Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  OVERDUE

  Blubber

  By Judy Blume 1974

  Ethnic Flensing

  By Jennifer Weiner

  For years, I’ve fondly remembered Judy Blume’s Blubber as the ne plus ultra of fat-girl lit—the uplifting, seminal story of how downtrodden, picked-upon Linda Fischer delivers a righteous comeuppance to the fifth-grade classmates who tripped her, teased her, played keep-away with her coat and her lunch, and called her Blubber.

  For years, it turns out, I have been completely and totally wrong.

  Blubber is not a story of the big girl triumphant. It does not feature a happy ending for poor picked-upon Linda Fischer, who’s crucified by her classmates for the sin of weighing 91 pounds in the fifth grade (and maybe this is a sign of the times, or a result of the 400-pound sixth-grader whom I just read about in the Times, in a story about kids who desperately need, and cannot afford, fat camp, but these days, 91 pounds doesn’t sound like a weight that would get you noticed, let alone teased to the point of vomit and tears).

  Linda may have inspired the book’s title, but she’s not the main character in Blubber. Neither is the fifth grade’s queen bee, Wendy, who leads the classwide [classwide, but either way!] charge against Linda, after Linda delivers an unfortunate report on the mammal of her choice—the whale.

  The star of the show is Jill Brenner, a skinny and conflicted classmate who’s just trying to fit in to her privileged Philadelphia suburb…and if the rule of the day is making fun of the fat girl, then Jill’s eager enough to go along, even though she knows that her best friend Tracy Wu was herself the victim of bullies.

  Blume doesn’t pull punches in describing the realities of fifth-grade pecking orders, or the girls who end up at the bottom of the pyramid. Linda Fischer isn’t the kind of friendly, funny fat girl that other, less-edgy YA authors might have offered. She receives neither of the consolation prizes typically offered to fat girls in fiction: the pretty face or the great personality. Instead, poor Linda’s got a head shaped like a potato, which sits on her shoulders without the benefit of an intervening neck, and a gray tooth. She responds to the teasing not with stoic silence or slashing wit, but with tattling and tears. She’s a whiner, a martyr, babyish, a bit of a drip (and, Blume takes pains to point out, she’s not even the fattest kid in fifth grade. It’s her personality, not her pounds, that make her a target).

  In Blubber’s bleak world, there are no heroes and a surplus of villains. There is no redemption for Linda, or for Jill, and no happy ending. Blubber never stands up to the bullies; she just gets briefly co-opted by them, and then dumped once more. The book ends with Linda just as isolated and pathetic as when the story began.

  Returning to Blubber as an adult, I’m amazed, once more, at the unflinching verisimilitude with which Blume describes what preteen girls are really like (monsters in training bras). But part of me was a little heartbroken: Why couldn’t Blubber have actually been Blubber’s story? Why is the story Jill’s and not Linda’s to tell? Why didn’t, or couldn’t, Judy Blume write a book about a fat girl?

  The afterword (which I don’t remember reading as a ten-year-old) offers a clue. In it, Blume writes that she was inspired by her own daughter Randy’s experiences, and that Blume wanted to tell a story about bullying, not from the perspective of the victim but from the point of view of one of the faces in the crowd, a girl struggling to balance morality with self-preservation in the Lord-of-the-Flies world that is fifth grade. In Blubber’s classroom, the adults are absent or clueless or cruel, or too busy struggling with their own vices to offer more than mealymouthed platitudes in a crisis—and that’s when they’re not lighting up a cigarette or turning a blind eye.

  But I wonder whether there’s not a bigger issue here. Blume’s heroines, from well-meaning Winnie in Iggie’s House to flat-chested, religiously conflicted Margaret in Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, to Deenie, the so-pretty-she-could-model fourteen-year-old afflicted with scoliosis, are all smart and spirited, reasonably introspective and interested in doing what’s fair and what’s right. They are also all, to a one, thin, pretty girls…or at least thin girls who are well on their way to becoming pretty. You just knew that once Margaret’s breasts arrived and Deenie’s brace came off, they’d grow up to be beautiful, just like Catherine in Forever, who effortlessly caught the eyes of not one but two hunky teenage boys (and who also had vaginal orgasms during her second attempt at intercourse, the lucky bitch).

  I wonder if, deep down, Judy Blume found Linda just as repellent, just as icky, as Jill and her friends did…or if she didn’t want to write about a fat girl because she suspected that, unlike Margaret and Deenie and Winnie and Sally, Linda would not emerge from the chrysalis of a back brace or belated puberty as a beautiful butterfly, and that her life wouldn’t necessarily have a happy ending.

  Whatever the reason, I’m grateful. I imagine there’s a bunch of young women writers who are grateful, too. Had Judy Blume taken on the story of a young Jewish woman from a Philadelphia suburb who grew up overweight and found her way to her own happy ending in spite of it…well, for starters, I would have had to find something else to cover in Good in Bed.

  In many ways, my first novel answered the questions I had when reading Blubber as an adult. What was Linda’s story? What was going on behind the doors of the house that Jill and Wendy dashed past, laughing, on Halloween night? Did Linda’s parents love her, or were they ashamed, or did they feel love and shame in equal measure? Could Linda find a best friend and a first love? Would she end up with a career and a husband and a baby and a life that, minus her extra pounds and her unhappy history, wasn’t that different from the one her classmates would have?

  I remember Blubber as a big girl’s story, but, in retrospect, I’m glad it wasn’t…because what Judy Blume gave us was a big fat tempting blank just waiting for a generation of writers who grew up on Judy Blume to fill in with our own experiences, our own stories, our own hard-won truths.

  BOOK REPORT

  The Cat Ate My Gymsuit

  By Paula Danziger 1974

  Teach for America

  I hate my father. I hate school. I hate being fat. I hate the principal because he wanted to fire Ms. Finney, my English teacher.

  I feel bad for teens today. Their parents listen to them. Teachers are invested in their intellectual development and well-being. Books are published on their optimal care and feeding; violins brandished for their edification; trips abroad marshaled so they may broaden their horizons and spread their wealth to others, eventually spearheading their own microloan organizations and so forth. What the hell! How are they ever going to learn about the world?

  Marcy Lewis is no rarefied hothouse flower from the West, ruthlessly cultivated to within an inch of her stamen. She is, by her own admission, a “baby blimp with wire frame glasses and mousy brown hair” who fears impending acne and hands her gym teacher a creative reason every day to not be forced to put on her gymsuit in front of everyone.

  She is not the only one on board. Her friend Nancy gives her this practical assessment: “Marcy. Come on. You’re not ugly. You are too fat, but you have good points too. It’s just that kids think you’re stuck up because you won’t play and you’re smart.” Her tepidly supportive mother tells her that she should really “lose some weight and look like everyone else.” Her 4-year-old brother, Stuart, wants her to be his best friend so that, as she says, “…I can help him put orange pits in the hole in his teddy bear’s head.” And her father, yet another in the line of apoplectic dads obviated around when Archie Bunker transmuted to Steven Keaton, renders this judicious opinion, not infrequently: “I don’t care if you get good grades. You do stupid things. Why do I have to have a daughter who is stupid and fat? I’ll never get you married off.”

  Enter Diane Finney, un-teachery teacher, wearer of turtlenecks, jean skirts, and macrame necklaces. Ms. Finney, in her 1970s way, reins in the unruly students by some Psych-101 method of staring at them unnerving
ly, then exposes them to an eye-opening battery of novel teaching methods while actually teaching them English—including but not limited to making a commercial to “sell” a book, using Monopoly to learn vocabulary, and drawing from the works of Marshall McLuhan.

  Drunk on this genuine engagement, both with their intellect and with their psyches, the students ask if they can form an after-school club to “do more about how we felt inside.” That is where Marcy finally meets Joel Anderson, unconventional love interest, when they are paired off to learn about each other:

  I didn’t know. Was I supposed to tell him I was a blimp trying to disguise myself as a real person; or that I probably had a horrible case of contagious impending pimples; or that I had this weird brother with a teddy bear filled with orange pits; or that I thought that he was cute and brave and probably thinking about how suicide would be better than talking to me?

  Joel—who is the type of boy to answer, in my favorite answer ever, “Joel Anderson,” to the question of what he wants to be when he grows up—actually tells the class: “This is Marcy Lewis. She says she doesn’t like lots of things, but I bet she really does…and she has a nice smile.”

  All this, of course, cannot stand. Despite Ms.—Ms!—Finney’s demonstrable skill as a teacher, her refusal to say the pledge while she salutes the flag provides a ready hook for the ire of Principal Stone, who, we are meant to understand, is not interested in the teachings of Marshall McLuhan. Ms. Finney, who is really only guilty of occasionally forgetting she’s holding a piece of chalk and trying to smoke it, is suspended, and the only good thing about this is that it provides Marcy with the opportunity to come into her own, both in love, life, and her family.

  After sticking it to the man by telling Principal Stone, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him,” Marcy shocks herself by spearheading the movement to save Ms. Finney, joined along the way, surprisingly, not only by the quietly supportive Joel, but also by her mother, who graduates from capitulating to her husband’s sullen abuse to defending Ms. Finney at the school-board meeting to decide her fate.

  The Cat Ate My Gymsuit is not only a snapshot of Marcy’s psyche, but also of a family and an entire country in transition. The war in Vietnam and the feminist movement are rarely mentioned explicitly, but their looming presence underpins Mr. Stone, Mr. Lewis, and all the other old-guard parents’ wholesale rejection of Ms. Finney, whose teachings, they think, are divesting their children of a crucial conformity. Ms. Finney, who will salute the flag but won’t say the pledge because “I am sorry to have to say that I don’t believe this country offers liberty and justice for all” signals peacenik touchy-feelyness to the powers that be. But in an atmosphere of divorce, unrest, and uncertainty, she’s not a handholder—she’s trying to start a movement to create adults worthy of holding hands with.

  But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work! It stubbornly refuses to end happily. Instead, we have a semi-progression into sort-of-slightly better circumstances. Ms. Finney wins the case but declines to return, because she knows she’d be too divisive. Joel and Marcy remain close friends. (“You have to start somewhere.”) Marcy’s mother registers for night courses at the local university and stops plying her daughter with ice cream. But her father, Marcy says, “hardly ever says anything to me anymore. He and my mother talk a lot, but he just looks at me and shakes his head.” As the book ends, Marcy informs us: “Yesterday I looked in the mirror and saw a pimple. Its name is Agnes.”

  BOOK REPORT

  A Ring of Endless Light

  By Madeleine L’Engle 1980

  Deep Thoughts

  I saw him for the first time at the funeral.

  Dolphins. Do I even need to write another word? Oh, I know I do, but…dolphins, I had to write it again! You dog/horse/wolf/rabbit/mouse/cave lion/alley-cat girls, keep your creatures. I am sticking with the one that can leap entirely out of the water, is psychic, uses over 80 percent of its brain, and symbolizes the timeless mystery and wisdom of the universe!

  In A Ring of Endless Light, Vicky Austin, seemingly the most ordinary of the triptych of L’Engle heroines that includes Meg Murry O’Keefe and, in later installations, Meg’s daughter Polly, yet again reveals herself to possess unseen depths. Having spent the previous summer on a camping trip across the country (The Moon by Night), then a year in New York (The Young Unicorns), Vicky returns to her grandfather’s house on Seven Bay Island under sad circumstances. Not only is her grandfather, a minister who marries passion with a cool intellect and warm faith, dying of cancer, a dear family friend, Commander Rodney, has just been killed trying to rescue a drowning boy. What has always been a happy summer on the water for Vicky has become a slow march into the sea.

  Luckily—it is summer, after all—L’Engle has seen fit to break up all this agony with a passel of love interests for Vicky, though all three boys are wrestling with their own boatmen as well.

  First up is the familiar Zachary Gray, Vicky’s pale, raven-haired suitor from The Moon by Night. While his old death wish used to mainly take shape in driving too fast and getting caught in rock slides in canyons, he’s moved on to driving on the wrong side of the road, flying prop planes too close to jetliners, and defending his cryogenically frozen mother. There’s also the matter of his recent suicide attempt—in which Commander Rodney lost his life while saving Zach’s.

  No wonder, after Zach pulls up in his hearse-like black station wagon, he wastes no time telling Vicky she’s all that stands between him and chaos. (“You’re reason where there isn’t any reason. Reason to live—”)

  Stick a pin in that, Zach! Awkwardly enough for him, Vicky has another ardent pursuer: Leo Rodney, the son of the man Zach has just, though inadvertently, killed. Luckily for Zach, Vicky can’t bring herself to think of Leo romantically, but she’s not quite ready to count him out, either:

  Without realizing what I was doing, I put my arms around him. “Cry, Leo, don’t hold it back, you need to cry—” I broke up because I was crying, too, for Commander Rodney, for my grandfather, who was dying slowly and gently, for a thousand porpoises who had been clubbed to death….

  …I held Leo and he held me and we rocked back and forth on the old elm trunk, weeping, and the salt wind brushed against the salt of our tears. And I discovered that there is something almost more intimate about crying that way with someone than there is about kissing….

  The French figured out that sex can evoke death; Vicky is learning, at least on the East Coast, it’s sex that can evoke death—and at the center of the novel lies this strange exchange.

  Complicating the mix even more is the darkly romantic figure of Adam Eddington, who’s studying dolphins at the island’s marine biology lab with Vicky’s older brother, John. Fans of L’Engle’s The Arm of the Starfish know that, when Adam meets Vicky, he’s still grieving over the death of his former mentor and friend, Joshua Archer, agonizing over the role he played in that death.

  But where The Arm of the Starfish was about how easily innocence can be corrupted by evil, A Ring of Endless Light is about the three great mysteries L’Engle always returns to: God, sex, and love. Adam asks Vicky for help with the dolphins, thinking that, in her (relative) youth, she might communicate with them better. But he has no idea what a change it will bring in their relationship to pair her passion with his intellect—or how much it will touch upon those three questions. In an electric, sensual scene, Vicky meets the dolphins (dolphins!!!!!!!!) and turns Adam’s heretofore practical project into a kind of spiritual communion:

  “Tell me what he feels like to you,” Adam urged.

  How can anybody describe the feel of a dolphin? “Something strange, alien,” I murmured, “like touching a creature from a different planet—and yet completely familiar, too, as though I’ve always known what a dolphin feels like….”

  Again I lifted my hand from the water, but I couldn’t see anything, and this time when I stopped scratching, Basil dove down, his great fluke flicking so that again I was dr
enched in spray, and appeared far beyond us, leaping up in a great and glorious arc before diving down again…

  I was still treading water and feeling more exhilarated than I have ever felt in my life.

  Yes, that’s right, she gets to swim with dolphins. Contain your jealousy. (Actually, just save it for when she has psychic conversations with them.) But Vicky’s summer is one of absurd juxtapositions and extremes—one moment quietly spent reading philosophy with her grandfather by his bed, the next being taken to a spa and a classical music concert by Zachary, the next eating spaghetti with her family and discussing the nature of death and cellular regeneration, the next skinny-dipping with Leo. It’s an overwhelming deluge of physical, philosophical, and psychological stimulae, sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, one in which the dolphins prove a crucial link for Adam—and for her:

  “It’s just—it’s just—there’s death everywhere—Commander Rodney—and watching Grandfather, and now Ynid’s baby for no reason—it’s just everywhere…”

  …“Are you afraid?” he asked softly…“Of what, Vicky?” He picked up another handful of sand, and started trickling it through his fingers. “Dying?” his voice wasn’t loud, but the word seemed to explode into the night.

  Unlike Zach, who is far too dangerous, and Leo, who is far too tame, Adam is capable of making Vicky feel strongly without making her feel entirely out of control—or making her feel entirely unlike herself:

  …I heard every word he said. And I think I understood. At the same time my entire body was conscious of the feel of his fingers stroking my hair. I wondered if he felt as strongly as I did.