Gawky (5 page)

When I finally got home from school I was in a full-blown panic and wanted to tell my mom everything. But instead I did what I always did when I went to my own house, instead of Amanda's: I folded endless laundry, composed mostly of my father's hole-filled socks and underwear. Laundry was the chore I minded least, as it held little opportunity for me to break something due to my clumsiness and, in my mother's words, “lefty-Louie-ness.” Dusting was a high-risk chore for me, especially with my grandmother's Cartier castaways all over. Washing dishes was also dangerous, as I lived in fear of ever nicking one of my mom's bone china teacups (again).

I took my mind off the never-ending underwear by watching reruns of
Moonlighting
on Lifetime, hoping Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis would just do it already. I had heard from Amanda that there was one episode where they finally had sex, and I watched reruns religiously, hoping to catch it. She told me it was really dirty and really gross, which only made me want to see it more. Then, around five o'clock, the kitchen phone rang. My body froze, my legs felt like lead. I could not move. My mom answered, and in a surprisingly calm voice said, “
Maaargot
, phone call. It's Paul!” No questions asked.

I grabbed the phone and pulled the cord as far away from my mother as I could get. Somehow I managed to get all the way into the laundry room and was even able to shut the door. I took a deep breath, a multitude of thoughts running through my head. I wanted to tell Paul I was having an identity crisis due to my unexpectedly large size. I wanted to tell Paul that Amanda made me do it and I just wanted
her to think I was cool. I wanted to tell Paul that I fancied myself a “Laverne DeFazio” type, if only he could wait a few years. I wanted to tell Paul I, too, understood what it felt like to be weird. Instead I took the phone and in a shaky twelve-year-old voice said this:

“Hi, Paul. I'm twelve years old.”

Silence. Silence that lasted longer than that awkward viewing of
Octopussy
with my parents. Finally, in that nerdy, nasal voice I first fell in love with, Paul spoke.

“You're twelve years old.”

“I'm twelve years old.”

Pause.

“You're twelve years old.”

“I'm twelve years old.”

This phone call was rapidly becoming an exercise in the Meisner technique.

“Well. Good-bye then,” and Paul hung up on me.

I felt a hitch in my throat. There went my big chance. I blew it. Instead of running away with Paul to his jet-setting thirty-year-old bank-teller lifestyle a few towns away, I found myself dumped by an aging, undersize phone dater in my parents' laundry room at age twelve. I stood there in shock until the irritating phone-off-the-hook noise snapped me right out of it.

I hung up, half wishing my mom would ask who Paul was, but she never did. I went back to folding the laundry and hoped that I hadn't missed Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd doing the nasty. As Bruce and Cybill bickered on-camera, I wondered if Paul was okay. This was my first breakup, but being a thirty-year-old big-time bank teller, Paul had probably seen it all. Hopefully he wasn't too heartbroken. I imagined him at work the next day, counting piles of fresh money and thinking about what could have been. I had a lifetime of dating in front of me, but Paul was thirty! How much more time could be possibly have to find his
true love? Maybe a nice, five-foot-tall, age-appropriate girl would come to his window at the bank the next day and they'd look into each other's eyes and just know it was meant to be. Maybe Paul would be able to get through this and come out a “bigger” person.

The next day at school I told Amanda he never even called. “That's what men are like, Margot. Take it from me,” she said.

CHAPTER 3:

A
s sixth grade continued, my breakup with Paul the tiny bank teller was easier to get over than I thought it would be. I learned from a brief period of sneaking episodes of
General Hospital
on Amanda's recommendation, before getting caught and grounded for it, that the best way to end your heartache over someone is to replace that special someone with another. Before my grounding I learned a lot about love through
GH
supercouple Felicia and Frisco's tumultuous relationship. After Frisco presumably died working undercover for the WSB (World Security Bureau), Felicia quickly moved on to Colton Shore, the very man who tried to kill her beloved Frisco. I figured I should follow Felicia's lead and move on from Paul the tiny bank teller, even though I had heard via Amanda after my grounding that Frisco had faked his own death and was back with Felicia after her brief bout with amnesia. I figured the odds of anything involving a faked death and amnesia
happening to me and Paul were slim, so it was best to keep myself open for new options in love.

Before Paul, my interactions with boys had all been in my imagination. I wanted
Growing Pains
breakout star Kirk Cameron to be my boyfriend, so much so that I kept a diary of love letters to him. They were all addressed to “Pretend Kirk Cameron,” because even as a kid, I knew that I needed to get real. There was no way this quick-witted wavy-haired dreamboat would ever go for me. My love for Kirk was so true that I had a torn-out photo of him from
Bop
magazine proudly displayed on the back side of my school locker door. Every time I opened my locker, I was greeted by this nonthreatening sex symbol with sandy blond hair and a clean record.

I also wanted to make out under a maple tree with Fred Savage, just as he had with Winnie Cooper in the flawless pilot to
The Wonder Years
. I wanted to be someone's Winnie Cooper. Instead, I was most people's Becky Slater, the freckle-faced obnoxious tween whom Kevin Arnold only dated to make his real love, Winnie, jealous. Pretty, big-eyed brunettes like Winnie always got the guy, it seemed. Samantha Micelli, played by Alyssa Milano on
Who's the Boss
?, was another pretty brunette who seemed to have skipped puberty and gone straight from cute kid to hot teen. Fair, pubescent girls like Becky Slater, Kimmy Gibbler, and me never seemed to get the guy. Kelly Kapowski got Zack Morris on
Saved by the Bell
, and even Uncle Jesse from
Full House
paired off with Becky (played by beautiful brunette Lori Loughlin). But the Becky Slaters of the world were limited to a four-episode story arc or at best were forced to wear horrible spandex camel-toed short sets like Kimmy Gibbler.

I briefly had an obsession with the British guy from
Grease 2
, daydreaming of him singing catchy musical theatre numbers to me in the same manner he had to Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie that seemed to be endlessly playing after
Teen Witch
on TBS. Then, one Saturday
afternoon, bored with my favorite number from
Grease 2
(“Let's Bowl, Let's Bowl, Let's Rock 'n' Roll”), I changed the channel to MTV.

Music videos were responsible for many of my fashion choices, catchphrases, and dreams. After I saw Lita Ford slide across the floor in her ripped jeans in the “Kiss Me Deadly” video I took a pair of left-handed scissors to my Lee Relaxed Fit Extra-Long Riders and tore those bad boys up. After Michael Jackson made choreographed all-male jazz dancing look tough I longed to have an occasion to yell in someone's face “You ain't bad, you ain't nothin'!” After seeing Jon Bon Jovi pop out of a moving platform beneath the floor to uproarious applause in the “Lay Your Hands on Me” video I wanted to someday matter that much to a crowd of hair-sprayed fans.

Music videos were essential companions to hit songs and were imperative to stay abreast of if you wanted to avoid becoming a total loser (which I was well on my way to being). Often, at school, Amanda would talk about the latest Richard Marx video, while a gaggle of girls crowded around listening as if she had the key to life. I had no idea who Richard Marx was or what songs he sang. I pretended I did, though, nodding my head and agreeing that “Hold On to the Nights” was a far superior song to “Right Here Waiting” even though I had never heard either song. They sounded pretty lame to me, in comparison to sexy rock hits like “Kiss Me Deadly.”

As a preteen trapped in a high schooler's body, my little-girl mind was continuously being sent confusing oversexed messages. For example, after I saw the music video for Warrant's “Cherry Pie,” I thought sex involved baked goods being dropped in one's crotch. I knew I had to be wrong, but I was scared to ask anyone about it. And who could I ask? My brother was too involved in creating a detailed spreadsheet of our home movie collection, Dad was always working, and my mom would love that I was opening up to her so much she would try to have “that talk” with me every day over high tea. Amanda seemed to have all
the answers, but admitting to her that I did not know anything would majorly take me down a few notches in her eyes. Amanda was already a bit out of my league friend-wise and I couldn't risk losing her. So instead I let all the stimuli around me run wild in my mind, turning to no one for answers and coming to my own deranged childish answers. For example, I believed oral sex was talking about sex on the phone. Oral hygiene meant a clean mouth, so why wouldn't oral sex mean talking dirty on the telephone? I'll never forget years later being humiliated while on the phone with an overly wise boy from class. “Do you even know what oral sex is?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “we're having it right now.”

Then, one particular Saturday, as I was watching MTV and folding socks, a man came on the screen and changed my life. I certainly did
not
want him to be my boyfriend. I had no desire to go on a romantic date with him; I didn't want to make out with him under a maple tree. For the first time in my life I wanted to do dirty, dirty things with a man and not speak to him afterward. I wanted to do them with R&B singer Bobby Brown. This was when Bobby Brown was just a cute guy in Hammer pants singing R&B songs in an attempt to launch a solo career post–New Edition. This was a glorious time for Bobby.

Watching Bobby Brown's low-budget video for the post–“My Prerogative” sleeper hit “Roni” for the first time in my life, my pants got wet and it was
not
due to peeing. The video was entirely made up of blurry, live-concert, low-budget footage edited together and filled with Bobby's oversexed antics, including lambada-ing before that was a thing and a lot of pounding on his sweaty hairless chest as he sang this forgettable R&B song. Bobby stood onstage shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of satin, royal-blue parachute pants. This was hot with a capital
H
, and the wet feeling down below was a shockingly titillating feeling that I would have paid more attention to had I not been completely mesmerized by this young man's pajama pants and
huge swinging wiener. I almost cried when he crawled across the stage on all fours with his tongue hanging out like a rabid dog. He was just stinking of sex! When he stood on the giant speakers during the song's breakdown clapping his hands, I just knew I needed to one day lose my virginity to him. The man who once sang “Cool It Now” would now become my secret lover.

A few years before “Roni” debuted, Bruce Springsteen had brought Courtney Cox (another cute brunette) onstage in the “Dancing in the Dark” video, and every girl in my school fantasized about one day having the opportunity to
step touch repeat
with the Boss. But Bobby took the audience volunteer pas de deux to a whole new level. The chick Bobby chose to dance with was certainly not an actress who had been planted in the audience and would soon be cast in Must See TV shows like
Family Ties
and
Friends
. Bobby's choice of a lucky audience member to rub up against could best be described as
an attainable woman
, which I felt meant I had a chance with this filthy, gap-toothed boy. This woman was wearing little makeup and sported an unfortunate-looking pageboy. She was a little overweight and had virtually no rhythm. Bobby had to ask her to remove her jacket and then a cardigan to reveal an olive-green turtleneck.

She was my hero. My hero in a turtleneck. I wanted to be her.

Then again, my height was constantly making people think I was older than I was. The local movie theatre manager never wanted to let me in at the children's rate, even though he was also the assistant principal of my school. When I handed in my paperwork to quit gymnastics classes (for obvious height reasons) the girl behind the desk said, “Aren't you that girl always hanging out with girls so much younger than you?” So maybe I had a chance to be Bobby's next victim. Perhaps if I could get tickets to Bobby's next show at the Garden State Arts Center, I could achieve my dream of rubbing my pelvis against a man with a Gumby haircut. If only my mom would let me go!

In the meantime, I would sit in front of MTV for hours, suffering patiently through crappy Milli Vanilli videos, various Paula Abdul atrocities, and unsexy Roxette ballads just waiting for Bobby Brown and his swinging big dick to come back and create that unexplainable feeling in my slightly irregular underwear bought in bulk at the Hanes outlet.