Patterns #2
My therapist says she’s detected a pattern–a predictable reoccurrence of breakdowns in communication. “We have to uncover the source,” she tells me, “or you will carry the pattern with you for the rest of your life.”
As she continues to talk, I wink at the floral wallpaper and consider the tragedy of a broken zipper. The way things work as they’re meant to until, one day, they don’t. People are easier to replace than repair. We pick out new partners and build new houses on broken zipper burial sites, and have nightmares of being chewed to death by metal teeth.
Last month, my therapist’s wallpaper was different. She thinks I don’t remember; but nothing’s more permanent than the memory of plaid.
The Cocktail Waitress
There was a girl, a pretty cocktail waitress with chin-length brown hair, dressed in the jet-beaded, flapper-style dress, with the words: “Dare to awaken.” tattooed in typewriter font between her shoulder blades.
I watched her standing with her back to the corner where someone had vomited; she was waiting for a man with a mop to come and clean it up before the other bar patrons noticed and were put off their $13 cocktails.
She appeared irritated, and understandably so. . I, too, would find frustration in the task of guarding vomit. But more than irritated, she looked bored—not just in the moment, the place and situation she presently found herself in, but profoundly and irretrievably bored.
Her big, dark eyes were empty: she wasn’t daydreaming, wasn’t imagining herself somewhere better—not sitting on a beach near the equator, digging her toes into the warm, damp sand; not standing out on a balcony, looking out on an entire city lit from within its buildings; not lying in bed beside a man who knew that gently sweeping his fingertips against the backside of her arm helped her to fall asleep. She imagined none of this, and nothing else.
She stood there, the people around her drinking and laughing, pushing buttons on their cell phones and watching the front door each time it opened or closed.
This must be what irony truly is, I thought. It isn’t clever or forgiving or just, but tragic and irrevocable. It is a girl with vacant eyes, standing amidst the pack of sleeping fools, the chance for awakening a vague and distant daydream.
Diorama
In my new neighborhood, people leave their curtains open at night so you can look in their windows and admire their color schemes and sconces and $200 pieces of coral used to accentuate their coffee tables and bookshelves.
Everyone locks their doors but leaves their windows gaping like mouths, so you can hear exactly what they’re watching on television as you walk by.
Women weep openly from second and third stories, waiting to be seen or heard.
Men pace naked in their street level living rooms, unable to see beyond their own reflections in the windows.
In my second floor walk-up, I leave my own curtains open and sit by the window as I listen to voicemail–no discernible voices or personalized messages, just background noise recorded at an outdoor concert many miles away.
3:21am
I was pulled from sleep by the voice of the man next to me saying, “Sarah, you’re grinding your teeth.”
Perhaps it was the tropical heat hanging over the bed, or the mind-fogging sleepiness and jet lag, but for a moment, I thought I was somewhere else, in another bed, lying beside a distinctly different man, myself a slightly different girl.
Later the next day, I recalled similar experiences from childhood. When having sleepovers at friends’ houses, occasionally I would be jarred from sleep in the middle of the night and for one stretching moment, have absolutely no idea where I was or how I came to be there. The feeling in this moment is at once strangely pleasant and completely terrifying, like feeling nostalgic and homesick for a place that no longer exists, if it was really ever there to begin with.
Keep Off The Grass
“That goddamned dog shit on our lawn again,” my father announced as he came through the door, dropping his briefcase beside the kitchen counter.
“Is that any way to greet your family?” my mother asked from behind the stove.
“Daddy!” my sister squealed and waddled up to him, stark naked, and clutched his leg.
“Does this kid ever put on clothes?” Dad asked.
“She refuses,” Mom replied, waving her hand over the pot roast she had just removed from the oven. “It’s just a phase.”
“Let’s hope so,” Dad said and reached down to ruffle Laura’s hair.
“How was your day, honey?” Mom asked.
“It was fine until I was coming up the driveway and saw that pile of shit.”
“Don’t say shit. Say poop,” Mom said.
“Poop!” Laura cried, laughing as Dad tried to free himself from her grasp.
For the last several months, the topic of shit, or poop, was always a part of the dinner conversation. Our next door neighbors, the Wagners, had been letting their Great Dane, Biscuit, use the bathroom at the edge of our yard, every day, and would not pick up after him. The only reason that there weren’t several hundred piles of shit lining our driveway was that my father went out every night to remove them, only to find a fresh one the next day.
“I’m losing my mind,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore.”
“Well, why don’t you say something,” Mom offered, same as she did every night. “The Wagners are nice people. I’m sure if they knew they were driving you crazy, they would do something about it.”
“It’s too late for that,” Dad said. “This has gone on for far too long.”
“And whose fault is that,” Mom muttered under her breath.
The fact is, my father could have said something and the Wagners would have most certainly curbed their dog. They were nice people, and they were older—probably in their 70s—so it was likely that they didn’t understand that their dog’s constant use of our front yard was the kind of inexcusable act my father made it out to be. They weren’t doing it out of spite or malice, though my father had his theories.
“Did we give them a Christmas gift last year?” he asked before loosening his tie and taking a seat with Laura and I at the dinner table.
“Popcorn balls, remember? You were the one who walked them over.”
Dad scanned his memory before nodding definitively. “Right. Well what about that dinner party we had last month. Did anyone park in front of their driveway? Should we have invited them over?”
“Give it a rest, Army,” Mom said, bringing the pot roast to the table and taking her seat.
That Saturday morning, I woke to find my father drinking coffee and reading the newspaper in our front living room—the formal living room—which we never used unless our out-of-town grandparents were visiting. The furniture there was stiff and uncomfortable, and breakable things lined the walls. My sister and I were instructed to stay out of that room unless we were under strict adult supervision.
My father spotted me coming down the stairs. “Hey, kiddo. Come in here and sit with me.”
I joined him on the sofa that faced the front window, clasping my hands together in my lap. I didn’t like that room. I felt certain that if I made one wrong move I would go careening into the wall, sending china and crystal flying and crashing into shards all around me.
“What are you doing in here?” I asked. “Let’s go into the TV room. The couches are more comfortable in there.”
“No no no,” Dad said, lowering his paper and peering out the window. “You have to help me keep watch. I’ve been waiting for about an hour now, but I’m reading a very interesting article, so I need you to take over for a bit. Keep your eyes peeled.”
“For what?” I looked out across our front yard and could see all the way down to our mailbox at the corner of the driveway.
“For that damn dog, “ Dad said. “I want to catch him in the act.”
In my groggy state I had forgotten that my father was a man consumed by an obsession. And now he had drawn me into his madness.
“Just keep watching,” he said. “I’ll be done in a minute, then you can go watch your cartoons.”
The loyal daughter that I was, I sat on the edge of my seat and stared out the window at the empty lawn. A few cars passed lazily on the street, but nothing more. I thought of calling out to my mother, but the last thing I wanted was to redirect my father’s wrath onto myself. As long as he was focused on the neighbors, their dog, and the piles of shit on our lawn, I was just a good little daughter helping Daddy with his work.
Several more minutes passed, and just as I was about to tell my father I wanted to give up the watch, there came Mr. Wagner, rounding the corner with Biscuit, his massive, gray dog.
“Look!” I shrieked, and Dad threw down his paper and stared out the window.
“Well what do you know,” he said, almost surprised that our vigilance had paid off.
Mr. Wagner walked Biscuit right onto our lawn just beyond the mailbox, and looked around for witnesses before nodding at his dog. The great beast buckled his legs and hunched up his back, and right there before our eyes, released a turd the size of my sister’s head.
“I don’t believe it!” Dad cried. “Right there, in broad daylight!” His eyes were wild, his face nearly touching the windowpane.
“And did you see Mr. Wagner?” I said. “It was like he actually told Biscuit to do it right there in our yard!”
“That man’s got some nerve.” Dad shook his head in disgust.
It felt good, egging my father on, fueling his rage. “Yeah, some nerve,” I replied.
When Biscuit was done with his business, Mr. Wagner patted him on the head and they continued on their way down the street.
“He has no consideration,” Dad said, and I assumed he wasn’t talking about the dog. “No consideration at all. You girls play in that yard, for Christ’s sake! I know you’re smart, but God knows what Laura would do if she found one of those turds.”
He was right. I was a terribly bright girl, precocious you might say, but Laura was capable of unspeakable things. “She would probably try to play with it,” I suggested, and watched the color drain from my father’s face.
He stood from his seat and took one last gulp of his coffee. “You’re right,” he said solemnly. “Something has to be done.”
He turned and walked out of the room, and I followed him into the kitchen where my mother was cooking eggs.
“And where are you going?” she asked Dad as he grabbed his keys and headed for the door.
“I’ll be back. You stay here,” he pointed at me.
“I’ll keep watch just in case he comes back,” I said. I knew it was unlikely, but I felt useful standing guard. After all, I had been the one to spot the criminal act in the first place. My father was in need of my keen vision.
“Good idea,” he said, and left the house.
“You stay put,” my mother said after he was gone. “Your breakfast is almost ready, and I don’t want you spoiling your appetite by staring at some pile of poop.”
My father had been gone for over an hour when I was stirred from my cartoon-induced stupor by the sound of a hammer banging in the front yard.
My mother heard it too. “What’s all that racket?” she said.
Along with Laura, naked as a jaybird, we walked out the front door to find my father at the edge of the yard hammering a signpost into the lawn.
“What on earth are you doing?” Mom yelled as we approached him.
“Quiet!” he said. “And watch where you step. I haven’t cleaned up the last pile yet.”
We joined him at the foot of the yard and looked down at the large, obtrusive sign. KEEP OFF THE GRASS, it said.
“What’s it say, Daddy?” Laura asked, squinting at the letters.
“Well, sweetie,” Dad began in a gentle voice, “it says to please keep your dogs from pooping in our yard so that our children might play in peace.”
“Poop!” Laura screamed and went waddling off toward the house.
Mom pursed her lips and looked sideways at Dad.
“You would have saved yourself a lot of trouble if you’d have just gone over and talked to them,” she said. “Now we have this tacky sign in our yard.” She walked off after Laura.
I looked up at my father and saw the sweat trickling down his cheek, a broad, satisfied smile spreading across his face. He put his arm around my shoulders and we admired his handiwork.
“Good work, Dad,” I said.
“Yep,” he said. “That outta do it.”
The next morning, I sat watching television with my father and sister in the den when my mother returned home from the grocery store.
“Well, it looks like your little sign didn’t work,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” Dad asked, looking up from the television.
“I was coming up the driveway, and there was Bill Wagner and Biscuit, leaving us another little present in the same spot as usual, right in front of your sign.” Her tone was flip and casual. She shared none of my father’s anger, and this seemed to upset him more.
“What?!” he cried. “Where the hell does that man get off? He’s lucky I don’t go over there and—“
“And what?” Mom cut him off, “Post a sign in his yard?”
“What did you do?” I asked her.
“Well, I rolled down my window and told him we would appreciate it if he kept Biscuit off the lawn. I reminded him that we have two small girls, and we can’t always be worried that one of them is going to stumble onto a pile of poop.”
“Poop!” Laura screamed, digging a finger into her exposed belly button.
“And…?” my father pressed.
“And he apologized and said he would have Biscuit do his business elsewhere from now on. He was perfectly lovely about it and told me to pass on his apology to you, as well.”
“That’s it?” Dad asked.
“That’s it,” Mom said, placing the bags of groceries on the kitchen counter. “Now we can get on with our lives.”
My father would never say anything, but I knew he was slightly humiliated by my mother’s actions. For all the time he had spent fuming, she had solved the problem with a little Southern charm and direct honesty. And though my mother would never say anything either, I knew she was the smallest bit pleased with herself for taking matters into her own hands and dealing with a problem that my father’s passive aggression would only enhance.
A few days later, safe in our front yard again, Dad and I were tossing around a softball when Mr. Wagner walked up our driveway carrying a metal tin.
“Hello Army, Sarah,” he said, smiling warmly.
“Bill!” Dad said, too loud. “How the hell are you?” They shook each other’s hands.
“Just fine, I guess,” he said and handed my father the tin. “I had my wife make y’all some cookies.”
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that,” Dad said, his voice as gentle as silk.
“I just wanted to apologize,” Mr. Wagner said, looking my father in the eye. “For well, you know…” He trailed off, chuckling, and my father laughed along with him.
“Don’t mention it,” Dad said. “Really, no harm done.”
Don’t mention it? No harm done? Where was the fury that had been building in my father for months? I would have been less surprised to see him punch Mr. Wagner in the face.
“It was just thoughtless of me,” Mr. Wagner continued and looked in my direction. “Especially with your girls, and all.”
“Honestly, don’t worry about it,” Dad said, the rage I had grown used to seeing in his face replaced by magnanimity.
“Wish you hadn’t gone to any trouble with that sign, though. You should have just come over said something.”
Dad paused for a moment then stuttered, “Well, you know…I didn’t…We weren’t sure it was your dog. I mean, we love Biscuit, honestly, and what with so many dogs in the neighborhood and everything, it really could have been anyone.” He laughed nervously.
“Right,” Mr. Wagner said and smiled. “Well, I hope you enjoy the cookies. And Sarah, you’re welcome to come over and play basketball anytime. The kids are all grown and gone, and that old hoop isn’t getting any use.”
“Thanks,” I said, still skeptical of this man my father had held a grudge against for so long.
“Take care,” he said and shook my father’s hand again.
“You too,” Dad said. “Thanks for the cookies. And tell Betsy I said hello.”
Dad and I watched him make his way back down the driveway before we resumed our game. I expected my father to say something mean or sarcastic once Mr. Wagner was out of earshot, but he said nothing except, “Softball season’s coming up soon. I think it’s about time we got you a new glove.”
Foodie
My mother had always considered herself something of a gourmet. She bought the monthly food magazines and tore through them all in one sitting, dog-earing articles about clarified butter or the newest braising techniques. On our trips to the bookstore, I could always find her sitting in the cooking aisle, knee-deep in new cookbooks she didn’t yet have stuffed into the shelves at home. Instead of Wuthering Heights or Sense and Sensibility, Sonoma Dining and Thomas Keller’s Kitchen were my mother’s literature of choice.
Whenever she would drag me along for a trip to Williams-Sonoma or Sur La Table, I would recognize that same glazed-over expression on her face that I would get, even as a child, when standing in front of the handbag display at Neiman Marcus.
“Silicon spreading knives!” she would gasp, clutching me to her side. “Do you know how long I’ve wanted one of these?!”
No, I didn’t, nor could I fully understand why.
My mother has always been an excellent cook, as far back as I can remember. It must have been hard for her, those twenty years in Knoxville, Tennessee where green bean casserole and chocolate icebox pie passed for extravagant eating. But even in a town where the only lettuce was iceberg, my mother happily cooked five-star meals for her family every night, with what gourmet ingredients she could find. Raised as a food snob, I knew at a young age the difference between béarnaise and beurre blanc. I could appreciate the complex flavor of a balsamic reduction sauce over a fresh, ripe strawberry. While friends had Chips-Ahoy for an afternoon snack, I had homemade biscotti.
Such an upbringing did have its drawbacks. At school, I found it difficult to choke down the rubbery chicken nuggets and canned vegetables in the cafeteria when I was being served molasses marinated pork loin and lemon zested mint peas at home.
When I was six years old, I threw a fit at a friend’s house when her parents served us Hamburger Helper for dinner. My mother sat me down and explained that not everyone ate the way we did, and there was nothing wrong with that at all.
“Hamburger Helper can be very tasty,” she offered. “Did you even try it?”
“They put Velveeta on it,” I countered, knowing the very mention of this substandard cheese would get to her.
Mt mother winced quickly, then wiped her face with a smile. “You should try everything once. All true gourmets do.”
Apparently, Hamburger Helper was much more typical as a dinner food than I thought. Whenever friends would come over to my house for dinner, their eyes would register panic at the sight of rosemary lamb chops and leek-gruyere tartlets. “Do I have to eat this?” they would always ask. My mother starting buying frozen pizzas whenever I had sleepovers.
After we left Knoxville, the food world opened up a little bit for my mother. There were more fine dining experiences to be had in San Antonio, and even more in ritzy, cosmopolitan Dallas, where we visited my grandparents frequently.
To this day, some of the clearest and most pleasant memories I have of my mother are of seeing her across a white linen tabletop, eyes lit up over a menu, anticipating the shared experience of an exciting trip for the taste buds. It was always a treat to go out and splurge on a meal that cost as much as a month’s worth of groceries, and my mother always took it as her chance to show off for anyone within hearing distance.
She grilled the waiter on menu specifics. “Now, it says here that there are sweet onions in the remoulade. Do you know if those are Vidalia or Bermuda onions?”
The waiter rushed back to the kitchen for an answer to my mother’s slightly inane question. Appearing a minute later he offered, “They’re Bermuda onions, ma’am.”
My mother clucked her tongue and nodded, throwing her hands up as if she’d won a bet. “See, that’s what I thought!”
As soon as the waiter was gone, she whispered to the rest of the table, “Vidalias are sweeter. A little milder, too. I wouldn’t order that dish, if I were you.”
At the restaurants, my mother took the opportunity to demonstrate her food knowledge in a more public arena than our home, even if few people cared to listen. It was here that my mother first taught me the concept of name-dropping, as well.
“Your dessert menu is exquisite,” she’d gush to the patient waiter. “You know, I took a class with Thomas Keller—“
“Oh, he’s great.”
“And he told me that the pastry chef here used to be his sous chef.”
“Really? Would you like to come back and meet him?”
My mother would emerge from the kitchen a few minutes later, absolutely delighted with herself. “They’re going to send out some desserts that aren’t on the menu for us to sample.”
If she especially enjoyed a meal, she would ask the waiter for a copy of the menu. If he declined, she would enlist me or my sister to slip one into her purse when no one was looking. We found this particularly humiliating, but always shared in her excitement afterward if we were able to get away with it.
“I’ll have to experiment,” she would say later, “but I’m gonna figure out how they made that ganache.”
I don’t think the restaurants ever had to worry about my mother poaching their recipes and selling them off to competitors. Her emulation was purely out of her love for food, and her creations (borrowed or not) never got much further than the mouths of family members and close friends.
My mother finally took her skills to cooking school, the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, when she was forty eight years old and my sister and I had left the nest. It was there that her ego was deflated a little. She was no longer the star chef she always thought she was, and she certainly wasn’t the youngest.
“I feel like a backwoods Betty Crocker!” She told me one night over the phone, the lonely, middle-aged, homesick co-ed sitting in her dorm room. “There are people here your age who’ve worked under celebrity chefs in New York City.” I pictured these so-called celebrity chefs wielding whisks and spatulas as the paparazzi chased them up the streets.
“Show them your crème brulee,” I suggested. She did make a killer crème brulee.
“That’s a custard dish, Sarah!” she hissed, as if I should have known I was being insulting. “They’ll laugh me right out of the kitchen!”
Even after much attempted encouragement, my mother could never again shake the idea that she wasn’t, in fact, the country’s best undiscovered celebrity chef. She graduated from cooking school, and instead of taking that degree into the work force, she sat at home, collecting new recipes and experimenting by herself in the kitchen.
“I’ve started to archive my recipes,” she reported, after I asked her one afternoon what she had been up to. “If I see one I like, I just clip it and put it in its coordinating binder. I’ve got a whole system.”
“You just…collect them?”
“Yeah. That takes up pretty much all my time now.”
My mother had never worked a paid day in her life. Before she and my father split up, she never had to. She had honed her cooking skills as a housewife, a mother. Her greatest joy was to feed her family; I don’t think she ever really considered where she would go with a cooking degree. So perhaps, faced with the reality of things, the fact that she might never get beyond her own kitchen, she sat collecting recipes and lost the nerve to try.
Without a full-time job, my mother’s one and only big-time cooking gig every year is when she prepares a feast for the whole family at Christmas in Dallas. No one asks her to do this. Each year, just after Thanksgiving, she calls up her parents and volunteers herself to be in charge of feeding thirty-four people on Christmas Day. Each year, the day after Christmas, she complains of swollen feet and a sore back and swears she will never do it again.
She works in a frenzy around my grandparents’ kitchen for two days in a row leading up to the big event, always attempting to outdo the meal she prepared the year before. She’s a cursing, sweating, furious ball of culinary energy. No one is allowed near the stove or oven. No one is allowed to touch anything. Last year, my mother missed the Christmas Eve party because she refused to peel herself away from the kitchen.
“I can’t leave my sauces,” she said.
Just before eleven pm, I brought her the double grande cappuccino she requested and sat with her in the kitchen, me still in my party dress, and she in her chef whites and rubber clogs, rubbing her lower back. In front of us, all the food was spread out on the kitchen counter. There were Cornish game hens, orange glazed carrots, chestnut squash, scalloped potatoes, and the Buche Noelle that was only half-assembled. She still had several dishes in the oven.
“Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” I asked.
My mother looked at me and smiled weakly. “Because I love it. I love cooking for my family.”
She would never tell me how she truly felt, but she didn’t have to say anything. She missed her chance for a dream that developed too late. She would never go out there and hunt down the life she wanted, because she had already lived a life she loved. So she cooked for her family because it was all she had. She was happy to do it because it reminded her, in the best sense, of what could have been.
The next day, the thirty-four of us sat down to the feast my mother had prepared for us. There were handwritten menus and calligraphy place cards. The first course arrived in choreographed time, followed by the second, the third, the fourth. Our usually rowdy crowd fell silent over plates; the food commanded every sense’s attention. Between courses, we could only talk about the food.
“What was in that soup?”
“Have you ever tasted anything so exquisite?”
“She’s outdone herself this time!”
We all could have been sitting in the fanciest restaurant, but looking around the room, I could see these people were experiencing something more than a delicious meal. Watching people’s eyes and mouths as they discussed the food, it was pride I saw. Pride because the woman who had created this food belonged to all of us. We were given the joy of this meal that no other people, no stranger patrons in some formal restaurant, would ever get. We were her family, her most loyal customers, her biggest fans.
After we had all stuffed ourselves on every last morsel of food, my mother, in the monogrammed chef’s hat my sister and I had given her, emerged from the kitchen to check on her patrons. The room burst into applause for the brilliant chef, and my mother beamed.
Late Bloomer
Most of my girlfriends became “women” in the seventh or eighth grade, with the exception of a couple who made the transformation in sixth grade. I sat by and watched as, one by one, each of them announced she had gotten her period. They all feigned disgust or embarrassment, but I knew the truth. They were exhilarated, proud. And if word got out to the boys, all the better. Somehow, finding out that a girl bled for five days every month made her all the more attractive.
I waited for my time to come, and when I was the only one left without a purse full of Tampax, I started to worry that my time would never come, so I faked it. I didn’t offer up any substantial proof, like Ashley Martin, who got her first period in the middle of science class and ran to the nurse’s office with a small, red stain on the back of her skirt, but I made sure everyone knew my time had come. Even at the age of thirteen, I was a seasoned liar. I kept an impeccable façade. Whenever anyone ran out of tampons or sanitary napkins or Midol, I was the first to offer help. I kept buying them, and since I wasn’t using them myself, I always had some extras on hand. The only other girl who never ran out of supplies was Missy Clark, who I suspected was also a faker, but since I didn’t want to expose my own fraudulence by questioning her standing, my suspicions were never confirmed.
Faking menstruation certainly had its perks. Besides finally feeling included in what all of my friends were going through, I could be crabby without giving a reason, and I could fake cramps in the middle of science class and go lie down on the couch in the guidance counselor’s office for a nice nap. I shared in the trials and tribulations of my fellow-mentruators, shaking my head in solidarity whenever someone complained of lower back pain or bloating. “I know. Don’t you hate that?”
In the sixth grade, the consciousness of our class shifted slightly, and everyone found out about sex. We all knew what it was, were either fascinated or disgusted by the idea of it, and couldn’t talk about anything else. This was the year that Laura Hamilton started at our school. She was an Amazon blonde, a woman in a girl’s uniform. She transferred to our school from an exotic, far-off place called Missoula. She was popular before everyone even knew her name, becoming the newest addition to the growing league of over-developed eleven-year-olds.
My mom would whisper, “Look at those breasts! And what is she, five-eight?! That girl could pass for twenty one. That’s just not right. What are her parents feeding her?!”
My mother’s constant gawking at my classmates’ endowments did little for my self-esteem. I was the runt in a class full of shiny, trotting purebreds. I was so uncomfortable with myself, physically, that I overcompensated by being funny. I was the class clown. I deflected everyone’s attention away from my appearance by making them laugh, and somehow because of it, I managed to claim a spot in the cool crowd. Best of all, Laura Hamilton was my best friend.
Deep down, Laura was wacky and strange like me, but somehow got gifted with a knockout body and perfect face. At the height of it, Laura’s and mine was the best kind of friendship. We had great times together, just being kids, before we got caught up in worrying what everyone else thought about us. I could forget for a while that I wasn’t as pretty or chesty as the other girls. And Laura could forget that she was. Still, sometimes I couldn’t believe that this girl had picked me as her best friend when she could have just stuck with the other early bloomers, who seemed to prefer to travel in packs. I was holding my breath and waiting for the day that she would be lured away and ditch me.
One night, during a sleepover at Laura’s house, I noticed her underwear. We were in her room, changing into our pajamas, when I caught sight of the lovely, silky thing she had fashioned across her chest. I, myself, had only a Cross Your Heart training bra, ratty, cotton, and white, which I had begged my mother to buy me but didn’t really need in the first place. I saw Laura’s bra, which was surely not for training, with its silky straps, under-wire cups and modern, floral design, and I knew I had to have one. Even if no one else ever saw it, I knew that simply having it would make me better.
Most of the money my parents spent on me for the next couple of years, excluding school supplies and food, was on bra and panty sets from Victoria’s Secret. On our trips to the mall, that is where I would head with a group of my girlfriends. And even though all of them had breasts, and I didn’t, I was determined to prove that it was just as much my right to be there as it was theirs. I made sure I had the fanciest bras, the silkiest panties. I even turned my own mother onto Victoria’s Secret after she got fed-up with the fact that her pre-pubescent daughter had sexier lingerie than she did.
Instead of academics or sports, breasts and sex became the only competitions at school worth winning. Laura Hamilton wore a 34B, so she sat a few rungs higher on the social ladder than Caitlin Walter, who clocked in at a measly 34A. I could only dream of filling out an A-cup, but I certainly didn’t advertise that fact. I bought the fancy satin 32As, and just hoped that no one would notice the bunchy, half-full cups in the locker room when we all changed for gym class.
“Is that a new pattern?” Chloe Brenner asked one day as we were changing back into our school uniforms.
“Yeah, isn’t it cute?” I asked, pleased with myself.
All the other girls turned around to look.
“Oh, I just got that one, too.” Caitlin Walter said. “What size is yours?”
“34A,” I lied.
“It looks a little big.”
Besides cup sizes, bases became another way to mark social standing, and I don’t mean baseball. First base was kissing, second was breast action, third was “fingering” (which as I understood it, consisted of a boy darting his finger in and out of a girl’s underpants for no particular reason), and home run was, well, a home run. Those were the rules, and we all revered them as such.
The girls who had grown breasts got boyfriends as a result, and most of them hit first and second base in no time. Laura’s boyfriend, Adam Brown, was a big meathead who everyone thought was cute, and he didn’t like me because I was small and funny and mocked him with words he couldn’t understand. Whenever we were around each other, he would always look at me through his half-open eyes, constantly suspicious of my presence.
I would find Laura and Adam together, leaning against her locker after lunch.
“What’s up, guys?” I would ask.
“What do you want?” Adam would counter, slit-eyed. Laura never stuck up for me when Adam was around.
“Oh, nothing. Hey Adam, I just ran into Coach Wester, and he wanted me to tell you that you left your jockstrap in his classroom after practice yesterday.”
Laura would laugh and Adam would turn purple.
I had a feeling that he was just as jealous of me as I was of him, although he probably never worried that I would shove him into a bush when we walked to the school auditorium every morning.
Much to my dismay, Laura began spending most of her time with Adam, which left little time for me. Whenever we had sleepovers, she would talk to him on the phone for hours, and I would be shut out of her bedroom, and left to watch movies with her parents in the den. It soon dawned on me that I would need to get a boyfriend of my own in order to keep my best friend from slipping away. If having a boyfriend was important to her, than it would have to become important for me, as well.
I finally got one late into the seventh grade. His name was Adam Bright, and conveniently he was a good friend of Adam Brown’s, although he wasn’t a meathead or a jerk. He listened to Metallica and wore a chain on his wallet, and I don’t know if I liked him for him or because he was my ticket back in with Laura, but either way, it was fun while it lasted, which was a solid two months.
Laura and I and Adam and Adam would go on double dates to the mall, to TGIFriday’s, to putt-putt golf, and everywhere else. Adam Brown even softened up to me a little after I jumped on the boyfriend bandwagon. I was no longer the threatening third wheel. Once again, I felt like I was back in the club, and most importantly, back in with Laura.
One night the four of us went to see a movie, and we sat in the back row. I suddenly remembered through rumors and other people’s stories that the back of the theatre was where the real action took place. Kristy Chapman let Tyler White touch her boobs when they went to see I Know What You Did Last Summer. Caitlin Walter got fingered by her boyfriend, Kyle, under his baseball jacket during My Best Friend’s Wedding. Adam and I had only held hands and kissed a couple of times, always in the daytime and always for other people to see, so the prospect of having to do something more was absolutely terrifying. I suddenly wanted out of the club.
I looked over at Laura and her Adam, who were already making out before the opening credits started, and I felt trapped. When Adam put his arm around my shoulder and the back of his hand accidentally brushed against my chest, I nearly leapt out of my seat.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered with his warm breath in my ear.
“Nothing, I’m just cold.” I pulled my big jacket on and zipped it all the way up my neck.
“You want some gum?”
“Sure.” He offered me a piece and took another for himself. We chewed until our mouths were fresh, then we started to make out. I opened my eyes just once and caught him watching Laura kiss the other Adam over my shoulder.
The next Monday at school, my boyfriend barely made eye contact with me in the halls. After social studies, Adam Brown pulled me aside and said we needed to talk.
“Umm, Adam wanted me to tell you that he doesn’t want to go out with you anymore.” He looked down at his feet.
I was crushed. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know. I think he just wants to be friends.”
Adam, my ex-boyfriend, then proceeded to start a popular rumor that I stuffed my bra, which I hand to spend the better part of a month vehemently denying until people lost interest. But I had to wonder, how did he know?
In the eighth grade, Laura, Maggie Epstein and Chloe Brenner all had sex with their boyfriends, one after the other, securing their spots as the three most popular girls in school. All three of them had been my best friends at one point or another, but with the boyfriends and bras and sex bases occupying all of their attention, it left little time for the short, awkward, funny girl who wasn’t rounding the bases with everyone else. I let go of the fantasy that I was just like everyone else. I started writing and imagining what life beyond school would be like. My peers could think of nothing but middle school, so after a while, we barely had anything left in common.
Just before the end of eighth grade, my mother decided to move me and my sister to Texas before the new school year began. I wasn’t that sad to go, and everyone at school seemed mildly upset, if not indifferent about it. All summer long, I fantasized about a whole new school with a whole new set of people who wouldn’t know anything about me but would be dying to get to know me. I knew they would all be more like me, be more interesting and less concerned with the way they looked or what sex bases they had reached. Maybe I would meet a really cool girl who would be a little bit funny and strange like me, and she would become my best friend and introduce me to all of her cool and fascinating friends. Maybe I would meet a really cute boy (not cute in a conventional way) who would be a dreamy, soulful outsider and listen to Dave Matthews Band and play the acoustic guitar, and he would say things like, “You’re different than all the other girls.” He would write songs for me and sneak into my bedroom at night through a window just to sleep next to me. None of that happened exactly, but high school was a little easier than middle school. I finally did get my period, for real, on the Fourth of July before ninth grade. I was wearing white underwear with blue flowers, so it seemed fitting. I was secretly relieved that I could drop the fantastic lie I had created three years before, because I was finally, truly, a woman.
Now, whenever I see pictures of my younger self, I still cringe a little. Not just because I had braces and bangs and a horrifying sense of style, but because I look so painfully uncomfortable, unsure of myself, out of place in my own skin. I’d like to say that now, as a 23-year-old woman, I’m confident, strong on my feet, and never have to lie to sound cool. Unfortunately, that’s not always true. Maybe the real reason I cringe when I look at old pictures is because I know I haven’t completely changed; I still carry that girl with me and she creeps out from time to time in places like department store changing rooms to remind me that I’m not as evolved as I’d like to think. Overly attractive boys still make me uncomfortable and I still envy those girls who can really fill out a halter top, but at least I have a sense of humor.
