Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Hello!” said my mom, her voice too bright and too loud, making a sweeping gesture toward me and Molly, who’d been hanging back against the wall. “Look who came to see you!”

  On our way back to the car, Molly shook her head as Fran muttered to herself, consulting the directions she’d scribbled on a pad. “Now, the doctors think this round of shock treatments finally did the trick . . .”

  Molly stopped, hands on her hips, boots planted in the frosty grass. “Fran,” she demanded, “how are we even related to these people?”

  As eager as I always was to go to Michigan, that was how reluctant I was to return to my life back home. When I was a girl, it meant the resumption of classes after vacation, the end of special treats and shopping trips, restaurant meals and soda with desserts, grandmothers who’d lavish me with kisses and let me stay up late. When I was older—twelve and thirteen and fourteen—I’d go home knowing that I’d failed again, failed to find favor with my attractive, popular cousins just as I had with the attractive, popular kids in Simsbury. All of them, Michelle and Eric, Rachel and Ronnie, were always nice enough, but I could tell that even in their hand-me-downs I was an impostor, a geeky pretender to the cool-kid throne whose friendlessness they could smell. Every year I daydreamed that we’d come out of the Windsor Tunnel, out of Canada, back into America again, and I would somehow be made new. I’d go back to Simsbury with a mysterious new smile, carrying myself like a girl with a secret, a girl who’d been kissed, a girl who knew she was beloved and beautiful.

  This never happened.

  We would make the return trip in one day, leaving before seven to reach Simsbury by midnight. Driving into the early-morning light, I would lie on my side in the way-back, on top of the suitcases and the cases of Vernors my parents brought home, as far away from the cooler and its smell as I could manage. I’d have a book open on my chest and I’d stare at the car’s ceiling, spangled with light, then dappled with shadow, then dark as we plunged into the tunnel, and wonder if it would always be like this.

  Fat Jennifer in the Promised Land

  Simsbury was miserable. Michigan changed nothing, but I knew I’d get a chance to turn my social life around during the six-week tour of Israel that I’d take the summer between my sophomore and junior years. There, I would be with kids from other towns, kids who did not know my sad social history, kids who would maybe be my friends.

  By then I was not just longing for acceptance—someone to talk with in the cafeteria, someone to call up on a weekend and invite to the Westfarms Mall to look at jewelry at Claire’s or clothes at the Gap. Acceptance was too mundane. I wanted it all—the gold medal, the blue ribbon, the brass ring. I wanted to be POPULAR.

  I thought that I could do it. I had a plan. Hadn’t I spent the last few years studying, with a Talmudic scholar’s attention to detail, the princesses of my class, the Missys and the Courtneys, the Rachels and the Kims? In my imagination, where I conducted endless rehearsals, I could imitate their intonations, the tosses of their spiral perms, the pauses between their “likes” and “you knows”; I’d memorized the trill of their giggles and the cut and dye of their jeans and the way their braces glistened in the late-afternoon sunshine that streamed in through the window during Mr. Cohen’s honors biology. I knew what they wore, the TV shows they liked, the bands whose T-shirts they sported the weekend after their concerts at the Hartford Civic Center (the Grateful Dead, Rush). I’d show up in Jerusalem and, armed with my encyclopedic, meticulously gleaned knowledge of All Things Teenage Girl, circa 1985, infiltrate the top social tier of the West Hartford girls—West Hartford being the mostly Jewish suburb from which the largest contingent of Teen Tourers would come. Once my position was secure, my Simsbury sisters would be sorry they’d ignored me . . . and I would rub their noses in their failure to accept me, just like post-makeover Sandy in the final scene of Grease, in black Lycra and leather, twirling the toe of her stiletto on a lit cigarette.

  Cigarettes, as it turned out, were where my troubles began. Our group of thirty or so Jewish teenagers, rising high school juniors just like me, began its journey early in the morning at the West Hartford JCC. On the bus to LaGuardia, kids were still half-asleep, and the ones from my synagogue had arranged themselves in their usual groupings (Kara with Ronnie; Andi with Lisa; Alison Landis, who spat when she talked, with Lori Morganstern, who was overweight; me by myself). At LaGuardia, our counselors distributed tickets to the El Al flight to Jerusalem. “Who wants a seat in the smoking section?” our jaded old (he might have been all of thirty-five) Israeli guide, Eitan, asked. Hands shot up in the air, and I watched in astonishment as my would-be peers hustled to the back of the plane, pulling packs of Marlboro Lights from the pockets of jean jackets as they went.

  They smoked? Didn’t they know smoking was bad? Didn’t they remember that picture of the rotted lung tissue the police officer had displayed during a fifth-grade “D.A.R.E.” lecture, alongside an ancient suitcase full of fingerprint-smeared plastic Baggies stuffed full of fake “goofballs” and “ ’ludes” and “Black Beauties” and some dusty-looking, weedy “Mary Jane”?

  Oh, well. I supposed I could have tried to buy a pack of cigarettes of my own, or asked to bum one from one of the West Hartford girls, but I hated the way smoke smelled, and I’d never even tried a puff, and figured that if I started smoking for the first time on the plane I’d just disgrace myself. I opened my James Michener novel, found a window seat, and resolved to wait.

  The Teen Tour was divided into two three-week segments. We’d spend the first three weeks on a kibbutz, living with, and like, Israeli teenagers. We’d have jobs, like our Israeli counterparts, but also free time to socialize and swim. For the last three weeks, we would sightsee, visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem, swimming in the Dead Sea, climbing Masada, visiting Tel Aviv and Eilat.

  Somehow, I’d been assigned to a room with two of the West Hartford princesses, plus a Simsbury classmate, a not-too-popular girl who’d treated me with more indifference than disdain. I’d identified Debbie, one of the West Hartford girls, as a potential friend. She seemed friendly and easygoing, with a ready, rolling laugh, merry blue eyes, and curly brown hair. Instead of the preppy clothes that most of my classmates sported, she had her own style, which involved feathered earrings, woven rope bracelets, and a jacket with the Grateful Dead’s rainbow-colored dancing teddy bears embroidered on the back. She’d been to six Dead shows, and she smoked, but she wasn’t aggressive about it, and if she didn’t seem especially smart, with a vocabulary heavy on the “wows” and “whoas,” at least she didn’t seem mean.

  We spent our first morning in the Promised Land complaining about jet lag and unpacking. I set out my Nikes where everyone would see them, right by the door. I’d bought them myself. My parents had given me half the cash, and I’d earned the rest myself. Starting when I was fourteen, I’d work through the summer, five or six hours a day, picking strawberries and green beans at Rosedale Farms on East Weatogue Street, or babysitting on Friday and Saturday nights. I’d bought them in May, but I’d kept them in their box, pristine and untouched, in preparation for the trip. Then I’d devoted the rest of the spring to convincing my mother to let me shave my legs. (“Up to you,” she’d finally said, cutting off my pestering with a shrug. “But once you start, it’s just going to grow back.”)

  I adjusted my sneakers, admiring the white swoosh’s gleam. “Oh, I hope I didn’t forget my razor,” I announced, loud enough so my three roommates could hear me, as we all got into our swimsuits. (Bikinis! They were wearing bikinis!) The plain navy-blue tank suit that I’d bought at Bob’s looked impossibly dowdy. And then, when I emerged from the bathroom stall and saw where my three roommates’ gazes had gone, as if their eyeballs had been magnetized, I realized with a sick feeling that while I’d been concentrating on my calves, I hadn’t considered that there were other places I should also have been shaving. My mother’s bathing suits all had skirts and, honestly, while I’d put in many late-n
ight hours exploring the territory below my waist, very little of that exploration had involved looking. I ducked into the bathroom with my razor and a bar of soap, but succeeded mostly in mauling myself while leaving swaths of the offending hair behind.

  Strike one.

  By the second day, we had our work assignments. We woke up at five in the morning to make our way sleepily to the communal dining hall and breakfast on rye bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, and Nutella. After breakfast half the girls headed to a combine that drove up and down the rows of the kibbutz’s tomato fields. Instead of simply plucking tomatoes from the vines, the machine uprooted the plants entirely, sucked them out of the ground, and spat them, with their dusty roots still wrapped around clumps of dirt, onto a conveyor belt that ran down the center of the combine. Our job was to stand at the conveyor belt and separate tomatoes from vines and dirt, as the machine rumbled up and down the rows and lumbered around corners.

  Our first morning as kibbutzniks, all three of my roommates and I showed up for work. The next morning, Debbie lay in bed, moaning that she had cramps. By the third day, both of my other roommates had joined her . . . and, somehow, all three of them, along with the majority of girls on the trip, managed to not only sync their menstrual cycles, but also have their period for the next three weeks. Each morning, they would lie in bed in agony, unable to work, then miraculously they’d recover by pool-time every afternoon. Meanwhile, I hadn’t gotten my period yet, and didn’t think I’d be able to fake menstruation convincingly—I would do or say something that would give me away as a pretender. I’d also had jobs for two summers by then, and I knew how many thousands of dollars my parents had paid for the trip. Even though I was pretty sure that the kibbutz’s bottom line wouldn’t be affected one way or another by my failure to show up and sort tomatoes, I was still too much of a good girl to bail. So every morning I trudged off to the fields. By noon, when it had gotten too hot to work, I would have dirt everywhere—underneath my nails, in the folds of my ears, in my eyelashes and eyebrows. I could taste dirt when I swallowed, feel grains of it under my eyelids when I blinked. At night, when I’d brush my teeth in the communal bathroom, I’d rinse my mouth and spit out toothpaste foam and dirt.

  On Day Four, Debbie left her journal open on her desk. We were all supposed to keep journals, making nightly entries about how inspiring it was to be in our ancestral homeland, or how impressed we were by our Israeli counterparts, who were all tanned and fit, who all spoke heavily accented if perfectly understandable English, and who seemed much more adult than we were. Heart beating hard, I leaned in for a peek. “Jennifer W. is annoying everyone,” Debbie had written.

  I rocked back on my heels. My skin felt icy. My eyes stung. How? How was I annoying everyone? I was barely talking to anyone! Silence was part of my plan. I had figured out, through close study of my peers, Seventeen magazine’s advice columns, and a handbook from the 1950s called How to Be Popular that I’d checked out of the library, that talking was surely one of my mistakes. People didn’t want to hear what you had to say, they didn’t want to laugh at your jokes (years later, I was amused to find this nugget repackaged in a popular dating manual called The Rules, which instructed that if a guy wanted to be amused, he’d stay home and watch Letterman). The secret, I knew, was to listen—to smile, to nod, to say “That sounds awful,” or “That must have been great,” to be a kind of friendly mirror, offering people the best possible versions of themselves. Laughing and listening, those were my watchwords, and I’d tried, I really had, but somehow, bits of my old, noxious personality must have seeped out, in things I’d said or not said, or in my clothes or my shoes or maybe even how I stood or sat or swam in the big, overchlorinated pool.

  It was like my difference was written on my skin, in ink that everyone could read but me, or it was a smell that surrounded me, no matter how hard I tried to scrub it off. People, even strangers, needed to spend only ten minutes in my presence to know that I was a loser, a misfit, a freak.

  It wasn’t just that I was smart. Stacey Goldblum was smart. Laurie Weiss was smart. But Stacey was quiet, with large breasts and an adorable stammer, and Laurie was freckled and laconic and sporty. The two of them had friends. Boys liked them. Nobody liked me. Not even the kids who had a reputation for being nice—Lindsay Gross, who was small and squat and freckly, and had such terrible breath that it smelled like she’d eaten trash; Dana Blum, who was much heavier than I was; Rob Teitelbaum, whose mother had died when we were in junior high and was known for his moody silences and his kindness to Lindsay and to Dana—not even those kids were nice to me.

  “Put the book down,” said Eitan, our fearless leader . . . except I knew that if I did, not only would I be lonely, but I’d be bored, too. James Michener kept me company as we piled onto, and off, our charter bus with the high-backed seats covered in garish blue-and-red-print fabric, making our way through the Land of Milk and Honey, which struck me as an unlovely scrap of overbaked, cactus-studded wasteland. Eitan didn’t have any other advice for me. I doubt he was being paid enough to try to figure out what was going on, or to find me more amenable roommates, or to offer me tips for survival. He’d shepherded thirty spoiled suburbanites through Israel the summer before; he’d be herding another thirty the next summer. If I was miserable, well, I wouldn’t be miserable on his watch for long . . . and, unlike my Israeli counterparts, it was unlikely that my woes would ever include gunfire.

  I wanted to go home. As much as I’d looked forward to the trip, as much as I had hated Simsbury and been desperate to leave, that was exactly how much I was longing to return. At least at home I knew precisely who’d be awful to me, and what flavor the awfulness would take. Israel was a constant buffet of unpleasant surprises; new people being mean in new ways and different languages. But even if I could have faked injury or illness and gotten myself on a plane back to Connecticut, my parents weren’t there. They’d taken my siblings on a trip across the country that summer, leaving the house empty and my grandparents in Michigan as my emergency contact.

  I was on my own.

  I tried to sound brave in the letters I’d write to my parents, at night, on thin sheets of airmail stationery, letters they wouldn’t get until days after my return. I’d sit cross-legged on my bed in my empty room while my peers were outside, on the poured-concrete porch, smoking. I’d tell them about the tomato combine and the pool and whichever historically important sights we’d been bused to that week. I wrote about everything that we were doing, and didn’t let on that I was doing all of it alone. I didn’t tell them what had happened with Randy Gutman, a handsome boy whose shiny white smile and smooth tanned skin and crisp dark hair made him look like a young Erik Estrada, who’d approached me one day on the bus.

  Randy hooked his arms into the metal luggage rack overhead. His T-shirt stretched tight against his chest as he looked down at me. “Is this seat taken?” he asked, gesturing toward the eternally empty spot beside me. He had dimples when he smiled, deep dents in his honey-colored skin. I smiled up at him helplessly. “It’s all yours,” I said, which sounded, to my ears, like the kind of thing a girl in a movie would say.

  His grin widened as he moved away instead, his body swaying with the movement of the bus, like he was surfing, I thought. A minute later, Donnie Kaplan plopped down glumly beside me. Donnie was tall and had a horrible case of cystic acne that had turned his face into a red, lumpy wasteland studded with blackheads and whiteheads and the occasional rivulet of pus. Zits by themselves did not spell social isolation, but Donnie had gotten a boner on the diving board one of our first days at the pool, thus ensuring that he’d be the only person to spend the six-week trip even lower in the group’s estimation than I was. Of course he didn’t acknowledge me, and I didn’t speak to him. We each knew that proximity to each other could only make things worse.

  I didn’t tell my parents about that, or about the time, a few days later, when I’d overheard Randy talking with a few of the other boys, Ethan and Caleb and Ma
tt. I heard my name . . . or, rather, I heard the name “Jennifer,” of whom there were five on the trip. “Oh, no,” Randy said, holding each of his hands approximately three feet away from his hips, “not the fat one.”

  I wasn’t fat. I look at pictures of my fifteen-year-old self now, thirty years later, and it makes me want to cry that other kids said that, and that I believed them. I was larger than the Kims and the Staceys, who were living on cigarettes and, in a few cases, sticking their fingers down their throats even after our vegetable-heavy meals, but I was a three-season athlete who followed up crew and cross-country ski practices with five-mile bike rides home (this was what you did when you had a mother who’d announced that you were too old to be picked up and dropped off). I was big and busty, but I was fit and strong. Of course, in the wake of that comment I felt as if I must have looked like the love child of  Jabba the Hutt and Moby Dick after a month at the all-u-can-eat buffet. I don’t think I wore shorts for the rest of the trip, exchanging anything remotely revealing for the long-sleeved shirt and long skirt we’d been told to pack for visits to religious sites and shrines. For the duration of the trip I never went swimming again.

  My chief tormentor—of course I had one—was a girl named Ronni. Ronni wasn’t one of the prettier girls—those girls mostly left me alone, too secure in their own beauty and, when we went to Jerusalem, in the attention of the young Israeli soldiers to waste their time picking on me. Ronni had tiny, close-set pale blue eyes, a generous scoop of a nose (soon to be surgically reduced), big, feathered dirty-blond hair, and an even bigger mouth. Ronni was wide-hipped and flat-chested, a condition she camouflaged by tying a succession of fringed scarves around the hips of her swimsuits. When anyone said or did something stupid in her presence, her watery little eyes would widen, and she’d cock her head, looking like a blond pigeon that had just plucked a bit of trash from an especially fetid crack in the sidewalk. Ronni’s particular genius—and, as I’ve been unable to find her on Facebook, I can only wonder whether she found a way to translate it into a career—was sensing weakness among her peers and pointing it out to others. She lived to humiliate me. In high school, I was going by Jen or Jennifer, but the kids who’d known me since elementary school, a few of whom were on the trip, still called me Jenny, like my siblings and my parents did. Ronni’s nasal bray turned the pet name into the vilest insult. “Oh, JEN-NEE,” she’d singsong when she’d catch sight of me. I’d hunch my shoulders, duck my head, try to ignore her, try to make myself less visible, less embarrassing, less there.