Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  Maggie nodded.

  “The way I understand it, Helen Bordanowitz used to go to Port Richmond High School, and she had the gym locker next to Catherine Usherer—whoever that is—and one day when Catherine Usherer wasn’t looking, Helen Bordanowitz stole it. Understand?”

  Maggie felt her heart pounding. As Liz pushed her into the crowded bar she still couldn’t understand how Liz had gotten the card.

  I STILL DON’T EITHER! And if I can blow some symbolic smoke rings myself, I will assert that Liz’s forcing of a new identity on Maggie—the “Ushering,” if you will—while being in possession of numerous ones herself is symbolic of what my friend likes to say about good girls and bad girls—namely, that they do exist, but that most of us have been both by the ends of our lives.

  Because you know why the birth certificate itself is there. Liz’s stepfather is going to call her “a little tramp,” and she’s going to decide it’s not worth it to pretend she isn’t one. She’s going to sleep with Sean, and she’s going to get pregnant. Sean is going to promise to marry her, and then his own father is going to convince him not to. And Liz is going to finally get Maggie to accompany her to her abortion—brought there by the town jerk, who, in a scene I have never forgotten, crams two hot dogs into his mouth at once while he’s driving them home, then wipes his face off with his hand while looking in the rearview mirror and checking his hair.

  And during the same time, what happens to Maggie? She loses weight. She stops plucking her eyebrows cockeyed. She gets asked out by Dennis to the prom, and she has to reject him in order to go with Liz, something he won’t understand until months, months later. Liz, who had based all of her hopes on the purity of love, is left with exactly the opposite. While Maggie, who was too afraid to even believe anyone liked her, winds up, like Sean, betraying Dennis, also through her own weakness. Ringing in their ears, of course, is Mrs. Fanuzzi’s advice. But not because they wished they had taken it. Because it, like everything else they’ve been told about love up until they try it themselves, is completely and utterly beside the point.

  OVERDUE

  In Summer Light

  By Zibby Oneal 1985

  Non-Idiots in Love

  By Margo Rabb

  I recently picked up an old diary I kept when I was 17, and found a page where I’d written this:

  I feel like I just woke up from a wonderful dream. I just finished reading In Summer Light by Zibby Oneal—it’s about Kate, a seventeen-year-old (which is partly why I wanted to read it) and about her summer, her father, her family, and falling in love with a visiting graduate student, Ian, who’s twenty-five. It’s one of the few books written about someone my age which gives a teenager any bit of credit for the ability to think, to be mature, to not be an idiot. I related to Kate and I admired and respected her. She was herself. Not sappy-nice, or always perfect, but real. I fell in love with Ian also. Nothing physical ever really happened between her and Ian, but it all meant so much just the same. It had so much meaning…they loved each other. They didn’t do anything, but it’s still love.

  I reread In Summer Light again every few years, reveling in this story of this rare, blurry, and intangible kind of friendship-love that I didn’t understand at seventeen, and nearly 20 years later don’t entirely understand, either.

  The book is set on a Martha’s Vineyard-like island in summer. Kate is the daughter of a famous painter, and Ian has come to catalog her father’s paintings. Kate paints also, but has lost her faith in her work, and feels crushed by the overbearing presence of her father and his genius. Ian takes Kate’s painting seriously and encourages her, and their friendship develops into something more, which Kate realizes one day late in the summer:

  Once she had asked her mother how a person knew when she loved someone. She hadn’t meant the family kind of love, but the other kind that she strangely imagined and sometimes thought about. Ten years old, leaning against her mother, she’d asked, and her mother had said, “You’ll know.”

  And that was true, Kate thought. She knew. She had known for quite a while. It hadn’t come to her at any one time or in any special place as she had expected, but so slowly that she hardly recognized its coming at all. It had been there before she gave it a name. Like air, it had been all around her.

  In so many of the books I read and movies I saw, love, especially among teenagers, was more about dithering over superficial makeout sessions and mindless crushes than about anything deep and real. I didn’t want to be an idiot in love. I wanted to be like Kate. And I wanted to understand the friendships I had that crossed over into other territory—what did they mean? Were they real? Is it love if you never act on it, if you never “do” anything? If it’s brief and short-lived and you never see the person again?

  Alice Munro writes about the same kind of friendship-love in her short story “Nettles”:

  Love that was not usable, that knew its place. (Some would say not real, because it would never risk getting its neck wrung, or turning into a bad joke, or sadly wearing out.) Not risking a thing yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource.

  Literary scholars may not find much common ground between a 1985 YA novel and Alice Munro, but both beautifully articulate a type of love that I’ve felt so keenly, but had no words for until I saw it portrayed on the page. For Kate, her love with Ian is a sweet trickle, an underground resource, a source of confidence, even if it never risks getting its neck broken or sadly wearing out.

  When Ian says good-bye, there are no dramatic scenes of lovelorn agony, but a sense of mature acceptance:

  Everyone came out to see him off. Even if they had wanted to, there was no time or chance then to say more than they had already said, but there was nothing left that needed saying. “Now and here aren’t all that there will ever be,” he had said. There were numbers of ways that she could choose to interpret that, and Kate chose to let it stand that way, with many meanings.

  At 17, I was learning that fiction was the primary way I’d understand and find meaning in life, that there were feelings I’d felt and experiences I’d had that I couldn’t comprehend until I read about them in books. That some kinds of love have many meanings, and the meanings change over time, the way a book changes each time you reread it.

  In Summer Light is out of print now. I want to write Oneal a letter, to tell her how much this novel meant to me at 17, and still means to me today; how I’ll pass my copy on to my daughter, and I hope she’ll pass it on, too. And 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.

  BOOK REPORT

  The Moon by Night

  By Madeleine L’Engle 1963

  Hit the Road, Zach

  It was John’s voice and he was calling for me. I supposed somewhere on the inside of my mind I realized it, but with the outside of my mind all I heard was the constant crying of sea gulls and the incoming boom of breakers.

  Don’t buy into the party of unity: When it comes to Madeleine L’Engle, you’re either a Meg, Polly, or Vicky girl. (NO ONE is Camilla. And whatever, Maggies—you’re deliberately being provoking.) For those of you rusty on the trois dames of L’Engle’s works, Meg is, OF COURSE, Meg Murry, of A Wrinkle in Time fame, while Poly (Polyhymnia) is her redheaded daughter of the excellent Dragons in the Waters action. Vicky is Vicky Austin, of Meet the Austins, two kinds of awkward, three kinds of innocent, and strangely appealing for a 14-year-old given to frequent bouts of vigorous prayer.

  I’m a Poly, of course, but I’ve still always had a very soft spot for The Moon by Night, the second in the Austin-family trilogy, for its scenic canyon views or barrage of male love interests, I couldn’t tell you. (Pure jealousy, I’m sure—having never managed to escape my family’s purview for more than 10 minutes on a camping trip or any other trip.) When we catch up with Vicky, she’s just exited the ugly-duckling stage, where all her “sticky-out bones and unmanageable hair
seem to come to some sort of agreement.” (Exiting the awkward stage, as we have learned, is a narratively advantageous time to launch a novel, AS WE CAN NOW GET A LOVE INTEREST OR POSSIBLY TWO IN THE MIX. More on that soon.)

  The Austin family—of the kindly physician father, the lovely stay-at-home mother, the older, supersmart brother, John, the pretty youngest daughter, Suzy, the surprise child, Rob, and Vicky in the middle—have just married off Vicky’s mother’s best friend to her uncle, deposited their foster daughter, Maggie, with the happy couple, and headed off on a camping trip across the country, bearing their usual Austin cheer with them:

  “When we reached the mainland we headed for a parkway and started playing the alphabet game. You know, you divide up by who’s sitting on which side of the car, and you have to find the letters of the alphabet, in order, one by one, on the signs. John and Daddy and Suzy were way ahead until they came to Q, and then Mother and Rob and I caught up with them and won. Then we played Animal Rummy, and Rob saw a white horse and won that. And of course we sang. We always do a lot of singing.”

  Approximately every 10 pages, to be precise. This level of saccharine should of course be unendurable, but Vicky’s innocence is the only acceptable kind. In L’Engle’s world, there’s no virtue in innocence, only a testing ground for what will happen when real choice is at stake. (Like the whole evil starfish consortium in Dragons in the Waters! Sorry.) There are only a few flavors of childhood in L’Engle: precocious, thoughtless, and as-yet-unformed, all trying to contend with what they can’t understand but know they must master. In short, the Austin family still all reads in the campground together at bedtime: but they read A Connecticut Yankee.

  Vicky, of course, is in the as-yet-unformed camp, every experience and piece of knowledge and opportunity to feel all the more a meteor hurtling wildly while all around her and snug in tight orbits:

  “John [is] terrifically intelligent, but not a bit of a grind. I mean, he just comes home from school and sits down and gets his homework done in half the time it takes me to do mine. He’s good at sports, too, the kind you can do with glasses on, like basketball and track. As far as I can see he’s good at just about everything, I’m proud of him, sure, but sometimes I feel, well, just kind of sad, because I can’t ever hope to be the kind of person John is. I don’t even know what I want to be yet.”

  No worries, sweets. That’s why you get the trilogy! This ties in, of course, to L’Engle’s vision of Christianity, one even a Spaghetti-Monster-fearing atheist might have a difficult time quarreling with, filled as it is with thoughtful analysis of one’s role and an aggressive rejection of piety voiced by almost every major character. (Choice excerpt, from Vicky’s uncle: “The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or why he does such and such, beware.”)

  In fact, the whole Christianity thing is so sublimated you are mostly concentrated, like Vicky, on GETTING TO THE BOY STUFF. This occurs right after the family has settled in at one of their first campgrounds and Daddy fights off a hood because he, you know, KNOWS JUDO.

  Suzy asked, “Daddy, weren’t you scared?”

  “I didn’t like it,” Daddy said, “but most hoodlums are cowards when it comes to a showdown. They’re only brave when they think you’re afraid of them. Now don’t let this spoil our trip, and don’t let it spoil Tennessee.”

  “Are we to be frightened of our teenagers?” Mother asked bitterly. “Has it come to that?”

  “Vicky and I are teenagers,” John said. “You can’t blame teenagers any more than you can Tennessee. There are dopy fringe elements in every group. I wrote a paper on it for Social Studies.”

  Sorry, I drifted off for a second, but is it…ZACH! Thank God, it’s ZACHARY GRAY! Like, riding up in a big black car into the campground and Vicky’s life NOW!!! Zachary of very pale skin and black hair and polo shirt and totally rich parents and bad-boy vibe! Zach, who is, in Vicky’s words, “really pretty spectacular.”

  Because, how awesome is it that you’re on a vacation and are finally pretty and your parents are nice but constantly making you sing and you kind of like it but ISN’T ANYTHING ELSE GOING TO EVER HAPPEN TO ME and the guy across the way full STROLLS UP, ASKS YOU OUT, and is a real person, filled with contradictions, enough that your family totally hates him on sight, even though he has his virtues and is not just some weird guy trying to sleep with you:

  “You’ve got an interesting face, Vicky,” Zachary said as we walked back towards our tent. “Not pretty-pretty, but there’s something more. And a darned good figure. I’d say something other than darned only I might shock little unhatched you.”

  “I’m not so unhatched as all that.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bet you nothing’s happened to you all your life long. Your meals have always been put in front of you and if you skin your little knee you can run crying to Mommie and Poppie and they’ll kiss it and make everything all right.”

  Well, maybe I didn’t have very much experience so far. But I was on my way to getting it.

  PREACH IT, SISTER! But why is Zach such an avatar of experience? Because, as we learn, he, like many of the young poets before him, suffered from rheumatic fever, leaving him with the dramatic coloring and disposition Vicky adores—and that drives her family to try to expel him like a foreign agent. (“This camping trip’s a family affair, Vicky.”)

  What’s most fascinating about L’Engle is how she’s able to weave the actual events of the trip with great moral quandaries to the extent that an adult can, with a stretch, almost read them as parables. You could say some delinquents throw a Coke bottle at their car, or that they, like all travelers, are beset upon by thieves on the road. They either use their station wagon to drive some Girl Scouts out of a flooded canyon, or they are Noah with an ark saving the innocents. There’s a baby left in a tent with Mother, and a fallen woman who gratefully retrieves her. Vicky learns about Native Americans, a town destroyed by half the mountain, the Holocaust, and American imperialism. She sees New Mexico: “At home in Thornhill nobody is really poor, and it was awful to see the shacks and shanties and poor, foreign-looking people along the roadside. No wonder D. H. Lawrence isn’t really happy in New Mexico.” She sees The Diary of Anne Frank with Zach when the family reaches Laguna Beach. “If God lets things be unfair, if He lets things like Anne Frank happen, then I don’t love Him, I hate Him!” she cries. Dude, hold on a second. YOU’RE GOING TO MEET ANOTHER GUY.

  And enter Andy Ford, the moral redhead who does not want Vicky to see Zach any more than Zach wants Andy to see Vicky! Eff morality: This entire book is about two guys chasing Vicky around sunlit canyons and about dark, starry nights around the fire, and though you have to actually read about three more books to see how it resolves, I would sit through any amount of secret sermonizing to find out what happens next.

  “You’re a funny kid,” Zach tells Vicky: “a mixture of goody-goody little Miss Prunes, and quite a gal. I look forward to knowing you in five years.” Trust us, Zach, there’s all this crap about dolphins and lovers and telekenesis, and it’s AWESOME.

  BOOK REPORT

  To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie

  By Ellen Conford 1982

  Riding Sidesaddle

  Dear Mom,

  Even though you will probably never get this, like you never got any of the other letters I wrote you because I never mailed them, I am writing anyway to tell you I am finally going to “take the plunge” and set out for Hollywood.

  I’ve always had a soft spot for Ellen Conford, one of those authors whose works are so universally skilled and vibrant, she’s prey to the solid-A-student syndrome: so dependable, readers forget she even exists. By the time our daily reading has switched to matte-finish trade paperbacks, memory has already mistakenly shelved her work in with a favorite, showier author. (My particular mis-shelf? Always to put And This Is Laura, her teen-psychic foray, into the Lois Duncan section.)

  To All My Fans, With Love, Fro
m Sylvie—set in the 1950s, peppered with references to Sen-Sens, James Dean, and oddments spelled “Teena”—is particularly vulnerable to such unjust switcheroos, as its subject matter hits notes from favorites by several heavy hitters: After veering vaguely into Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself territory, we pivot momentarily off Bette Greene’s Summer of My German Soldier, then careen for a moment into Francine Pascal’s Hangin’ Out with Cici.

  But though the book bears glancing similarities to those others—a young girl obsessed with Hollywood, crappy father figures, Eisenhower-era signifiers—it’s entirely its own animal: a comic quest in which a 15-year-old tries desperately to get to Hollywood before a series of foster fathers and assorted other creeps get their hands on her.

  The story of 15-year-old Sylvie Krail takes place over the course of five days in which Sylvie escapes her last foster home in New York and almost makes it to Hollywood, where she’s headed to become a star, the book could easily stand beside Transamerica in the Humorous Heartwarmers for Adults That Begin with Really Unpleasant Sexual Encounters, Actually department.

  Sylvie’s good looks are exactly good enough to make Hollywood a reasonable proposition, and invite perpetual trouble. She’s that strange, singularly adolescent mixture of precociously cynical and totally out to lunch, deftly avoiding being routinely pawed by her yucky “Uncle” Ted while simultaneously spending $14.99 ($3,455 in current deficit dollars) of her hard-earned $137 runaway dollars on a hatbox—must-have model’s gear—in preparation for her flight:

  I figured I had about an hour and a half before they came back from church. I wished I could take a nice, cool shower, but there wasn’t time. Everything had to be packed and my hatbox and suitcase had to be hidden before they got back from church.

  Church. That was a laugh. Uncle Ted going to church and singing the hymns and praying to God and looking all Christian and holy five minutes after trying to tuck me into bed. What if they knew what he was really like? What if Aunt Grace knew? I bet she’d drop dead right in the middle of her paint-by-numbers oil picture of the last supper.