How Did You Get This Number (14 page)

The Special Moments cards were far and away my favorite. Even as kids, we recognized the dated presumption that all our special moments would have to be found
outside
the colored wedges of Marriage or Career. Nope, no joy there. Cue the visual of grown Girl Talk players, seeking out their “special moments” by going on shopping sprees beyond their means, binge-eating their children’s Easter candy, and sitting on dressing room benches, trying on La Perla underwear and weeping....

It’s easy to point at the past and say, “Can you believe we ever thought this was okay?” It makes one wonder what contemporary nuggets of idiocy we’re producing. What we call “normal” now will eventually be viewed as cultural carbon monoxide—the silent killer of logic and good sense, imperceptible until we all wake up in ten years surrounded by photos of women wearing sunglasses sized for bullmastiffs on their way to stick vials of stroke medication into their eyebrows. Looking back, I can’t decide which makes me cringe more—that I avoided speaking to Rachel Hermann about her home life or that I participated in a game that predicted the number of babies I would one day expel from my body as dictated by the first digit of my area code. That would be nine. Who wrote this shit? Mormons?

If I had been permitted to ask Rachel questions, I’m not sure what they would have been. But what I can say is what they wouldn’t have been. They wouldn’t have been about the devil’s musical stylings that were the Indigo Girls. Or hemp. Or why one of her mothers wore gym shorts in the middle of winter. I wished I could spin an arrow and it could land on a new category called Reality. I wondered: What was Rachel’s life like? What did she make of us? Did she have to put stickers on her face and drink from a dog bowl where she came from? If you have two mommies, can you still play one parent off the other? Were you saddled with two bad cops or blessed with two pushovers?

“Hey”—one of Zooey’s minions poked me in the biceps—“I think you’re missing a zit.”

She bounced her index finger in close proximity to my face, counting my battle scars. Then she consulted the rule-book, searching for a punishment for the intentional smuggling of fake pimples.

For all its many flaws—and there were many—at Girl Talk’s core was the single lesson that prepared me for truth-or-dare. Which prepared me for “I never.” A thread of advice that strung through all the drinking games of New England and, subsequently, life as I know it. I learned that if you want to get out of something, it is always better to tell the truth. Not because it is the moral option, but because nine times out of ten, it’s less work. The path of least resistance. Turn the pockets of your past inside out, beat your peers to the punch, expose yourself, and bore the people around you into leaving you be. Two-mommied Rachel knew this, too.

When she arrived after dark, it somehow made sense that she would be dropped off later than everyone else, that her parents parented differently than ours did. Not so much because there were multiple sets of breasts involved, but because Rachel had just moved to the East Coast from California. What the time difference didn’t account for, the Berkeley mentality did. “Seven p.m.” was more of a suggestion than a fact.

Rachel was tall for our age, lanky, with wide-set eyes that would be identified by any modeling scout as “Jackie O-like” but which were identified by our peers as Kermitlike. She had already begun to hunch. If I have ever come to the defense of a celebrity who claims to have been called Olive Oyl or Skeletor as a child, Rachel is the reason. But for all her physical discomfort, she had a sense of calm about her. Her voice, which never surpassed a certain octave, made me conscious of keeping my own exaggerated squeaks to a minimum. She seemed a bit older and a lot wiser than we were, the way people who have lived elsewhere seem when you’re twelve years old. If I could make a graph of our miniature society, charting how much Rachel spoke, how many stories and crushes of her own she shared, how many times she complimented other girls, Rachel would fall exactly in the center. Over the next few years, she landed in this spot with apparent effortlessness. Whereas my endeavors to fit in were always soaked with effort. Alas, taking stock after each chauffeured trip to the movies and each sleepover, I calculated too many failed jokes, too little volume control, or too much forced mysterious silence on my part. Or, worst of all, zero attention from Zooey.

 

 

 

 

ASIDE FROM THE TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD FRESHMAN, the most unrealistic aspect of teen movies is how conscious the upper echelons are of their own status. Whereas in real life, such hyper-awareness of group dynamic would only damage one’s social standing. Cafeteria tables may be as delineated as nation-states, but the borders remain invisible at all times. Getting caught muttering Shakespearean monologues about one’s plans for coup-staging would make you seem schizophrenic. When it comes to pointing out middle-school injustice, it’s not just impolite to point—it’s unproductive. At the time I thought we were all conscious of this system, undetectable to the naked eye as it was. As it turns out, the bird’s-eye view of grade school is not to be found at the top of the tree. The altitude of popularity actually makes you a little stupid.

I know this because in adult life, I am friendly with a girl who would have been portrayed as a Queen Bee in any teen drama but at the time clearly thought of herself as, say, an affable ladybug. A Marie Antoinette figure who unconsciously abused and misunderstood her position. Oblivious to the system, she assumed that the populace of other cliques was composed of people who shared different interests, who she just didn’t know as well. Recently she said to me, “Can you believe it? Craig Marcos got divorced.”

I scrolled through the contact list in my head until I produced an image the approximate size and shape of someone named Craig Marcos.

I said, “Craig Marcos got married?”

The blithe assumption that I kept tabs on her friends, that I’d be invested in their contemporary lives, would be insulting if it wasn’t so flattering. She viewed her world not in cliques but as this borderless mass of fun where the only reason she might not see you at a secret party was because you were across town at an even better and more secret party. It was downright touching. How can you not want to hug Marie Antoinette just a little bit when she suggests replacing bread with cake? It’s made of sugar and flour. It’s not like it’s a
bad
idea.

Zooey was a different animal. One got the feeling she was abnormally aware of her power within this falsely inclusive echelon. But she would never wield it against me. Not because I had done anything especially cool to warrant my turn skipped in that great Girl Talk game of life. I simply had too much on her.

The incident had taken place in fifth grade, a time when I was regularly raising my hand and asking for the bathroom hall pass during math class. The “pass” was a normal-sized key with a wooden block the size of a brick attached to it. This was meant to broadcast the administration’s lack of faith in our ability to hold on to small objects. Still, I would rather clutch in my hand that corroded block, which every child who didn’t wash his or her hands had just clutched, than spend half an hour writing numbers on a blackboard. Afflicted with the plight of the right-brained, I had no gift for percentages or protractors. I raised my hand for the hall pass with increasing frequency.

I’d wander around the school grounds, kicking acorns on the concrete beneath the basketball net and stopping to appreciate the big mural outside the auditorium. Little did I know I was about two pee-break excursions away from my math teacher calling my mother and my mother calling a doctor, who would quiz me on my frequent urination habits. I felt at once empowered by and guilty about the perception my teachers and parents had of me, that of a child whose devious acts were not the stuff of white lies but the stuff of white coats. Surely there must be some terrible force beyond my control causing me to skip class. Testing negative for everything, the doctor left me with the suggestion that I “wipe more thoroughly,” a piece of advice that has stayed with me to this day, despite the fact that I was being misdiagnosed at the time it was given.

What I had was an acute case of procrastination. When Mattel released its infamous “Math is hard!” Barbie doll, the woman cut to the core of me. To my mind, the only flaw in her design was that she didn’t say “Math is hard!” and then spontaneously raise her hand via some battery-powered mechanism in her plastic rotator cuff. (I think she also said something to the effect of “Let’s go shopping!” But the math crack was so insanely sexist, Barbie’s minor faux pas got lost between the cracks of the Dream House floorboards.)

I was taking one of my regular constitutionals around the halls, clutching the pass and sidestepping the discolored spots of tile, which were known to have a high concentration of cooties. I snooped in the supply closet, which held only makeshift aisles of paper reams and boxes of No. 2 pencils but in which I fantasized were hidden secret documents implicating the school in a national scandal. Or, at the very least, the blueprints of the building, which would at long last prove it was an exact replica of a medieval dungeon.

By this time I actually had to pee. I walked into the girls’ room and did a quick visual sweep under the stalls. I was going through a phase where I felt uncomfortable when people could hear me going to the bathroom. I’m still going through it, really. Problems arise when the biological and the social get too close. Why do people persist in carrying on a conversation from the adjoining stall, forcing me to flush on them mid-sentence? It’s amazing that we listen to one another release piss and excrement into porcelain tubs and then pretend like nothing happened. We hear the difference between a healthy digestive system and one that has been plied with beer and cheese fries the previous night. It’s not that I desperately longed to have open conversations about bowels and pus and mucus. I had a roommate like that once, who used to stare quizzically at the food globules on her used dental floss and encouraged me to do the same. I no longer live with this person.

My eyes stopped sweeping when I saw two tie-dyed Keds with blue ink tattooed around each sole. The fringes of a pair of stonewashed jeans covered the laces. Zooey. I opened the stall adjacent to hers, made myself a toilet-paper wreath, and sat. I enjoyed the idea of catching Zooey being human, even if it meant I had to listen to someone in the next stall. I also enjoyed the anonymity. I imagined her feeling as embarrassed as I would have been.

“Owwwwum,
” she whimpered.
“Ow o wow
.
Hooooof.
”

Silence again. Followed by a throat clear.

“O wow ow,
shit,
ow,
” she whimpered, louder this time. Something was very wrong.

“Zooey?”

My voice was tentative as a ream of toilet paper rolled on the ground from one stall to the next. She slid her feet closer together until the rubber bumpers of her Keds touched.

“Everything okay in there?”

At the unripe age of ten and three quarters, Zooey’s body had gone ahead and won itself the distinction of first period in our class. Despite her mother’s encouragement to stick with the “less interfering” feminine hygiene products, Zooey was ready to take on the tampon. I was listening to the sound track of her first attempt. A process that sounded so atrocious that when my time came years later, I thought of nothing but. I practiced the art of relaxing my own muscles by lying on my bed and pretending someone had just knocked me unconscious with a frying pan, conveniently anesthetizing every nerve in my body except the ones in my right arm.

Zooey was not used to being embarrassed, and thus had no storage container for her shame. She had no practice in suppressing awkward moments the way the rest of us had. Instead, it kind of free-form spread all over her like a rash.

“Please,
please
, don’t tell anyone,” she implored, her voice extra-breathy and high.

Who would I tell? I couldn’t imagine. Where would “Zooey’s bleeding like a stuck pig” fit into a conversation about the merits of wall clocks in the shape of Swatch watches?

“I won’t, I swear.”

We were at that age when it’s difficult to imagine others not thinking as you do. I assumed Zooey was paranoid about en masse urination because I was paranoid about en masse urination. Likewise, she asked me to keep her secret because if it had been
me
trying to negotiate with a cotton missile, she would have told everyone by lunchtime.

I coached her via the Lamaze breathing techniques I had seen in talking-baby movies. Not in possession of a stick to bite, Zooey reached her non-nether-region-exploring hand under the stall for me to grab. I hesitated on hygienic grounds, unsure if that expression about one hand not knowing what the other is doing could be applied so literally.

“I’m just going to get it over with.” She wiggled her fingers again.

Not only was this a bonding moment between Zooey and me but a much-needed bonding moment between Zooey and the rest of womankind. I reached down and squeezed the hand of Zooey Ellis as she inserted her first tampon.

We walked out of the girls’ room in silence, passing the supply room and making a right at the classroom where M.A.S.P. met. M.A.S.P. was an acronym for “More Able Student Program.” The administration has since changed it to S.O.A.R., which presumably expands into a more polite label than “Other People’s Children Are Idiots.” Before we parted ways, we stopped and glanced through the square window in the door. Neither Zooey nor I were in M.A.S.P. Through the window we saw kids gathered in organic clumps, chatting. We moved in closer. One day soon this group would include Rachel Hermann. Rachel, who would laugh and gesticulate in a way she never did when she was with us. In a smattering of seldom-seen instances of bonding, Zooey and I would spy on Rachel. We would watch as Rachel regaled the room with her stories, commanding the attention of anyone in her orbit. Perhaps the fellow geniuses brought out the girl in Rachel Hermann, whereas fellow girls brought out the quiet genius. I remember watching Zooey watch Rachel. As she glared, I realized that her profile was the perfect facsimile of one of the smiling and wicked teenage photos that graced the old Girl Talk box. So many rules crammed into such a pixie-sized head.