Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (11 page)

My first major crush obliterates most other thoughts whirling through my head, which leads to the next big similarity between me and Tony (as well as a similarity for every adolescent in the world): Tony develops a major crush on his neighbor's sixteen-year-old sister, whose window he can peep into with the binoculars he gets for his thirteenth birthday (his parents are so clueless that they actually believe he wants the binoculars for his new hobby, bird-watching). The sixteen-year-old is nice enough to him but of course not remotely aware of him as anything other than her little brother's little friend. Tony is busily lusting, busily having his first erection, his first wet dream.

My crush is a seventh grader like me, but not in any of my classes. His name is Rob and his last name rhymes with Miglione. Only the first letter is different. I see this as even more reason that we belong together. I am crazy about this boy despite never having said a word to him. He is a slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed boy who has captivated me on sight. I once heard the sound of his voice and spent hours closing my eyes to hear it again.

A girl named Amy who has a few classes with Rob offers to ask him if he likes me. I say yes because I'm twelve, and this is what twelve-year-olds do, as evidenced by the girl in Tony's class (Corky) who is madly in love with him and goes to embarrassing lengths to show it. To Tony, she barely qualifies as a nuisance. That's how little she registers on his radar as a girl. It was important to know that you can, like Corky, love a boy with all your might, and that said boy will not even think of you for a single second of the day, even if you do everything in your twelve-year-old power to get him to notice you. I understand this when Amy reports back that Rob's answer was
no.

I walk around the halls, my heart bursting with something I'm not allowed to talk about. In the cafeteria I see Cara at our table and I break down in sobs like I did on fake Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“I'm really sorry about Rob,” Cara says, squeezing my hand in the girls' bathroom.

And then finally, I say it. “No boy is ever going to like me. My own father doesn't even love me.”

“You don't know that,” Cara says. “I'm sure your father still loves you. He just can't deal or something.”

It feels good to talk. It feels good to know that my story is my own, even if I'm pretty sure I will never see my father again, never hear from him again, as though he never existed at all, like the old me. (I turn out to be right about this, by the way.)

Then Again, Maybe I Won't
said in black and white and gray areas that you can hold on to who you are even when your life is turned upside down and then sticks sideways. I did that without realizing it at the time, and it's thanks to Tony. It's thanks to Judy Blume.

Julie Kenner

When I look back over the course
of my life (not that it has been so very long so far, mind you), three important influences shine crystal bright as if from a beacon: my family, my friends, and the books I read in my youth. Their individual influences ebb and flow, sometimes my family taking precedence, sometimes friends, and sometimes books, mixing like currents in a river so that I'm never quite sure what had the greater impact on me or why; I only feel the influences pulling me along and holding me up.

On occasion, though, I
can
see as well as feel the effect of these influences, and it's interesting to stand back, almost as an observer in your own life, and say, “Yes, this I owe to the books I read or the family I love or the friends I hold dear.”

With regard to the books I write, for example, I owe a huge debt to writers such as Edward Eager, E. Nesbit, and Madeleine L'Engle, who brought magic into my world and made it real. Their work has influenced my own work in so many ways that it would probably be impossible for anyone except a graduate student to analyze and decipher (assuming any graduate student felt inclined to study my books). The positive influence of those books represents a huge debt that I can only hope to pay forward.

But it's to another writer that I owe an even larger debt. Judy Blume. To her I owe not only the intangible imprint that surely paints my own craft but something even more dear: my health, my self-respect, and my confidence in my own imagination and intelligence.

Sounds lofty, doesn't it? But it's true. At the time, I never thought,
Wow, these Judy Blume books sure are keeping me grounded.
But that was in fact the case.

It started simply enough during the summer after my freshman year of high school with a bruise and William Shakespeare. I was fourteen. The bruise was on my thigh, and the play was
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Appropriate, I think, since so much of what happened seemed to be like wading through a dream (not a good dream, mind you, but a dream nonetheless).

All these years later, I don't remember what my exact involvement was with the play other than that I was a crew member and that I was required to slink along the various levels and crawl over and under the stage in order to place and retrieve an assortment of props. I used to fantasize à la Sally J. Freedman that one of the actors would drop out or lose her voice, and the director would be in a tizzy, wondering who could take over. And since I had been there through all the rehearsals and have an excellent memory, I would stand up and say, “I can do it.”

The director, of course, would be concerned. I was (and am) shy, and that was certainly no secret. But since she had no other choice, she would give me the part. And I, of course, would overcome my fear and excel, garnering rave reviews and being discovered by a Hollywood agent, who would whisk me away to become the Next Great Star. In the process, that pesky shyness would vanish. Life would be grand.

In case you're wondering, this never happened. But the fantasies never stopped. I'd been living in a fantasy world all my life, and I can remember being thrilled when I read
Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself.
There was a girl like me, despite the different era and the different cultures. Judy Blume and Sally J. gave me permission to lose myself in those fantasies, and I have been doing just that ever since.

During my freshman summer, though, I was limited to that one Hollywood fantasy. I was too busy listening for cues and doing my stage job to lose myself any more deeply in my imagination. Not at first, anyway.

The summer play was being rehearsed and performed in an outdoor venue in Austin, Texas. That means, to anyone not familiar with central Texas, that I spent my time sweating in shorts and tank tops, thankful that I was on the crew and not one of the actors forced to wear yards and yards of thick muslin, tights, and velvet.

One day, after slinking and crawling around the set, a friend noticed a bruise on my thigh. I didn't think much about it—I'd been banging around the stage—and went on about my life. (Later, when I reread
Deenie
after knowing the true cause of those bruises, the similarity struck me: Deenie had been told her posture was “off” by the modeling agency, but that hardly caused a life revelation, as she seemed perfectly normal.)

A few days later, the bruise was larger, and there were others. Each had a hard spot underneath, and the original bruise had expanded to about the size of a baseball. It even protruded somewhat from my skin. Frankly, I looked a bit as if one of those tennis ball-serving machines had spewed forth hundreds of balls, each whacking me on my thighs and calves and occasionally on my arms. I was a mess. And when my friends began to express worry, I realized that I was also scared.

I did what I always did when thrust into a scary situation—I fantasized my way through it. This time, though, the scary situation seemed more real. I wasn't faced with giving an oration in front of twenty-five people or even auditioning for the school play. This time, I was faced with a body I didn't understand, doing things that didn't make sense. Bruises, I knew, were supposed to appear after you banged against something. They weren't supposed to appear out of nowhere. Something was wrong, and I distinctly remember turning for comfort to my own imagination and the familiar friends who lived in my books.

I think I reread every Judy Blume novel on my bright yellow bookcase over the next few days, but the Blume character who gave me the most comfort was Sally J. I'd first read the book several years before, and though I'd moved on to much more complicated texts (that summer, I was reading several of Shakespeare's plays along with
Crime and Punishment
and several Edith Hamilton books on mythology),
Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself
drew me in, giving me permission to lose myself in possible scenarios about the odd things going on with my body. Sally J. was a friend; we understood each other. And when my fantasies started turning dark with thoughts of mysterious illnesses that would erase my life, I knew that she (whose happy fantasies had ultimately been tainted by the horror of the Holocaust) would understand.

Like Sally J., I made up scenarios in my head. And my friends helped me act them out. In our case, though, we acted them out in reality, casting ourselves as brilliant doctors with a mysterious case to solve. (My mother has always been physician-phobic, and while she was aware that my legs were somewhat bruised, I was careful to not let her see the full extent. Stupid? Yes. But I had the foolish confidence of youth and was certain that I could solve this mystery, both in real life and in my fantasies.)

With my friends Kathy and Cindy at my side, we traipsed to the library and hauled down medical texts, reading about blood and bruises, and ultimately deciding that my blood wasn't clotting properly. This was, in fact, correct, but our self-prescribed treatment—vitamin K as recommended by the skinny college-aged kid at the original Whole Foods Market on Lamar Boulevard—was both foolish and naive. And not just in retrospect; I knew it at the time. But I was a scared kid, determined that my fantasies would become reality. I should have known better. Sally J. had to live in the real world despite her fantasies, and so did I.

That lesson came more swiftly than I would have liked, simply because the largest of the bruises kept on expanding. What had once been as large as a baseball was now the size of a Texas grapefruit. My theater friends—who saw me in nothing but shorts—were concerned.
I
was concerned. And I knew I couldn't hide it from my mom any longer. Suddenly, I found myself in the doctor's office, faced with scary words like “specialist” and “hematologist.” Words that were all the more scary, since I knew my mom's tendency to hold out going to the doctor until the last possible minute. Clearly, I must have hit that minute.

Something, I knew, was wrong with me. I just didn't know what. And in the days before my appointment with the hematologist, I remember pulling down
Deenie.
I'd read the book several times before and loved it. But I can't say that I'd ever fully empathized with Deenie.

Now, though, I did. And I wanted the comfort of reading about someone else who'd looked into the dark unknown of a medical issue and come out of it okay. I spent hours curled up on the couch, ignoring schoolwork and taking comfort in Deenie's nervousness when she knows that she has to go see the doctor but hasn't yet had the appointment. And, yes, I took comfort in knowing that she was cured by wearing a brace. She wasn't going to die; she just needed a treatment. So there I sat, miles and years and pages away from my friend Deenie, and hoped for a simple prescription. Five pills, I thought, and I'd be fine.

Needless to say, I wasn't blessed with my hoped-for outcome. Instead, I ended up undergoing a painful medical test and then being at the mercy of a doctor who apparently believed that a young girl had no brains whatsoever since he essentially avoided my questions (like Deenie's doctor often did) or patronized me (like Deenie's doctor often did).

What in fact happened was a very long wait in the waiting room followed by an even longer wait in the examining room. Between the two waits, a nurse drew my blood. After the second wait, a distracted doctor came in, examined me without talking, pulled my mother into the hall, and then returned to tell me to pull my jeans down and lie on my stomach. I wanted to ask my mom what was going on, but she looked too scared, and the doctor himself was too scary.

So I did as I was told. And about ten minutes later, my backside had been numbed by a local anesthesia and a needle was sliding down through my body, through my bone, and into my marrow (which, thank you very much, was not at all affected by the anesthesia). The whole thing hurt like hell, and I cried and cried, empathy for Deenie growing and growing as I remembered her mortification at being fitted for her brace and my own disgust that no one would tell her what was going on.

No one told me what was going on, either, at least not until the test results came back. Here, my memory fails. It may have been weeks that I waited. It might only have been minutes. To me, it seemed a lifetime. But when the results did come back, my mother was called out of the room and given the news, and the relief in her eyes when she returned told me plenty.

The fear, I learned later, was that I had leukemia. The bone marrow test confirmed that I didn't have cancer, and after a few more tests, my significantly-less-than-verbose doctor rendered his diagnosis: idiopathic thrombocytopenia purpura.

And that is?
I asked.

A blood disorder,
I was told.

Not exactly the wealth of information I was looking for, and so, like Deenie investigating her own scoliosis, I went on an information hunt of my own. In today's world, this would be no problem. Back then, that meant schlepping to the main branch of the public library and the science library at the University of Texas, then poring through books and trying to understand the medical lingo. Ultimately—through a combination of my own research, questions to the nurse, and specific questions to the doctor fed through my mom—I learned that my ITP was an autoimmune disorder in which my own body made antibodies against my platelets, essentially attacking them. The cause was unknown, thus the term “idiopathic.” I learned that the disorder was chronic, that it might go away when I got older, that it was the result of my body filtering out my antibody-covered platelets through my spleen, that platelets are what makes your blood clot, and that the bruises on my legs were blood clots that had formed very, very slowly, having to rely on my minimal supply of platelets to do the work normally done by a whole crew of the little guys. Worst of all, I learned that without treatment, I could hemorrhage. Possibly to death. Since that didn't sound good, I welcomed whatever treatment came my way.

Like Deenie, I had some answers. And like her, I wasn't crazy about them, but I was happy to finally be informed.

I still hoped that the treatment would be a simple shot or prescription. I also remember thinking about the book and about the brace Deenie had to wear. I hated wearing braces on my teeth, so I was glad my illness was in my blood. Surely no one at my school would see that I was ill. Like Deenie, I first anticipated that I could keep everything a secret. After all, when the prescription made my bruises go away, all the evidence would be hidden. (In point of fact, it took over a year for the largest clot to dissipate and fade.)

Again, though, it turned out that I had more in common with my literary friend than I'd anticipated. My prescription was for massive doses of prednisone taken over a long period of time (years, it turned out, since my ITP did not correct itself quickly as happens in many cases). And since my less-than-verbose doctor didn't warn me or my mother about the side effects of the drug (especially in such large doses), I didn't expect the acne that popped up on my face and back. I didn't expect my periods to stop. I didn't expect to develop cataracts or have to guzzle Mylanta at the ripe old age of fourteen. And most of all, I didn't anticipate the effects of salt. My face soon ballooned to the point where I was unrecognizable. Simply a round, doughy Pillsbury girl. And if you think that is fun in high school, please think again.

Like Deenie, I hated the way I looked. Unlike Deenie, I couldn't have taken off my doughy, round face under any circumstances. I was still me, though, and I told myself that my friends wouldn't care. Deenie had learned that, right? When she'd decided to keep her brace on at the party instead of changing into the cute outfit she'd brought with her, she was trusting her friends to be there for
her.
And her trust paid off.