One of Those Girls

This has been a crazy week. I graded, graded, graded. I ran, ran, ran. I tried to tie up all sorts of loose ends before the Boy From Work arrived in Maine on Friday with a suitcase full of sponge candy (orange, milk, and dark) and a new haircut--two things of many he would roll out over the weekend in order to make a strong case for us getting back together.

A lot of those things were sweet and serious--a book of short stories he'd written about me, for example--but some of them were of the more frivolous variety. The sponge candy (delicious). The new haircut (adorable). The trip to see the Portland Pirates (awesome).

While we were at the arena, I busied myself with my usual Jess at Hockey Game Fare: discussing how much I love watching men play sport on ice, discussing how I could listen to the song "I Want to Drive the Zamboni" every day for the rest of my life and be happy about it, dissecting my love for Ryan Miller, recounting the days in grad school when each Maverick home game was preceded by cheerleaders doing lifts on skates, and screaming things like Eeep! and Ack! and Jesus! and I will kill you if you don't score!

And even though I was pretty busy with all of that, I still managed to squeak in some time to be charmed by the girls sitting behind us.

The row directly behind us was filled with seven eleven year-old girls who were extremely excited to be at the Friday night hockey game. They were also extremely excited that they knew one of the boys who worked the ice--you know, cleaning up after Chuck-a-Puck, shoveling ice shavings off the lane by the boards, making sure the goalies had their water bottles safely stowed in the nets.

Every time that boy would make an appearance, the girls behind us would stand up and sing out, "Oooooooh, Robbie! Oh Robbie-Robbie-Robbie! Ooooooooooooh, Robbie! Hiiiiii, Robbie!"

And that boy on the ice--Robbie--would blush and shake his head and look at his toes. It was all very charming and sweet, and I felt like I wanted to turn around and tell those girls they were just about the cutest thing in the world.

This feeling only intensified in the second period, when those girls started talking about the boys they were in love with.

"Did you, like, see him the other day?" one would say.

"Oh my God!" another would squeal. "He's sooo cute!"

They were eleven year-olds with high pony-tails and sherbert-colored hoodies. They had hot pink nails and scrubby tennis shoes. They were sugary, jittery, giggly whirs that buzzed up and down the stairs to get snacks, to get Robbie, to get the camera man's attention. What they wanted more than anything was to get on the Jumbo-Tron, where they would dance and squeal and hug each other.

I understood them. I understood them a lot.

Sadly, though, the woman sitting next to me--the woman sipping light beer, leaning against her husband--did not.

In fact, at the end of the second period, this woman--who had, at the end of the first, turned to me and said, "Those girls need to have their mouths sewn shut!" before informing me that she didn't have kids and was never in a million years going to have any--whirled around, raised her voice, and started yelling.

"Listen!" she said, sounding like any number of the evil math teachers I've had over the years. "I paid money to come and watch this hockey game! I did NOT pay money to come here and listen to YOUR CONVERSATION! You girls need to be QUIET!"

Oh my God, I thought I was going to die. I nearly crawled into the Boy From Work's lap to get as far away as possible from that woman. I wanted those girls to be certain that I wasn't with her and that I didn't share her views. I'd paid my money to see the hockey game, sure, and I was sort of in love with the weird background conversation that was playing as a soundtrack to the sport playing out below. It was making me nostalgic. It was making me think back to the days I roamed Holland Speedway with Tammy, giggling and sipping Pepsis we'd gotten from the cute boy down at the beverage stand. We sat behind numerous families who'd paid their money to watch drunk farmers derby their cars around an asphalt oval, and they were getting us--and all of our, Oh my Gods! and He's so cutes! and Do you think he'll let me drive his race car when we get marrieds? No one said a single word to us. We were allowed to scale the tall steps of those bleachers and gallop back down whenever we pleased and with as much fanfare as we found necessary.

People didn't need to turn around and yell at girls like us. We weren't like the tough girls my mother turned around and yelled at when I was a little girl attending one of my first races. It was the late eighties, and those girls looked like something out of a Whitesnake video. They had tall hair and red lips and stacks of bracelets climbing their wrists. They were wearing tight acid-wash jeans and matching denim jackets. They were beautiful in the way that was just right for that moment in time, and they knew it. They were showing off. They were tough and they were pretty, and they were talking about their racer boyfriends and how those boys were going to kick the fucking shit out of that motherfucker and that asshole and that dickhead.

My mother couldn't take very much of that before she turned around and told those girls that there was a little girl sitting right next to her and they needed to watch their language because that wasn't the stuff a little girl needed to be hearing.

I was horrified. I felt uncool. Babyish. I couldn't believe my mother would do such a thing. And when one of the girls--embarrassed and horrified herself--leaned down to pat me on the shoulder and say, "Hey. Hey. I'm so sorry," I could have dissolved into a hot little pile of ash.

Those were the girls you yelled at--foul-mouthed filthy girls--but even they knew when they'd done something wrong and could apologize for it. But the girls behind me at the hockey rink? They probably had never been yelled at before. They were probably good girls who volunteered to work in the library and held elaborate fashion shows at sleepovers. They probably cut their crushes' pictures out of the yearbook at the end of the school year and pasted those pictures into their diaries. And all they were doing was being themselves and having a good time. But the woman next to me couldn't stand it. She hated the giggling and the talking and the frivolity. It made her clutch her armrests, her beer, her husband's arms. It made her turn and yell.

I felt so bad for the girls. I felt so angry with the woman next to me. I was half hoping that one of the girls' mothers would come down and tell the woman to mind her own business or get up and move seats if she couldn't handle a little girl talk. But that didn't happen. I just burrowed closer to the BFW and said, "Jesus. SOMEONE needs another six wine coolers to calm herself down."

But deep down I was hoping that I would never become one of those women--one of those women who hates kids, who thinks anyone who makes the decision to have kids has been ill-advised--because there are days I wake up thinking, My God. Will I ever feel ready or capable or prepared? I don't want years of that wondering panic to spin into bitterness, into black hatred for kids--something so strong it makes me turn around and tell them that they are not important, they are not part of the deal, and they need to shut the hell up. I'd rather stay one of those girls--pink and blushing and twitchy--forever, running up and running down, making my way as loud as humanly possible.

Conjunct This, Saturn.

You would never in a million years guess this by looking at him, but my office-mate is big into all things astrological. This is not something he likes to broadcast. It is not something he wants a lot of people to know. In fact, at last year's department Christmas party, when he promised me he'd show the birth chart that plots the planets at the exact moment of my birth, he made me go into a separate room so he could smooth my chart down on a coffee table and point to the different elements, explain them so I'd understand why I am the way I am. He kept his voice low. He kept one eye on the door, just in case anyone happened by.

Everything he told me was interesting and sickeningly accurate, and I was pretty amazed by the whole thing. And it wouldn't be the last time. This past week, my office-mate brought my chart back in and scooched his chair over to my side of the room. He had a thick book in his lap. "Okay," he said, "let's do this."

My office-mate knows I haven't been having the most stellar time lately. Although I've been having a perfectly lovely semester--seriously, it's been a pretty giant love-fest with my students these last few weeks--he knows my personal life has been glum and gangly. Just ugly. And there were days I would drag myself into school feeling guilty because I liked my students and I wanted to do right by them, but the last thing I wanted to do was stand at the front of a classroom for hour and a half chunks and try to teach them things about writing and literature. I would sit down at my computer and thunk my head to the desk and moan, "I can't do this. I don't know. I'm just so tiiiiiiiiired."

And my office-mate would lean back his chair, nod, and say, "Well, Jess, that's just Saturn."

He explained that people like me--people with their sun conjuncting Saturn--were in trouble for a while. He said Saturn was a planet that made things difficult, heavy, cumbersome. He said it was going to be rough going but then things would get better.

That didn't sound so bad, so I brightened and asked when exactly I could expect my life to feel less like it was a five hundred pound man rolling over on me in the middle of the night--and I fully expected my office-mate to say something like, "Oh, it should all be over by next week!"--but he shrugged and said, "Somewhere around August."

Needless to say, I needed more information. I wanted specifics. If my life was about to be total crap for a mess of months, I wanted to know why. So my office-mate brought in my chart and a stack of reference books.

He pointed things out on my chart and then cracked open one of the books. "Here," he said. "This is you. Read all of this."

"Have you read it?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"And is it horrible? Does it say I'm a horrible person who will have horrible things happen to her?"

He gave me a Look. "Read it," he said.

And I did. And it scared the living hell out of me.

Basically, it said that thirteen years ago something awful had happened in my life. It was a time of great upheaval, and that upheaval directly shaped the person I am today. In fact, the book said I'd gone so far as to make myself a promise thirteen years ago, and this year--this one right here--was the year that I was going to make good on that promise, that something was going to come of it. It also said that I couldn't make good on that promise with too many other things cluttering the way, so I was probably going to go through an awful dissolution of a relationship and that I better not try to start anything new either because that was going to be ugly, too.

(It's interesting to know that while I was reading this, I could not keep from conjuring up that part in The Wedding Singer where Adam Sandler and his movie-fiancee, who just stood him up on their wedding day, are discussing the reasons why the wedding didn't occur. His fiancee lists all sorts of things she doesn't like about Adam's character and he says, "Once again, these are things that COULD'VE BEEN BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION YESTERDAY!!" I think I felt sort of like that. All like, Gee, thanks, Saturn. Fuck off.)

Anyway, I knew exactly what the book was telling me. I knew exactly what event it was referring to. I knew exactly what promise I'd made to myself. And I would've remembered it just fine on my own, but a few nights before, as I was unpacking one of those last straggling boxes from the move, I stumbled on my diary from my freshman year of high school (which was thirteen years ago), and I read through some of the most depressing entries a fourteen year old girl could ever carve out of a page.

My best friend and I had just gone through a very public and evil fight, and the end result was that she said she hated me, and I said I hated her, and she said she was going to get some of her upperclassmen friends to beat the shit out of me, and I said she should just go ahead and try it. Then for the next few months I was doubly sad: after all, I was vaguely terrified I was going to get my ass beat by that tall junior who was rumored to have been in jail, plus I no longer had my best friend in the whole world.

There was something important that corresponded to all of this. My family was taking a winter vacation down to Charlotte, North Carolina so we--a NASCAR-loving brood--could tour the raceteams' shops and get our pictures taken next to Jeff Gordon's championship trophy. I packed all my best turtlenecks and chunky shoes, and I sat in the backseat of the family car with my earphones capped tightly over my ears for the length of the nine hour drive. I seethed the whole time. I thought, I hate my best friend. I hate her. I hate her. I thought, How could she do this to me?

But my mood lightened in Charlotte. I loved Charlotte. And I realized there was a whole big world outside the small town where we went to school, where we lived. And I realized I was meant for bigger things than I could find in that town. And right there, in Charlotte, North Carolina, right outside the Charlotte Motor Speedway, I promised myself two things: that I was going to be the one to get out of our small town, and I was going to become a writer. I was going to become a really good writer. I was going to make something of myself. I thought those things would make my best friend miss me. I thought those things would make my best friend realize she had made a huge mistake. And that's what I wanted more than anything.

Now Saturn is telling me it's time to make good on that promise. And I'm listening. I know Saturn's game now. I'm clued in. I know it's going to be hell for a while and that I'm going to feel fairly awful about everything until this all blows over--just like I did back then, back when losing Tammy's friendship was all I could think about--but I'm ready, and I've been ready, and I'm trying. I'm really, really trying.

What Happens When I Listen to Toad The Wet Sprocket

Today I was driving back from Portland when Good Intentions by Toad the Wet Sprocket came on the radio. And suddenly it was 1995 in my head. I was fourteen years-old. I was on the bus to a field trip and sitting behind Tammy--my best, best friend--and she was making out with the boy that would eventually take down our friendship.

This happens every time I come across "Good Intentions." There can be long stretches--months, years--where I completely forget that song even exists, but when those first few notes come over the radio and I do remember, things get foggy inside my head. Something in those notes has the ability to steal into my heart and twist it backward, all the way back to eighth and ninth grade, to the years where I was desperately trying to be my best friend, to the years where she was desperately trying to become anything but who she already was.

But it's not Tammy I'm thinking about when Toad the Wet Sprocket gets a courtesy play during the 90s hour on local radio. It's the boy--the one who's pressing her up against the reinforced bus windows, the one who has been pressing so close for so long it's possible that their skin might grow together, might root them to that spot. They have been making out for the last thirty minutes straight, which I, up until that point, had thought physically impossible. At fourteen, I didn't know much about kissing--I was still two years away from getting my first--but what little I did know seemed to support the fact that it involved a lot of mouth action and would, I assumed, impede the breathing process. I figured you had to come up for air every now and again. But Tammy and--well, let's call him David--so proved me wrong.

Tammy and David kissed in a way that I haven't really seen since. Their methods were what I based all my knowledge of kissing on. Which possibly explains why I was so terrified at the prospect of putting my lips on someone else's for the first time--I was sort of afraid I was going to choke or gasp or run out of air and prove to be a complete novice. When Tammy and David kissed, they sucked their mouths together and--I can only assume--tangled tongues the entire time. There was no gentle pecking, no together-apart-together-apart-together-apart the way normal human beings kiss. There was just sucking. Sucking, sucking, sucking. For, like, an hour. And whenever they separated, there was a moist unlocking sound, and Tammy always had to wipe at the corners of her mouth. She just looked so practiced and smooth and cool about the whole thing, and I knew I was going to completely screw it up if ever I got to try it.

And you know the most horrible thing? The person I wanted to try it with the most was David. After all, I was the one who liked him first. It was a strange thing, me liking David, because I was a very good girl--nerdy, brainy, quiet--and David was none of those things. First of all, he'd failed a grade. All his best friends had facial hair and talked about getting cars. He seemed worldly and interesting and misunderstood. He played the drums and always carried a spare set of drumsticks around with him, which he would tap on books and desks and radiators--usually at inappropriate moments, like when Mr. Weaver was talking about the beauty of Mark Twain's prose.

I didn't fully understand why I liked him. He was everything I didn't want. He was everything that would've put my parents into cardiac arrest. He was everything that a girl like me never, ever, ever got. Was he cute? No, not really. He was skinny. He had knobby knees. He wore a lot of ratty blue plaid. He had that hair that was popular in the 90s--parted in the middle, long down each side, greasy. His best feature? His eyes. They were a blue that you very rarely ever see--pure and clear, striking, icy. Looking into those eyes, a girl could forget an awful lot. She could forget the list of detentions on a boy's record. She could forget the smart-mouthed way he talked to teachers. She could forget that he smoked. She could forget how to breathe.

When I first developed my vague interest in David and his eyes, I mentioned it to my best friend, and she didn't seem all that impressed. But a few months later the two of them were dating.

I didn't mind all that much. It wasn't like I was going to get him for a boyfriend. Ever. But this way--with my best friend dating him--I was able to be close to him without being rejected. I was their third wheel. I was their lookout girl. For months I kept my eyes peeled, scanning dances for chaperones, scanning hallways for teachers, scanning our seats at the racetrack for her family. But even though I was looking out, I always had one eye on him.

David liked me. I knew he did. He thought I was funny, in a nerdy sort of way. He thought I was nice and good to talk to. He thought I was fun to hang out with. But I knew that's where it stopped. He never looked at me and thought, Gee, I wish I was kissing Jess instead of Tammy.

But that didn't mean I wouldn't get my chance. Because I would. Because I did.

When we moved up to high school, Tammy went through a brief upheaval. She suddenly realized there was a whole other world out there, with new boys and new social groups and new opportunities for coolness. She wanted to be mature and sophisticated. She wanted to run with the wild crowd. She accomplished that in a two-step process. First, she cut off ties with our old friends. Second, she developed a crush on David's best friend--one of the ones with facial hair and a car--and then cheated with him.

David, who had spent the better part of a year half-breathing through marathon makeout sessions and giving hickeys, was crushed. He suffered through the breakup in a very poetic way. He was, after all, a musician, and he grieved in a very rockstar kind of way. There were a lot of dramatics. There was talk of suicide. There was talk of kicking the shit out of everyone involved in the situation. There was talk of drugs and alcohol. And I know this because I was the one hearing this talk. I had tried the best I could to talk Tammy out of going off with David's best friend, the boy whose only redeeming quality was a potentially large penis that the older girls whispered about. After a year with David, I knew there was more to him than all the badass bad-boy stuff. He was--honest to God--a really nice boy. But Tammy would have none of it, and she went off and did what she wanted to. And afterward, in a desperate attempt to win her back, David started calling me to make his case.

At first I tried to explain to Tammy just how bad David had it, just how bad he was suffering. But she was content with her decisions. There was no changing her heart. So I kept on taking David's phone calls. I kept talking him through it.

Tammy and I were yanked apart shortly after the breakup. There was bad blood. I didn't like how she was suddenly living her life, and she didn't like that I was taking David's side, that I was talking to him every night. There was a big fight, which threw me into the exact same position as David. Suddenly I was telling him how much it hurt, how much I wanted her back. And so we did the only thing left to do: we dated each other to try to fix the things she had broken in our hearts. And to get a little bit of revenge.

It didn't really work. The revenge or the relationship. By this point, David had been transported to another school district and, since neither of us had cars, we never saw each other. We talked every night and said that we loved each other, but it was mostly a charade. Still, he was my first boyfriend that lasted beyond a weekend. And there was one day where our relationship suddenly became very, very real to me.

We'd somehow both fixed it so that we would be at the mall at the same time. I was there with one of my oldest friends--a girl who grew up down the road from me--and he was there by himself. The three of us had a short window of time to wander the mall before our parents came again to claim us. We had to make the most of that time. And I knew this meant David would want to kiss me. He would want to kiss me a lot. He was used to that. He would expect that.

And me? Well, back then I was scared of everything. And topping my list of fears was my first kiss. There was such potential for disaster. After all, there was no way in hell that I was going to admit to him that I'd never been kissed before. Did I want him to think I was a mutant? A prude? A freak? I wanted him to think I was capable of everything Tammy had been capable of, even if that was impossible.

But, oh, did he ever try his best. He had his hands in the back pockets of my jeans the whole time. He pinched me and poked me. He nuzzled into my neck. He slipped his hand up under the back of my shirt. He drew a finger down my spine.

I loved every minute of it, even if each move he made chiseled another worry, another fear into my heart. I liked the feeling of being chased, of being wanted. I liked the feeling of a boy trying so hard just to get me to turn toward him, to give him a little bit of tenderness.

And so I did something a little reckless. In the middle of Claire's--that chain jewelry store in every mall ever built--I turned into David and kissed his neck. Then I kissed his nose. Then I kissed his lips. But once my lips touched his, I realized my mistake. He would certainly make the move to take more than just a peck. I pulled away before he could even open his lips. I wanted nothing to do with complicated kissing. I wanted nothing to do with teeth and tongues and the mechanics I didn't yet understand. He pulled me back to him, but I squirmed away. I would keep squirming away for the rest of the day. He would lean in, and I would lean away. I would twist my way out of the cage of his arms and dodge behind a rack of clothes, a stack of books, a bench.

We both left unsatisfied. I'd wanted to kiss him--to really kiss him--but I just didn't have it in me. I wasn't Tammy, no matter how hard I tried. There was too much I didn't understand, and I wasn't sure I even really wanted to understand yet. And that was the day David realized that dating Tammy's best friend wasn't anything close to dating Tammy. It wasn't the healing thing he'd wished it to be. I wasn't going to rescue him. I wasn't going to be that good story he told to his friends years later--the story that started with him dating one girl, falling hard for her, then realizing the one he really wanted to be with was his girlfriend's mousy best friend. Neither of us were going to come away from this having fixed our broken hearts.

We broke up shortly thereafter. It was the sweetest, kindest, easiest breakup in the history of breakups. During our nightly phone call, David casually mentioned he thought it might be better for both of us if we went our separate ways because, well, he'd met someone at his new school, and it was so hard to date someone in another school district anyway. We didn't even have cars. He could tell he wasn't what I wanted or needed. He asked me if that was right, if he'd guessed correctly. And he had. I wanted Tammy. I didn't want him. But I wanted him to be free and happy, and it was a relief that he was saying what I'd been wanting to say for weeks. I told him a breakup was fine with me. And so we told each other how much we liked each other, how much we wanted to stay in each other's lives, and that was that.

Then I didn't have Tammy and I didn't have him. I never had either of them again.

But there are times--like when Toad the Wet Sprocket comes on the radio--that I like to think about David and those few strange months we were together. Way back in the beginning--before he and Tammy took up together--I'd thought of him in a way that wasn't entirely fair or flattering. I thought he was bad news, no good, and trouble. I figured he had very few redeeming qualities. But he proved to be one of the biggest surprises of my teen years. He was sensitive and kind and funny. I loved to come home from school to hear him talk about his day. There was an easiness between us. There was friendship. I would've never expected it.

Not that long ago I saw David again. As luck would have it, after high school he ended up in a relationship with another girl from my group of friends. The two of them had a baby together, and they and the baby showed up to a wedding of yet another of our high school friends. David and I said approximately ten words to each other the whole time ("Hi" and "How are you" rank high on the list), and I spent the whole time feeling just so incredibly weird. I marveled at how two people can go through such drama together and then, years later, be complete strangers. But it didn't matter. When I watched him tussling on the floor with his baby--his baby who is a miniature version of him, with the same eyes and sly look--I was so thankful that we'd had each other for a short period in our lives. And I was so happy that both of us were able to shake all of that ugliness off our shoulders and move on, even if it felt in those moments like we were never going to be able to breathe right again.

So I'll take all of that. I'll turn up Toad the Wet Sprocket whenever they come on the radio, and I'll let my heart sing its old songs, and I'll sit very, very still for three minutes so I can live in my old life, my old body and be thankful for Tammy, thankful for David, thankful for those years where nothing and everything in the world made sense.