Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  The Gift of the Pirate Queen

  By Patricia Reilly Giff 1982

  Blood Kin

  I always loved this story about Grace, whose younger sister has diabetes and who, after the death of her mother, has to get used to her new cousin Fiona, who her father has brought over from Ireland to watch her. Throughout the story, Grace is absolutely tormented by breaking a beautiful china angel her teacher kept on her desk—one given to her by her first class, one she’s evidently loved much more than the one she has now. It’s a standin for everything Grace has lost—the family that was better than the family she has now, one she’s as unwilling to adjust to as her teacher is to let go of the dream of her original class. But it’s also such a moving portrait of the small griefs and worries of childhood—how doing something as small as breaking a piece of china can take over your entire psyche, or how having someone else cooking dinner in the house looms larger than a presidential election. (I could break all the china in my friends’ houses and they could cook forever in mine, and vice versa, and I dare say none of us would much notice the difference.) There’s no romance in adjusting to strange, old Fiona; and there’s no real natural affection in her frightened teacher—but that makes this year of change, in which Amy learns to take her diabetes seriously and Grace to stop taking everything so seriously—far more affecting.

  Chapter 5

  You Heard It Here First

  Very Afterschool Specials

  It Could Happen To You

  It is part of the perverse logic of childhood that, as far as the fictional world goes, the greater the horror of the story, the greater the greedy reading glee. Parents dead, left in poverty in a garret? Terrif. Intense privation, wandering around with wolves? Done. Persecuted unjustly for witchcraft? Lay it on us.

  But it goes without saying that a story that can tell us an entirely new horrible thing we’ve never heard has unparalleled possibilities for enjoyment. Who knew your spine could grow in an S shape, nearly crippling you forever? That some people are beaten in private by their parents—and no one cares? That you can be raped—by someone you know—or just want to stop eating? (Wait—do I want to stop eating?)

  There is an unavoidable sensationalistic bent to fictionalizing any pathology—the anorexia, the scoliosis, the date rape becomes its own separate character, a relentless bogeyman that we had no idea was even lurking on the horizon. (How many girls bent over to ask a friend to measure if their hips were even after reading Deenie?). There’s also the Very Important Problem aspect, the novel serving the same purpose as an AA pamphlet with a built-in scare story. (Now you know if you ARE an alcoholic…and you know what happens to alcoholics, don’t you?)

  This is probably why reading plans tend to tout these books’ value as useful vessels for history, society, tolerance, and other bracing assaults to human depravity. But I have to imagine their appeal is far more basic—simply, to imagine one’s own capacity to respond to the same situation, given the shot.

  That’s because they were more than spokesmodels for hotlines. These girls were living, breathing characters who emerged from their situations intact. Some had stories that were primers for the disorder, the DSM-IV meets Dostoevsky. Some took that same primer and turned it around to show us that the problem was nothing like what we’d thought. Either way, however sensationalist the story, there was a clear result—it got us information we might need. In a country where Betty Ford’s acknowledgment that she was an alcoholic was still a shocking revelation, these were almost revolutionary in their candid disclosures—and their refusal to condemn their characters or let them be condemned. Yes, this can happen, they all said. It happens.

  BOOK REPORT

  Deenie

  By Judy Blume 1973

  Brace Yourself

  My mother named me Deenie because right before I was born she saw a movie about a beautiful girl named Wilmadeene, who everybody called Deenie for short. Ma says the first time she held me she knew right away I would turn out the same way—beautiful, that is.

  Oh, how I wanted to look like the girl on this cover. She might be the only cover girl I ever wanted to look like, actually. (Those legs! That skirt! That thin salmon SWEATER!) But kudos to the cover artist for catching an essential part of the story. Deenie Fenner, as envisaged, is that rare kind of beauty who can be appreciated equally by her high-school-aged peers and by New York modeling agencies. In short, she’s a girl readers can relate to exactly as the other characters do: with admiration, jealousy, and an involuntary sense of possession.

  When we first meet Deenie, she’s an ordinary high-school girl, complete with a less pretty older sister, Helen; two best friends, Janet and Midge; a dishy crush, Buddy Brader; and an actual stalker, Susan Minton, who wears whatever Deenie wore last week. Her place in the social circle is secure if not exactly, like your typical beauty, all powerful. She by no means torments her social inferiors, like Gena Courtney, her wheelchair-bound neighbor, or Barbara Curtis, a new girl whose eczema Deenie privately calls “Creeping Crud.” But she’s not exactly rushing to sit with them at lunch, either.

  Her mother is a different story. While her father—albeit affectionately—reacts to the events in Deenie’s life with baffled, genial detachment (“I didn’t make the cheerleading squad.” “So you’ll find another activity.”), her mother takes on Deenie’s beauty as a spiritual mandate. “Deenie, God gave you a beautiful face,” she says, poo-pooing any reluctance Deenie has to become a model. “Now, he wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t intended for you to put it to good use.”

  Deenie treats her own beauty with admirable equanimity, even a few qualms. When she’s trying out for the cheerleading squad, she tells us, “Most times I don’t even think about the way I look but on special occasions, like today, being goodlooking really comes in handy. Not that a person has any choice about it. I’m just lucky.” But when she thinks about her mother’s confidence in her future profession (“Deenie’s the beauty, and Helen’s the brain!”) a fault line emerges: “One thing I’m sure of is I don’t want to spend my life cleaning house like Ma. Sometimes I think Helen’s lucky. She’ll be a doctor or a lawyer or engineer and she’ll never have to do those things. But if I don’t make it as a model, then what?”

  Still, it’s important to remember that Deenie’s no queen bee, though she’s well-received in all the modeling agencies despite complaints about her posture. (Foreshadowing, foreshadowing!) In another narrative, Deenie might lord a trip to New York to see a modeling scout over her friends. But this heroine is stubbornly a product of her age-appropriate present, irritated that she’s missing, of all things, a trip to Woolworth’s:

  When we go to Woolworth’s Janet’s the best at trying on junk without buying. You’re not supposed to do that but Janet always gets away with it. The one time I tried on some nail polish the saleslady caught me and I had to buy the whole bottle.

  “And we saw Harvey Grabowsky,” Midge said.

  “You did?”

  “Yes, we followed him all around the store.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He never even noticed.”

  “Oh.”

  Harvey is the best looking guy in the ninth grade. He’s also on the football team and President of his class. Harvey has never said one word to me. I guess he doesn’t talk to seventh-grade girls at all.

  As soon as I hung up the phone it rang again. It was Janet.

  “We followed Harvey Grabowsky in Woolworth’s,” she said.

  “I know. I just talked to Midge.”

  “Did she tell you what he bought?”

  “No…what?”

  “Three ballpoint pens and a roll of Scotch tape.

  And once I stood right next to him and touched his shirt sleeve!”

  I just knew I’d miss out on something great by going to New York.

  It would have killed me to miss this, too, naturally. But the social drink of adolescence is like a delicate, primordial soup into which the introduct
ion of a foreign agent can alter the composition forever, causing unexpected, irreversible roils in the resident organisms. Which is exactly what happens when Deenie—heretofore heading in a predictable evolutionary direction—finds out she has adolescent idiopathic scoliosis; or, in Deenie’s words, “adolescent and something that sounded like idiotic.”

  Suddenly, Deenie goes from having her photo snapped and practicing her walk in front of agents to having her X-rays taken and walking around in order for the doctor to better pinpoint her infirmity. It’s portfolio to pathology, something Deenie comes to realize almost immediately when she starts chattering with her new doctor about the pictures on his examination-room wall:

  “Were you a good football player?”

  “I was fair,” he said. “Are you interested in football?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t know much about it yet. I wanted to be a cheerleader, but I didn’t make the squad.”

  He didn’t say anything about that. I thought he would. I thought he’d say “Well, you can try again next year” or something like that. Instead he said, “Bend over and touch your toes with your hands, Deenie.”

  No more cheerleading, no more modeling—and no more “you’ll find another activity.” Instead, it’s a race to figure out what activities the new, highly unimproved Deenie actually can do, and who’s to blame for the situation:

  In the car, on the way home, Ma told Daddy, “Your cousin Belle had something wrong with her back…remember?”

  “That was different,” Daddy said. “She had a slipped disc.”

  “But I’ll bet that’s where this came from.”

  “I don’t think so,” Daddy said.

  “Because you don’t want to think so!” Ma told him.

  I wanted them to stop acting like babies and start helping me. I expected Daddy to explain everything on the way home—all that stuff Dr. Griffith had been talking about—that I didn’t understand. Instead, he and Ma argued about whose fault it was that I have something wrong with my spine until we pulled into the driveway. It was almost as if they’d forgotten I was there.

  In a way, Deenie is not there anymore. As the doctor marks her plaster cast with a felt pen to show the braceman where he should put the straps, he might as well be marking the spot in the narrative where Deenie must also fit herself into a new role: whoever was beneath the pretty face that was going to be such a successful model. When Deenie is cut out of the cast, she even finds that her body stocking has disappeared, leaving her nearly naked. She’s a babe born into a new life, running, mortified, for the closet.

  It’s also no coincidence that the first thing Deenie does when she gets home is masturbate. This passage, I am not ashamed to admit, went right over my head at age 8, but I still got the gist: whatever she was doing meant Deenie did have a private life, and private desires—and also, presumably, some socially acceptable public ones that would soon be made manifest: “I have this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling,” Deenie tells us. “I don’t know what it’s called or if anyone else has it but when I have trouble falling asleep, touching my special place helps a lot.”

  Deenie’s first step is breaking free of her mother, who’s devastated to see the future she’d wanted for Deenie decimated by the wrong kind of fitting:

  The brace looks like the one Dr. Kliner showed us three weeks later. It’s the ugliest thing I ever saw.

  I’m going to take it off as soon as I get home. I swear, I won’t wear it. And nobody can make me. Not ever!…I had to fight to keep from crying.

  Just when I thought I was going to be okay Ma started. “Oh, my God!” she cried. “What did we ever do to deserve this?” She buried her face in a tissue and made sobbing noises that really got me sore. The louder she cried the madder I got until I shouted, “Just stop it, Ma! Will you just stop it please!”

  Dr. Kliner said, “You know, Mrs. Fenner, you’re making this very hard on your daughter.”

  Ma opened the door and ran out of Dr. Kliner’s office.

  Daddy hugged me and said, “I’m proud of you, Deenie. You’re stronger than your mother.”

  And it’s not only that Deenie is stronger that her mother—it’s that suddenly, this outward manifestation of difference makes Deenie realize she really is different: not only from what everyone thought of her, but what she thought of herself.

  Part of this involves accepting the idea that she, the former beauty, is “disabled.” As the nurse shows her illustrations of her own scoliosis, she sees a drawing of kyphosis, or hunchbackism—what the woman who mans the newspaper stand near her bus stop has. “It was hard to believe I really had something in common with Old Lady Murray,” Deenie thinks. After she’s handed a form for the handicapped bus, she throws it away—then wonders if her wheelchair-bound neighbor, a former friend to whom she never speaks, thinks of herself as a “handicapped person or just a regular girl, like me.” She stops worrying about catching Barbara’s creeping crud in gym, after she can’t lean over to tie her shoelaces and Barbara wordlessly does it for her: “When she told us to choose partners Barbara and me looked at each other and grabbed hands.”

  But she has her best insight about the brace after wearing it for a few days and responding to endless questions, not knowing whether she should feel sorry for herself or worried about being considered “different”:

  When Harvey saw me he asked, “What happened to you?”

  He would be the only one in school who didn’t already know. “I have scol…” I stopped in the middle. I didn’t feel like explaining anything to anybody. Instead I looked straight at him and said, “I jumped off the Empire State Building!” After I said it I felt better. I usually think up clever things to say when it’s too late. From now on, when people ask me what’s wrong, I’m going to give them answers like that. It’s a lot smarter than telling the truth. No one wants to hear the truth. “I jumped right off the top!” I forced myself to laugh.

  “Oh, Deenie!” Janet said. “Tell him the truth.”

  “I just did.”

  “Hey, that’s a good story,” Harvey told me.

  It is, and it’s a much better story than the story her mother had planned for her. It’s also better than the one she had planned for Helen, whose love life she meddles in after deciding it also doesn’t fit into her plans for her other daughter. But with Deenie chucking her part, the center cannot hold, and the entire beauty-and-brains scheme comes crashing down:

  “Oh Ma…you’re impossible! God didn’t give me a special brain. You made that up. And you almost convinced me, Ma…you almost did…. I used to tell myself it didn’t matter if I wasn’t pretty like Deenie because I have a special brain and Deenie’s is just ordinary…but that didn’t help Ma…it didn’t help at all…because it’s not true!”

  Helen turned around and looked at me. Then she did the craziest thing. She ran to me and hugged me and cried into my shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Deenie…don’t let them make you believe that…it’s really not your fault.”

  I started crying too. Helen doesn’t hate me, I thought. She should, but she doesn’t. We both cried so hard our noses ran but neither one of us let go of the other to get a tissue. And right through it all, Ma kept talking. “I wanted better for you,” she said. “Better than what I had myself. That’s what I’ve always planned for my girls…is that so wrong?”

  Oh, jeez, now I’M CRYING. Focus. But this isn’t a comeuppance story about a conceited beauty who gets brought low by her own flaws, it’s a more subtle point about the perils of any gift, including good looks. They can give one opportunities, but they can also be their own kind of cage. While Deenie’s not conceited, she’s passive—a very minor flaw in the scheme of things that unchecked, as Blume knows, can have far more dire consequences. Deenie’s brace, ironically, frees her from the invisible brace her mother was setting up for her, which was a life she hadn’t chosen for herself, however well meant. A plastic cage, with its collar and straps, chafes. But Deenie’s
brace is far better than the one her mother had in mind—and one Deenie can emerge from with her standing intact.

  BOOK REPORT

  Don’t Hurt Laurie!

  By Willo Davis Roberts 1977

  Hit and Miss

  Laurie sat on the edge of the table, not looking around her because it always frightened her to see all of the emergency room equipment.

  Don’t Hurt Laurie!, the story of a young girl whose mother has been assaulting her for years with the same energy with which she evades detection will seem to modern readers so completely of the Lifetime pathology-meets-story tradition—dire warnings mounting as if for an approaching hurricane system—that it’s important to remember that in its day, both the revelation of the problem at all—to say nothing of its features—were largely unknown by the public, including young readers.

  When we meet Laurie, she’s sitting on the table at the emergency room, having her hand sewn up by a kindly physician. The knife wound has been delivered by her manifestly unkind mother, Annabelle, and, we soon learn from the girl at the desk’s gentle inquiry, Laurie has also recently been in for burns and either a broken collarbone or arm, wounds carefully put down as “accidents.” “If she’d be more careful, she wouldn’t have so many,” Annabelle snaps back at the girl’s hesitant observation, then drags Laurie away.

  Laurie’s father has abandoned the family, and her new stepfather, while jocular, has two other children and little attention to pay to Laurie. Still, after pointing out that Laurie is the “readingest kid I ever saw,” he buys her a dictionary for her birthday at the urging of her new, younger stepbrother, who’s the only one in the family who has any idea what Annabelle does when her husband is away on business trips. One of the few luxuries, in fact, that Annabelle allows her daughter is trips to the library, where Laurie picks out books “where everybody had adventures with nice mothers and fathers, and there were horses and dogs for pets. She’s always wanted a pet, but Annabelle didn’t like animals.”