And I think then in high school I may have forgotten a bit about her. Though far from the celebrated arrival I had for so long been optimistically anticipating, I had secured boobs. I’d been long enough in my role of half-this and half-that to be a bit more comfortable in my skin so as to not be bothered so much when people would inquire, “What are you?” Or maybe it was just that I went to a pretty small school, and by high school, people just knew me and had already asked.
But after high school I remembered Margaret again. By the time I got to college, I’d been half Jewish for a while, for my entire life; I’d gotten used to it. But when I arrived at American University in Washington, D.C., a place where it seemed the entire student population was Jewish, I wasn’t half Jewish anymore. Suddenly, I was not Jewish. At American, I was called for the first time—other than by Nana—a shiksa. I was shunned. By my people.
Later, once people discovered that I was half Jewish and that the Jewish half was actually the mother half, I was consoled that since it was my mother who was Jewish and not my father, technically, I was okay. On behalf of my father, I found this insulting. And then, with the whole “technically, you’re Jewish” hurdle successfully leapt over once again, Adam Silverstein, proud member of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, became my first college boyfriend.
Adam, a junior, was short in stature and had fair skin and longish, wavyish hair. He majored in political science, smoked cigarettes and pot, and drove a black Mazda RX-7. He kept his seat reclined more so than what would generally be considered normal for driving; in order to reach the steering wheel, his arm, always just the left one, had to be fully extended. I always thought he looked like a racecar driver. A really laid-back, stoned racecar driver who wore basketball sneakers and a baseball hat on backward. I’ve always had a bit of a thing for racecar drivers.
Adam was very popular with American University women and supposedly had dated a senior when he was only a freshman. Supposedly, people said, he’d driven her crazy. But the thing was, the driven-crazy girl in question, she was in this sorority in which supposedly all the women were crazy, so really who’s to say if it was Adam who did her in or not? And also, I like to think that if you’re the type of person who’s going to let someone drive you crazy, you, more often than not, already have a set of directions waiting in your glove compartment.
Adam and I started dating exclusively. Previously, I’d actually always thought dating implied exclusivity. Among the things I learned at American University: it doesn’t. And only a few months later, Adam attained the title of the first man to ever break my heart, by breaking up with me the night before my sorority semi-formal. And the reason he gave me for said unceremonious end? I wasn’t Jewish, and he just didn’t see the sense in dating me. He’d promised his parents, he’d told me, a freshman in college, he would only date someone Jewish.
I didn’t explain to him that technically I was Jewish. I remember having a sense of foreboding right then that felt very much the way it felt when Jessica Kleinman sat me at the dorky table at her Bat Mitzvah. Even though being Jewish and Catholic and Episcopalian (oh, my) could indeed mean I could date Jews and Catholics and any variety of WASPs without my parents so much as blinking an intruding eye, I sensed that perhaps it might not bode well for me. I can remember time traveling right then, in my mind, during that breakup. For a moment, I was in my pink 1980s bedroom with the Laura Ashley bedspread, and I was wondering how Margaret might have dealt with this same issue had she faced it at whatever college she went to. Make that at Penn, because now that I think of it, I’m quite sure that Margaret went to Penn.
Sure, there have been other issues in my life, and I imagine there will be more. For starters: I’m older than I’d like to be and still single. My friends tell me I have to go on Match.com. Deadlines freak me out, which isn’t the best thing, considering I’m at work in a pretty deadline-heavy field. My personality could be categorized with some degree of ease under the general umbrella of neurotic. And I think there might be some other things, too. Though for the sake of brevity and privacy, I’ll resist the temptation to digress.
But I can say with all certainty that having Margaret there for the first things I ever saw as issues in my life made me feel at once understood and not alone. Something I’d later understand as a universal thing that books can do and would make me want to read them all, and eventually once I got my nerve up, write them, too. The friendship I had with Margaret showed me that it was okay, that it was perfectly fine, to be a late bloomer, to feel different, and to have no religion but still believe in God. It told me that my feelings made sense and it told me that it was okay. It told me that other people, even people with churches and temples and big boobs to call their own, felt that way, too.
I wish that there had been an entire series of Margaret, that I’d been able to see Margaret navigate her way through high school, college, and early career choices; through the weddings and first children of her friends, asking God if maybe he could hurry up with her soul mate, since he had repeatedly ignored her requests for anything other than an A cup. I’m quite sure I would have felt some solace in seeing Margaret up on the fifth floor of Blooming-dales, debating the merits of the Wonderbra. Or perhaps logging onto Match.com and checking off “spiritual but not religious” under religion and taking some solace of her own in the fact that so many other Internet daters have checked off that unaffiliated box, too. I think Margaret would have really liked that. And as much on her behalf as on my own, I do, too.
Alison Pace’s writing career began in third grade with a short story about how God might have created the world with a bathtub faucet and a rubber band. She survived a late-blooming adolescence to become the author of the novels If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend and Pug Hill and a contributing editor at The Bark magazine. Her third novel, Through Thick and Thin, will be published in 2007. She lives in New York City.
Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume Page 24