Nothing is wrong with me and I will prove it became my solemn vow, and school my ally and proof text. What mattered now was being good at things. Art was out and now music. But theater and languages, even Latin, proved vow worthy. In fact, Nadine Nash Blackwell, the red-haired drama teacher who was only a little taller than me, the shortest girl in my class, starred me in our fourth-grade pantomime play Cinderella. She coached me to evoke horror on my face so the audience would know without words that Cinderella had spilled an entire bucket of water while scrubbing and was therefore in grave danger. I could act it without feeling it. I’d rather have memorized lines. Memorization was proof of achievement. Still, I had the lead and mattered to Mrs. Blackwell and my theater buff mother.
School success and best friends kept my soul alive. We best friends felt flawless to each other. Together we were allowed to walk to the movies at RKO 86th Street. On the way home my friend Nancy and I were accosted by a group of girls who pulled our hair and snatched our scarves. We got away and ran ourselves breathless. Even after the girls had given up the chase I kept running. I felt a terror almost as keen as what I’d felt in the theater, but this time I could run, and this time I told, something I later regretted because I thought it might have been a factor in my parents’ decision to move to the suburbs, away from the city, where conditions were changing, they said.
We moved to Darien, Connecticut, by the time I turned twelve. Because of social and, I believe, class pressures, my parents also decided that we should summer in Westhampton, Long Island. Twelve is not the best age to move—my school, my city, my friends, my farm, and my pony, all gone. I bet by then I could have taught a whole course in how to mourn without dying of grief—or how to hate your parents and still love them. But I was getting to the age when I had to urgently concern myself with Project Life, which to me meant getting a boy, getting a period, getting some boobs, and getting a best friend—also not bothering God about my plans, or for that matter thinking that God, who never uttered a darn word, was any kind of savior.
I hated Darien, not so much for its social purity, or the fact that, by “gentlemen’s agreement,” Jews were excluded from buying real estate on its shore, or even because there were embarrassing jokes about “Aryans from Darien” in the Broadway play Auntie Mame, but because Darien’s country club/cocktail party culture increased Dad’s drinking, Mom’s anxiety, and my smoldering rage as a late-blooming adolescent tragedy with out-of-control parents and enrolled in a roiling junior high school with boys in it. Most of it was the times, but who knows about the “times” when they’re in the middle of those “times”?
Three things saved my life.
(1) Annie, my Darien best friend. She straightened my head out about sex, which turned out to be exactly what my mother had told me, but without barnyard animals. Annie didn’t laugh at my embarrassment. “Your mother jumped the gun”—we both thought that was impossibly hilarious— “and scared you shitless. A trauma.” I liked this new word trauma. “But it doesn’t mean you’re abnormal. I read about it.” When I went home and told my mother that Annie had told me all about sex, she turned and muttered to the air, “I don’t understand that girl. I told her about sex years ago.” I guessed my mother didn’t know much about sex herself, but at least I was unraveling the knot and could begin my sexual career. All I needed was a boy, blood, and boobs.
(2) The Holy Bible. I read it from cover to cover, night after night, though I only skimmed Leviticus. I was looking for dating advice and the holy book was a bust. God got a girl pregnant, apparently a good thing back then, but not the 1950s when getting pregnant meant scandal and exile. Biblical stories, especially in the Old Testament, were pretty juicy though. People did really bad things; God was moody, even tempermental, like a teenager, yet somehow God and people kept getting back together again, even after the worst sins, disasters, breakups, and traumas, some of them caused by God. The Bible made me laugh but there wasn’t a damn thing in there to help me get a period or boobs. I tortured my mother with dramatic laments about being deformed for life. Exasperated, she one day turned on me and almost shouted, “Lynnie, for God’s sake shut up, you come from a long line of bosoms. You’ll get them!”
(3) Bill Brakeman. I met him at a party, one of those high school, hope-soaked, loosely chaperoned events at the home of an overweight girl whose popularity was enhanced by such parties and the feasts her mother prepared for her friends. In one room a couple spent the whole evening with bodies pressed and shuffling in a movement no one could call a dance. I was in the dining room grazing on celery, longing to gorge on chocolate cake, and imagining myself fat when I saw Bill standing in the corner. He smiled. I smiled. We smiled and exchanged shy “hi’s.” Bill was swoonishly handsome with dark hair, and a look full of innocent wistfulness. My heart sprang into his.
“Are you here with Beebe?”
“I was, but . . .”
“I’m here alone,” I said.
Our conversation proceeded at its teenage halting best.
“Maybe we should hit the Driftwood Diner for a hamburger after the party,” Bill said.
“What about her?” I said.
“We’ll drop her home first. You sit up front,” he said.
Bill’s plan felt romantic, daring, even scandalous—ditching Beebe after she’d been callous toward him. I hopped into the front seat of his, yes, chartreuse Chevy convertible. We dropped Beebe off then drove to the diner. I felt sorry for her, a little.
The diner served the most succulent hamburgers I’d ever tasted. Ketchup oozed from the bun and my tongue darted out to catch it. I wasn’t embarrassed to eat in front of Bill.
“I hate it here,” I said.
“This diner?” he said.
“No, this town. I miss my city. This place makes my father drink more than ever.”
“My father too. I miss Chicago. But this burger is the best. So are you.”
Bill had great wit. His stories joined us in laughter.
“Just after we moved the school had to test me,” he told me.
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
“You should have seen my mother’s face when the test lady called to tell her that I had an IQ status of moronic. No kidding,” he said. “She wanted to know how I’d find a lost ball in a field.”
“Just head to where it landed and look,” I said.
“Of course, but the dumb woman wanted me to start at the edge of the field and circle inwards.” We split our sides laughing.
Bill and I became a couple, an “item,” to my mother, who was thrilled. I felt happy and safe with Bill, and proud of my emergent boobs. We mattered together. In the teen testing lab called high school, we joined the “middle class”—solidly friendly, not nerds or hoods or cheerleader/football greats or prom kings and queens.
“Darling, it’s you,” my mother said after we visited Smith College. Dad had lobbied for Vassar because his mother had gone there and was sure I’d get a scholarship. He lost. Mom’s support encouraged me to bare a tiny corner of my soul and tell her about the theater trauma.
“By the way, Mom, did I ever tell you what happened to me in the theater when I was eight and went with Aunt Tink to see the Rockettes?”
“No dear, what?”
“This
