Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  That rat becomes her friend. Her imagination gives her power over others as well—not only to keep Miss Minchin at bay, but to find other friends—ones who, as in the ancient fairy tale, eventually restore her to her rightful place, all her diamond mines intact. But despite those diamonds, and despite the title, Burnett isn’t arguing that holding a glass slipper to our hearts is the way to save ourselves. If we can learn anything from Sara, we should know it’s this: Telling stories is.

  EXTRA CREDIT

  All-of-a-Kind Family

  By Sydney Taylor 1951

  The L.E.S. Pinafore

  There may be no better housecleaning scheme in all of literature than that found in an early scene in this series, the wonderful story of Ella, Charlotte, Sarah, Henny, and Gertie, five Jewish (what else?) girls growing up on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century. Okay, so here is Mama’s method. To make sure the girls dust the entire front room, she places buttons for the girls to find in all the hard-to-find spots. When they find all the buttons, they have finished the room.

  But wait! you ask. What about how once the girls find one button (say, on a table leg) they might leave the rest of the table undusted? Well! You will be very happy to hear, as I was, that Mama is crafty, and in time, periodically places a few buttons on one item, or none, or a penny, to prevent just such an eventuality.

  Phew. And now, we come to yet another deliriously fetishized vision of household labor, one in which young Gertie, given a gift of her choosing, pipes up, “I want a little washboard and a little tub so I can wash my dolly’s clothes.” (Well, I do, too.) Taylor hews to the Dickensian model of providing pretty much one event per chapter, preferably something illustration worthy, which means you can successfully call up the entire text by simply listing the chapter titles. (The Library Lady, Dusting is Fun, Rainy Day Surprise, Who Cares if t’s Bedtime?, The Sabbath, Papa’s Birthday, Purim Play, Sarah in Trouble, Mama Has Her Hands Full, Fourth of July, Family Outing, Succos, A New Charlie.) You’re welcome.

  Chapter 10

  Panty Lines

  I Can’t Believe They Let Us Read This

  Playing Hide-the-Library

  You did it under covers, in the dead of night, hiding, hoping no one would walk in on you. You snuck off to do it, you did it when no one was home, you talked about doing it with your friends, laughing hysterically—and sometimes you even talked about the best parts of doing it at sleepovers, when it was the big elephant in the room. You knew there was nothing wrong with it, yet you felt vaguely dirty about it—like you’d be embarrassed if your parents knew you did it—and thinking about it now, you still feel slightly embarrassed about doing it, even though you know almost everyone does it. You—what’s that?

  No, I am talking about reading dirty books, you ninny. But I’m glad you brought that up—since you almost certainly learned about that by doing it, too.

  In general I’m against book banning, but in the case of filthy literature, I’m all for it. How else would we find out which are the best ones? I think it’s possible the CW generation might go so far as to set aside their disbelief at the outlandish idea of iceboxes, Walkmans, and corded phones to stand agog at the fact that, once, it was impossible to learn about coitus simply by turning on the TV. (Or the computer. Or car radio.)

  No, those who needed to know what went where and how and when had to either have careless parents or very careful friends, the kind who could sneak a copy of The Joy of Sex off the nightstand and replace it before it was missed, or who could tuck a copy of Wifey between Tuck Everlasting and Sounder and slide it past the librarian for a supremely unwholesome threesome. And even more daring girls, the kind who knew about works like The Group, The Secret Garden, Scruples, The Carpetbaggers, Kinflicks, The Thorn Birds, even The Godfather—forget about it. Armed with a pen and the ability to dogear, they wrote their own ticket, ruling the playground, the lunch-room—let’s face it, the world.

  But, as we soon learned, many of these books (inexplicably) didn’t require much sneaking at all. Take the works of V. C. Andrews, forty times as filthy as that toilet seat your mother was always warning you about. (Or, as Andrews might put it, “Filthier by thousandfold!”) Alongside fat chocolate bars and gum, they hid in plain sight at the head of the grocery aisle, their spooky black covers with alabaster faces staring out like a ghost story by way of Sweet Valley High. (“Oh, honey. Well, only if you promise to finish The Red Pony.”)

  Or take the works of Norma Klein, which often just featured a moody-looking girl on the cover, perhaps one in the throes of the same crush as the ones on those other innocent paperbacks, or worried about a divorce or whatever—but certainly not posing nude for a Columbia professor, sleeping with her science teacher, or engaging in a lengthy flirtation with a senior citizen.

  And don’t even get me started on Jean M. Auel. The Clan of the Cave Bear and Broud? Valley of the Horses and the longest, hottest loss of virginity on record? The Mammoth Hunters, of the swaying pachyderms and other protuberant objects? Those three may have managed to sneak their way onto some reading lists seeking fictional works on the Paleolithic period. (Dinosaur bones!)

  But my personal hiding-in-plain-site filth is Jaws. Who knew the word pudenda appeared in the first pages of Jaws? (Well, now you.) Who remembers that there’s other splashes than the shark’s, like the married woman shifting on a vinyl seat, worried she’s so wet she’ll drip through her dress before her lover shows up? (Hey, I didn’t write it—talk to Peter J. Benchley!)

  I often feel bad about Forever, the relatively tame love story that became the lightning rod for outlawed info for the underaged. Those mothers were onto Forever, that’s for sure—for a while it was harder to get ahold of than The Joy of Sex. But on the other hand, I’m grateful. That classic playground Samizdat was sacrificed at the altar to all the reads we did get away with.

  So. Jaws. Your kids will thank me later.

  BOOK REPORT

  My Sweet Audrina

  By V. C. Andrews 1988

  A Tale of Two Sisters

  There was something strange about the house where I grew up.

  For those of you unfamiliar with V. C. Andrews’s oeuvre (and pity you, poor souls!), she can best be described as the occultress of the way-too-familiar family, which, in her world, is a cloying blind, a knot of secrets in which the sensual spills over into the actionable in fairly short order. Instead of pedestrian pancake slicing, in an Andrews creation breasts jiggle ominously, bottoms are spanked until they are duly red, and flat chests produce buds that grow into full, swollen breasts against which men of all ages are helpless, especially if they are genetically linked to the breasts in question.

  The Andrews heroine with whom most of you are likely familiar, is, of course, Cathy of Flowers in the Attic’s Dollenganger clan, a sister so unfortunate as to be locked up with her brother long enough to imprint herself on his prepubescent psyche, thus ruining him for other women forever. On a purely Best-in-Waiting-Room level, I have always favored Heaven of the Casteel clan, pure “hill trash” whose violet eyes and teeny waist propel her firmly out of Appalachia. But Audrina, the 9-year-old with a Swiss-cheese memory, (“prismlike”?) “chameleon” hair and, uh, violet eyes, always seemed the youthful template for these creations, a stand-alone whose story could be taken as a long exercise in how to write a 400-page book in which 90 percent of the events occur in one house.

  When we meet Audrina Whitefern Adare, she is a lonely child living in the shadow of her older sister, who has died in apparently horrendous but unknown circumstances. With her in the huge, rambling mausoleum referenced above is her papa, a rakish tycoon, her mother, the beautiful Lucky, her dour aunt Ellsbeth, and Ellsbeth’s daughter, Vera, a venomous slattern who is BAD NEWS BEARS for all involved.

  Audrina is tortured by the fact that she has no memories of any of her childhood, and cannot keep track of time, finding that months have passed when she thinks only a week has gone by. Vera, of course, gives her he
ll about this, and also about the fact that Audrina is the great favorite of the household, while Vera’s own mother can barely tolerate her, to say nothing of the uncle and aunt upon whom they both depend. Audrina is also somewhat rattled by the fact that her father is given to locking her in her dead sister’s room and making her rock in her dead sister’s chair, apparently to access some special “gift,” although Audrina only sees visions of being horribly ravished and left for dead under a “golden raintree,” which sounds kind of like some eco-friendly detergent but is apparently not.

  Into this mix soon come Audrina’s love interest, Arden—yup, he’s named “Arden”—as well as Arden’s mother, Billie, a legless former skating champion who is shockingly beautiful with skin like porcelain. (In Andrews-land, all are preternaturally beautiful until you find their secret flaw: for Audrina, the aforementioned memory loss; Vera, bones so fragile they break if she falls; Lucky, a heart condition; and Sylvia, Audrina’s retarded little sister, who is the cause of Lucky’s dying in childbirth. Even Arden—so dedicated to Audrina he acquires a symbolic name to keep it at the top of your mind!—will turn out to be not what he seems.)

  But in between finding out the grand mystery at the center of the novel, there’s a lot of positively filthy stuff to keep you alert. Here’s Papa castigating Lucky for her behavior at a dinner party he forces her to have in her sixth month of pregnancy: “You flirted, Lucietta. Flirted and in your condition, too. You cuddled so close to the teenage piano player on the bench you seemed blended into one person. You jiggled! Your nipples could be seen.”

  Gotta love that passive! This is followed, of course, by a whipping in bed Audrina sees through the keyhole, which she eventually decides is the cause of Sylvia’s condition. Alongside the memory of her sister’s rape, the following scene in which Vera describes losing her virginity completes Audrina’s sexual education:

  “I have seen a naked man, Audrina, a real one, not just a picture or an illustration. He is so hairy. You’d never suspect just how hairy by looking at him fully clothed. His hair travels from his chest down past his navel and runs into a point and keeps going and getting bushier until—”

  “Stop! I don’t want to hear more.”

  “But I want you to hear more. I want you to know what you’re missing. It’s wonderful to have all those nine inches stabbing into me. Did you hear me, Audrina? I measured it…almost nine inches, and it’s swollen and hard.”

  Jesus Christ, this book was dirty! But in Andrews, the passages about sex are meted out with a strange primness, as in the scene where Arden’s mother Billie winds up in bed with Papa:

  “They were in their underclothes, Arden’s legless mother and my father, playing intimately with each other.”

  Jeez, you’d think by the time you socked the legless lady in bed with the dad, you could rock out with something more indelicate than “playing intimately with each other.” (Maybe like “great gun cocked and aimed…,” another Vera contribution.) It still, however, breaks up the myriad scenes in which characters simply hurl backstory at each other like so many brickbats:

  “Ellsbeth,” shrieked Momma after some insult about the house she loved, “the problem with you is you’re so damn jealous our father loved me better. You sit there and say ugly things about the house because you wish to God it belonged to you. Just as you cry your heart out each night, sleeping alone in your bed, or lying there restless and awake, jealous again because I always got what you wanted—when you could have had what I have if you’d kept your damned big mouth shut!”

  “And you certainly know when to open your big mouth, Lucietta!” barked my aunt. “All your life wandering through this mausoleum and gushing about its beauty. Of course our father left this house to you and not to me. You made me want to vomit you were so sweet. You set out to rob me of everything I wanted. Even when my boyfriends came to call on me, you were there smiling and flirting. You even flirted with our father, flattering him so much you made me seem cold and indifferent. But I did all the work around here, and I still do! You prepare meals and you think that’s enough. Well, it’s not enough! I do everything else. I’m sick and tired of being everybody’s slave! And if that’s not enough, you’re teaching your daughter your tricks!”

  Well! There’ll be a quiz on all this tomorrow. But rather than spoil all this for you, I’ll simply defend Andrews’s use of the purple—as well as our enthrallment to it—by saying that, as over the top as she was about it, Andrews depicted the internal experience of pubescence for girls with stunning precision: the dangerous, teeming sexuality implied in the smallest touch, and the knowledge that you are flying blind in a world where everyone knows more about who you’ve been and who you’re becoming than you.

  Whatever! You know you were just going to reread it for all the “swollen breast buds” parts, anyway.

  OVERDUE

  The Clan of the Cave Bear

  By Jean M. Auel 1980

  Ayla Kicks Ass

  By Cecily von Zeigesar

  When I was 11 or 12 I tore through The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel in a matter of hours. The book was full of information I hadn’t found in any other book—information about the relationship between men and women in particular. Nudge, nudge.

  Fundamentally, The Clan of the Cave Bear is a coming-of-age story, about a young girl, Ayla, who loses her family after an earthquake. Wandering lost and alone and nearly dead from starvation, Ayla is eventually found and adopted by cavemen from the Clan of the Cave Bear. She soon learns to talk like them, with grunts and hand motions. She learns to behave like them, sticking to her adoptive family’s hearth and helping them with their work, the work of survival. She becomes a medicine woman, taught by her adoptive mother. She learns to hunt with a sling by watching the older men teach the younger boys. And, at the age of 11 or 12 (the clan do not count past 10), the same age I was when I first encountered the book, she gives birth.

  Of course the part when Ayla gets pregnant in the first place is what I thought I remembered most about the book. At that age I hadn’t read any books with sex scenes or even allusions to sex in them. Nothing could have been more exciting than caveman sex! It was raw and naked and dirty and fast, and I couldn’t believe I was reading it.

  I’ve been reading a lot of boring books lately, so when I decided to reread The Clan of the Cave Bear, I was eager for the caveman-sex part. I even hid the cover of the book from passersby on the subway, worried that they’d know just how juicy the book was because I’d be blushing while I was reading it. I glanced at my neighbors constantly to see if they were reading ahead. Had they come upon any exciting words, like “throbbing organ,” yet?

  The thing was, I never found that juicy sex scene. The disturbing passage below is the one I remembered reading when I was a girl:

  She was nearly unconscious when he threw her over on her face, feverishly ripped her wrap aside, and spread her legs. With one hard thrust, he penetrated deeply. She screamed with pain. It added to his pleasure. He lunged again, drawing forth another painful cry, then again, and again. The intensity of his excitement urged him on, rising quickly to unbearable peaks. With a last hard drive that extracted a final agonized scream, he ejected his built-up heat.

  It’s a rape scene. Ayla is nearly killed. Even my 11-year-old self must have recognized that she wasn’t exactly consenting and she certainly wasn’t having any fun. Disappointed—in my young self, in my memory of what I had thought was a fun, at-the-beach sort of book—I read on. And even the second time around I found I could not put the book down. Not because of the sex, but because of the way it shows a young girl figuring her shit out. In particular, Ayla figures out shit about not taking shit from guys. And I started to think that maybe, just maybe, the book was so memorable to me because it’s empowering.

  Sure the book is about hairy bigheaded grunting cavemen in the early days of man, but the lessons still apply. The cave women bow and shuffle and serve the men. The cave women prepare the food but are
n’t allowed to hunt. They’re isolated during their monthly “curse.” Cavemen were allowed to beat cave women when they did not do as they were told, and even when they gave the cavemen dirty looks. And cavemen were allowed to relieve their “urges” whenever they felt like it with whomever they wanted, not just with their mates. Little boys even stuck it inside little girls just for fun, and the author goes into detail about how most little girls’ hymens were broken during this sort of horseplay. Hello?

  Ayla refuses to take it. She tries very hard to fit in and act like a good cave woman is supposed to, but she just can’t. She speaks her mind. She becomes a better hunter than any of the men, and she makes herself indispensable to the clan by becoming the best medicine woman they ever had. She never mates (that’s “getting married” to us evolved persons). In the end, when the jerk who raped her, the father of her son, gives her the death curse and boots her out of the clan, she tells him to go rip himself a new one. And then she’s off, on her own, and I, the reader, am left at the end of the book with the feeling that she’s only just getting started.

  As a girl I always shied away from books that taught obvious lessons, thinking them too preachy and unsubtle. It’s something I’m very careful of in my writing, too. There’s nothing worse than a book that shoves a message down its reader’s throat. Even the word empowering makes me cringe. But I have to give my younger self credit. I may have been in it for the sex, but I came out of it feeling like a natural woman.