Blue Plate Special (13 page)

Jim’s drinking was, it developed, a topic of concern among my parents’ friends. All the grown-ups drank wine and beer; they all smoked pot. But Jim was the only one in their group who became drunk, who stumbled, who slurred his words, lost motor control, and sometimes even fell down.

But aside from their marital problems, Jim and my mother still had fun; they loved to dance together and, she told me years later, they always had a good sex life. They had a king-size water bed in their room, whose air smelled of stale incense and pot smoke. Their sheets always smelled of sex to me, even
when they were clean. I had a passionate interest in, and simultaneous revulsion for, the idea of sex. When they weren’t home, I was drawn to their room with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I found
The Joy of Sex
(and read it from cover to cover) in their nightstand drawer, along with their pot-smoking paraphernalia, which I hated and which filled me with fear.

Before they went out together to go dancing or to a party, they disappeared into their room for a long time and came out on a waft of incense, dressed elegantly, smelling of pot smoke and giggling. I hated the smell, hated the way it made them act, hated that it was illegal, that my parents weren’t straitlaced and proper like all my friends’ parents. And Jim sometimes made sexual jokes to my mother in front of us; it made me gag. Jim had started to actively repulse me. He had pink lips in a close-cropped blond goatee. He had silky pale hair and watery blue eyes and a tall, lanky, slinky body. His voice was high and breathy. He always kissed us on the lips, he insisted on it—I cringed at having to let his pink, wet lips anywhere near mine. The idea of him and my mother having sex gave me palpitations of nausea.

Still, I had crushes on boys and thought about them with increasing physical urgency. I had finally gotten contact lenses, my braces had come off, my hair grew long and thick. I was still stick thin and totally without curves, but I had some semblance of a teenage body suddenly, along with the usual hormones.

I reacted by becoming aggressive. There was an older neighborhood boy who had an obvious crush on me—I don’t even remember his name. He was tall, already an adolescent, with a nascent mustache and a low voice. One day, bored, I blindfolded him with a bandanna and led him around the neighborhood, narrating to him in a low, bossy voice the things I would do to him later. I took him into bushes, behind houses, along the sidewalk. He stumbled. I led him. He was totally in my thrall. I hardly touched him; I just promised future delights.

When I was much littler, I had been sexually aggressive with boys: in third grade, I chased a boy I liked at every recess, and when I caught him, I kissed him. In second grade, I’d played house in my garage with a neighbor boy; he lay on top of me and we kissed. Even earlier, I’d convinced a smaller boy to show me his penis, which was uncircumcised with a tip that I thought looked like a strawberry. I had never been shy about bossing a certain type of boy around.

Now, I could feel this neighborhood boy getting charged up, excited, waiting to hear what I would say next. His excitement was the whole point. But he was too passive to sustain my interest for long. Soon I was done with him, bored and sated with power. I ripped the bandanna off his face and ran home. The next night, as I was washing dishes in the kitchen, whose window looked out at the street, I saw him standing on the sidewalk under the big palm tree in our front yard, looking in at me. He threw something into the bushes beneath the window and ran away. I went outside and found a folded-up piece of paper on which he had written a love poem. Dispassionately, I read it, found it trite and lacking in beauty, and threw it away. I never spoke to that boy again.

One day after school, I went over to my friend Jennifer Dominguez’s house to hang out. My mother was late picking me up. Jennifer had to go to the church with her parents for some function or another, so I stayed behind with Kevin, just the two of us, playing cards together on their front patio while I waited for my mother.

That night, for the first time ever, I found that I could talk to him, could look him in the eye. Over gin rummy, I flirted brashly, made bold eye contact, felt triumph when he looked away, grinning and blushing. His evident attraction to me turned me on.

When I got home, I found blood in my underwear for the first time in my life. I didn’t tell my mother about it. She had
bought me a box of pads already; I had it in my bathroom cabinet. Telling my mother was so fraught with untenable implications, I could not bring myself to do it, even though I knew I should—what girl doesn’t go running to her mother at the first sign of womanhood?

I didn’t want this. I wanted to be a boy. I didn’t want these breasts, either; not that I had much, but what little I did have freaked me out. Before the onset of adolescence, I’d been safe in my skinny, strong, broad-shouldered body. Now, here was the irrefutable proof that I was not like my father; I was like my mother.

Also, since Jim had come on the scene, I had become aware of the ways in which my mother had always appropriated me, how I’d made sure to have no needs of my own so I’d always be available to her. I was so firmly entrenched in the habit of not asking for anything from my mother, I tried to hide all signs of weakness from her. Grimly, I launched myself into womanhood alone.

Every now and then, Jim or my mother would pull a hairy two-pound zeppelin from their alarmingly productive backyard garden. My mother would chop it up and fold it into a casserole and serve it to us horrified kids for supper. Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and green beans also issued forth from the neat rows by the fence. Those were delicious, but the mealy, seedy, weirdly sticky, and spongily dense zucchini was a new object of loathing. Along with tofu—that chalk-white substance that tasted vaguely of some sort of low-vitality bodily humor and had an appropriately slimy, coagulated texture—it was suddenly everywhere, all the rage. I hated it on first gag.

We were also given new things to snack on: “soy nuts,” toasted, salted soybeans that were crunchy and not too bad, as well as dried banana chips, which were sweet and crunchy and not too bad, either. Freeze-dried apples came along, as soft and chewy as ears, and so did yogurt-covered raisins, carob instead of chocolate, and fruit leather roll-ups. Supposedly, these things were better for us than potato chips and candy, but I suspect they probably weren’t, that they just had the aura of health food that was so trendy all of a sudden.

Food was splitting off into two distinct categories in those days, and parents and kids stood on opposite sides of a widening divide. Kids craved Big Macs and hot apple pies, baloney sandwiches on Wonder bread with mayonnaise and Kraft
cheese slices, Pop-Tarts, and Mountain Dew; whereas our parents championed wholesome grains with vegetables and a baked fillet of fish, homemade carrot cake, and milk. Grownups liked tofu, or pretended to; I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever choose to eat that stuff (to my mother’s credit, she hated tofu; Jim was the one who bought it).

My longing for what I couldn’t have turned out to be a source of inspiration. Maybe because we weren’t allowed to eat junk food or drink pop, maybe because I craved forbidden sugar cereals and potato chips and root beer but couldn’t have them on a daily basis, writing about food gave me a sense of heady power that was in some ways even better than eating the forbidden items in real life. I couldn’t always have what the characters I read about ate, but I could feed my own characters all the things I wasn’t allowed to have.

In eighth grade, I wrote a short novel that might be pegged these days as a YA thriller. The thirteen-year-old heroine, Claudia, and her little brother go into the remote Arizona desert on the heels of their evil band teacher, Mr. Aragones, a kidnapper and possible murderer. After the scary parts are over (Claudia finds a severed arm in a cupboard she’s hiding in, “a dead human arm”), after everything has resolved itself, they end up in a diner, where Claudia orders almost everything on the menu. I remember hungrily listing with the bottomless appetite of pubescence every conceivable thing I myself would have ordered in such a situation—french fries, baked beans, chicken, hamburgers, meat loaf, blueberry pie, ice cream, etc. I wasn’t trying to be funny; I wrote it in a state of vicariously swooning, single-minded earnestness.

My muse for my first novel, which I called
Life Can’t Be a Penguin
, was my eighth-grade crush, a short, stocky boy named Kenny who wore glasses and had bushy brown hair and brown eyes. He sat behind me in Mrs. Rodgers’s social studies class; I passed him chapters of this novel as I wrote it and felt a thrill
when I heard him chuckling as he read the funny parts. He had a crush on a girl named Penny who was far prettier, nicer, and smarter than I was: she got straight A’s and had a lovely, oval face and long, straight, silky blond hair. Penny was sweet and good and perfect, and I was not, but she didn’t crack Kenny up the way I did, so I assured myself that secretly he liked me better. I was sure I would grow up and marry him. He smelled like warm toast and was so comfortable to be around; I could see us as grown-ups in our easy chairs together in front of the TV, eating dinner and chuckling, then going to bed afterward in our twin side-by-side beds like Rob and Laura Petrie. I had no sexual interest in Kenny at all; I just wanted to marry him, which seemed like a completely different thing. What I liked best about him was that he had a crush on someone else. He was unattainable, a challenge.

Kenny and Penny and I were all in the gifted program together, along with bespectacled, bubbly Patty; serious, deep-voiced Judy; a smart-alecky redheaded boy named Chris; and my best school friend, Curtis. The gifted program was a new thing at Simpson, and the teachers hadn’t ironed out the kinks yet, which is to say, they had no idea what to do with us, but they had to do something. Finally, owlish, gruff, old-school Mrs. Rodgers stepped in and proposed a project. And so the seven of us were sent to the cafeteria once a week to brainstorm on a patriotic theme: we were in the early months of 1976, and the country was catching bicentennial fever. In the end, the gifted program kids spent the afternoons doing whatever we felt like, doodling and talking and hanging out, and then scrambled at the end of the year to make a cheesy banner to hang in the cafeteria during the big end-of-school assembly. What this had to do with having high IQs, I do not know: a monkey could have drawn that thing.

That whole year, Curtis and I were inseparable. He was in love with me, I knew because he told me repeatedly, but I
couldn’t return his love, even though he looked like a Slavic prince, broad shouldered, slender, with black, long-lashed eyes and thick glossy black hair and creamy skin, and he was smart and funny. He was too goofy for me to take seriously, too playful and smitten with me—I liked Kenny’s solidity, his husbandly, inscrutable aloofness, his complete lack of interest in me. I liked having to woo him; I liked that he was slightly boring, because it meant I could spice him up. Curtis understood everything I said, got all my jokes, and always seemed to sit next to me during the school day in class, at lunch, even at recess. I never got sick of him, though; we had a lot of fun together. We were collaborating on a science-fiction novel about an exiled princess in a future dystopia. He drew cartoon strips about futuristic androids and interplanetary adventures; I drew one based on the misadventures of a hapless, screwed-up but well-intentioned character named Quigbert with a triangular head and a nerdy suit with short pants. We spent many recesses at our homeroom desks, drawing floor plans of our modern dream houses together. How could I have any romantic interest in someone who was so clearly my soul mate?

My other best friend, Susie, went to a different school. She was the daughter of one of my mother’s psychologist colleagues, and since we were the same age and both played the violin, our parents had set us up. I went over to Susie’s house first, and then she came to mine, and then we were best friends. Every time we had an overnight, we played violin duets, especially the Bach Double Violin Concerto. All the hours and years I’d spent sawing away at Kreutzer, H
ímalý, and Wohlfahrt were finally paying off. Susie and I shared the first stand of the second-violin section in Symphonette, the Phoenix youth orchestra, and were roommates together at the Northern Arizona University summer music camp.