Gawky

by Margot Leitman

For nearly a month I carried this weight around. I was sure I was pregnant with Jonah Hertzberg’s baby. What other possible explanation could there be? Our bodies were so close when we made out, something could have leaked out. Recently, in the dark, Jonah Hertzberg couldn’t see so well and he accidentally Frenched my cheek. Could the angle have affected things? He was a few inches shorter, giving his penis room to stick straight up through his jeans, which fell directly below my crotch. Had I been wearing thick-enough pants to every make-out session? Corduroy would probably have prevented any leakage, but what about my new velvet leggings? Granted, velvet is one of the thickest fabrics aside from burlap, but leggings really bring out your crotch.

  I was totally screwed. I had to tell someone . . . but who? The girls from the horrible “Love of a Lifetime” circle were not to be trusted. My parents weren’t even an option; we weren’t that kind of family. We didn’t have free-spirited, anything-goes conversations about our sexual journeys while passing around a rain stick. My brother, Greg, was too busy remaking Tim Burton films into his own creations, such as Gregory Egg-Whisk Hands. Jonah was a no—I wanted to keep my cool image with the only person who actually thought I was cool.

  Finally, I came up with someone I could tell. The only person who wouldn’t judge me. I could tell Alyssa, my big-boobed friend up the block. She’d know where I could get a cheap back-alley abortion with the money I’d saved from babysitting those wretched twin girls down the street.

  I picked up the tan clunky telephone in my parents’ bedroom to call her. I had asked repeatedly for my own line but my parents refused to cave. I had then started begging for a phone in my room, maybe a cute multicolored one like they gave out as consolation prizes on Double Dare, but alas, there was no phone jack in there. When I asked them to upgrade to a cordless so I could bring the phone into my room, they told me that the tan phone worked just fine and there was no need to replace it. So I was reduced to hiding in their bedroom whenever one of them wasn’t lying in bed doing a New York Times crossword puzzle, knowing I could be walked in on at any moment.

  I began to dial Alyssa’s number, which I had committed to memory the second she gave it to me the first day of middle school while waiting for Randi at the bus stop. Then I remembered it was Saturday. The Sabbath! Shit! It was Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. On Saturdays, Alyssa’s family didn’t use the phone or TV or drive or cook. Sometimes they would slip me some cash to come over and use their electrical appliances to make their dinners. I loved those nights. Being made to feel magical by simply turning on an oven was just the ego boost I needed at that point in my life. Though some would have viewed this as sacrilegious, I saw it as a great way to make a dime while hanging out with Alyssa. It certainly beat babysitting those bratty twins who wanted to watch Look Who’s Talking every single time I came over. I’ll take turning on a Jewish oven and dishwasher anytime over rewatching forced sexual tension between two puffy Scientologists.

  I had no choice but to walk to Alyssa’s house. The seven-minute walk felt as long as that fateful viewing of The Crying Game with my folks. As I knocked on Alyssa’s door I thought to myself, Please be home, I have to take care of this soon, the fetus is growing inside of me, I can feel it. My fist trembled as I knocked, intentionally not using the doorbell in order not to show off my unlimited electrical rights during Shabbos. Lucky for me, Alyssa answered the door wearing a tight black T-shirt that hugged her C-cup boobs just so. “Can I come in?” I asked, my heart racing.

  “Sure!” she said, smiling at me with those perfect teeth that didn’t even require braces. She must have been relieved, I’m sure, to have a visitor from the outside world of electricity users. Shabbos always had a laissez-faire connotation to me, so I was relieved I wasn’t crossing any religious boundaries by popping in during the day of the Sabbath. We sat down on the couch; I looked around for any family members lurking, then mustered all my strength to confess to her my deep, dark, dirty secret.

  “Alyssa, I think I’m pregnant. I French-kissed Jonah Hertzberg in the vacant lot last month and I haven’t gotten my period since. Our bodies were really close. Something could have leaked out. I’m sure I am. A woman knows.”

  Alyssa took a moment, soaked in the bomb that was just dropped, and assessed the situation. Jonah Hertzberg and I were hardly boyfriend and girlfriend; we were just two people nostalgic for a time we never experienced firsthand who liked to make out with each other. Alyssa now had to process the hot gossip that I had been making out with Jonah Hertzberg on a regular basis, and that I was with child. It seemed like an eternity as I sat there waiting for advice from the neighborhood sexual guru.

  She let out a big sigh and then finally gave a verdict. “Well, it sounds to me like you’re definitely pregnant. What you need to do is call the 1-800 number on the back of your box of Tampax and they’ll tell you where to go to take care of it.”

  “You mean you don’t know where to go?”

  “No,” she said, “but the ladies at Tampax will. I’m sure of it, that’s why they have the number on the box. Everyone knows that. Are you going to tell Jonah?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not sure, I’m trying to keep him out of it, I don’t want to freak him out.”

  “Good idea,” said the object of every seventh-grade boy’s sexual fantasy. “Try to remain cool with Jonah.”

  I left Alyssa’s house and walked home, feeling my unborn child grow within me with each nervous step, sure that I was the most fertile kid in town (aside from Teresa Carimonico). At home I frantically pawed through the linen closet, searching for a box of Tampax, tiny soaps and mini shampoos flying everywhere. I never understood why my dad hoarded them if he never intended to use them. Whenever I asked, he would just say, “Someday.” I felt using the soaps was a very attainable dream, but to my dismay, he never went for it. I occasionally used them, but the tiny size of the soap only made my body feel larger, like a giant in a dollhouse. I wondered if this was why no one else in my Amazonian family ever used them.

  Finally, behind a universe of tiny lotions and various Ramada Inn soaps I found one box of Tampax Supers. Gross. Supers were for ladies with larger-than-average vaginas, which was the direction mine was heading if I ended up giving birth to Jonah Hertzberg’s baby. I never wanted to be caught with a Super, feeding the stereotype that tall girls have big vaginas, as stupid Chad Decker had said on more than one occasion.

  I found the 1–800 number on the back, snuck into my parents’ bedroom, closed the door, and dialed the tan, clunky telephone. A nice operator lady picked up the call right away.

  Panic-stricken, I summoned the courage to blurt out, “Can you please help me? I’m thirteen years old, my period is two weeks late, and just one month ago I made out with Jonah Hertzberg and our bodies were really close. Something must have leaked out; I’m pregnant, right?”

  Silence.

  I worried that the Tampax lady, like Alyssa, might have similar concerns regarding my social standing, so I said, “Don’t worry, I haven’t told Jonah.”

  “Well, did you actually have sex with this Jonah?” she asked.

  “No . . . that would be gross,” I said. “At one point he did French my cheek, could the angle have affected things?”

  “No, the angle could not have affected things.”

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding as she explained on.

  “Well, miss, you may not know this, but it’s very common in young girls to have irregular menstrual cycles at first.”

  Silence. Irregular? Whatever. Was I pregnant or not?!

  The Tampax lady continued. “Sweetheart, a ‘leak-out pregnancy,’ as you call it, is highly unlikely and in any case would have had to involve nudity at the very least. You’re definitely not pregnant. Calm down. Everything is going to be okay.”

  It was going to be okay! Was it really? Was everything going to be okay? Okay to me meant happily starting my weekend over French toast with my family before socializing at the sunny park
with my many, many friends who loved me. Instead, I was spending a beautiful Saturday afternoon alone on the phone with a middle-aged stranger whose job it was to field calls about menstrual blood. Thinking about how I had managed to already be a huge disappointment to human-kind, again I had no words.

  “Miss? Miss, are you there?”

  “Yes,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’m here.” Why couldn’t I just say “thank you” and hang up? What more did I want from her?

  “Miss,” continued the Tampax lady, “are you okay?”

  This was a loaded question. On one hand, I was okay. I had gotten confirmation that I was not pregnant; I was not going to have to go “study abroad” like Teresa Carimonico. But on the other, I also had confirmation that Alyssa, the sexiest girl I knew, had no idea what she was talking about. She was supposed to know everything! After all, she did have big boobs and boys liked her. So if she was faking it, and she wasn’t really all-knowing, what did that mean? Did anyone really know anything about anything? I suppose the Tampax lady did; otherwise she wouldn’t have been hired as a licensed period expert. But still, I was now doubting the credibility of the entire human race. I needed to answer, so I decided to leave Ms. Tampax with a cliff-hanger.

  “No,” I said. “I am not okay.” And then I hung up the phone so aggressively it dinged a little, a truly dramatic ending to a bizarre phone call. If I ever one day spoke of this to my brother (highly unlikely), I would certainly advise him to use the “No, I am not okay” phone slam in his next creatively licensed film. This conversation with an employee of Tampax was the most informative discussion of sex I had ever had up to this point. This anonymous call with a kind stranger was the most I had opened up to anyone the whole year.

  Despite the relief I felt from finding out I was not in fact teen pregnant with Jonah Hertzberg’s baby, how could I be okay? I was a gargantuan young girl, entering her teens during what seemed to be the wrong decade, in the wrong town, in the wrong state. Everyone else seemed to be reveling in Umbros, Color Me Badd, and New Jersey culture, while I indulged in bell-bottoms, Jethro Tull, and Haight-Ashbury. Something was definitely wrong with me if the best thing that happened to me all year had been the Gulf War. Something was definitely wrong if Alyssa, my confident neighbor whom I thought of as the next Dr. Ruth, was just as clueless as I was about sex. Something was definitely wrong with my depth perception if I believed a poorly angled, clothed French kiss could cause a fetus to grow inside me. Aside from the Tampax lady, I was pretty sure the rest of the human race was just as dumb as I was. No one knew anything about anything.

  No, Ms. Tampax, I was not okay.

  CHAPTER 7:

  Not Exactly a Horse Girl

  The phone call to the Tampax lady was truly a low point, so I decided to spend more time with live friends my own age. After spewing it all to an anonymous expert on period blood, I had the realization that I was desperately in need of more true friends. Alyssa and I hung out more and more as seventh grade was ending and summer approached, but I was itching to branch out. I also needed to figure out what I was going to do for the summer. Now that I was officially a teenager, I wasn’t sure I should spend it in my usual fashion—performing in the community summer theatre review, run by failed actors with possible drinking problems. This program took place at the local high school and had just enough budget to make all costumes out of tin foil. Being one of the oldest participants, I had basically peaked the summer before, when I was cast as Mary Poppins in the Disney montage. I stood on a riser, swaying to “Chim Chim Cher-ee” wearing a large hat. I had no solo or lines but all the glory. I got to have a solo bow instead of the horrible group ones, and got “special makeup” instead of the requisite blue eye shadow and red lipstick (which also got used as blush). I had a feeling if I went back again for the fifth year, I would be spending my pre-show moments hoping that the lipstick being smeared across my mouth hadn’t just been used on some sweaty kid’s acne-ridden cheek. I would be back to my usual role of girl in back row wearing unflattering high-cut leotard. I was a little too old for that stuff now, and needed to figure out another way to spend my days so I wouldn’t go stir-crazy inside the house. If I didn’t find an activity, my mom would surely find one for me, whether it be weeding, laundry, or dusting her endless bone china teacup collection. I needed to find a new summer outlet.

  I was not athletic, or coordinated, or agile, so when Alyssa invited me to horse camp, I was skeptical as to whether or not this was my true calling. I said yes, although I wondered just how fast Alyssa could gallop on a horse with her giant boobs. Perhaps horseback riding was a place where my A cups would be an asset. Alyssa’s invite was my pathway to finding a social group outside of my town, where everyone knew me as the girl who has looked thirty since she was twelve.

  I was optimistic about horse camp, even though I had never ridden a horse, or experienced one in person for that matter. I had barely even seen one on film. When my brother re-created the Godfather trilogy on his borrowed camcorder, we used my live dog as a replacement for the iconic horse’s head scene (although I found my brother’s description of that scene to be far less harrowing than the old lady chloroform scene from Cloak & Dagger). I had never seen the actual Godfather movies because my parents deemed them “too violent.” (Yet Octopussy when I was a small child and The Crying Game as I hit puberty were perfectly appropriate.) I had an aversion to horse-centric Little House on the Prairie, which I thought was for choir girls and sissies. Laverne & Shirley, The Carol Burnett Show, and Moonlighting reruns on Lifetime . . . Television for Women never had a single horse on any episodes.

  Besides, horse girls were constantly reading books like Black Beauty. I still hadn’t moved on from my obsession with Go Ask Alice,the published diary of a suicidal, drug-addicted teen. I continued writing every journal entry with the intention of someone reading it, discovering I was a genius, and publishing it at a profit, which was such an un-horse girl thing to do. Horse girls sported long, straight ponytails that they brushed out frequently and publicly like manes. I did not have a long, straight ponytail. No matter what I did with my hair, I always ended up looking like an extra in a Whitesnake video. Horse girls wore clothing inspired by Quakers. I wore clothing inspired by Jimmy Page, Stevie Nicks, and Cher. Horse girls drew horses on their notebooks and wore sweatshirts with horses airbrushed on them. Perhaps the horse girls would also be misunderstood and desperate for new friends and we could bond over not quite fitting in.

  Nonetheless, I was excited for horse camp. I didn’t need to spend another summer singing “Home” from The Wiz Broadway musical alone to my own reflection in my mother’s full-length mirror. (I had wanted to play Dorothy in a previous summer’s production of The Wiz but ended up the Scarecrow. They told me it was because I moved in such a “floppy manner.”) I didn’t care if I’d be spending the summer surrounded by girls who would probably remain virgins way longer than most and tended to be obsessed with mythical folklore. Horse camp for me was purely a social strategy. Maybe at horse camp I could be at the upper level of social standing. Compared to these girls, maybe I could be cool.

  Despite Alyssa’s current interests, which included above-the-jeans hand jobs and Nair, she was an undercover horse girl. No one but I knew her dirty secret, which is how she remained so popular with boys at school. She had been going to this camp for years. This horse camp was a few towns over, where all the girls were rumored to be sluts. I had heard all the girls in that town had professional, salon-quality full-set acrylic nail tips with nail art. They chewed gum at all times and went all the way with boys behind the Gravitron whenever the ghetto carnival came to town. I was thrilled to be leaving my town on a daily basis, even if it did mean I had to spend time with sluts and spooky animals whose severed heads could be placed in one’s bed if one ended up rolling with the wrong crowd.

  The first day of horse camp, Alyssa’s mom pulled into my driveway in her old station wagon with a FOLLOW ME TO THE HADASSAH bumper sticker pr
omptly at 8:00 AM. My mom, being somewhat unsupportive of my new career as an equestrian, didn’t have any desire to be a part of the first day of the rest of my life. Although she enjoyed betting on horses at the racetrack, riding them was something foreign to my family. We were more of a placing-bets-while-someone-else-rode-the-horse kind of family.

  When we arrived at horse camp, I quickly discovered that this town had no horse girls available to run the place, so instead they utilized the local Jersey sluts. I had imagined that even in this skanky town there would at least be one or two horse girls on call—but no. These girls were not reading Black Beauty, they were getting finger banged by guys in jean shorts behind a Friendly’s dumpster. They were classic Jersey girls with big perms, tans, spandex shorts, mirrored sunglasses, and an unlimited supply of gum. They all looked like the spawn of Tawny Kitean and Samantha Fox. Still, they had a certain cred. Alyssa immediately informed me that she had heard one of the counselors had made out with a member of Skid Row. She didn’t know which guy it was, but it “definitely wasn’t Sebastian Bach.” Yes! This was exactly the kind of lifestyle I had been yearning for. I was under the supervision of a girl who actually knew a real rock star and had tasted his saliva! I was practically in the presence of rock ’n’ roll royalty. I immediately became obsessed more with the counselor’s past relations with D-list rock stars than with saddling up a stallion.

  I didn’t expect the counselors to make us ride on the first day. I thought we’d spend the day trading gum and swapping lip-liner techniques. But after a very brief intro, they discussed the difference between riding Western (sexy/badass) and English (pretentious/Hamptons). I tuned out and let my mind consider these options. Girls who rode Western seemed more attainable, while the girls who rode English were wealthy and wore cute helmets, beige tight pants, and fitted blazers. These girls came from old money, possibly had their own pony at home, and definitely had a country house. I had never met the type of girl who rode English, and I had high hopes to possibly encounter one during my brief stint at horse camp.