Too bad I wasn’t on board. Perhaps my summer with the horse camp counselors made me return to school with a newfound secret knowledge. Sure, I had minimal experience with boys, but now I knew what was out there. I knew what real teenagers were doing, and I wanted in. Just hearing the skanky counselors’ stories made me feel as if I had a step up. I had learned it was best not to share my sexual wisdom with six-year-olds, but beyond that minor bump in the road I was ready for a new year. I had no interest in these ultrasafe wannabe bad boys. But I wasn’t complaining—if they wanted to pay attention to me, despite taunts of “how gross” from Jessica Rosenstein, I welcomed the attention. One overweight guitar dude would buy me black T-shirts of different hair metal bands and leave them in my locker. I had two Warrant “Cherry Pie” shirts, three Poison shirts, and countless Skid Row shirts. After all, Skid Row was the ultimate success story of our area, after Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen of course. I didn’t want to wear these shirts to school, because I didn’t want this guy to think I liked him. However, I would wear them after school to impress my brother’s high school friends whenever I got the chance. I wonder now if even that weird guitar dude was subtly trying to have a fashion intervention with me. Maybe he was thinking that if I wore hair metal band T-shirts, at least that would get me out of my “Female Jimmy Page” look a day here and there. Regardless, I was so not into him, or anyone for that matter. I just wanted to get through the day.
Meanwhile, it seemed as if everyone else at this time was busy preparing for a religious ceremony followed by a party where they received lots of presents and had really good cake. The Catholic kids were having confirmations, where their cakes were store-bought and filled with heavy vanilla pudding and covered in a thick coat of buttercream with roses made of orange. My mother always insisted on making all my birthday cakes from scratch, following traditional British recipes resulting in a vile brown cake filled with raisins and orange peels and coated in a glaze, never a frosting. All I ever wanted was a brightly colored store-bought cake from ShopRite with HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARGOT written in neon tones. Enough with the raisins, Mom. I was getting more than enough fiber from her black, seed-filled bread.
I went to a few confirmations, but I didn’t quite understand what was happening in the ceremonies. I loved that the girls got to wear white dresses after Labor Day though. Anything that pushed the rules of fashion seemed cool and antiestablishment to me. I’d eat at least two pieces of ShopRite sheet cake at each confirmation, thinking, This may be your last chance, eat it while you can. Coming home to my mom’s Pecan Sandies was almost tolerable after an afternoon gorging myself on cheap sheet cake in a Catholic church.
The Jewish kids were having Bar and Bat Mitzvahs with personalized party themes such as Jonathan’s All Stars, Marla’s Marvelous Mall, Samantha on Broadway, or, my absolute favorite, Gary’s Stock Market. Somehow I had secured an invite to Gary’s Stock Market Bar Mitzvah, whose party premise was, essentially, money. He had Styrofoam glitter dollar signs as a centerpiece (no doubt made by my old BFF Amanda’s mother out of her garage) and fake dollar bills with his face on it. I admired his directness. When guests entered the Temple Shalom rec room, it was decorated as if to say, Listen guys, we all know I learned that haftorah just for the money, so let’s cut to the chase and celebrate why we’re all really here. You’re going to give me money and I am going to collect it. Sure, we’ ll rock out with inflatable neon guitars and cheap giveaway sunglasses, then play some classic Bar Mitzvah games like freeze dance and huggy bear, but beyond that, I’ d really like to take you for all you’re worth and pay for one to two years of college—and not a state school. I’m talking big-time, private college, far away from here. Got it?
I was invited to about eight Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, most likely because I had gone to elementary school with a bunch of Jewish kids and they felt obligated to invite their “oldest” friends. I was never close enough with anyone to be called up to light a candle during the “special people” section of the party. This was when the Bat Mitzvah girl would stand in front of her fabulous, store-bought, raisin-free sheet cake decorated with, say, a giant purple buttercream telephone for PHONE IT IN AT ALISON’S BAT MITZVAH. Then the Bat Mitzvah girl would say something like, “I love it when we go shopping at the mall. You always know the best bargains and that’s not all. Nancy, come on up and light this light, you always know what fits just right.” Then some gum-smacking girl in a puffy teal balloon dress would act as if she’d just won a surprise Academy Award and come up and light the candle, being swarmed by Jewish aunts taking photos of this special friendship that will surely last forever. Often the Bat Mitzvah girl would get sick of writing individual poems for her “special people” and toward the end would say something like, “I love you guys with all my heart, you’re always there for me even when I got a C– in art”— hold for uproarious laughter because this is the funniest private joke in history—“So without further ado, Rob, Karen, Doug, Lisa, Jodi, Sara, Debbie, Carrie, Elizabeth, and all my art club pals, please come up and light this candle. I love you guys!” That’s when it would really sting, when the Bar/Bat Mitzvah guy/girl would essentially pull the original black-and-white Gilligan’s Island opening credits technique of “The movie star . . . and the rest . . . here on Gilligan’s Isle,” instead of giving the Professor and Mary Anne their due. Why couldn’t I be clumped into some ragtag group of “and the rest” called up to light a candle for once in my life?
I didn’t have a Bat Mitzvah or a confirmation. My mother is half Catholic, half Protestant. She and her twin sister were baptized Catholic in honor of her father’s side of her family, but one day he went off to work at the candy factory, slaving away as usual to master the latest recipe for chocolate turtles, when her British mother lit up a cigarette, made sure no one was on her tail, and rebaptized the twins at a nearby Protestant church. So I am pretty sure the double baptism cancels each individual baptism out, making my mom unbaptized and unable to force me to endure confirmation training.
My father was raised Jewish but is a staunch atheist. Known for his clever catchphrases like “Think about it, Margot, where do you suppose everyone fits in heaven? There’s no room, it’s not practical,” this man would never enroll me in accelerated Hebrew school just so I could have a big party with store-bought sheet cake and foam centerpieces. Besides, what would my Bat Mitzvah theme be anyway? “I Had a Hulking Good Time at Margot’s Bat Mitzvah” or “Margot’s Gargantuan Good Time”? Between my two parental figures, there was no solid religious guidance. That made me nothing. A heathen. Raised without God and with no opportunity for a big theme party with tacky dresses and cash gifts. That particular year it felt really pointless when my birthday came.
My mother and I were fighting a lot at the time, normal teenage girl/mom stuff, but nonetheless unpleasant. Her mom, my British grandmother, was dying, and the stress of dealing with that huge loss and her overdeveloped daughter entering her teen years was not a good combination. I wasn’t a little girl anymore (not that I was ever little), and raising my A-student older brother had not prepared her for the wrath of a teenage girl. Everything she said to me seemed so lame, and everything I said to her came off as confrontational. One Sunday morning she came downstairs and said, “Your morals are becoming fucked up. I’m taking you to church today. And don’t tell your father.” I wasn’t quite sure how watching a big-boobed neighbor make out on a regular basis made my morals “fucked up,” but excited by a Thelma-and-Louise-style getaway, I went without protest. Sneaking off together, albeit to church, would surely be a true bonding opportunity and way to reconnect after a lot of nonsensical bickering. I put on a flowery dress that landed right below my knees, that unflattering length that’s too long to be sexy and too short to be stylish. Realizing I was teetering on looking Amish, I debated putting on a church hat from my childhood dress-up drawer, but I thought that would draw my father’s attention during the sneak-out.
I came downstairs where my mother was waiting
for me, blending in, washing dishes so as not to draw attention to the world’s first church sneak-out. She saw me out of the corner of her eye, finished rinsing the chipped Smurfs mug from 1983, grabbed my arm, and said, “Follow me.” We walked to the Plymouth Voyager, not stopping to say good-bye to my clearly oblivious dad, who was leafing through records for his “Sunday soundtrack,” or my brother, who was filling out applications to top-notch universities, and took off. If church wasn’t the final destination of this trip, this would have been one of the most exhilarating rides of my life. My mom was speeding. Fast. I rolled down the manually operated window and let the wind flow through my hair. We were rebels, sneaking off to church to fix my “fucked-up” morals behind my atheist father’s back.
I didn’t realize how fast we were actually going and wondered if we were going to be unfashionably late. My hat-versus-no-hat inner debate had set us back only about two minutes, but I was just noticing my mom was going eighty miles per hour when the cop lights turned on behind us. “Shit,” she said, in true fashion of how she’d been acting all morning. Her sudden potty mouth was probably caused by the stress of her own mother being very sick at the time, but nonetheless, I loved my mom’s new vernacular.
She pulled over to the side of the road, took a deep breath, held it in for a beat, and began to cry on cue. Never before had I seen such magic from her. 1, 2, 3, cry. Amazing. She probably used season 6, episode 113 of Laverne & Shirley, “Not Quite New York,” as a sense memory. I blinked a few times to try to induce tears to help the cause but to no avail. The officer approached the window and my mother manually rolled it down. Just once in my life I wanted my parents to own a car with power windows, which were first invented in the 1940s . . . I know this for a fact. I looked it up. With each inch the window clunkily rolled down my mother’s crocodile tears grew more and more evident.
“Hello, officer,” said my mother, barely able to get the words out.
“Hello, ma’am,” the officer nodded at me, “miss.”
I nodded right back, eager to not disturb the awkward dynamic my mother had already instituted with her enviable ability to cry while simultaneously being chased by the cops. This was my first run-in with the law. I was loving every second of it.
“I’ll need your license and registration, please.” My mother handed it over, awaiting her punishment. “Ma’am, you were speeding pretty badly. Eighty miles per hour in a fifty-five zone. Were you aware of that?”
“Sorry, we were on our way to church and didn’t want to risk missing the sermon.” As if we hadn’t missed it every single other weekend of our lives? My mother took out a used tissue from the bottom of her purse and wiped her nose with it for effect. Who’s kidding who, it was probably a piece of one-ply toilet paper, as we never had any tissues in the house.
Still, my mother must have known what she was doing, because the cop softened. “I understand, ma’am. I’m a God-loving man myself. I hate missing church on Sundays.”
What the hell was happening? My mother was now bonding with a cop over their mutual love of God and churchgoing habits! This would be a lovely moment if any of it were true. I sat and watched, happy to have one up on my mother for this behavior. My mother then unfolded the already snot-filled toilet paper and loudly blew her nose into it . . . again. My mom’s nose blowing and sneezing were a constant cause of embarrassment. We were once in a two-level store shopping with my grandmother in Manhattan when my mom sneezed her usual overexaggerated “A-CHOO!” We were on the second floor of the store and a customer on the first floor called up to us, “God bless you!” I was humiliated. This particular nose blow in front of a suburban cop was as loud as the infamous Manhattan sneeze.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” continued the cop, desperate to make her stop reusing what had now become the opposite of a tissue. “Because I understand what it’s like to be late to church,” he chuckled to himself, my mom joining in as if they shared a bond over the hilarity they both knew from personal experience ensues when one walks in late to church—“I’m going to let you off with just a warning. Drive safely, and please obey speed limits in the future. Enjoy the service ma’am, miss.”
I nodded in disbelief.
“Thank you, officer,” said my mother, “and God bless.”
God bless was a phrase she had never once used, but it rolled off her tongue with such ease that I wondered why she had chosen a career in teaching rather than three-card monte. She let out a closing sniffle and rolled up the window, each creak accenting the awkward silence. As the officer walked to his car, my mother watched him in the rearview mirror. As soon as he got into his vehicle, she quickly wiped the tears from her eyes, leaving just the smear of her Estée Lauder midnight-blue eyeliner. She sucked in her remaining mucus, looked me in the eye, and said in a tone I’d only heard previously in Clint Eastwood movies, “Jesus Christ, I thought for sure that officer was gonna give us a ticket. Let’s go.” She peeled out going even faster than before with no sign of having been in hysterics just seconds earlier. And my morals were “fucked up”?
We arrived late to the service, though no one seemed to mind or even notice, and sat in the back. This was a Unitarian Universalist church, and we had missed the preaching part. We arrived during a medley of pretty songs, and I couldn’t tell if they were religious or not. The songs seemed to mostly be about flowers and love, which seemed remarkably similar to my father’s Joni Mitchell records. Then we sat in silence for a while “meditating,” during which I spent the entire time wondering about my mother. She must have been really upset about her mom. Where did she learn to cry on cue and lie like that? Did the officer think my mom was hot and that’s why he let us off? Or did he really believe her Mother Teresa shtick?
Either way, between the church sneak-out and the run-in with the law, today would be a special secret day kept between only my mother and me. If her intention in taking me away was to re-create a mother-daughter bond that recently had been diminishing, she had definitely achieved her goal. After the service, we drove home at the requisite speed limit, never spoke of the day, and never returned to church. My father never found out (until now if he’s reading this). But one thing was certain after our brief stint with religion: I was certainly not going to have any sort of God-infused coming-of-age celebration for this year’s birthday. If I wanted one, I was on my own to figure it out.
CHAPTER 9:
My Orange Unitard
Because my birthday falls in October, so close to the beginning of the school year, who to invite to a party always seemed a little shaky. Having no love of a lifetime, no style, no religious affiliation, and not really belonging to any clique, I was about to resign myself to forfeiting hope of any rite of passage. But then I heard rumblings around school and found out to my delight that Alyssa was throwing me a surprise party at her house (obviously not during Shabbos, so we could pump up the tunes). I thought surprise parties were for popular, well-dressed, normal-size girls like Jessica Rosenstein of the White Lipstick Posse. I thought girls like me were supposed to spend their birthdays alone writing tortured love ballads on their acoustic guitars. This grand gesture of throwing me a party was pretty much the nicest thing a friend had ever done for me.
The big night came when I was supposed to come to Alyssa’s house under the ruse of the usual experimentations with Nair and Jolen body hair bleach. Having clear body hair still made me envious of brunettes who got to experiment with chemicals and hot waxes in order to remove unwanted hair. Pouring bleach on one’s upper lip seemed like really risky behavior, and I wished I had reason to give it a try.
I walked over to Alyssa’s house to “hang out for the night,” making sure I was wearing my best outfit: black-and-white horizontally striped tight bell-bottoms with an oversize belt. I knocked on the door and heard a few “Shhs” and “She’s heres.” Alyssa opened the door wearing a tight gray V-neck over tight black jeans. She looked hot in a way that said I spent two hours to make it look as if I just th
rew this outfit together. She smiled and then flung open the door to a group of pubescents in Starter jackets and neon-colored, parachute-material Hot Dogger jump-suits yelling “Surprise!”
I took a note from my mother’s recent brilliant performance and acted incredibly surprised. I said things like “Wow! Alyssa, you devil! I had no idea! I am sooooo surprised! You guys!” I really worked my skills as an actress, marveling at how convincing I was and figuring it must run in the family. But no one bought it. Instead, everyone began yelling, “You knew, who told you? Alyssa, she knew!”
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