Gawky (2 page)

But for now, let's get started on some stories of “growing up sensitive and artistic (and may I add
tall
) in the suburbs of New Jersey.” Away we go.

CHAPTER 1:

A
t a time when other kids were obsessing over Sweet Valley High books and Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers, and the teen idols were Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, two pop stars who performed in shopping malls, I had a couple of distinct role models of my own: Penny Marshall and Carol Burnett. I too was tall, gawky, and hunched over due to my early-onset scoliosis. When compared with my BFF and business partner, Amanda, I too was the “funny one” (a nice way of saying the “not pretty one”). I'd watched every single
Laverne & Shirley
and
Carol Burnett Show
rerun by the time I was eight, sitting on the peach living room carpet I was (and still am) allergic to. I even asked my mom to buy me an
M
brooch, in the same style of the
L
that Laverne had sewn onto all her sweaters. I wore it to school every day in hopes of starting a brooch trend, which sadly never caught on. My favorite
Laverne & Shirley
episode was season 6, episode 113, when Laverne and Shirley finally escape their impending doom of living in Milwaukee and working in Shotz
Brewery forever. In this pinnacle turn of events titled “Not Quite New York,” the girls pack up everything they have and move across the country to Hollywood to become movie stars. When the twenty-five minutes were up, my mom was weeping at the end of an era. I however felt invigorated, ready to get cracking on my quest to avoid a boring fate. I was going on to bigger and better things than suburban New Jersey had to offer. You wouldn't find me working at the local Fotomat on weekdays, bowling with divorced softball coaches on Friday and Saturday nights. I, too, was going to amount to something. I had a hard-core addiction to tall, funny ladies with bad posture and continued to watch these shows religiously in hopes that some of their confidence would rub off on me.

Even though Laverne was hunched over and funny-looking with a wardrobe resembling an old spinster's, Lenny of Lenny & Squiggy was still so madly in love with her he had to gnaw on his own palm to calm himself down. And Carol Burnett got to kiss all sorts of hot guys, like Harvey Korman and Lyle Waggoner, because she was funny and on TV. Laverne and Carol Burnett were comfortable in their own skins. I was not. There was no way I could rock those pocketed '70s Bob Mackie pantsuits in the same powerful way that Carol did. Whenever I tried Carol's trademark tugging-at-the-ear send-off in the mirror, I looked as if I were removing wax buildup. Carol Burnett looked cool . . . I did not.

I grew six inches in fourth grade, ending the year at five-foot-six. Which means I
started
the year already five feet tall. I was essentially a giant child. In our class picture that year, while all the other kids stood on a riser, I had to stand on the floor in order to be the same height as everyone else, including my teacher.

Towards the beginning of fourth grade I brought in a photo of my family vacation to the Southwest. It was a photo of a huge mountain with my very tall older brother and me looking miniscule standing below it. My father, Bob, a Bronx-born academic, told me it symbolized how small we were in comparison to the hugeness of Earth. I liked
it because it was the only photo in which I actually looked tiny. I stood before my class in my first-day-of-school outfit, a hot-pink patterned button-down paired with hot-pink wooden button earrings on my newly pierced ears, and proudly displayed the photograph in its painted gold frame. Pretending I came up with them on my own, I used my father's words to explain to the class, “So as you can see, me and my brother are, like, really small in comparison to the hugeness that is Earth. Any questions?”

Carl, a newcomer to the class, raised his hand. “Um, this is more of a comment, but it's impossible for you to look small. I mean even next to a mountain, you're still the tallest girl in the class. In the whole school, I think, as far as I can see.” Humiliated, I looked at my mousy teacher for support. She smiled back at me in a way that I could tell was insincere because her eyes were frowning. She was probably exhausted from mal-nourishment. If I had to hear one more time about how she had recently lost sixty pounds, I was going to fake a “family emergency” and leave school early that day. All I ever saw her eat was sugar-free cookies hidden in her desk drawer. She didn't care that someone was embarrassing me. She was dreaming of Boston creams. She looked at me as if to say,
You're huge, Margot, what do you want me to do about it? Those are the facts. Have I told you I recently lost sixty pounds
?

That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the year. I realized I would have to accept forever being the type of girl on the lower half of a chicken fight. I certainly wasn't ever going to get a piggyback ride from any of my friends' dads; that option expired around age five. I would have loved to have been petite and cute like Paula Abdul, spending my time tap-dancing beside a cartoon cat or telling the world I was “Forever Your Girl.” But that wasn't the path my family's genetics had mapped out for me. I was on my way to being a woman, albeit about eight years too early. So knowing that I was certainly not “Forever Your Girl,” or even forever
a
girl, I decided to make the best of it.

Before my growth spurt I really excelled at gymnastics. Not in an uneven-bars, backbend-on-a-balance-beam kind of way, but in a double-jointed, can-put-my-legs-behind-my-head-easily-to-make-a-human-pretzeland-impress-kids-before-class kind of way. My extra-bendy body made me a real force to be reckoned with on the extra-bouncy gymnasium floor. After I reached the size of an above-average grown woman by age eleven, my future as a gymnast was clearly about as realistic as my future as a horse jockey. Then I became useless in P.E. class, picked last every time even though one would think I was the strongest. Somehow my long legs that bent backward like a flamingo's made me run more slowly than the short, chubby kids always chosen before me. Plus the lack of left-handed equipment—you'd think the school could invest in just one left-handed baseball glove—made me a real train wreck out on the field.

No matter where I was, some grown-up would always make me feel as if I were doing something wrong just by existing in this body. I was once removed from the monkey bars by a middle-aged recess monitor with a big butt who told me that my shirt rode up too much and boys would get the wrong idea. It wasn't my fault my extremely long and rapidly growing torso made it impossible for my shirts to fit me properly for longer than a month. And believe me, the boys weren't getting the wrong idea; they were all a foot shorter than I and terrified of my Lee Relaxed Fit Extra-Long Riders. At this point I wasn't quite sure what “the wrong idea” even meant. To me, the “wrong idea” was to accuse a little kid of trying to seduce a playground of prepubescent boys just by existing in her body. It seemed that many adults were uncomfortable with a girl my size playing with all the other kids who still could be described as “cute.” Just because I was growing at a faster rate did not mean that I was now a sex-crazed teenager. I was still a kid, but the adults projected early sexualization on me, as they couldn't wrap their heads around how else to treat this girl/lady they were encountering.

My band teacher, Mr. Fervor, was one of the worst. He treated me differently than my BFF Amanda, who was allowed to share a chair with him when assigned the coveted job of sheet-music-page-turner. When it was my turn, I squeezed myself down next to Mr. Fervor and he quickly got up. “Uhh, hey, Margot, hey, uhh, I think you should pull up your own chair. I don't want any of the kids here to think the wrong thing.” Again with the
wrong thing
? I was humiliated. Did Mr. Fervor actually think my fourth-grade classmates would suspect us of having an affair? Don't flatter yourself, Mr. Fervor. At that age, Fred Savage was more my type.

Meanwhile I was taller than my teacher and was held to a more mature standard than my smaller classmates. If they cried in class over teasing or a grade, they were just kids being kids, and were sympathized with accordingly. If I cried, I looked like a blubbering grown woman in a homemade skirt set.

My parents tried their best to be compassionate, reminding their friends not to make weird comments about how huge I was every single time they saw me. I didn't want to be reminded how gigantic I was by aging hippies, so I appreciated that my folks often created a diversion. What I did want was teenage boys to pick me up the way slutty girls were in Mötley Crüe videos. But I was ignored by teenage boys, who were much more interested in fully developed teenage girls, who were in their prime in late-'80s hair-metal Jersey.

Pretty quickly I began to detest school, where I always felt like a giant loser. My grades were fine, but even in academia my body rebelled against me. I'm left-handed, and despite the lot of genius lefties—Ben Franklin, Julius Caesar, Carol Burnett—I was frequently accosted about my messy handwriting. The fact that my left hand smeared every letter as soon as I wrote it was compounded by the fact that I took an artistic license with the alphabet. To me the alphabet was boring and I wanted to spice it up a bit by adding my own spin on certain letters.
I'm sure no one would have questioned famous lefty Henry Ford if his
g
's flared out a little too much. Instead, I was tested for dyslexia about once a year.

In my free time I fantasized about being a glamorous, exciting, older woman like my British grandmother, a five-foot-eleven grand old dame who lived in an apartment on the Upper East Side, sold Cartier silver, and drank gin martinis with dinner every night. I even hoarded candy cigarettes in my bedroom and practiced smoking them in my grandmother's hand-me-down 1970s pink marabou negligee whenever I couldn't sleep. Sure, I was well beyond the age when playing dress-up was appropriate. But childhood had seemingly come to a screeching halt for me when I shot up past all my classmates and most of my teachers, so I occasionally caught up on kids' stuff when no one was looking. “Look, dahling,” I'd say, a white powdered sugar cigarette dangling from my red-stained lip, “I'd love to stop by tonight, but I've already had eight gin and vodka martinis, and I'm ready to call it a night. I already have on my
negligee
.”

Perhaps a leaning toward fantasy ran in the family. I had caught my older brother, Greg, and his friends digging through my dress-up drawers on more than one occasion. He would have elaborate wrestling matches with his buddies in full costume and wigs. Wrestling was huge at the time, so huge that GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) was created to keep up with the demand. Perhaps my brother and his friends were loosely inspired by some of these “gorgeous ladies.” My brother's wrestling matches were a perfect combination of drag show meets Ultimate Fighting Championship and I loved when he would stage them. I admired how much they all committed to their characters. One of the most memorable matches was Surfer Dude (my brother) versus Russian Babushka Lady (his friend). In the midst of the match, his
friend's mom called to tell him he was late for dinner. Scared of getting in trouble, but still in full costume, the friend ran out the door in a floor-length gown and Russian fur hat, borrowed my brother's banana-seat bike, and pedaled off into the distance. Although I was concerned about getting two of my best dress-up items back, I did enjoy imagining the friend showing up for dinner looking like a sweaty, overdressed Russian madam in a
schmata
. Just the thought of him eating his Hamburger Helper in full drag made me proud of my brother's choices in friends.

My mother, Pam, was obsessed with British culture, and seemed to observe as many British traditions as the Queen herself. By the time I was seven, I had learned to fake an allergy to Yorkshire pudding, believing, like most kids, that pudding should be made of chocolate or banana—certainly not beef. My mother served me tea in a bone china teacup every morning before school, along with a marmalade-drenched biscuit that seemed to be made entirely of sesame seeds. Even though she was born in Pittsburgh, her mother was born in England, so I understood the allegiance. Still, the constant bragging about how her mother won the “Cutest Baby” award on the boat from England to America, despite my grandmother being almost five years old at the time, needed to stop.