Gawky (9 page)

The New Kids were older than me but not as much older as Grandpa Munster, so I figured my mother would have to say yes. And she'd be glad that I wasn't asking to call who I really deep down wanted to call . . . those bad, long-haired, leather-pants-wearing boys from
Warrant. She hesitated for a moment, stirring her tea, clanking the spoon against the walls of her bone china rose teacup from England.

“Fine, Margot. Just call it. Anything to wipe that puss off your face.”

Wincing at the word
puss
, I thanked her and ran upstairs to my parents' bedroom so I could seduce a New Kid in privacy (after all, I was a woman now). I shut the door and dialed the number with shaky hands on our clunky tan telephone. As I dialed I debated whether or not to use the same approach I had used with Paul the tiny bank teller on the phone-dating service. I could give them all my relevant stats, just leave out my age, lack of boobs, mouthful of baby teeth, and current gross status of being on the rag.

It rang once, and before I could even take a deep breath and ask to speak with Jordan, then Donnie, then Jonathan, a recorded message from all five New Kids, including gross Danny, began to play. They kept using their song titles in their sentences, “Thanks for calling, ‘We'll Be Loving You Forever.' You're our ‘Cover Girl.' What, do you have to go so soon? ‘Please Don't Go Girl.'” I slammed down the phone, completely disappointed. I knew I should have called 1-900-909-JEFF for the DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince hotline instead.

I was about to storm down the stairs when I made the bold choice to call Amanda and tell her my big news. Of course I'd pretend everything was fabulous. Getting my period was the one thing I had over her, even though it was painful and messy.

“Hey, Amanda, guess what? I'm a woman now,
if
you know what I mean. And my mom felt so bad she let me call the New Kids on the Block number!”

“No way,” Amanda said.

“Oh yes. I spoke with Donnie Wahlberg for a while. Jordan couldn't come to the phone. He was recording in the studio.” I chose to play up my second-favorite New Kid; that way it was more believable.

“Wow! I wish I got my period. You. Are. So. Lucky. NKOTB? For real?”

For once I was cooler than Amanda, even if it took a painful shedding of my uterine lining to accomplish it! I wanted the moment to last, but Mom was calling me from downstairs, so I told Amanda I'd talk to her later, and walked back to the kitchen for my first lesson on maxi pads and tampons. I found the last remaining unripped wicker chair and sat in it, leaning into the wooden table. I hoped my Girl Supplies 101 lesson would be slightly less traumatizing than that nightmare-inducing birthing video from health class. It would be impossible for this to be worse.

“Okay, Margot, as you know, this is a maxi pad,” my mother said, daintily sliding a maxi pad across the kitchen table as if she were a hand model in a Lee Press-On Nails commercial. She seemed to really be enjoying this. My grandmother always had perfectly manicured long red nails so she could elegantly showcase the items she was selling at Cartier. She used to say the secret to keeping your nails long was “How you use them.” My mother seemed to be using her medium-length nails with chipped beige nail polish to the absolute best of her ability while displaying this maxi pad. My grandmother would be so proud!

“
Aaand
. . . this is a tampon.” She delicately removed the tampon from the wrapper, careful not to damage her two-week-old home manicure any further. “And this is the tampon applicator.” She separated the tampon into two pieces. The applicator looked very familiar to me. My mom continued, “Some girls, older girls, prefer this to the pad. We'll worry about that later.”

I looked at the applicator. It looked familiar. It was a four-inch-long plastic tube with a claw-like top and some ridges around the bottom . . . Hey! I knew where I'd seen one of these before! The beach cleanup! The poor man's
Airplane
! lady had duped me—that bitch! Beach Cleanup Lady was in her forties; she knew exactly what a tampon applicator was. Why did she think it would be more appropriate to suggest a tampon
applicator might be a device used to smoke crack? Why did she pretend not to recognize it? Why couldn't she just pretend it was a crack pipe and let me have my moment for once in my life?

“That's a tampon?” I seethed.

“Yes.”

“And that's a tampon applicator?”

“Margot, I just said that, yes.”

“So why did the woman at the beach cleanup tell me she had ‘absolutely no idea' what it was?”

“Well, maybe she was trying to protect you,” my mother said, fiddling with a Carefree pantiliner wrapper.

“Protect me from what? Menstruation?” I was disgusted. “Can I go now?” I asked, desperate to get out of there before my mother busted out a birthing video from her private stash in the same manner my health teacher had sneak-attacked us. I slithered up the stairs to my room and opened up a pack of candy cigarettes, channeling my grandmother. I was sure that in her Manhattan neighborhood everyone was discussing tampons with great vigor and honesty. The highlight of my decade so far was calling the NKOTB 1-900 number as a result of getting my period. I really needed a fresh start. And worst of all, that bucktoothed kid had stolen all my glory with his golden-ticket crack pipe, while I made the world safe only for squeamish Jersey teenagers and perhaps a seagull or two.

I was done with being a little kid in an oversize body. I just wanted to be a true teenager, not a giant child. I wanted my equivalent of coming to America on the boat from England like my grandmother had. She must have been so inspired and excited for her totally new life in a new place filled with new opportunities. Maybe middle school would be that place for me.

CHAPTER 5:

I
couldn't wait for this stupid time in my life to end. I had heard that teenagers were allowed to pick out their own outfits, and the wild ones got sent away to boarding school. If only. Getting my period was the first sign that I was becoming a teenager—my age was slowly matching my size. I couldn't wait to kiss troubled boys and have artistic happenings à la John and Yoko with the new kids in public regional middle school. I couldn't wait to feel normal. Hopefully seventh grade would be everything new and different I was waiting for.

Middle school began, and there were, in fact, many changes. No longer did I have to walk home from elementary school alone while mean Sharika Jackson yelled “Margot Fargo farts a lot” out the window of the school bus at me. I didn't even fart a lot. I did trip and fall down a lot, but I guess “Margot Fargo is really klutzy” didn't have the same zing.

Sharika was a heavyset girl with a huge personality. Despite her being in special-ed classes she was confident and popular. I don't know
why Sharika Jackson had it out for me. She seemed like such a fun girl except when she was screaming at me out her bus window. During elementary school recess she would stand on the sidelines listening to her Walkman while the rest of us played stupid sports that I was constantly getting injured during, like kickball. Kickball was always a perfect opportunity for a ball to fly directly at my head, as it was always the highest target on the field.

One day, during a kickball game, our old Russian principal Mr. Luskavitch, or as Sharika called him, Mr. Luck-a-vitch, came out to observe. Sharika was busy listening to her En Vogue cassette tape as usual when she saw him across the field. She called across the kickball game, “Hey, hey! Mr. Luck-a-vitch!” He looked over at Sharika and waved. She continued, “Man, I love this song!” And then she began to serenade Mr. Luskavitch with En Vogue's biggest hit, “Hold On.”

Her plus-size body swayed along with every lyric that she sang perfectly on key across the kickball field.

       
Ooh!
My first mistake was
I wanted too much time
I had to have him morning noon and ni-i-ight.

Mr. Luskavitch shook his crooked fingers in the air, dancing the best he could at his age to the music, and then called across the field, “You sing it, Sharika!”

“Thanks, Mr. Luck-a-vitch!” she shouted back as the rest of us played our boring game of kicking a stupid red ball around a dirt field. “God, I love this song!”

Mr. Luskavitch smiled and went back to the game, unembarrassed by being serenaded by a big-mouthed twelve-year-old girl. I was almost envious of Sharika and Mr. Luskavitch's friendship. They seemed kind
of close. Why was she so fun-spirited with an old Russian man and so taunting of me? And why did Mr. Luskavitch allow her to listen to her Walkman at recess while the rest of us were forced to play dangerous kicking games?

That was last year. Now I took a bus home, too, and Sharika wouldn't be able to taunt me out the bus window about the made-up flatulence problem she was so kind to endow me with. I took a tiny bus, known as a “tart cart,” driven by a nice obese woman named Randi. Randi liked to discuss the details of her impending divorce with us, and as the child of happily married parents, I really got into the juicy details of it all. Her ex seemed like a real scumbag, and I told Randi every morning that today would be the day he'd finally sign those divorce papers. When that day finally came, I was over the moon for Randi. Our morning discussions then moved to how she would bridge her way back into the singles scene after all these years. I had no idea what kind of singles scene my town offered, but if anyone could make it happen, it was Randi.

I loved my bus, and not just because the majority of its passengers were picked up in front of a bar. What type of school system sets up one of their early-morning bus stops in front of a bar? As the drunkest of the drunk would stumble out in the morning, Randi would pull up the extra-small bus to pick up the kids from that neighborhood just in time so they wouldn't have to interact with the alcoholic locals. I often wondered if Randi's ex was passed out somewhere in that local dive bar. The way she talked about him, I wouldn't be surprised. My bus may have been small, but it surely had character.

I loved it because it was filled with dangerous teenagers, like Craig Sandowski, who wore a Megadeth P
eace
I
S
S
ELLING
B
UT
N
O
O
NE'S
B
UYING
T-shirt and a fresh hickey to school every day. A few months into the school year, Craig Sandowski got expelled for putting an explosive device in a school toilet. I stand by Craig and believe him that his intentions were nothing major. He wasn't intending to blow up
the school; he just wanted to make the toilet explode, and to cause a spectacle, which he did achieve. But the school didn't see it as a successful science experiment; instead they viewed it more as a death threat to students, teachers, and faculty, so they expelled him. I never saw Craig Sandowski again after the incident, so I mostly socialized with Randi and encouraged her to get back in the saddle. The bus wasn't the same without him.

Over the course of our first six months in middle school, Amanda and I drifted apart. There was no fallout, but our middle school was much larger than our elementary school—kids from four different elementary schools were combined into it—and that simply gave her more options for friends. To my chagrin, Amanda drifted naturally toward the normal-size girls who brought Lunchables to school. There was no room for a towering friend whose mom packed cream cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel. It didn't help that I had just discovered my father's record collection over the summer and was now eschewing the fashion and musical trends of my own generation. While most kids donned Hypercolor T-shirts and Starter jackets, I wore fringed vests and flared jeans.

My father, however, was thrilled. As a man who bought his entire wardrobe at Costco, he was overjoyed I was not becoming a slave to fashion. And as the ultimate music buff, my dad was incredibly pleased that someone was finally getting some use out of his formerly dust-collecting record collection. The only thing that would have made him happier would be if I actually started using the tiny soaps and shampoos from his business hotel complimentary toiletries collection. When my father told me all about the controversial protest methods during the Vietnam era, I wondered how he could be so happy stuck in the suburbs after doing something so supercool as barely escaping the draft. I had never heard of anything so dangerous and I wanted nothing more than to be transported back to his glamorous heyday of the '60s and '70s and escape the impending lameness of the Jersey Shore in the '90s.

At the start of the decade, on New Year's Eve, when the clock struck midnight, I had been at a grown-up party with my parents watching their friends get drunk. Too young to have my own plans that night, as my older brother had, and too old to be in bed, I was forced to hang out with the aging Rolling Rock swiggers as they rang in the '90s with great hope.