I extended my hand and took the bucket. Chachi must have heard me tell my coworker that my parents were away. I looked over my shoulder to see if she overheard this random and perverted offering, but she was outside putting out a cigarette while simultaneously lighting up another.
Equally as flattered as I was freaked out, I asked, “Everything?”
“Yes, everything,” said Chachi.
Weird and fetishy, yes . . . but Chachi was finally flirting with me. And who was I to judge if someone was a little weird? I once wore an orange unitard to middle school (and still stand by the fact that it was a killer outfit). Standing tall, buttercream in hand, I walked out of the bakery, anxious to call Adam and tell him the insane thing that had just happened. A few hours later Adam came over, we had a buttercream fight in the backyard, and that night I shaved my legs with it. As the pink Gillette Daisy disposable razor hit my pale, long, freckled leg, I thought to myself, I have arrived.
When my parents returned to town, they noticed a strange rotten dairy odor coming from the backyard. I provided no explanation for it, because even if I did, it would have left them even more confused. After my folks returned, Adam and I went back to spending our nights at the deserted playground.
School was about to end, and although no one seemed to know that Adam and I were seeing each other, no one would have cared anyway. All the nerds were paired off with last-minute girlfriends, and everyone else was cool enough to have their own thing going on. As graduation approached I was happy to finally be having fun. Adam was great, though I was more intrigued by him than in love with him. I was searching for excitement, not a relationship. Adam was going to major in politics at Brown while I was going to major in theatre at Ithaca College. Our lives were about to go in completely different directions.
Beyond the connection we had over finally enjoying high school (and some good sexual chemistry), we really had almost nothing in common. Even though Adam had some majorly hot moves, like walking his fingers up the back of my thigh while making out with me, I was getting anxious to go away and study theatre. When I would talk to Adam about this, he didn’t understand. Adam was practical and had a nice future ahead of him in politics. I wanted to live a life like Rodreigo—nontraditional, sexy, adventurous, and free. I didn’t really want to lead a conventional life like I could see Adam having, even though those last few months were the only part of high school I actually truly enjoyed.
“Adam, I really don’t know what’s going to happen to us when we go away to school. I don’t want to make a false promise to you,” I said one night while sipping peanut butter mocha at the local Main Street coffeehouse.
“Well, we can meet here. You’ll come visit and stuff, right?”
“I don’t know how much time I want to spend here once I’m gone.”
“It’s not so bad, Margot,” Adam said as he nervously munched on his biscotti and tried to clean up the mess of crumbs he had just created.
“I know it’s not. You just don’t get it,” I said, as I smiled and took his hand across the table. I was really eager to go somewhere and reinvent myself. I didn’t want to visit a place where I would always be known as a gargantuan freak. I wanted to leave, start over, make friends with people who appreciated intricate tie-dye patterns, and never look back.
A few days later was graduation. I was graduating sixty-seventh out of a class of about 190. “Top fifty, Margot. I thought we were going for top fifty. Too much daydreaming.” My mother was not pleased, my older brother having graduated in the top fifteen four years before. “Well,” she sighed, “at least you were recognized in the yearbook. You know I was voted—”
“Friendliest,” I cut her off. “I know, Mom, you’ve told me a thousand times.” My mother’s win as “friendliest” often made me wonder if she had a slutty side in high school, but I never dared to ask. I, on the other hand, tied with the prom queen for “Most Involved” due to my mad-dash senior year to join every activity possible to get into college and make up for three years of brooding.
The other superlative I won was “Most Unique,” an honor I shared with Eli, my prom date. “Most Unique” really was just a nice way of saying “weirdest,” but I took it as a compliment. It helped, actually. When graduation day came, I felt as if I had had a true suburban high school experience, albeit in the last few months of school. Between prom princess and the yearbook, I would be remembered for being weird . . . not gigantic. And I liked that.
On the day of graduation, my brother was away in Chicago for the summer but my parents both came. Greg had just graduated from Northwestern film school where Friends star David Schwimmer gave the department graduation speech and big-time hottie Robert Redford was the school graduation speaker. My high school ceremony was far less star-studded—featuring two nerds gone wild giving the keynote addresses. After rolling with the big boys in Chicago, I worried my folks had gone Hollywood on me and would be disappointed in my public regional high school’s inability to produce even one B-list celebrity speaker.
As Floyd Barstow and the rest of the band played “Pomp and Circumstance,” I walked slowly in line with the other graduates. I sat down in my itchy polyester robe on that football field, realizing that in the past four years I had barely even attended a game. As I looked at my mom, who was weeping, of course, I wondered if she was ever going to bring up the fact that she recently found and then neatly folded the boxers Adam left in my bedroom. As the valedictorian rambled on about “following your dreams,” I deduced that I was not in trouble and that my mom had decided it was easier to pretend she didn’t find them and to not tell my dad. I knew when I went away to school that she would fondly remember me as Senior Year Margot, who participated in after-school activities, school dances, fudge factory parties, and beach weekends. She would be happy to forget Freshman–Junior Year Margot, who sulked around like Lurch from The Addams Family, smoked too much pot, and played variations of the same four chords on her guitar. The beach was twenty minutes away, the next town over birthed the great and powerful Jon Bon Jovi, and the big city was an hour away. But here, at home, to me there was nothing to offer but a town full of people constantly misunderstanding me and wanting to fight each other when I was awarded a tiny rhinestone crown. Until now. Things were finally working out, but I was out of time. I had counted down to this moment, now it was here . . . and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to leave after all.
That night we drank on the football field, laughed as Eli streaked around the track, and stayed up until dawn. I went straight to work at the bakery the next morning, waltzing in at 5:30 AM and proudly announcing to Chachi, “First of all, I’m a little bit drunk.” I used a grand hand gesture I imagined Mrs. Roper on Three’s Company might use to emphasize the word drunk and began crookedly arranging the donuts for the crew of obese truckers about to enter the premises at 6:00 am on the dot. Between this entrance and the buttercream incident, Chachi was beginning to think of me as a real wild broad. I liked the new me. I was growing into myself finally. Maybe it was finally time to spice things up and order a wig from my Raquel Welch Wig Collection catalogue.
The night before I left for college, Adam and I drove to the shore and hooked up on the beach, which I really do not recommend. There is still sand lodged somewhere in my cervix from that fateful night. While picking a piece of seashell out of my belly button, I wondered how the hell I could incorporate Adam into this faraway place I was about to go to. I wanted to start fresh. If I was going to say good-bye to home, I was going to leave all of it behind, as I had been planning on doing ever since I saw season 6, episode 113 of Laverne & Shirley, “Not Quite New York,” where the girls pack it all up and head off to Hollywood. Sure, Carmine a.k.a. “The Big Ragu” joined them, but they also made new friends like Rhonda the busty blonde. I wanted to head off and meet my Rhonda.
Then we made out in front of my house in the front seat of his Toyota Corolla and kept accidentally honking the horn, because girls my size really need at least an S
UV to have ample room for the front-seat make-out. As the horn kept honking, I wondered if my mom could hear it. Then I hoped she would categorize this moment with the time she found Adam’s boxer shorts in my room. She definitely heard it but would pretend she didn’t, because that was easier than admitting that her teen/almost-adult daughter was hooking up on a hot New Jersey night in a vehicle right under her nose.
We promised each other we would try our hardest to make it work while we were away at school, but there would be no commitment. I had a sinking feeling about that.
“Okay then, well, I guess this is good-bye,” I said.
“I’ll try my best to stay in touch while we’re away.”
“Okay, but remember, no promises, right, Adam?”
“I know, no promises. But when are you coming home to visit?”
“I’ll be home for Thanksgiving.”
“November, Margot?”
“November. Until then?”
Adam kissed me good-bye and I exited the car, feeling more free than sad. I entered my house and waved good-bye to him as he drove away. I walked up the stairs and noticed my parents turning off the light just as I got there. They were pretending they were asleep so they didn’t have to acknowledge why exactly I was in a parked, honking car outside the house for over an hour. I went into my room and looked around at the now-bare walls, just specks of Fun-Tak and tape stains in place of all my posters of middle-aged rock stars. Perhaps my mom was right in her initial insistence that I just use magnets to hang posters on my metal closet doors. The tape and Fun-Tak did ruin the walls. She was right. I took out my bags and finally began to pack, something I had avoided doing since my college acceptance letters came in.
I slept about two hours that night because I gravely underestimated just how long packing up a closet full of vintage clothes would take. The next morning I opened the door to start my travels to Ithaca and found a handwritten card on my doorstep from Adam telling me how much this summer together had meant to him. He must have gotten there really early to leave it. As I opened it I thought about his commitment to romance, and how much more sleep he would have gotten if only he had simply given it to me the night before.
My parents and I headed off in the jam-packed Plymouth Voyager for the five-hour trek to Ithaca. I clutched Adam’s card the whole way there and thought about how lucky we were that Corey the stalker had not succeeded in blowing up that car. If we had to take my mom’s sedan, I definitely wouldn’t have enough room to take my entire handmade paper collection.
CHAPTER 18:
Good Old Maggot
I have heard that college is a place where fitting in doesn’t matter and one can completely revamp him/herself, like on The Facts of Life when Beverly Ann Stickle, played by Cloris Leachman, came to Peekskill and took over for Mrs. Garrett supervising those wacky girls. After Charlotte Rae left Facts, the show got a much-needed makeover, giving it the edginess it always needed. As a kid I was inspired by the Cloris Leachman era of The Facts of Life and was eagerly anticipating my upcoming reinvention.
College was brand-new territory where you could change your whole identity in one moment, significantly altering the course of the rest of your life by way of the new you. That sounded great to me, and already I was planning on introducing myself to everyone at college as “Maggie.” Because while “Margot” a.k.a. “Maggot” a.k.a. “Margot Fargo farts a lot” is a humongous freak who sits alone in the cafeteria, “Maggie” is a cute girl with freckles on her shoulders who attracts guys by fiddling with her guitar on the quad.
I had always hated my name. Correcting moronic people on a daily basis that the t on the end was silent was the bane of my existence. My mother always said to tell people who would mispronounce my name, “You don’t say escar-GOT, and you don’t say Brigitte Bar-DOT, so why would you say Mar-GOT?” While this seemed like an adequate comeback, it was a bit long-winded, and usually not worth repeating every time a pharmacist called out your name to come sign for your amoxicillin. Games of “Marco Polo” were especially unbearable. “Marco” sounded remarkably similar to my name, so whenever I walked past a game of “Marco Polo” at the pool club and heard someone calling out “Marco,” I’d always stop and say, “Yes?” Thus I’d interrupt a game I was not invited to participate in and ruin everyone’s fun. And when I actually would play Marco Polo, I could never fully get into it. I’d be so worried that someone was actually calling my name that I would always open my eyes to check. It made me anxious and I always ended up quitting, putting on my embarrassing bathing cap, and swimming in the lap lanes.
It made me especially annoyed to know that I was originally supposed to be named Carey, after the Joni Mitchell song. How inspiring it would have been to be named after a song that contained the lyrics, And we’ll laugh and toast to nothing and smash our empty glasses down. Plus, Joni Mitchell was my dad’s dream girl (my mother’s dream guys being a tie between fellow tall person and actual Brit John Cleese and hunky president Bill Clinton). But a few days before I was born my mom became concerned about the cult-classic Sissy Spacek movie Carrie. My mother’s fear was that the other babies my age would have seen the R-rated horror movie and then make fun of me for having the same name as its virginal, pig-blood-coated star. Carrie is a movie I did not see until I was about twenty-five, and by then another iconic “Carrie” had come front and center, Carrie Bradshaw, a woman whom half of all womankind wanted to be exactly like. So really? Would naming me Carey have been a horrible mistake? Because I went to school with a lot of Jasons during the Friday the 13th era, and they all seemed to be okay. And I went through middle and high school with a girl named Carrie, and she was never once teased for her name. I know this because I sat behind her in countless classes, and every day at roll call each teacher pronounced her name perfectly on the first try. Never once did I hear a snicker or whisper of “dirty pillows.” I, on the other hand, was called MarGOT by virtually every teacher I ever had, resulting in a huge uproar of laughter from my classmates with phonetically spelled names like Rob.
It was obviously time to rebrand myself. If I never got to be Carey, I would settle for Maggie. I couldn’t wait.
My parents and I arrived early afternoon at a dorm building in the middle of a scenic wonderland. There were waterfalls and flowers and birds chirping. There was a lake on the horizon and a smell of fresh air mixed with crisp fall. This was a far cry from the strip mall I called home. Here in Ithaca, I was smelling new smells! I was on my way out. I was going to be the new me. Maggie was about to make her life debut. My dad hadn’t even cut the engine in the parking lot at school when I grabbed a bag and struggled to open the annoying sliding door of the backseat of my parents’ minivan.
“It might help if you unlock it, Margot,” said my father oh-so-helpfully, taking a swig of his now-hot seltzer that had been sitting next to him in the car for the last five hours.
With a huge sigh I flipped the manual lock, looking forward to soon traveling only in vehicles driven by cool artists with normal doors. I wouldn’t have a car in college, and that was okay with me. I planned to make friends with people who had cars, learn the local public transportation system, and go on long walks where butterflies would land on my shoulders and I would have major breakthroughs about my life’s calling.
My mom was silent for once, most likely because she didn’t want me to know she was crying. I got my lanky frame out of the car and we all walked to the dorm to check in. Suddenly the same feeling of walking into Jessica Rosenstein’s fashion intervention rushed over me. The dorm was filled with happy faces of late teens who were about to be free from parental supervision for the longest stretch of time they’d ever gone. Everyone seemed to have been there for hours and already made his or her best friends. I hadn’t even started school yet and I already felt alone.
My parents came with me to the check-in table at the dorms, where I was to get my room number and key. Right away we discovered that there had been a glitch with my housing. A week b
efore, I had gotten a letter informing me that I had been placed with a smoking roommate on the last remaining college “smokers’ floor,” and my mom called and complained.
“What is this, 1964?” my mother had screeched at the nineteen-year-old work/study student who answered the phone in the college housing department. Apparently, the nineteen-year-old work/study student did not take the initiative to resolve the situation and place me with a different roommate as promised. So a battle began to find me a place to live where I would not have to restart my childhood candy cigarette fetish in an attempt to trick my neighbors into thinking I was one of them. My mom served as war general for our side of the skirmish.
I was mortally embarrassed to watch my mom create a scene, but I actually agreed with her that I needed a new place to live. Despite my New York City grandmother’s glamorous example of holding endless More 120 brown cigarettes between her perfectly manicured red nails, I had never taken up the habit. As chic as my grandmother made smoking look, my coworker at the bakery made it look equally revolting, really driving home that smoking just wasn’t for me. I didn’t belong on a “smokers’ floor,” and there was no “granddaughter of a smoker’s floor,” so I was going to have to go somewhere else. The college finally solved the problem by assuming that not only could I not live with a smoker, I couldn’t live with anyone, and they assigned me to a single.
A single? Oh no. My mother’s first college roommate was still her BFF. I had eavesdropped on countless phone calls between them where they laughed hysterically at endless private jokes. I wanted private jokes! My mom and her college roommate spent every New Year’s Eve together drinking Bahama Mamas and dancing to sixties music. Who was I going to drink Bahama Mamas with?
“I’m so sorry, honey,” said my mom, as she handed me the key we had just gotten from the RA. “Hmm . . . room 1310.”
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