Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume Read Online Free PDF Page B

familiarity of my mom’s friends’ figures that intrigued me; it was the stuff they talked about. For instance: Mrs. Feinberg was cheating on her husband with the pool boy—two, sometimes even three times a week. Mrs. Diamond caught her housekeeper stealing right out of her wallet, and Mrs. Denberg wore falsies. These were things I wanted to know! Especially the part about the pool boy. My mom was interested in that little tidbit, too. We were both trying to figure out what Mrs. Feinberg saw in him. We weren’t nosy or anything. We were doing detective work. If we could figure out why Mrs. Feinberg no longer loved her husband, we could apply that information to what was happening in our own house, something neither of us understood.
    I used to love to lounge around with my mom’s friends, quietly nodding and yawning, pretending to smoke, drinking water out of a coffee cup. There was a rhythm in the way they wove in and out of conversation with their long, languid pauses and a certain beauty in the way they didn’t run around the house or climb on the furniture to get to the phone. I had no desire to do anything that involved sudden movements, since they made me feel arthritic. When given the choice, I always opted for a nice quiet game of canasta over a raucous sleepover. I hated jumping on the bed. I was always afraid I’d fall off and wind up in a hip cast. The last thing I wanted was to wear white.
    Unfortunately, circumstance was such that I typically had to spend more time with my own friends than my mom’s, and it was always the same routine. Just like the girls in Judy Blume’s books, they all called the same boys every time. In our case, it was Daryn Saks, Jeff Gold, and Brian Brioni. The first question was always, “Who do you like?” And the second, “Well, let’s say she just got run over, then who would you like?” Our teacher was never on the list, so what was the point? Why bother calling some prepubescent slobbering idiot to find out who he liked when I had a perfectly good man waiting for me in homeroom? But, still, I went along with it. I desperately wanted to fit in—even though I knew my mom was home alone, waiting for me to come home.
    The more I picked up Judy Blume’s books, the more I knew something had gone awry. How could I possibly have had anything in common with Margaret or Nancy or Winnie or Jill, when I couldn’t even relate to my own friends? They were all just innocent children, happy and carefree, with age-appropriate bodies and parents who were grown-ups. But it wasn’t like that in my house. My father seemed like a teenager himself, on the verge of discovering who he was for the first time at forty. He questioned everything, rebelled against everyone, and was determined to find his place in this world before it was too late. By the time I turned twelve, he was so tortured and confused that when he stopped coming home until very late at night, I used to imagine him walking the streets alone in the dark with his head down, thinking he had no place to go. For some reason, he felt home was no longer an option. None of us knew why, and I worried about him all the time. I worried that he wasn’t happy and that it was because of me and the way I turned out. He used to promise me that I’d grow up to be something special. He used to promise me that all the time. But there I was. Just an average girl with peculiar hips. I worried that I was losing him. If only Judy Blume had written a book about the male midlife crisis, it might have shed some light on my adolescent experience.
    My mother used to wait up for him with the covers pulled up to her chin, wondering what she had done wrong to make him so unhappy. All she ever did was love him, protect him, and support him while he was trying to make sense of his life. She needed someone to confide in, someone to tell that her life was falling apart, that she didn’t know her