When I read this book as a girl, I have to say I was equally taken with the idea of ghost-hood as I was with a) owning a huge, pretty, mirrored globe all to myself while being the petted, pretty child living on a beautiful estate and b) getting to own a white dress of cotton lawn with a wide blue belt. (Still am!) But upon reread, I can see the tone of the novel was actually very modern and amusing—told from the point of view of the older Louisa, it has an interesting romantic conflict in the form of a dull fiancé, Martin, and an aggravating but irresistible interloper, Adam, with whom she argues, among other things, about whether or not women deserve the right to vote. (I still growl with irritation at the smug argument that women might be too hysterical to vote wisely. Too hysterical to respond to idiot arguments without growling, maybe.)
The story is simple: Jane, naturally, seeks to spread her evil influence over both of them—not only to thwart Louisa from marrying her childhood crush, Adam, but also to take over Emily and thereby live out the childhood that’s been snatched too early from her. Her evil spirit is housed in a great silvery globe on the property—although, naturally, reasonable people, like Adam, he of fear-of-hysterical-voters, are loath to believe that what’s ripped Louisa’s gown apart is, you know, spectral. Or that Emily’s moodiness is due to a ghost’s influence, when actually her parents have just died.
Luckily, though everyone adores Adam, no one takes him, or his idea that women are too emotional to deserve the vote, under serious consideration. By the time the book ends, the world may have lost one ghost—but it’s added three future voters.
EXTRA CREDIT
Down a Dark Hall
By Lois Duncan 1974
In-School Suspension
You can keep your girls of Canby Hall—if we are dibsing boarding schools. If I may, I will lay claim to the tiny class of the ominously named Blackwood School for Girls, whose intimate, supportive environment makes it all the better to channel the dead through you with, my dear. The Blackwood School—for which the tiny entering class has filled out a peculiar application that they have no idea is really meant to test how good a host they’d be for your average dearly departed genius—is a bit like a Yaddo for those in the afterlife who are peeved that they died before the advent of NEA grants and massive library bequests. While the novels, paintings, mathematical proofs, and scores the girls “produce” are most impressive, it turns out that one cannot live so intimately with an artistic genius and not go a little bit crazy. You don’t say.
Chapter 8
Him She Loves?
Romanced, Rejected, Affianced, Dejected
If you’ve reached this far, you know I have spilled quite a bit of ink on the idea that young adult literature for girls is rife with sophisticated, subtle, and fascinating truths about the human condition. Phew. NOW WE CAN TALK ABOUT BOYS.
If you take magazines for teenage girls—or women, for that matter—as a guide, you’d have to decide that the main function of the male in the female’s life is to provoke anxiety, mortification, and the exercise of a battery of stratagems worthy of Rasputin. (My old boss at a teen girl magazine was fond of saying we could run entire issues dedicated to the most-asked question of the magazine’s run: Does he like me?) This is true in the same sense that whenever you need a cab, there aren’t any—meaning, while one is enraptured, men may seem the aggravating, mysterious center of the world. Fortunately, this condition only occurs, in both cases, when you’re wearing heels and under the impression you’ll die if you don’t get one immediately.
If you looked at the broad swath of commercial fiction, you’d find that the successful acquisition of said love interest is also the end of the story—the march into the sunset that signals you can get up, brush off the popcorn, and finally go to the bathroom. And while the comedy of errors that so often accompanies courtship is the Old Reliable of love in type, you’ll actually find it far less than you’d think in the books herein.
First we have Tayari Jones’s essay on Forever, which doesn’t only focus on the book’s inordinately helpful explications of the particulars of lovemaking (oh! It goes THERE, etc.), but also on how Blume’s point isn’t that love is grand or love is a bitch—but how we’ll be able to survive the agonies of both. Then there’s Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger, rife with agony, it’s true—but also rife with an exploration of the genuine pain of love when the real world, as it annoyingly does, insists on interfering. And then we have Happy Endings Are All Alike, a book where lesbianism and rape, dramatic though they be, aren’t the triggers for a couple’s doggedly mundane breakup. Even a book like Fifteen, which brightly declares its boy-seeking ends right from the beginning, manages to dissect the foibles of courtship so thoroughly that, at the end of the day, it’s better regarded as a cultural and psychological précis than an amusing narrative.
But at the end of the day, it isn’t only that all these books but one end either in breakup or unspecified limbo that distinguishes them. It’s that, whether in the person of Fifteen’s fitful Jane, unable to translate Latin, so intent she is on willing the phone to ring, or To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie’s heroine, who is under the mistaken impression that all signs of affection from men are as solemn, respectful, and loving as those she sees on the big screen, our protagonists are all given room to experience the true complexity of love at its best and at its nadir. As Margo Rabb says in her essay on Zibby Oneal’s In Summer Light, “I’ll keep rereading it, as I do every few years, to revisit that old Kate-like part of myself that tries to be mature, accepting, and to not be an idiot in love.” These girls are all idiots in love, to be sure. But they remind us that, at the game of love, however old we get, we’re all amateurs.
OVERDUE
Forever
By Judy Blume 1975
The Talk
By Tayari Jones
When I was about 11 years old, my mother gave me The Talk. I am not exactly clear in my memory, but I believe that my father was in the room, too. This was their idea of being enlightened parents—having a very sane and sober discussion with their on-the-brink-of-puberty daughter about sex, although they didn’t call it that. “Sexual intercourse” was the term they used and they explained it the way that you might explain the workings of a combustion engine. When they walked away, proud of themselves for being so much more open than their parents had been, I was somewhat underwhelmed. I understood how babies were made. I’d picked up a few extra bits of vocabulary like “ovary” and “spermatozoa,” but I had no idea why on earth people were having this sexual intercourse in the first place.
In those fifth-grade days, I had a friend named Cookie, who was much wiser than me on every front. Much of this was due to the fact that she was the last of five children, a brood that included an older sister who had been a senior in high school when she ran away with a very famous musician for several days. (This musician, who is still quite famous, has a reputation for being litigious, so I won’t mention his name here. Trust me when I say that you would know his name if I told you.) It was from this world-wise sister that Cookie had picked up Forever, by Judy Blume. Apparently, the juicy pages had already been dogeared when Cookie lifted it from her sister’s nightstand drawer.
The paperback was a stunner—the cover art featured a locket with a cutout depicting a complicated-looking white girl looking a little bit forlorn, a little bit wise. “Forever…A moving story of the end of innocence.” When you opened the cover you saw the whole picture; there was a guy there with the locket girl. You couldn’t tell if he was stroking her arm or restraining her. Around her neck was an orange scarf that seemed to be signifying something, I just wasn’t sure what. “The first time, a loving time, but what about forever?” I was a little confused, but I wanted to appear as plugged in as everyone else. “Oooh,” I said. With a triumphant little grin, Cookie flipped right to the page where Katherine and Michael have sex, for the first time, on the living-room floor. This time when I said “Ooh,” I meant it. There are about four sex
scenes in the novel, and Cookie gave me a guided tour through them all. We read the bathroom scene twice and puzzled over the logistics of woman-on-top.
This was no tidy discussion about the mechanics of sexual intercourse. In about two paragraphs flat, I fell into a world where boys named their penises “Ralph” and creamed their shorts. (This was what my mom and dad meant by ejaculation.) My parents never even mentioned the existence of a female orgasm, but there it all was, on the folded-over pages. Perhaps this is when I developed my taste for erotica. Just reading those pages gave me a tingly feeling that helped me understand the motivation behind boys and girls getting naked and putting their parts together.
I asked Cookie if I could borrow her book, not only because I wanted to read the hot pages in the privacy of my bedroom, but because I was curious about the relationship between sex and love. Until I glimpsed those pages of Forever, I hadn’t really understood that physical intimacy could be an expression of emotional intimacy, too.
Cookie consented to let me borrow the book for one night. She was very stern about my returning it because there were other girls waiting. As an 11-year-old black girl living in Atlanta, I was completely estranged from many of the details of the story (Fondue? Water skiing? Sleepaway camp?). Still, I was given a crash course in the relationship between bodily pleasure and passionate entanglement and, of course, romantic disappointment. At the end of the novel, lover boy acts a complete ass—that’s what that whole “end of innocence” tagline is all about. Several of my friends swore that they cried actual tears at the end when Katherine and Michael broke up, going on with their separate lives. I, on the other hand, was quite gratified with the no-regrets tone of those final pages. It was as though Judy Blume was promising me a world full of passion, pleasure, and romance. Sure, she seemed to say, there would be pain, but don’t worry. It won’t kill you.
BOOK REPORT
Happy Endings Are All Alike
By Sandra Scoppettone
1978
The Price of Fault
Even though Jaret Tyler had no guilt or shame about her love affair with Peggy Danziger she knew there were plenty of people in this world who would put it down.
Sometime around the invention of email, as I was slowly drifting into cubicle death, I sent the following email to a high-school friend I hadn’t spoken to in years:
H—
What’s the name of the book where there are two lesbians and the girl gets raped under a tree? Not My Sweet Audrina. There are two girls on the cover. How are you?
—L
The friend in question did not even bother to respond to the perfunctory closing query. She immediately zinged back:
HAPPY ENDINGS ARE ALL ALIKE!!!!!
Such is the power of this novel, which I had borrowed from the friend in question for months until I was forced to finally return it, then commenced idly thinking about, roughly every three days since. It wasn’t only that there were lesbians, or rape, or pretty girls in polo tees with shiny hair on the cover whom I might grow up to look like. It was that, like so much of the work of Paula Danziger or Paul Zindel, it presaged a world for us filled with more than gym teachers hurling basketballs at us (see Plotfinder), alive with teenagers struggling with the new complexity of adult relationships—one in which gym teachers, lesbian or no, weren’t anywhere near the center of the drama.
I’d like to provide the nut graf for Happy Endings Are All Alike, but Scoppettone’s first paragraph does it so admirably it seems a shame to mess with it:
Even though Jaret Tyler had no guilt or shame about her love affair with Peggy Danziger she knew there were plenty of people in this world who would put it down. Especially in a small town like Gardener’s Point, a hundred miles from New York City. She and Peggy didn’t go around wearing banners, but there were some people who knew.
Considering the hullabaloo about teenaged sex—ANY kind of teenaged sex—nowadays, pretty much every sentence of that paragraph is mind-blowing. But remember, this is the fictional world of 1978, where parents might mention Susan Brownmiller as quickly as they asked you to set the table. Castigated by her sister, Peggy thinks resentfully to herself, “You weren’t a pervert just because you loved someone of your own sex, for God’s sake!” And, as the preternaturally well-adjusted Jaret puts it to said mother: “Look, I know where you’re coming from, Mom, but don’t let it freak you out. I’ll tell you this: Whatever I did with boys I found really boring. I didn’t get turned on, okay?…And it’s got nothing to do with you and Dad. I mean, you didn’t make some terrible mistake in raising me or anything. And it’s not so terrible. In fact, it’s pretty nice. So don’t lay a guilt trip on yourself, okay?” Okay! And don’t forget the napkins!
But just because Peggy and Jaret—and, nominally, their semi-informed families—are not completely up in arms about their relationship, it doesn’t mean they are off the hook entirely. The ancillary characters are brought in to project the basic prejudices of their time—a narrative conceit that might seem clumsy in an adult novel but it, beLIEVE me, provided crucial info for an 8-year-old girl.
First to hold a nasty grudge at the girls’ love is Peggy’s sister Claire, who is jealous not only of her sister’s favor with their father but also her looks:
She lit another cigarette, sending up a smoke screen between herself and the mirror. Again her mind fixed on Peggy and Jaret. Both of them were attractive. Jaret might even be considered beautiful. Dammit, she was beautiful…by male standards, she was a knockout. And that was what really made Claire crazy. Jaret Tyler could have had any boy or man she wanted and she wanted none. Peggy, too, could have had her pick. And who did they choose? Each other. It was sick. Crazy. Enraging. Why, when they could have the cream of the crop, did they want each other?
Okay, first lesson: People think if you’re goodlooking, not getting with a man is a waste. Lies! Check. Scoppettone’s second lesson: Not all heterosexual relationships are happy, or free of complication—but that doesn’t mean married women are all oppressed. Jaret’s parents are a case in point: While Kay, her mother, muses her husband is madly in love with her, she thinks with irritation how she’s truly invested in his looks, even if she allows him to think it’s the other way around:
He often accused her of regarding him as nothing more than a sex object and she had a hard time denying it. “Well, kid,” she often said, “I can’t help it if you’re a looker.” “What about my mind?” he’d ask. Kay would shrug and say, “Who needs it?”
Of course, she didn’t really mean it. She just said it to keep Bert aware of the way women were treated. And he knew that. What he didn’t know was that Kay was not overwhelmed by his mind.
Kay is an interesting character—an aggressively liberated mom who is deeply disturbed at how disturbed she is about her daughter’s new relationship:
She lit a fresh cigarette. [If you’re thinking of lesbians, grab a smoke.] Kay had read everything she could find on the subject of homosexuality and lesbianism and what she’d read wasn’t that helpful. There were many theories as to why a person turned out to be a lesbian—environment, chromosomes, choice—and a lot of big, fat blanks. No one really seemed to know. Nevertheless, Kay couldn’t help blaming herself and Bert. But why blame? Why the need to put it in those terms? She knew it was because she still had one foot in the fifties and a lesbian life-style was not what she’d had in mind for her daughter; it was not something she could fully accept as normal, no matter how liberated she might be.
Oh, what a fraud she was! Pretending to Jaret it was all fine with her, simply swell, because she wanted Jaret to like her, to think she was cool! What she really wanted to do was throw herself at her feet and beg her to see a psychiatrist so she’d get over this thing.
Equally equivocating is Peggy’s friend Bianca, who reacts to the news with blasé sophistication until one day Peggy, chatting with her in the bedroom, tells her sweating friend to take off her clothes, then is shocked and appalled to realize she thinks she�
��s hitting on her:
“Besides,” said Peggy, “do you think I’m interested in all females?”
“I thought…I don’t know,” she said, somewhat ashamed.
“No, I guess you don’t. I thought you understood. I mean, are you interested in every guy you see?”
This was not only a revolutionary piece of transitory logic to a third-grader, but also a good schooling in the minor injustices visited by well-meaning people on people who are different, particularly (primarily!) by their own friends. But if the emotional travails of their friends and family were the only ones in store for the girls, this would be a fairy story, not a political coming-of-age. There are deeper dangers in a character named Mid, a friend of Jaret’s brother Chris and no less disturbing for being stereotypically disturbed. Musing he’d like to “knock [Jaret] on her ass” for being so goodlooking and aloof, he stalks her and finds out that she and Peggy have been making love in the woods. Not realizing Peggy and Jaret’s rarefied world is only agonized about their girls’ predilections, not apt to disown them for them, he decides he can rape her with impunity.
The rape scene is long and awful and I APOLOGIZE. But the introduction of sex to girls, however it is rendered, is such a constant trope in the novels, it is instructive to think of how it’s handled by the character—in this case, Jaret, who is shocked and destroyed, though not permanently—and by the author, whose scene is neither maudlin nor lurid, but simply chilling:
“I hate your guts,” he whispered.
Why then? she wondered apathetically. His movement continued. Her head was turned to the side. Breathing became difficult. Month after month passed. Staring at the landscape, she wondered why the seasons didn’t change. Where was the snow? She longed for snow, cool, white. Snow would stop the burning inside. She felt her body rock as Mid’s movements quickened. Would she break apart? Explode into pieces of flesh, bone, blood, flying through the air, sticking to trees, bushes?
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