As I took the subway back to my apartment in Fort Greene, I wondered, was I asking for too much—to have a job and an engagement and a decent apartment in my thirties? Obviously there were many, many people who did not have any of these things, and to articulate that I wanted them felt entitled, like I deserved things that other people didn’t. On the other hand, right now, I didn’t have a job or an engagement or a decent apartment, and many people did have all of them. Why shouldn’t I also be allowed to know what I wanted and try to get it?
I realized I had never been comfortable articulating exactly what I wanted—it made me feel too vulnerable, like I would be held accountable or people would pity me if it didn’t work out. I couldn’t allow my dreams to take up space in my own mind, so they couldn’t take up space in the world, either. I knew that these anxieties were, on some level, irrational—even without really being able to talk about my big-picture ambition, I had still achieved a decent amount of success. Besides, most people are not keeping track of their friends’ hopes and dreams, and if they are, they’re usually not critical if they don’t achieve them, unless their friends are assholes.
So maybe part of growing up was becoming secure enough in myself to articulate what I wanted. But if that was the case, I had a lot of growing up to do.
CHAPTER TWO
When it came to school, I wasn’t a late bloomer. If anything, I was too much of an early bloomer, a precocious kid who was desperate to fit in and not be singled out for being smart. One day, when I was in kindergarten, I was playing with blocks with my friend Jodie. Suddenly, my teacher, Mrs. Gotkin, and a student teacher, Melissa, approached.
“Doree, it’s time for you to go to the library to meet with Mrs. Zeigler,” she said. “Melissa is going to walk you there.”
I was confused—I was playing with blocks. I didn’t want to be taken away from my friends, and I certainly didn’t want to meet with a woman I didn’t know in the school library.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go.”
“You have to go,” Mrs. Gotkin said.
“I don’t want to go,” I repeated. “I’m playing with Jodie.”
Mrs. Gotkin and Melissa looked at each other. “Doree, you have to go.”
I started crying. “I don’t want to go!” I yelled, as Melissa picked me up and started carrying me out of the classroom. “Don’t make me go!”
I cried as Melissa dragged me, literally kicking and screaming, to the library. It wasn’t meant to be a punishment—I was getting extra time and attention because I could already read, and I was way beyond the kindergarten curriculum of learning letters and sounding out words. So Mrs. Gotkin had figured that my time would be better spent in the library, reading, which in theory was a neat solution for a student who had too much time on her hands. In practice, it made me feel awful: I didn’t want to be singled out or made to feel special. Everyone else got to do these big, colorful workbooks that had an individual letter on the front of them, and as they finished the workbooks, they got hung up on the walls under their names. I didn’t have any workbooks under my name, because I wasn’t doing them. I didn’t care that I could already read—I wanted to be doing the workbooks, like everyone else.
Mrs. Zeigler was an older woman with a kind face and dark brown hair. “So,” she said, “I heard you like to read.”
I nodded sullenly.
“I think I know some books that you might be interested in,” she said, smiling. I begrudgingly took a look at the stack of books she had in front of her and then slowly started feeling a little better.
Soon, I wasn’t mad about having to go see Mrs. Zeigler, even if I did still occasionally feel embarrassed about being singled out. She introduced me to Ramona Quimby and Superfudge and The Boxcar Children, and later to Tuck Everlasting and Harriet the Spy. I already loved to read, but I became obsessed with reading and kept books on my bed so I could easily access them again and again. Then I became obsessed with writing: I wrote, in longhand, books inspired by Little House on the Prairie and then, the summer I was seven, I got my first diary: It had Hello Kitty on the front, and more important, it had a lock. (Just to make sure that no one breached my defenses, I wrote PRIVATE! KEEP OUT! CONFEDENTIAL [sic]! TOP SECRET! THIS MEANS YOU! on the first page.)
Earlier that year, I’d read Harriet the Spy, which is about a precocious yet immature (and somewhat obnoxious) eleven-year-old New York City girl who carries a notebook everywhere she goes, scribbling observations about the people she spies on after school (a man with twenty-five cats, a divorcée confined to her bed, a family that owns a grocery), but also about her classmates. When they find her notebook, and read what she’s written about them, they vow to take their revenge. It’s a story about a girl who’s a bit of a weirdo with a rich imagination, wise beyond her years in some ways but also very much still a child who eats only tomato sandwiches and is unhealthily attached to her nanny, who thinks she’s smarter than almost everyone else and probably is, but that doesn’t mean she knows anything about the world. Despite our differences (not limited to the fact that I hated tomatoes), I identified with Harriet completely, and so I needed a notebook of my own where I could write my own observations about my second-grade classmates: “Alyssa thought she could take over. I don’t like her.” “Person: Nina. Description: fat, smelly, black hair. Personality: nice, mean. Nina loves Christopher in our class.” About my teacher, I wrote, “Personality: usually mean.”
* * *
—
WE LIVED IN Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, in a brown wooden house on a dead-end street. Brookline is now out of reach for people like my parents—single-family homes start at around $1.5 million—but in the early eighties, you could be a junior college ESL professor (Mom) and textiles company middle manager (Dad) and afford it. They were the kind of parents who were proud of the fact that the only TV I watched as a kid, on a tiny black-and-white set, was Sesame Street, and that I didn’t know what a cookie was until a babysitter gave me one. They got me a Holly Hobbie record player when I was four and I listened to Free to Be You and Me and the soundtrack to the Annie musical on repeat. Books were everywhere, and before I was born, my mom had collected into a three-ring binder all the Stories for Children that ran in the back of Ms. magazine in the 1970s: stories like the one about Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man so she could fight in the Revolutionary War, and a child named X whose sex was a mystery.
My parents didn’t seem like especially romantic people, but the story of how they met sounded like it had been scripted in a rom-com. Picture it: It’s 1970. A pretty University of Michigan sorority girl takes a trip to Europe with her best friend the summer before her senior year, but best friend bails halfway through to go home to get married, right before the pair was supposed to go to Israel. So the sorority girl finds herself staying alone on a kibbutz, a little bored, until the handsome red-headed Israeli paratrooper who grew up on the kibbutz notices her and invites her to tea. (I mean, come on!) They fell in love, my mom finished up her senior year of college a semester early, and went back to Israel to be with my dad, who was five years older. They lived for a couple of years in a remote kibbutz on the Lebanese border, but eventually made their way back to the United States, got married, honeymooned in Greece, drove a VW bug across Europe, and then, in 1977, they had me.
My dad never totally worked through his wanderlust, but when you have three kids, I guess that just means you end up traveling a lot for work. I liked to look in his passport and see the stamps: the Philippines, Germany, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Ecuador. Whenever he left, which was around once a month, he would be gone for a week or two and we would hear from him a couple of times, his voice sounding far away and staticky over the international long distance lines. He would always bring us back little gifts, sometimes things like a set of tiny figurines playing instruments he’d gotten in Nigeria, but more often than not
, a bar of Toblerone chocolate. (For the longest time I thought that Toblerone was something you could only get in foreign countries.) We often didn’t know exactly when he was going to be leaving for another trip until right before he left, which sometimes made planning things tricky. Was he going to be in town for my birthday, or my dance recital? Maybe, maybe not.
According to my parents, I had been shocked when they brought home my brother, Michael, a few months before I turned three. They also said I had never really gotten over not being an only child anymore. There’s photographic evidence, too: In a Sears photo of us when I was around three and a half and Michael was still an infant, my face is set in a grimace, my eyes narrowed; Michael is smiling, clueless that his older sister resented his existence with every fiber of her three-foot-tall being. In another photo, taken at my grandparents’ house, I’m sitting, grumpy, in the background while Michael crawls, blissfully unaware, in the foreground.
My sister, Karen, came along when I was days away from turning seven, and again I felt usurped: not just a younger sister, but they had given her a middle name, something that I didn’t have and desperately wanted, because everyone had a middle name except me, and she was born six days before my birthday, thereby ensuring that hers would overshadow mine until the end of time. It seemed unfair. Why couldn’t she have been born in literally any other month?
Once she got home, I ignored her. I had more important things to do, like finish first grade and go to swim lessons and tap dance class, than to hang around with a screaming, pooping baby. But she was, actually, hard to ignore. When she wasn’t screaming or pooping, Karen was impossibly cute, one of those babies who gets stopped on the street and cooed at, with fair hair and blue eyes and a little button nose. Meanwhile, my so-called friend Nina was looking at my hair in our second-grade classroom and not liking what she saw. “Your hair’s stringy,” she informed me one day (maybe this was why I referred to her as “smelly” in my diary?). I touched my hair self-consciously. What did stringy hair feel like, anyway? My hair was just, well, hair: dark brown and straight, with a row of bangs across my forehead. But now, according to Nina, it was stringy, and therefore, not cute. I was suddenly hyperaware of my hair, and the fact of its not-cuteness.
* * *
—
THE IDEA THAT there was a specific way that girls were supposed to look and act, and things that they should be interested in, was really reinforced when I first went to sleepaway camp when I was nine years old. It was a Jewish camp on the shores of a small lake in southern New Hampshire, a little over an hour’s drive from our house. My mom had gone there for one idyllic summer, twenty years before, and still talked about it wistfully. What I didn’t totally grasp at the time was that my mom had been outgoing and popular—class treasurer, part of a self-named high school clique called the Wee Five—and I was more like my dad, reserved and slightly aloof, minus the thick Israeli accent.
We were Bunk Two, the second-youngest bunk of girls, and yet all the other nine-year-olds in my cabin seemed so much more mature. I barely felt like a tween, and they seemed like they were already deep into adolescence. They came with hair dryers and curling irons and lip gloss and wore Keds with slouchy socks like the older girls did, and by day three of camp had already loudly announced which of the boys they had crushes on, as though to claim them. The queen of the bunk was a girl named Rachel, from Long Island, who had long caramel-colored hair and a perpetual tan, and two older brothers who were also at camp. She and her friend Kim were the ones who plotted to ambush our counselor when she got out of the shower and pin her down on the bed, open her robe, and take a Polaroid, as though to say: We rule this bunk, bitches. Popularity meant power, or was it the other way around?
I loved some parts of camp—learning to water-ski, the campwide sing-alongs in the dining hall, rainy days when we’d stay in the bunk and write letters and play jacks—but the social aspects were challenging, even more so as we got older. The girls my age were neatly cleaved into the popular girls (as always, led by Rachel!), who had boyfriends and made sure to take all their electives together and saw one another during the school year and had inside jokes, and the rest of us. And yet I continued to go back to camp year after year, as though one summer I’d suddenly have a glow-up, and Rachel and her minions would finally induct me into their clique, and she’d share the secret pink memo, written in bubble letters with a heart instead of a dot over the i, that gave them specific instructions about to which summer to start bringing a razor to shave their legs, whether we were all wearing Umbros, how to talk to a boy to make him like you, and we’d make matching friendship bracelets in arts and crafts and mixtapes with “our” songs on our dual-cassette boom boxes and we’d all sit together on movie night, and of course, the Seths and Joshes and Bens in the boys’ area would all want to go to the social with me.
Everything came into sharp relief the summer I was thirteen. For three weeks in July, I’d gone to a different camp—nerd camp, where I lived in a college dorm and took an essay-writing class and slow-danced to “Stairway to Heaven” with a boy from my class whom I had a huge crush on. I loved it. For those three weeks, I felt like myself, to the extent that any thirteen-year-old can really feel like herself. I loved living in the dorm, eating in the dining hall, doing homework late at night. I put up a Simpsons poster in my dorm room and made friends with three girls all coincidentally named Kristen who lived in my hall. I didn’t want to leave.
When I got back to my old camp in August, it felt like someone had poured accelerant on everyone’s social and sexual development. I was embarrassed that all that had happened between me and my nerd camp crush was a chaste slow dance, because Rachel and Co. were all getting fingered by their boyfriends on the soccer field after the stale cookies and Kool-Aid at evening snack. Soccer-field fingering didn’t really appeal to me on a practical level (unsanitary, high probability of grass getting into your butt), but it nonetheless seemed like another rite of passage that I wasn’t a part of. Each night, half the bunk would melt into the soccer field with the Seths and Joshes and Bens, and the other half—me, and the rest of the nonchosen—would silently make our way back to our bunk and wait for the rest of the girls to get back and tell us all about that night’s adventures.
I hadn’t even French-kissed anyone yet, which I hadn’t been especially concerned with until now, when it suddenly seemed like I was way behind. So when, on the last night of camp that summer, the meanest girl in my bunk—a skinny, black-haired girl named Larissa whose pinched face and small eyes always looked like they were plotting something—came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to the basketball court to hook up with a guy our age named Steve, who was a friend of hers from home who was new at camp that summer, I said yes, even though I barely knew him and it seemed like there was a not-insignificant possibility that this was a trap. Would I get to the basketball court and wait there all night in vain while Larissa cackled at the success of her mean-girl plot? Steve wasn’t one of the soccer-field boys, that much I knew, but beyond that we’d literally never said a word to each other.
I didn’t ask Larissa, the madam of Bunk Thirteen, the obvious question: Had Steve requested me, or had he just charged Larissa with finding someone—literally anyone—to make out with that night, because it was the last night of camp and that was just what you did on the last night of camp. (It was 1990; apparently no one was concerned about the liability of dozens of horny kids wandering around unsupervised in the dead of night.)
Larissa and I walked over to the boys’ area in silence. When we got there, the lights in most of the bunks, except for the ones belonging to the littlest kids, were on. We went into Steve’s bunk; it was mostly empty, except for Steve. “You guys know each other, right?” Larissa said, gesturing to Steve. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I gotta go,” she said, and left.
Steve and I went to the basketball court and sat on the ground. There was barely any
preamble before he leaned in and then his tongue was in my mouth and mine was in his. I closed my eyes—you were supposed to close your eyes, right? I was having trouble separating the act of kissing Steve from being aware of the act of kissing Steve. But as I walked back to the bunk, I couldn’t help but smile, just a little. Now that I’d actually done it, I told myself it didn’t matter if Steve had wanted to make out with me or not. It had happened. Now I wasn’t a French-kissing virgin anymore.
I made out with a few more boys over the next year, including one who shoved his hands up my shirt while we watched the movie Ghost in a near-empty theater. But in high school, my self-consciousness took over, and I stood on the sidelines, figuratively and literally, when it came to relationships. I think I probably would have felt less alone if I’d actually bothered seeking out and talking to other people who were also not dating or having sex, but it was like I hated myself too much to admit that these were people I would find comfort with, and so I continued to seek out the approval and the treacherous friendship of the popular girls, because why would I join any club that would actually have me as a member? I identified with misfit smart-girl heroines like My So-Called Life’s Angela Chase and Heathers’s Veronica Sawyer, who left their former friends in the dust as they strived to be accepted by the popular clique, to sometimes disastrous results. It was the classic insecure smart-girl dilemma of desperately wanting to be accepted by the cool crowd, but also wanting to get good grades, and the two were almost never compatible. The only way to thread that needle was to do well in school while pretending that you didn’t care if you did well, like you weren’t working hard at it. But I did care, and it got increasingly harder to pretend that I didn’t.
* * *
—
IN MY FAMILY, the misfit smart-girl persona stopped with me—if I was Veronica Sawyer, my sister Karen was Cher Horowitz, bubbly and blond (as though to drive this point home, she had all of Clueless memorized, seemingly the second it came out). The adorable baby grew into an adorable teenager who had an impossibly blond, tan, lacrosse-playing boyfriend in high school, as though he had been cut out from a Popular Boys of High School paper doll book. She had gotten that secret pink memo. I watched from afar in awe as she did exactly what she set out to do, whether it was winning a swimming championship or going straight to law school after college, and how people treated her like she was special. It seemed like, even at a young age, she never second-guessed herself.
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