Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  The Long Secret, the sequel to Harriet the Spy, understands having a BFF is extremely complicated even when no one is blowing the UPS man. (Don’t get me wrong. I love Samantha and Sex and the City and its ilk in a greasy, 1:00-a.m., fried-chicken-in-a-bag way. I’ve just never understood how anyone could be friends with Carrie without therapeutic intervention.) But where Harriet the Spy introduces us to the remarkable Harriet, The Long Secret takes over with Harriet’s friend Beth Ellen, her spiritually wispy sidekick for years.

  When we catch up with them, the girls have hit adolescence and Beth Ellen, whom Harriet has always called “Mouse,” is coming out from under her well-meaning thumb whether she likes it or not. Here’s them talking about Beth Ellen’s inappropriate crush on the itinerant, pot-bellied, piano-playing Bunny:

  “I don’t want to write about him; I want to marry him,” said Beth Ellen.

  “Well!” said Harriet, “that’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. You’re only eleven.”

  “Twelve.”

  “How can you be twelve when I’m only eleven?”

  Harriet looked furious.

  Beth Ellen waited.

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Harriet finally. “I always forget that about birthdays. I remember, you just had one.”

  There you have it: just being older than your friend briefly is sufficient betrayal, at the age of 11. (The opposite becomes true at 28.) Harriet is also enraged that Beth Ellen cannot think of anything more interesting for her future profession than marrying a rich man and moving to Biarritz. But wait a minute, Harriet! Something far more upsetting is coming up!

  “MOUSE!” Harriet gave one great agonized yelp.

  “What?” whispered Beth Ellen.

  “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”

  “I’m—”

  “WHAT?”

  Beth Ellen’s voice suddenly found itself and came out so loud she jumped. “I’m—menstruating!”

  “What’s that?” asked Harriet, awed.

  “It’s—”

  “I just remembered,” yelled Harriet. “How come you’re doing that and I’m not?”

  It was an unanswerable question. “I don’t know—” began Beth Ellen.

  Harriet hung up on her.

  The girls are spending the summer on Montauk, Harriet with her parents and Beth Ellen with her grandmother, whom she’s always lived with while her mother, Zeeney, gads about Europe. As Beth Ellen accompanies Harriet biking around on her summer reconnaissance, the sleepy town of Water Mill is being rocked—as rocked as sleepy towns on Montauk can be, that is—by a sneak who is leaving around, for all members of the populace, slightly tweaked quotes that are, as one recipient puts it, like a “nasty fortune cookie” and, as another admits, “kinda hit home sometimes.”

  Harriet, being Harriet, is, of course, on it:

  NOW THE THING IS WHO WOULD LEAVE NOTES LIKE THIS? SOMEBODY WHO READS THE BIBLE BECAUSE THEY ALL SOUND LIKE THEY’RE RIGHT OUT OF THE BIBLE. WHO DOES READ THE BIBLE? DOES ANYBODY? DOES MY MOTHER? CHECK ON THIS.

  NOW I KNOW WHERE I GOT MY HUGE ADDICTION TO CAPPING EVERYTHING. But while Harriet is bursting with questions about what motivates all the adults around her, Beth Ellen is in a similar quandary about herself:

  Dear Me:

  Why am I so different? Why am I never happy? Is everybody like this or just me? I am truly a mouse. I have no desire at all to be me.

  Goodbye,

  Mouse

  Beth Ellen and Harriet are still in the roles they played as children—not because one is a sap and one is a bully, but because it still shields them from the complications of the world. But the world, as it does, is not going to let their friendship alone long. Jessie Mae, a deeply religious Southern girl they meet on one of their spying missions, observes their interaction and neatly dissects it, to Harriet’s shock and consternation:

  “You the captain and she the lieutenant?” said Jessie Mae, beside herself with giggles. “If I may say so, you do speak sharply to your friend.”

  “She’s MY friend,” said Harriet, appalled.

  “Well…” said Jessie Mae, looking away and fanning rapidly, “I do feel that, like the Good Book says, we should honor our father and mother, but I, personally, think we should honor our friends too.”

  Harriet was stunned into silence.

  It’s not that Beth Ellen needs an excuse to start to dislike Harriet—it’s just that she needs to stop using her as a security blanket. “Hurrying after Harriet,” Beth Ellen tells us, “made her feel curiously liberated, as though she could be a child and it was all right. Harriet always gave her this feeling. It was one of the few things she really liked about Harriet, as a matter of fact, because the principal feeling she felt when with Harriet was one of being continually jarred.” But Beth Ellen is jerked out of Harriet’s protectorate even further by the announcement that Zeeney, whom she does not even remember, is returning from Europe to resume her role in Beth Ellen’s life:

  Try as she might she could not find one emotion connected with this piece of news. She lay back on the bed. She felt the bedspread. It was nice to feel something with her hands, something solid. Was her mother coming to take her away, like something she had bought at a dress shop and couldn’t wait to have delivered? Would her grandmother let them take her? Did her grandmother want her to go? Where do I live, she thought, and began to cry. She cried a long time, then fell asleep, her face lying in a white patch of tears.

  Actually, the only one who is really excited about this development is Harriet, who is practically beside herself that Beth Ellen has a) A REAL MOTHER, b) A FREAKISHLY BEAUTIFUL MOTHER, and c) A MOTHER WHOM APPARENTLY HER OWN FATHER KNEW IN HIS YOUTH, ALTHOUGH HE WILL NOT TELL HER NEARLY ENOUGH ABOUT IT. There is nothing exciting about Zeeney’s arrival for Beth Ellen, however, since she mainly regards her as a vaguely irritating presence to be stifled out of all recognition.

  …Beth Ellen lay in the bathtub staring at her body. She and her mother had just gotten back from Elizabeth Arden’s in time to bathe and dress before they went to dinner. She lay there with a blank mind…. I have straight hair. I am called Beth. She had heard Zeeney and Wallace discussing her that morning at breakfast as if she were a piece of toast. Zeeney had said, “I think her head is too little.” Wallace had disagreed but said, “No, I don’t think that, but she does have curious knees.”

  Between her grandmother who wants her to be a lady and her mother who wants her to have straight hair and her body which wants her to grow up and Harriet who cannot stop exploding with frustration at her passivity, Beth Ellen’s mysterious activity, when we discover it, is not that surprising.

  Yes! Spoiler! Beth Ellen is leaving the notes. Your basic dutiful sleuth of the third-person indirect would probably handily notice that she is present at every instance of note-discovery and never wonders herself who is leaving the notes whatsoever. But perhaps not. Beth is so successfully blank to her herself, she’s a little blank to us too.

  Maybe because the long secret of the book is not really that Beth Ellen is leaving all the notes, but that Beth Ellen is angry.

  This becomes monumentally clear when Zeeney declares she will be taking Beth Ellen back to Europe with her, and Beth Ellen, in her first act of rebellion, throws an enormous tantrum in the bathroom: They started banging on the bathroom door. Beth Ellen sat on the tub and pretended she was sitting under Niagara Falls. She hugged her knees. I will flood the house, she thought. Then I will begin to grow and be huge. I will get so monstrously big that I will break the bathroom and fill the house, the yard, all of Water Mill. I will tower over the Montauk highway like a collosus. They will all run away like ants.

  The cold water ran down on her, on her head, her clothes. It beat around her ears like the safe rain of a summer’s day.

  And just like that, Beth Ellen exits the limbo utero of the bathtub and comes into her own. As the book ends, Harriet has found her out:

  “What ever gave you the idea to do it anyway?” asked H
arriet with not a little admiration in her voice.

  Beth Ellen smiled and said nothing.

  “Well, you could have told me,” said Harriet. “I knew it at The Preacher’s. I watched your face and I knew. But you could have told me.” And flinging the book on the bed, she stomped into the bathroom.

  Beth Ellen sat on the bed and looked fondly at the book. I’m a child, she thought happily, and I live somewhere. Nobody can ever take me away.

  Beth Ellen laughed, a loud, happy laugh.

  “WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING ABOUT?” yelled Harriet from behind the closed door. “Wait’ll you read the story I’m going to write about you and those notes!”

  Beth Ellen laughed again. It didn’t matter.

  And I assume by the time “Harriet” did actually get around to doing it, they were friends enough that it still didn’t.

  BOOK REPORT

  Then Again, Maybe I Won’t

  By Judy Blume 1971

  Window Undressing

  Who says March is supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb? That’s a load of bull. All it’s done this March is rain. I’m sick of it.

  It’s difficult to say why they keep trying to ban this book by Judy Blume. Significant anecdotal evidence continues to suggest it’s perfectly possible for a young body of either sex to read it numerous times, understand many of its adult complexities, yet still have no idea what a wet dream is until told explicitly many years later under entirely different circumstances. I know that I was, say, a good twenty-two (I’ll cop to it) before, sitting around, I finally realized WHY Tony would have wanted to carry a raincoat to school and a stack of books to the front of the room when he wrote on the blackboard. (What can I say? The school play, SATs, and papers on Blake had pretty much eaten up most of my free brain space in the intervening decade.) I certainly understood stained sheets had something to do with sleep, not sex—I’ll leave readers to access their own dorm-room memories, here, if you don’t mind—but I can’t say it made it hard (I’m just not going to be able to get away from puns, at this point) for me to understand Tony.

  Written in the years before being working-class was considered a virtue, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t is the story of one Tony Miglione, who’s a Jersey City resident; lover of basketball; younger sibling of Ralph, a teacher crammed in upstairs with his wife, Angie, and Vincent, who died in Vietnam; son of Vic (“Pop”) and Carmella (“Ma”); and grandson of Grandma (“Grandma”), who does all the cooking and cannot speak because she has no larynx, which doesn’t creep Tony out, because he loves her.

  The crisis in the novel occurs almost immediately, when Angie gets, insofar as one can, inadvertently pregnant. (I’m going to go out on a limb and assume, due to the presence of several Father Pisarros in the narrative, that she and Ralph are using the rhythm method.) Pop, heretofore a general contractor, also goes out on a limb and sells some electrical cartridge thingie to a businessman named J. W. Fullerbach, which immediately gives the family the means to move out of Jersey City to the leafy environs of Rosemont, Queens. (Literally a deus ex machina!)

  Before he knows it, Tony has been transplanted from playing basketball at the Y with characters named Big Joe and Little Joe to hanging out with his polite shoplifting neighbor Joel, who has an inground pool, a hot older sister, and a mother who calls Tony’s mother, Carmella, Carol because it’s “easier.”

  As a novel of class, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t is neither cutesy nor polemical: Rather, the pressures Tony experiences as he tries to adjust to the strangeness of newly being consumed with liking girls and having wet dreams is merely doubled, as now he must also contend with the strangeness his new home in Rosemont imposes on him. Blume depicts with mastery the peculiarity of that brief window of adolescence where one is held hostage not only by one’s parents but by one’s own body as well.

  Meaning one might get yelled at for not putting the paper under the mat on one’s daily route. Meaning one might lose said route and move to a new town, next door to a rich kid who makes prank calls from his parents’ bedroom, which has a circular bed on a pedestal, and this STRESSES ONE OUT. Meaning one’s mother might insist on one’s calling adults “sir,” pick up lint from the new carpets constantly, and acquire a maid that usurps one’s grandmother’s role such that she secretes herself in her bedroom except to visit one’s brother’s grave. Meaning one’s dad might buy a new car because one’s neighbors notice the truck and ask if one is having work done on the house.

  One might have erections constantly and have to carry a raincoat or a stack of books at all times to conceal one’s condition, and one might lie to one’s parents to ask for binoculars for birdwatching, then use them to watch the older girl across the way undress. One might become an uncle, be forced to take piano lessons, decide everyone’s a phony, go ahead and let one’s friends get caught by a security guard for shoplifting and sent to military school. Pretty much everything might STRESS ONE OUT so much that one might get terrible stomach pains out of anxiety and eventually wind up in the hospital, after which one’s dad, cutting one a break, would prevent one’s mother from imitating the neighbors and sending one to a military academy as well—after which finally, one might come into one’s own enough, as it were, to put the binoculars away.

  EXTRA CREDIT

  And You Give Me a Pain, Elaine

  By Stella Pevsner 1978

  Sister Act

  In the pantheon of beings whose merest whim can wreak havoc in the life of the preteen girl, never forget the mighty older sister, whose halfway state between child and woman is dangerously unstable, two parts that can combine at any moment like warm and cold air to create a murderous thunderclap. One such thunderer is Elaine, who is too consumed with her own bad mood to even lord her willowy beauty over her stockier sister Andrea. (“Someday, if there was any justice on earth—which I was beginning to doubt—Elaine would be all flab with no muscle tone whatsoever. And I’d be slim.”) As a bigger sister, whenever I’m feeling like I’m being a pain, I pick up my copy and look at the lithe body of Elaine, twirling her hair while she’s talking on the phone in teeny-weeny cut-offs and dangerously narrowed eyes, and feel a rush of sympathy for illustrated Andrea, who, sitting dutifully at her desk without a glint of glamour anywhere, is obviously not even going to be allowed to finish her homework in peace.

  In this tale of sisterly disaffection, two sisters differ in every other way they can. Elaine is a sullen, almost hostile scholar; Andrea gets straight A’s (except from the teachers who, of course, still bear a grudge against Elaine). Elaine sneaks off to drink beer and carouse; Andrea becomes the dependable stage manager of the school play, Dracula. Andrea begins a low-key romance with the props guy; Elaine runs away with a bad boy who ditches her by the side of the road after she runs away. Elaine is her mother’s favorite, and Andrea her father’s, and Andrea is good-natured, understanding, and mellow—except when it comes to Elaine.

  What’s most interesting about And You Give Me a Pain, Elaine is how Pevsner resists making Elaine a character defined by Lifetime-worthy bad behavior. She’s not an alcoholic; she’s not dangerously obsessed with a boy; she doesn’t have a boy who’s dangerously obsessed with her; she doesn’t have an addiction to painkillers or an addiction to pain. Her drama is simple—she’s in a bad mood. But it’s a bad mood that, like a gathering hurricane, pulls the hapless surrounding atmosphere straight into its moody, whirling vortex, and from the havoc she wreaks, each nasty word might as well come with a cudgel.

  And more interesting still, the solution is not sisterly love. The girls’ older brother, Joe, knows the only cure is to stay clear. (“I’m not her audience and I care nix about her performance.”) Andrea doesn’t realize she has a choice—until Joe dies, and she begins to see herself as a person apart, someone who exists as more than in opposition to Elaine—who has, miraculously, started to tire even of herself. Sisterly love doesn’t help Elaine stop being such a fuckup—in fact, Andrea releases herself from all responsibili
ty for Elaine’s well-being: “It was something my sister would have to work out for herself.” But in the quiet after the storm, sisterly love is something that can finally grow.

  EXTRA CREDIT

  To Take a Dare

  By Paul Zindel and Crescent Dragonwagon 1982

  Homing Instinct

  Despite having one of the most recognizable co-author names in all of history, Paul Zindel and Crescent Dragonwagon’s joint foray may be the least remembered for either author. That’s a shame, because this story of a bookworm masked in the body of a bad girl who runs away before she’s even 14 is one of the most memorable, complex novels in the bunch. It was a book I found on my friend’s shelf and borrowed over and over again, never able to find it in any used bookstore until I was finally saved by eBay, completely obsessed with the expression on the face of the girl on the cover and her terrific body, both lean and curvy in a way teen authors seemed insistent about, but few cover artists could accurately convey. Would I get that body, too? Would my teenage years be that striking and dramatic? (No and no; whatever.)

  But Chrysta, who, like Elaine in And You Give Me a Pain, Elaine, is the girl at the party who takes a hit of the pot and definitely goes home with the bad guy, is the antithesis of the awkward, worried character who’d like to get puberty going so she can get a boyfriend already—meaning the antithesis of most of the girls, like me, reading her story over and over, wondering what it would be like to be let loose in the world and forced to find yourself before you could even drive. For Chrysta’s part, she knows full well that if only her bra size had been a few cups smaller, she’d have been allowed to be left in peace to hang out at the library with the rest of us.