Pretty Amy Read online

  “You coming, Smurfette?” Cassie asked.

  I looked at Lila. I guess I needed reassurance.

  “I have an extra sleeping bag,” she said, smiling her Lila smile that no one could say no to.

  “She has soap, too,” Cassie said.

  I rubbed at my face. That stupid blue paint.

  “It’s still there.” Lila laughed.

  “Come on already,” Cassie said. “My pubic hair is turning gray.”

  I followed them out from under the bleachers and away from the game. Even though I was nervous, I didn’t feel like I was doing it because I had to. Even though I barely knew them, it felt like they were the ones I should have been screaming Sophomores! with.

  Maybe it was because they were saying all the things I thought but was too afraid to say. Maybe it was because they were actually talking to me, instead of talking to me while they were looking around for someone more popular to talk to. Of course, it’s not like the popular kids hung out under the bleachers.

  That night, we wandered the streets of Lila’s neighborhood, singing at the tops of our lungs. Ringing her neighbors’ doorbells at 2:00 a.m. and running into the bushes before they shuffled down the stairs to answer. We lay on Lila’s driveway counting stars, cigarettes in our mouths like smokestacks. That night I was finally able to tell the world who I really was; who I really wanted to be.

  Lila and Cassie were going to help me get there.

  Twelve

  To find the perfect place for me to make it look like I gave a crap, I went to see some female social worker that Daniel recommended. The minute I saw her I knew why she was there. It wasn’t so much out of the goodness of her heart, but because nobody else would have her. She had warts all over her face and was balding. In fact, she had more hair on her warts than she did on her head. I guess charity work not only made people feel good inside, it also gave ugly people somewhere to go.

  I felt bad thinking it, especially when I realized I was standing there, too.

  I was about to turn and run, when a sickly sweet whisper came out from between her lips, a combination of a life spent whispering under one’s breath and a new life in a position of questionable authority.

  She asked me personality-based questions about which colors and shapes I preferred and how I dealt with certain improbable situations and feelings. The sum of my answers, which it seemed to me had about as much scientific significance as a quiz from a magazine, told her I would do my best work with a roadside cleanup crew. Forget children, the homeless, and the elderly—my calling was trash.

  I was sent to volunteer with an organization devoted to taking girls like me and turning them into girls who were not like me. It was volunteer work combined with a weird sort of rehabilitation therapy. I’m not sure about rehabilitation, but it definitely crossed garbage man off my list of possible career choices.

  At 6:00 a.m. on the morning following my test, my mother dropped me off at the designated rest stop on the highway.

  “Where are they?” I asked, finding the expected white van, but seeing no one in or around it.

  “Just go; you’ll be late,” my mother said, already hitting reverse.

  I didn’t move, hoping I’d been left behind. Hoping I could go home and go back to bed.

  She slammed the car into park. “Do you want me to come…?”

  I opened the door and jumped out of the car before she could even finish. The answer to that was no, no, no.

  I had learned my lesson from past instances when I had allowed her to act as my ambassador. The worst of these times was when she took me to the doctor because I wasn’t getting my period.

  She talked about it like it was Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog who had to see his shadow in order for there to be a shorter winter. To her, the question the onset of my period answered was whether I was a freak or not. And every month it didn’t appear, my body was saying, It’s just as you suspected.

  As birthdays thirteen and fourteen and fifteen passed and nothing came, my mother would look at me over the breakfast table every one of those mornings for all those years with the same question in her eyes. Since I couldn’t provide her with the answer she wanted, she would ask my father about it and he would say what he always said when she asked him about anything medical.

  “Beverly, I’m a dentist.”

  And she would say, “Well, in your professional opinion?”

  And he would say, looking at me and smiling his sappy dad smile, “From what I can see, she’s just holding onto being my little girl for as long as possible.”

  In my embarrassment, I would pray for the gods of puberty to bring my period on like a torrent, so it would flood the house and kill them both.

  At sixteen, I was booked an appointment with my mother’s gynecologist, my great-uncle Saul. It was very messed up that my mother saw my father’s uncle as her gynecologist, but it was even more messed up that at every family holiday I had to sit at that long table and watch him eat with the same hands he would have all over my uterus.

  When we got to the office, my mother went up to the receptionist’s window while I sat in one of the chairs ringing the waiting area. There were three other women and all of them had that curly, old-woman hair that was set weekly. I doubted any of them had menstruated in the past thirty years. If I had to start a conversation with one of these women, at least we would have this in common.

  “Is that Amy?” I heard someone ask, and I looked up to see the squat, frog-faced receptionist stand. “Get over here, girl,” she said, clapping her hands like she was calling a dog. “There’s no reason to be shy.”

  I didn’t move. I was trying to pretend that I was fully enthralled in the pamphlet I was reading—Genital Warts and You—and that I hadn’t heard her.

  “Amy,” my mother hissed, “come here and meet Margie.”

  Genital warts would have to wait. I huffed and walked to the window.

  “I have just heard so much about you,” she said, with a smile that looked like someone had slit her face from cheekbone to cheekbone.

  “Thank you.” I had never heard a thing about her.

  “I know all about your problem,” she whispered.

  I glared at my mother. Apparently she’d heard everything about me.

  “Amy, it’s fine,” my mother said, “Margie’s a medical professional.”

  Somehow that was little consolation, considering I was moments away from basically getting to third base with my great-uncle.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it one bit,” she said. “Some girls are just slaves to the pituitary. I myself started when I was in sixth grade. Came like it had been coming for years, but I had a cousin didn’t get a little ketchup with her steak till she was in college.”

  Gross.

  Waiting in the examination room wasn’t much better. The fact that we were family didn’t give us any special privileges. I still had to wear one of those surgical-green patient gowns. I still had to sit up on the table with the butcher paper. I still had to have my mom smoothing out the gown, saying, “Gosh, is this thing wrinkled,” and putting her hands to work like makeshift irons.

  “I don’t understand what he’s checking for. I mean, if nothing’s happening, what is he going to be able to see?”

  “Just be quiet; you’re lucky we have someone to go to about this sort of thing.”

  The luck o’ the Jewish: there was always some doctor in your family you could go to with your most humiliating problems.

  There was a knock at the door, and then it opened to reveal my great-uncle Saul. “Hey, hey, hello,” he said, looking at his clipboard, I’m sure as much out of habit as anything else. He took a seat on the wheel-around stool that later would enable him to be at eye-level with my crotch. “So I understand you haven’t started menstruating yet?”

  I felt my cheeks burn. I couldn’t believe a man was asking me that question, especially one who used to make quarters magically emerge from my ears.

  “Yes
,” my mother said, “just like I told you on the phone. There’s something wrong.”

  And, for some reason, this hit me hard. Not only did she think I was a freak, she wasn’t afraid to tell countless other people that, too.

  “Well, as I said, there’s probably nothing to worry about, but better safe than sorry, right? In reality,” he said, lowering his voice and cupping a hand at the side of his mouth, “your mother told me that if I didn’t check you out, she would stop bringing her famous Jell-O mold to Shabbat dinner. I couldn’t risk it.”

  My mother smiled like some schoolgirl. Compliment her about anything, even a Jell-O mold—which she only needed to boil water in order to make—and she turned to, well, Jell-O.

  “What was it you said about her breasts?” she asked, looking serious again.

  This was too much.

  “Menses onset usually occurs with the growth of breasts and the appearance of pubic hair.”

  “Well,” she said, pointing at me, “she’s obviously way past onset.”

  I pulled the paper robe tighter around me. I had to escape. I looked around, wondering if an anatomically correct model of fallopian tubes could be used as a deadly weapon.

  “She’s sixteen already. She’s late, right?”

  “It could be her diet. Do you drink enough milk?”

  “Milk is for babies.”

  “We’ll stop at the store on the way home,” my mom said, smiling at Uncle Saul.

  “Whole milk.” He nodded. “None of that watery junk.”

  Great. When I finally became a woman, I would be totally fat.

  “Okay,” he said, putting on a pair of latex gloves with a snap. “Let’s take a look.”

  I got my period two months later, which my mother insisted must have been because of her whole-milk campaign. My guess was that it was really my body exploding with repulsion at the prospect of another visit to Uncle Saul.

  …

  I finally saw a woman yelling through a megaphone. She looked like a lifeguard, or at least she was dressed like one. She wore a white tank top and khaki cargo shorts, with a whistle around her neck. On her head was a hat complete with plastic shark teeth.

  “I guess you think you can show up whenever you want.”

  Next to her stood five girls about my age, each wearing an orange vest.

  She threw one on the ground in front of me. “That’s yours. Let’s go.” She turned to the girls. “What do we say to people who think they get to live by their own rules?”

  “No siree, Bob,” they said in unenthusiastic unison.

  “That’s right,” she said, putting the megaphone to her lips again as if she had just remembered she still had it. “You get here on time all the time, or you walk.” She pointed to the highway. “At your own risk.”

  When we got to our designated mile marker, she lined us up and rode back and forth in front of us in an old-person scooter, like some paralyzed drill sergeant. “First thing you need to do,” she said, screaming through the megaphone, “is to be able to admit to yourselves why you are here. You all have your reasons and I don’t need to know what they are. Only you need to know that.”

  Not like we could have told her, anyway. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other, or to her unless she talked to us first, which seemed like a hurdle to the whole therapy thing. Apparently I was supposed to have some sort of psychic connection with the girls around me, but I tried saying, OMG, WTF, This f-ing sucks! telepathically, like I might send a text, but I received no response.

  “You each have your refuse sticks and bags,” she said. “You will be required to pick up at least two pounds of trash, and we will stay here until every last one of you picks up your two pounds,” she yelled, standing in the seat. “This is to teach you accountability to your community. You need to learn that the things you do affect those around you.”

  I didn’t think you were supposed to spell out things like that. I thought you were supposed to allow the patient to make her own connections. Evidently she didn’t have time for that.

  She also didn’t have time for introductions. I didn’t find out her name, which was Ginny, until she passed around a time sheet. On the top was her name and below that six others that I tried to match up with the girls around me. I wondered if they were doing the same thing and if I had been mistaken for anyone else. I hoped it was the waif-thin girl with the Barbie-doll blond hair or the pretty brunette with full, red-grape-colored lips. It would have been nice to have someone see me that way for once.

  We went to work, hobbling like hobos on the side of the road, scattering like little bugs on the shoulder of the highway. Ginny yelled through her megaphone as we worked, telling us to view the trash we picked up as a gathering of all the souls we affected with our drug use. To see each piece as one more person who forgave us.

  I picked up an empty box of adult diapers and wondered who that was supposed to be.

  “Hey,” whispered the waif-thin girl with the Barbie-doll blond hair. “What’d you do?”

  I looked over at Ginny. She was busy shining her megaphone. “Pot,” I whispered back. “I got pulled over with my two best friends on the way from prom.”

  “That was you?” she said, her eyes getting wide. “Cool.”

  I got respect for being bad—that’s something Daniel and my parents would never understand. Something Joe would never understand.

  “Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t help basking in her admiration.

  “Cocaine,” she said. “Well, I got caught shoplifting, but I had cocaine on me.”

  “Crap,” I said.

  “Yup,” she said. “I’m pretty much screwed.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Not as much as me,” she said.

  “It was a lot of pot,” I said.

  “It was cocaine,” she said.

  “No talking,” Ginny yelled from her newly shined megaphone.

  Without Lila and Cassie, was this the way the rest of my life was going to be? Empty conversations with girls I barely knew and would probably never know, where we talked about whose life sucked more?

  Like before.

  We went back to work. The side of the highway is where average trash goes to die. I picked up used condoms splayed out like squashed earthworms after a rainstorm and plastic bags of unidentified brown, yellow, and green stuff. I grabbed greasy wet paper bags with any number of surprises inside: maggot-infested, half-eaten hamburgers; the contents of someone’s car ashtray; fruit like rotted-out teeth. The list of shit went on and on, while Ginny yelled through her megaphone, “Remember why you are doing this. Remember that you can make a difference. That your life has consequences, that your actions have repercussions.”

  I tried to do what Ginny asked, but it’s hard to heal when you’re supposed to find significance in picking up a used tampon.

  Besides, wasn’t I the only person who had been affected by my drug use?

  I was the one who had been arrested. I was the one who would have to answer for it and who had to go through all this crap. I was the one who had to try to figure out what to do next.

  Thirteen

  When my parents and I arrived for my arraignment, we found all of the lawyers schmoozing and shaking hands like they were at a cocktail party, asking about one another and one another’s families in small oscillating circles around the courtroom. This was like their prom, coming together from all their small towns to the big, important courtroom in the city.

  The plaintiffs and their families looked like they were waiting in line at the DMV: rows and rows of torsos and heads that sat like marble busts until their number was called. Of course, we sat all the way in the back.

  My mother probably hoped that there would be less likelihood of being seen, and as for my father, he always wanted to sit in the back so he would be close to the bathroom. That day, I was thankful for his embarrassing habit, because I had been throwing up steadily all morning.

  Of course, I knew I wouldn’t be able to
leave once the arraignment started, but I’d brought a white-and-tan Liz Claiborne purse that my mother had bought me back when she still thought she could change me.

  When she saw me carrying it, she said, “At least you’re finally getting some use out of that. It was a good choice with the navy suit.”

  I didn’t tell her I planned to use it as a barf bag.

  The white headband she’d made me wear dug into my scalp. I looked around the room trying to find Cassie and Lila, but I didn’t see them. My mother liked to be early and so we found ourselves like this all the time—sitting in a line, my mother, my father, and me, waiting longer than other people waited for whatever we were waiting for.

  The bench felt and looked like the wooden pews that filled our temple, and for a moment I found myself wondering if there was some supply store that only churches, temples, and courtrooms used.

  I saw Dick Simon come in and heard him walk over to one of the groups of lawyers and give them a hearty hello. He was carrying a stack of binders, balancing them with his chin, as he made the rounds shaking everyone’s hands.

  “It’s as cold as my wife’s side of the bed in here,” he said, laughing. “There’s my girl.” He pointed at me and walked toward us.

  “How are we all doing today?” he asked, sitting next to me.

  How did he think we were doing? I hate it when people say things because they’re used to saying them in other situations, without any thought that they are saying them in a completely inappropriate situation now.

  We all looked at him, but none of us answered. He took my hand between both of his, making it look like our hand sandwich had the meat on the outside and that the meat was moldy olive loaf.

  I pulled my hand away—just because this guy was my lawyer didn’t give him any right to touch me.

  “Don’t be nervous,” he said, and I could smell ketchup on his breath, ketchup and root beer. He certainly wasn’t nervous. He was gorging himself at every drive-thru in town, while I couldn’t even keep down a piece of toast.

  “This will be over before you know it,” he said. The thing people say before you get a shot. Before something painful and horrible is about to happen.