straight silky blond hair from falling into his sexy hazel green-brown eyes. He kind of dips his head down and to the side a little and then flips it back. Two seconds later the gorgeous blond hair slides back down over his eyes again. I could watch him do that forever. In fact one time I was doing just that when he looked up and caught me, and I had to pretend I was looking for someone in the row behind him. It didn't work so well because unfortunately, at the time, he was sitting in the last row.

Did I tell you that he's about six feet tall and he's got the most sensational body I've ever seen in my entire life? It's not all that different from everyone else's—I mean, it's got the same number of things—but on him it all seems to fit so perfectly.

I probably sound like I'm very superficial and that all I'm interested in is his looks. That's not true, because I know there's a lot more to Jim than just his looks. For one thing he's the kind of person everybody always wants to hang out with. And not just girls. Guys too. Maybe that's because he always looks like he's having such a good time. I suppose it's his smile. It's the catching kind. Makes you feel happy just to look at him.

He's been the president of his class for two years running, and the captain of the tennis team,
so obviously I'm not the only one who thinks he's terrific.

One tiny little thing. He
probably
knows he's something special, but he'd have to be blind or a hypocrite not to. Actually he just looks like he feels good about himself, and I don't think that's so bad.

Obviously I've completely lost my mind over him. And like I said, he doesn't know I'm alive. But that's okay because Steffi (the friend I told you about) and I have decided that the situation is pretty viable (my mother's favorite word; no matter what you talk to her about, you've got to figure that somehow something in it is going to be “viable.” It got so bad, I finally had to look it up).

Anyway, it's still definitely viable except for that one disgusting, ugly, grungy problem. Her name is Gloria, and she's been his girlfriend since the start of his junior year, which makes it almost a year that she's been going more or less steady with him. And that's not even the worst. Steffi and I did a little digging and we came up with a lot more bad news. Number one is that she's his sister's best friend. Number two, she lives in his apartment building. And number three is the real killer—she's sixteen. I would sell my kid sister's soul (and all the rest of her too) to be sixteen. But what's the use. Nobody's buying.

Even Steffi admits Gloria shoots a big hole in
the viability angle. Especially when you see her and Jimmy together. She's always right there, hanging on to his arm like she was drowning. She'd better cool it or he's going to wake up one morning with one six-foot-long arm. I hate to think what his sweaters must look like. And she's a whiner—“Jim . . . my, I'm hungry—Jim . . . my, I'm thirsty—Jim . . . my, I'm cold—Jim . . . my, you promised . . .” She's not as bad as my sister Nina, but for a practically adult person she's pretty awful. And on top of that she's also one of those really girlish types of squeamish, too-too precious, dainty things that'd faint dead away if they saw one measly little worm. You know, the kind that's always wearing some guy's jacket or sweater because she's shivering, even in August. Very dependent type. You don't see too many of them around anymore since women's lib. She's the last of a dying breed, and we should probably preserve her. In fact that would be a perfect solution. Have her stuffed.

Her and Norman. Norman's my sheepdog, and even though it's horrendous to talk that way about your own dog, with Norman it would probably be a month before anyone noticed the difference. It seems like all he ever does is sleep or watch Nina—that's my twelve-year-old sister—and me argue about whose turn it is to take him out.

We've had Norman forever, and for a long time
we thought he had some kind of psychological block against showing affection, but now we realize that the only reason he doesn't give us those big leaping doggy greetings with all the kissing and tailwagging is simply because it takes too much energy. If he could figure a way to do it without getting up I know he would, because deep down he really loves us—except for that thing he has about us plotting to steal his food. My father says he's paranoid, but I don't think he's any worse than Nina when it comes to something she loves. First thing she does is spit on it. (That definitely discourages sharing.) She's a real winner anyway. It seems like she's always hanging around, butting in, bugging my friends, tattling, whining, borrowing and never returning, and generally being a pain in the neck. She also looks like a troll—well, to me anyway, although she has nice greenish eyes if you can find them under her glasses. And they say she'll have pretty teeth when the rail-road comes off. (I'm wired, too, but not with tracks—the thin kind that's almost invisible.)

Listen, I know Typhoid Mary was worse, but she wasn't my sister. My mother keeps assuring me that it's natural for siblings to think they hate each other as kids but that there's really a deep well of love (her words) that we'll discover when we're older. She's probably right—when I'm about a hundred I should start liking Nina.

Actually, in this last year she's made two big improvements. One is her hair. It used to hang in strings like grunge. Then she made a brilliant discovery: shampoo. The second thing is her trick belch. You know what it's like to introduce some great guy to your sister and instead of “hello” she takes a monster breath and . . . well, that's the second improvement. Now she only does it around the house with family and close friends. She's still got a long way to go.

I probably ought to count my blessings. Steffi's brother still picks his nose and he's nearly fourteen.

Say I eventually do get Nina under control. That still leaves the real tough ones, Felicia and Philip Martin, terrific, fabulous, sensational people except when it comes to being my parents. The problem is so obvious to me. They take their job too seriously. I'm two seconds away from being fifteen, and they're still hanging over me, making sure I eat a proper breakfast, wear my scarf, my boots, my gloves, my sweater, and then there are all those watch-outs—watch the knife, your fingers, the bottom step, the car door, sharp corners, strangers, drafts, and fish bones. To be absolutely fair, I think they've got it together a lot this past year. Four different times in the last month neither of them warned me that I was going to tip over and crack my head when I leaned back on the dining room chairs.

I guess it's always possible that they've just stopped caring about my head, but I don't really think so. I'm an optimist and I think they were just going through a bad stage and now they're improving. Like now, they're actually considering the possibility of me being a mother's helper this summer out on Fire Island. I definitely know my mother's considering letting me take the job, because the last time we discussed it (actually it was the seventeenth time since April) she said, “We'll see.” I know from way back that “We'll see” usually stinks, but I read it as a giant step up from “Are you out of your mind?” and “Absolutely not!” For my mother, even just considering the possibility is a huge improvement.