Hungry Heart Page 3

  When I was eight years old, we moved across town, into a four-bedroom Colonial on Harvest Hill Road where I’d live until I left for college. My mother was pregnant again, and my father was doing well enough to buy a house with a two-car garage and an inground swimming pool in the backyard so that, in the summertime, my mom could swim laps at home, and we could have pool parties, where Fran would serve barbecued chicken or steak at wooden picnic tables on the deck.

  Our new neighborhood, West Simsbury, was fancier than our old one. Everything was bigger—the lawns, the houses, the rooms themselves. The bedroom that I’d share with Molly had wall-to-wall white carpeting, cream-colored wallpaper with a pattern of strawberry vines, twin beds, matching white dressers, and a white bookcase in the center with a foldout desk that neither one of us used. My favorite reading spot was on my belly, on the floor between the beds. Molly’s favorite activity was jumping from bed to bed, chanting, “The quick brown fox jumps OVER the lazy dog, the quick brown fox jumps OVER the lazy dog.” I would ignore her, as my mother had instructed, until I couldn’t take it anymore, and I’d thrust my fist in the air, catching Molly mid-jump in the belly, sending her crashing down on top of me.

  With our new home came a new school. Where Latimer Lane was bright and airy, Belden was a hulking brownstone that seemed to huddle away from the street and glower at pedestrians in the shade. At one time it had been the district’s high school, so it was enormous, with endless staircases, echoing bathrooms, and cavernous classrooms that seemed ill suited for little kids. Belden combined its second and third grade into one class, so there were dozens of kids to meet. Amy Smallwood had a loud voice and black hair and big teeth; Christie Kellerman, even at eight, was cool and beautiful, blond and blue-eyed, with feathered hair and a thin navy-blue ribbon around the neck of her pale blue button-down. Brendan Flaherty was squinty and flat-faced and freckled, a boy who couldn’t see a ponytail without yanking it, or pass a water fountain without jamming his thumb over the spigot.

  One warm fall morning my first week at Belden, Brendan cornered me in the playground. “You’re Jewish,” he said.

  I lifted my chin. “Yes.”

  Brendan glared at me. “You killed Jesus.”

  I was shocked. I knew that being Jewish meant that my family celebrated different holidays, that our prayers were in a different language, that we went to synagogue instead of church and celebrated Chanukah, not Christmas. But this was the first time I’d been insulted for my religion, the first time I’d ever connected being Jewish with doing something wrong. And as for Jesus, my mother had explained that Jews believed he was “a great teacher,” but not the Messiah, which left me with the vague impression that Jesus was like Miss Burdick or Mrs. Palen, that He’d taught kids like me, maybe in a neighboring district or a different school. I might not have been clear on where He worked, but I was positive no one I knew was responsible for His demise.

  Tears prickled the backs of my eyes. “I didn’t kill anyone!”

  Brendan shrugged. “Probably your parents did.”

  I hit him in the nose. He bled. We both cried, and we both got in trouble. That was the beginning of my unhappy time in Simsbury, which would stretch out for the better part of the next decade.

  Ultimately, religion was the least of my problems. Simsbury was a place where good looks mattered, and the preppy aesthetic ruled. With my wardrobe of hand-me-downs from Aunt Marlene’s daughter Rachel and clearance items from Marshalls, with my big nose and dark skin, my Semitic features, and eventually, my ungainly body, I was neither pretty nor preppy. I took up space. I made noise. I was smart and mouthy, cracking jokes my classmates didn’t get, trying out my new vocabulary words in conversation, even if I wasn’t sure I was pronouncing them right. I wanted friends desperately, but I couldn’t understand how the thing that pleased my father the most—my intelligence—could make other kids hate me. So I’d thrust my hand in the air every time I knew an answer, and I would casually drop references to Freud or Isaac Asimov into conversations in the cafeteria, or say things like “Kelly! Have you no couth!” to an undoubtedly befuddled classmate at the bus stop.

  On Girl Scout hiking trips, I’d spend my time talking to the troop leader. At away games, the soccer coach would have to assign one of her daughters to be my roommate, because no girl ever volunteered. On the bus to and from school, I would sit by myself; on the playground, during recess, I’d be by myself. After school, I would sometimes join the neighborhood pack that included my siblings and the kids who lived nearby, and I would always have a book to keep me company, but I never had a real friend, a friend who was just mine.

  Simsbury, and the people who lived there, looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. I looked like a Lane Bryant outtake that had wandered onto the set. My sister was petite and adorable, my brothers were athletic and handsome, all of them were well liked, but I was large and weird and unlucky. Other kids could, for example, get away with a quick nose-pick, or discreetly pulling their underwear out of their butt crack after it had ridden up during chorus. Not me. I always ended up picking my wedgie in full view of Christie Kellerman, who’d laugh, and point, and call her friends over to join in the mockery.

  I’m not sure my parents knew about my social ineptitude or how lonely I was. If they’d known, I’m not sure what they would have done; whether they would have tried to fix it. My guess is that they would have left it alone, saying, This will give you empathy, and stories to tell, or Someday this pain will be useful to you. It was a different time . . . and, soon enough, my parents would be locked in their own battles, their own misery, and my father wouldn’t be a father to us anymore.

  In the Sharon Olds poem, the narrator imagines pulling the paper dolls apart, setting her parents on different paths, away from each other. Of course she doesn’t, no more than any of us can or would.

  . . . I want to live. I

  take them up like the male and female

  paper dolls and bang them together

  at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to

  strike sparks from them, I say

  Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

  It would be years and years before I could tell about it, before I could take the raw material of all that hurt and embarrassment and spin it into fiction, but even at five or six or seven, I was already taking steps in the right direction. I was always writing—back then, it was poems about the wind and spring flowers, or short stories about lost balloons. With my teachers’ encouragement, I would submit the poems to children’s magazines. One summer day when I was eight or nine, I went to get the mail for my mother, who was probably expecting a new issue of the New Yorker, and was surprised to find an envelope with my name—JENNY WEINER—typed on the front. Inside was a check for twenty-five dollars and a letter, on stationery with a letterhead on top, informing me that my poem “The Sunny Day” was going to be published.

  I can remember everything (except strangely the name of the magazine)—the feeling of the envelope in my hands, the slap of my bare feet on the burning pavement as I ran across the street and through the front yard, then the house, and up to the pool, the way my heart jumped when I saw my name, typed out, all official looking, my mother’s delight when I told her. For days I walked around, wrapped in my own invisible robe of happiness. Someone had paid me—had given me money—for words that I’d written! Other people would read those words and would see what I’d wanted them to see and feel the way I’d wanted my words to make them feel!

  It was one of the best days I’d ever had, and even though it would be years before anyone else paid me for a piece of writing, I’d been set on the path. Storytelling—taking readers into a place you’d created, just with marks on a page—that was a kind of magic. If I could figure out how to make that magic my life’s work, I would be the luckiest girl in the world.

  I wrote whenever I could . . . but my encouraging first-grade teacher gave way to a less indulgent second-grade teacher, who made it
clear that I was an aggravation, mostly because I had the bad habit of reading in between words during spelling quizzes, pulling my book out of my desk and into my lap as soon as I’d scribbled down the answer. Mrs. Brooks accused me of cheating; I told her that I was just bored because of her “interminable pauses.” My parents were called in, the principal was consulted, and, together, they all decided that I’d skip third grade. Because, really, what better to do with the chunky, mouthy, socially inept eight-year-old than move her into a different school with strange classmates a year older than she is?

  The trend of skipping grades stopped once educators realized that they were creating a generation of social cripples. By then it was too late for me. On my first day of fourth grade, it felt like everyone took turns telling me that I’d gotten off the bus at the wrong school. “No, I’m supposed to be here,” I kept saying. It seemed like my classmates didn’t believe me . . . or that, if they did, they didn’t want it to be true.

  Luckily, my new school had a dedicated gifted teacher. Every day, I’d skip social studies and science and go to Mrs. Ciabotti’s little classroom, with its glass walls that looked out into the hall (all those missed classes are the reason that I can’t read a map, name the states or their capitals, or explain photosynthesis or why the sky is blue).

  Mrs. Ciabotti was a trim woman with iron-gray hair and bright blue eyes. She wore shirtwaist dresses, pink lipstick, and glasses, and she treated education like an all-you-can-eat buffet, where the five of us—me, Louise, Peter, Philip, and Derek, who’d also skipped third grade—were allowed to fill our plates by ourselves, sampling whatever we wanted, gorging on our favorites.

  In her classroom, we’d go on deep-dives into the environment or history or human biology. In fifth grade, I won a local science fair with a scale model of the human nervous system, complete with electrical circuits that lit up if viewers followed the taped narration and pulled the switches at the right times. Mrs. Ciabotti would let me spend entire afternoons with a book and a dictionary and a stack of blank paper, working on poems and pieces of stories. She even arranged for one of the high school English teachers to make the trip to Central once a week and read my poetry, which he would do with gravity and care, questioning me about word choice and tone, assigning me Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot poems to read.

  In sixth grade, I wrote a play that the entire grade performed. I took nascent stabs at writing novels that I kept in notebooks and never showed anyone. By the time I made it through the crucible of Henry James Junior High and into Simsbury High, I was writing speculative fiction loosely based on my own life and heavily influenced by Stephen King. (What if the weird, silent diners at the restaurant where our heroine buses tables were actually vampires? What if it turned out that the administrators at the high school our heroine attends were secretly sacrificing and eating students, as a way to stay eternally young?)

  I wrote and I watched, telling myself that things would get better and paying attention all the time. I watched other kids and tried to figure out what made me different. Was it their clothes, their expressions, their hair? Was it the TV shows they talked about, the songs they sang, the way they stood with their hands in their pockets and their JanSport backpacks dangling from just one shoulder? How did some girls know, without being told, which boys to talk to and which to avoid? Why was Andrea Freeh, who was very heavy, popular with girls and boys, while Monica Levy, who was just slightly chunky, was derided as fat, with no friends at all?

  As hard as I tried to crack the code, or to arm myself with its signifiers—a French braid, ribboned barrettes, an ABBA cassette—I never got it right. Everything would always be the tiniest bit off—too tight, or the wrong brand, or the right brand but the wrong color, or the right color but the wrong cut. I’d save up for Nikes and finally buy a pair and arrive in homeroom only to find out that, at some point during spring break, all the girls in junior high had decided that Tretorns were now the thing; or I’d ask for an alligator shirt and my mom would find an Izod-style shirt at Marshalls, a shirt that would look right until you noticed that the animal on the breast pocket was a tiger instead of an alligator, or that there wasn’t any animal at all.

  With adolescence came my growth spurt, which was actually spurts, plural, because it was as if each part of my anatomy decided to embark upon the journey to adulthood at a different time. When I was twelve, my nose and my breasts took off, sprinting for the finish line while the rest of my face and body were much slower out of the gate. In junior high I had a mouth full of braces and a Dorothy Hamill–style wedge haircut. I had wide hips and broad shoulders and double-D-sized breasts that I was constantly trying to hide in baggy shirts and boxy sweaters that only made me look bigger. Nothing worked—not my hair or my clothes, not the makeup I didn’t own and wouldn’t have known how to apply if I’d had it. In every picture that exists from that era, I’m hiding behind someone or something—a parent, a tree, my hands.

  The older I got, the more things at home changed. The more outspoken and contrary the four of us became, the more my father shut down, swinging between sullen silences, absences, and terrifying, violent eruptions of rage. He’d always had high standards for everything, including appearances, and if you didn’t meet them, he was not likely to give you a comforting hug and tell you he’d help you do better next time. If I got a ninety-nine on the math quiz, he’d ask what happened to the other point, and if I brought home anything less than an A, he’d thunder, “You want to be a secretary? Because that’s all you’re good for.” When he got angry, he’d yank whatever paperback I was reading out of my hands and tear it into chunks. When I’d ask if a shirt or new dress looked nice, he would eye me slowly up and down, then say, “No.”

  My mom loved us, but she was busy and distracted. She had four kids and a life of her own—she took classes, in slow pursuit of the master’s degree she finally finished when I was in college; she read books for her two book clubs. At 9 Simsbury Manor, she turned our basement into a darkroom and became a competent photographer; at 13 Harvest Hill Road, she and a friend launched a mail-order spice business that they ran from our dining-room table. At both houses, she swam a mile every single day. As we got old enough to take care of ourselves, she adopted an attitude that could be kindly described as benign neglect. “I’m not refereeing,” she’d frequently say when we came to her with our disputes and tales of the injustices, or sometimes, our bruises and bloody wounds. We fought violently, with teeth and nails and kicks and punches. Hair was pulled, names were called, blood was drawn. Jake called me fat. I called Jake a male chauvinist pig. We took turns locking poor Joe in the basement, where, we’d told him, a fifth brother named Josh had been buried. This went on until my father left and we united against a common enemy.

  Back then, I didn’t understand that what was happening in my house was not happening in everyone’s house at night, when the doors were shut and the blinds were drawn. It took me just as long to sort out my physical self—how to dress in a way that flattered my shape, how to do my hair and makeup (or pay professionals to do it), how to be in a body, in the world. It took time before I could take all that pain and use it; transform all that loneliness and isolation and shame into stories.

  But eventually it happened. I went to college, I fell in love, I got a job and found friends and read hundreds of wonderful books. Then wrote my own . . . and the grown-up versions of the girls who were so cruel to me in elementary school and junior high started coming to my readings. In California and New York and San Francisco and Rhode Island, at synagogues and schools and bookstore bathrooms, they appear. They find me on Facebook, they message me on Twitter. They look into my eyes, they reach for my hands, they name one of my heroines—the lonely, smart-mouthed, fat reporter in Good in Bed ; the lonely, sarcastic, plus-size lawyer in In Her Shoes ; the girls without boyfriends, the girls without girlfriends, the girls whose parents were too wrapped up in their own misery to see them or help them, and they say, That was me, too.


  Part of me doesn’t believe them. Part of me is angry, still. Part of me wants to say, Where were you in seventh grade, when I’d put my books down on a table in the cafeteria, a table where five other girls had hung their purses from their chairs, and I’d go and get my iceberg lettuce and chickpeas and bacon bits that were not bacon and tasted like gravel on a Styrofoam plate, and when I came back to the table all five purses had disappeared and the girls were sitting somewhere else? Where were you when I was being laughed at, where were you when I was being ignored, where were you during all those bus rides when I sat by myself, all those recesses, years of recess, when I stayed inside because I knew that if I went out I wouldn’t have anyone to play with?

  But I don’t do it . . . not any more than Sharon Olds tore up those paper dolls. I smile. I squeeze their hands. I remember that one of the girls who left me alone in the cafeteria in junior high had a mustache, and not a faint, barely noticeable one, either, and that another queen bee spent half of high school hospitalized for anorexia, that even the ones whose lives looked, or look, perfect have suffered, will suffer, are suffering now.

  Maybe I was lucky, after all. Maybe the damaged ones, the broken ones, the outcasts and outsiders end up survivors, and successful, and with empathy as their superpower, an extra-sensitivity to other people’s pain, and the ability to spin their own sorrow into something useful. Maybe my parents and Simsbury and all those hard, lonely years did me a favor.

  Because now I have stories to tell.

  . . . and Then There Was Nora

  My mother and my Nanna have a handful of anecdotes about me that they never get tired of telling. One of their favorites dates back to 1980, when I was ten years old and spending my summer at Camp Shalom.