by Nancy Friday
What I like about my girlish self (and grieve that I have lost) is its utter lack of guile and self-consciousness. Books in hand, I mount my trusty Schwinn and pedal like the wind away from that house of timidity, slowing only to wave at the women setting out their flower baskets at the foot of the post office steps, and the men delivering ice in their horse-drawn wagon, which I used to ride alongside (until my mother’s friends reported me). By the time I have reached my friend Joanne’s house, I am ready for another breakfast, especially since this one will be with a full family, meaning a father at the head of the table. I am welcomed as one of the family, and literally come to life, smiling, charming.
Joanne, being my best friend, is one of the Jivers, and we readily suggest giving the family a preview of our act. I stand, and with my arms around her—she barely reaches my shoulder, but what do I care of height, what do I know of adolescence?—we do our song and dance, “You Wonderful You,” as performed by Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in Summer Stock. The romantic words of the ballad blend perfectly in Joanne’s sweet soprano and my alto. The sentimental yearning is all there in two little girls playing the roles of a man and woman in love. We are still children, and while we feel the longing for love—as we do at any age—we are not yet awakened to the sexual undertones of what we are singing.
All that was required in those brief years was that I turn up at home for meals and be in bed at nine. And even these demands were waived when I telephoned from one of the many homes all over town in which I was welcome. I owe so much to the families that laid another place for me at their tables. Did they see me as a lost soul, the only child in our circle without a father? I have no idea. If they did, their pity never showed; instead, praise, acceptance, and love were reflected back. I have not paid this debt of gratitude, and it bothers me sorely. Perhaps it is too great. Or perhaps I’ve had to live this long to appreciate the enormity of my debt to these people, this school, in memory, the whole idyllic town.
These preadolescent school years replace the narrow confines of home. If our parents and siblings have always seen us as The Quiet One, it is difficult to change their opinion. Opposite our older, outspoken brother, yes, we are silent, but without that comparison, we are now, for the first time, heard fresh by teachers and classmates. The power of our voice and new reflection in their eyes shines back at us. This voice is ours, this new respect, and we cosset it, a treasure on which to build.
And so there were two of me, the achiever at school for whom they engraved a silver cup for leadership when I graduated—it holds the pencils beside me today—and the person at home, where invisibility began to suit me. My whereabouts were never questioned, which left me deeply ambivalent, for while not being missed hurt, it did give me the chance to re-create myself endlessly.
My school, that wonderful place where I grew and lived more hours than I spent at home, was my Garden of Eden, a place of endless delights, in which I would rehearse plays, practice baseball, write musicals, be a leader. Some mornings I would arrive so early that only the caretaker was there, and while I waited for the rest of the team to arrive for practice, I would shoot baskets, perfectly happy just to be there, my school, mine. I cared deeply for competitive sports, and if they became a bit too important, there was a reason. In the South, girls weren’t supposed to compete hard, meaning to win, which drove me a little crazy given that winning was the point of the game.
I must add that this was an all-girl school, for which I have been eternally grateful; had male companionship been available, I’m sure I would have been desperate for boys’ eyes to see me as a likable/lovable girl instead of becoming the athlete, the scholar, the leader. For when boys did enter my life, I gave up all the rest for the love of them, though to be fair, they never asked me to.
Well, there is my preadolescent portrait, one that I admire more wholeheartedly than any memory of myself between then and now. I was kind, I was good, I was ambitious, fair, competitive, eager, articulate, a leader, and I abandoned it a few years later for the portrait of The Nice Girl, a portrait that didn’t fit.
Seeing Ourselves on the Silver Screen
Few memories are as indelibly linked to these years as the discovery of our secret selves at the movies. If the bicycle offers physical mastery of the outer world, movies awaken our imagination, opening us to dreams we might never have had, given how we saw ourselves, and others saw us, in our small world. If fairy tales mirrored the turbulent emotions that rocked us as small children, the experience of the big screen picks up where the Brothers Grimm left off. As we sit in the movies, the perimeters of life extend infinitely; we see beyond home and school, imagining ourselves wherever the camera takes us. Yes, it is make-believe, but to some of us it feels more real than anything we have experienced, or even read about. We are not beautiful, we cannot dance up and down flights of stairs, but neither could the heroine in the beginning, until—until what?—until someone saw her differently because of a song, a dress, a kiss.
For some young people, the movies are simply entertainment; they are only ten but are at home in their skins; they see themselves in time becoming their parents; given their temperament and life experience so far, what they want is already familiar. For others, movies are where life began. Think back to your own childhood at the movies. Can’t you separate out the people you grew up with who lost themselves in the big screen from those for whom it was an experience that began and ended with the movie?
For ten-year-olds like myself, movies, with all their make-believe, were where life began. I think it has everything in the world to do with earliest visibility within the family, with whether or not we are seen and warmed by the most important eyes in the world, our parents. If we were their movie, the person in whose beloved features they lost themselves, then our own days of stardom absorbed our need for visibility. We have been sufficiently adored at the proper time, the beginning. If we have not, I believe the movies—and I don’t mean television but instead, the big, big screen—give us an image in which to lose ourselves. Staring at the screen, we may be the voyeurs, but the magic of movies is that they take us in.
I’m not surprised that I share this obsession with my closest friends who, like me, saw every movie that came to town. What draws us to one another isn’t precisely our religious attendance at the movies but our shared inclination toward exhibitionism: the predisposition to put ourselves on the line and take chances.
Like the little boy in the film Cinema Paradiso, having seen one movie, I had to see them all. I would scavenge in my mother’s coat pockets and handbags until I found the necessary small change—less than a dollar, as I remember—then walk the few blocks to the drugstore on the corner of King and Broad Streets where I would meet my friends. Having already decided between the film at The Gloria or The Riviera, we would stop at the bakery to fill brown paper bags with jelly doughnuts and chocolate éclairs to be devoured in the sanctity of the darkness that encouraged the surrender of our naked selves, transformed into the people on the big screen. Eyes riveted, we sighed with them; mouths filled with sugared dough, we died with them; we were them. This is what is missed on television; the giant size of the people and their passion, which overwhelmed and included us.
If no real adult in our young lives has as yet fleshed out the heroic feelings inside us, these giants who live for an hour on the screen of the movie theater fill the void, reflecting what feels and looks like someone we could become. To sit in a large dark space—amid strangers!—and experience our most private and unacknowledged feelings publicly is a revelation I’ve not since duplicated. We gasp and sigh in a group display of emotion, which is the flip side of Good Manners, mandating that we keep our feelings to ourselves. I suppose it was what the Greeks and Romans shared in their amphitheaters.
Oddly enough, it was akin to what the Church gave me: a feeling of being part of a larger-than-life emotion, shared with others publicly, a group image of ourselves. Certainly, I saw myself as a little Christian, mirrored
in all the other nice, good Christians around me, but the Church Me was only a fraction of who I was. The Real Me was born at the movies, where I was introduced to all my selves, the smorgasbord of what life could be. This is where the seed was planted that would grow into an adolescent sureness that I didn’t want to marry after graduation, like so many of my friends. There were experiences to be had, emotions to be felt in all their fullness, as I had felt them up there on the screen; oh, no, I wanted it all.
Movies also gave great comfort; here were villains far worse than my own evil suspicions about myself. Seeing Richard Widmark was terrifying, but the extent of his meanness made my own livable. Maybe I was not so bad after all. Elizabeth Taylor’s beauty was beyond my wildest dreams, but instead of envying her, the glamour of movies allowed me to adore her. Strangely enough, her giant beauty as well as her suffering—they always suffered, the great beauties—made me think that beauty wasn’t everything, that powers alternative to beauty might actually be preferable, meaning that there was hope for me. Yes, beauty was powerful, but movies gave you an eyeful of how close the envious have-nots come to killing the beauty.
Nothing, however, moved me so seismically as the great musicals of the late forties and early fifties: Singin’ in the Rain, Show Boat, On Moonlight Bay, Good News, Funny Face. Hypnotized, I would sit in the dark, lips moving, body in motion, me as Doris Day pining for the boy next door, and when I left The Gloria after being Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in Easter Parade, I couldn’t help taking the post office’s flight of steps two at a time, imaginary cane in hand, oblivious to the smiles of the flower ladies below. The music in the movies that captured me would continue its spell long after I’d bought the records and learned every word. I didn’t want to come out of the trance into which I’d allowed myself to fall, all sighing and longing and dying. The promise of happiness in song and dance.
How appropriate that the old musicals came back so strongly in the loveless eighties, when heartfelt romance was at a low ebb. Unable to manufacture new lyrics and music that captured romantic love, we rediscovered Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, who effortlessly created the sound of a breaking heart for a new generation.
When I say that movies saved my life, giving me a look and a promise of faces and roles I might try on, it is not an exaggeration. It mattered not a jot whether the emotions were felt by male or female; the movies opened my eyes to precisely what I hadn’t been able to find in real life, where I’d been taught to hold back and deny the full expression of large steps and a big voice. Movies said it was more than all right, it was good to feel as much as possible, that you must never give up hope, like Black Beauty, like Leslie Caron, like Bette Davis.
Three Little Girls Can’t Play Together
What we need when we are ten and imagining ourselves in all of life’s variety is the heartfelt encouragement of our dear band of friends. We read a book, see a movie, meet someone who awakens in us a sense of mutuality. We are right to be shopping around, living with myriad balloons over our heads, trying on this person or that, to see who fits. There will never again be so few pressures to conform. If we had the nerve to experiment, to grow and change with full reinforcement from friends, we would hold on to these imaginary inner portraits so determinedly we might get through adolescence without abandoning our dream. Eventually we might grow up to become our own heroine: someone we admire instead of a woman unsure of who she is, how she looks, always adjusting, changing, altering her body, face, and hair to conform to a look that never stares back from our mirror as convincingly as we saw her in the pages of a book, a magazine, a movie.
If young girls could only champion one another, encourage individuality, originality. Oh, we form intense friendships with girls without whom we feel we cannot live, friendships that could support uniqueness. But the very love in these friendships leads us to betray one another and ourselves too. The love is patterned on the only kind we know, tight and symbiotic, with a dark side; the old anger we couldn’t afford to show mother for fear of losing her is now affordable, is, in fact, irresistible. One day we drop our best friend, or exclude her. Another girl has come along, setting up a threesome that triggered an undeniable urge to leave someone out.
It is a game women play, and it begins so early in life that it defines us as inevitably as breasts, as if to say, This is woman. In fact it is learned. By sheer repetition it becomes compelling whenever more than two females get together. There isn’t a mother who hasn’t gone through it with her own daughter: “Mommy, she was my best friend! What did I do? Why did she and that other girl giggle and run away and leave me?”
When, out of a clear blue sky, two little girls begin shunning another, they are flexing muscles, getting off on the misery they are able to cause, a pain they know well having been there themselves. It is such “girl” behavior, excluding one of our own, someone who was our nearest and dearest five minutes earlier. Two girls are absolutely fine, but a third, the alternate, affords the opportunity to create a thrilling dyad out of the misery of one girl by giving her “the treatment.”
It begins as soon as we are out of the house, when we are practicing relationships, and it is patterned on the only love relationship we’ve ever known, with Mother. We want intimacy with our new friend, but we want power too, like Mommy’s power over us, a desire to which we are reawakened when “the victim” comes along. Since we’ve had to play that role ourselves, there is an insurmountable urge to impose it on another. We want to play mother. It isn’t that we’ve stopped emotionally connecting with our best friend; we have, in fact, confused her with us. Aren’t we the same, meshed, just as we were with Mommy? Very well, let her suffer for a while, as Mommy made us suffer.
Being able to create a victim automatically makes the new dyad with our conspirator more alive and intense. It is real passion. The grimness of it is that even after we have been the abandoned one ourselves, when the opportunity arises, we will do it to another girl/woman.
If mother had allowed her daughter to go through the gradual process of becoming her own person, with the love between them internalized in the journey of separation, the daughter wouldn’t be so afraid of losing love whenever mother turned to others in the family; there wouldn’t be total dependency on mother for everything. With no safe perimeters of identity locked inside, the little girl remains frozen in a love/hate relationship with mother, which now extends to all girls/women. She loves her best friend in the only way she knows how. The sad irony is that in loving her, she cannot help making her suffer, as mother had with her.
These should be years of great friendships and the practicing of loyalty. And they are! But they are also the commencement of betrayal and the abandonment of the people we love.
The following letter was printed on the “Help!” page of American Girl magazine; it is such a frequent cry for help that at least one “left out” letter gets answered in every issue:
Dear American Girl,
My two best friends stick together like glue. I am always the one left out. I’m fine playing with them separately. How can we all be friends without being in a fight all the time?
We are nine, maybe ten or eleven. Our bodies are stretching, our capacity for emotions growing, and our faces opening with expectancy, a palette across which all the feelings of life should feel free to race without fear of censure. Mother isn’t always present to tell us to calm down and be good. We should be egging one another on, applauding. Our eyes should be wide in anticipation of shared adventures with other brave, curious girls. What makes our big eyes narrow and shift nervously?
Fear. Apprehension. Anxiety over potential loss of love. The suspicion that if we go too far, win too much, get too happy, the other girls will abandon us. Where else do you think grown women learn to deflect compliments—“Oh, this old thing?” “That old one-hundred-thousand-dollar contract?” Threat of exclusion hangs in the air like the sword of Damocles over the dearest of little-girl friendships.
“Mommy, why did
they hide from me? What did I do?”
She did nothing. Two little girls wanted to feel intensely close, and a third girl was needed to get them there, not unlike a fire that only bursts into flame with the added fuel or, in this case, sacrifice. The excluded victim may well be loved again tomorrow, but now, this moment, the irresistible urge can’t be denied. Punish her, hurt her, defuse the stored-up anger! It worked. The third girl’s banishment made the dyad madly inseparable, totally entwined and giddy on pain they had caused another. Something more complicated than love was wanted—for if two can love, then three can love more—and that was the rage/revenge/power still enmeshed in the girls’ concept of love. Never weaned off infantile symbiotic love, wherein trust of self and another in a love relationship was learned, the tight dyad remained the only known, safe form of love: total ownership.
How then did this sort of love feel when mother turned away from the girl to father or to her baby brother, breaking the dyad? The girl was only one or two and so her rage had to be swallowed to keep mother’s love; an exercise learned again and again as when the girl turned to father and felt mother’s angry competition at her back. Forbidden by mother to display any signs of her own anger or power—a rule laid down more rigidly for girls than boys—the little girl would reenact the painful scene with her dolls, whom she punished just as she’d been punished: “Bad, bad, bad!” She loved her dolls, but by now integral to love were rage/revenge and the desire to own mother’s power herself.