Big Girl Small (16 page)

“Judy! Do you want to see it?” he shouted to me, pushing the door open. “Oh!” he said when he saw Ginger. He shrank back like a tiny weed. “Sorry, I didn’t know—”

“That’s okay, Sam. Come in—this is Ginger.”

He looked down at the floor, nodding so that his straight hair flopped over his eyes. I could tell he found Ginger pretty, and that this unnerved him. The truth is, Ginger might be the prettiest person I’ve ever met, and either she doesn’t try or she tries so hard that it makes it look like she didn’t even have to try. I mean, she wears almost no makeup, had the kind of skin so clear you can basically see through it to her veins, floppy blond hair, and all small features except for her lips, which are so puffy that they look like some kind of sea monster attacked her and sucked on them until they swelled up. Well, that’s not an attractive way to put it, but the point is, her lips are huge and everyone wants to kiss them because they present themselves so assertively. The result is that Ginger looks like a commercial for whatever she happens to be doing or eating or holding. Now she was selling my bed, sprawled across it like a giant when Sam came in.

“You can show both of us,” Ginger said. She propped herself up on her elbows.

“Show us what?” I asked.

“Whatever you were going to show Judy,” she said to Sam.

I liked her for saying this to him, rather than answering me. It seemed respectful, made Sam feel dignified.

“Oh, that,” he said. “It was just a move.”

He looked up, and I was amazed and alarmed to see that he did, in fact, want to show Ginger and me his “move.”

“Go for it, Sam—show us,” I said.

He took his coat the rest of the way off, revealing a Kanye West T-shirt so absurd and big and aspirational on him that I wanted to wrap him up and protect him from whatever Ginger was about to think. But she was smiling.

Sam began jogging in place and then threw himself down on the rug in my room and tried to spin himself up into a headstand of some sort. It didn’t work out very well, but, perhaps in an effort to save face, he vaulted himself from a triangle kind of yoga pose into a regular headstand and then came crashing down, leapt up, and did some more jogging. I applauded.

He stood there, blushing.

“It doesn’t really work on the carpet,” he said, picking up his jacket.

“No, no,” I said. “We could tell it would be great on a real floor. Very impressive.” But he was looking at Ginger, who had a huge smile on her face.

“That was great,” she said. “You’ll be breaking on stages across America, no doubt. You should audition for
So You Think You Can
Dance
. Or at least go out for D’Arts.” She used a very serious voice to say this. Sam regarded her for a moment, trying to tell whether she might be mocking him and deciding, from her unblinking performance, that she was not.

At dinner, my mom watched Ginger carefully, with an interest I couldn’t place. She asked lots of polite questions about Darcy, some less polite ones about Ginger’s parents, who, it turned out, were divorced, both remarried, her mom redivorced and her dad living in Texas with a young wife Ginger said she hated. I was totally shocked, had assumed Ginger had an absolute picket fence around some perfect family in a white house. My mom, although not surprised, was also not impressed, and when Ginger left after dessert and a bit of lingering, my mom put on a flat voice that sounded like she was helping me run lines: “It was nice to meet her.”

Then she waited for what she thought was long enough before she asked, “When is Sarah coming over again? Do you two have any plans?”

Adults are so obvious. It’s weird that the teenage brain is considered underdeveloped. Maybe the more we develop the less capable we are of hiding our mostly pathetic motives. Or maybe we just give up, stop trying.

“No,” I finally said. And went up to my room, listened at the vent to see if my mom would tell my dad what I knew she thought of Ginger, that she was a bad influence on me, or that I had “fallen in with a bad crowd.” I was so sick of the idea of being careful. My plan was to feel thrilled about having smoked pot. But instead all I heard was my mom and dad bickering about Christmas and who was staying in what room when everyone visited and whether some people should stay in a hotel and whether Chad would want to come home or stay in his dorm over the holiday. My mom was furious that my dad wasn’t helping figure everything out in advance without being nagged to; my dad was annoyed that she was nagging him. He never thought planning or setting anything up was a big deal. Of course he didn’t have to do the planning or setting up, and maybe that was why. Or maybe if she had nagged him less, he would have taken more initiative.

Listening to them, all I could think was, “Can I please keep my exuberant brain forever?”

7
I was so nervous the night of the senior voice concert that I couldn’t stop asking Chad if teenagers could have heart attacks. My pulse was like 210, pounding in my neck like an alien trying to escape. Chad said teenagers never die of heart attacks.

“You’re going to be great,” he kept saying. “The nervousness is the sign of a true genius.” He said he was so nervous before his swim meets that he sometimes threw up, and the more nervous he was, the better he did.

“I’m not nervous when I dance,” Sam said.

It was a cold, rainy night and the pavement in the parking lot shimmered as we walked up to the school from the car. I had on boots, black skirt, white blouse, and red tie, since those were the colors the seniors were wearing. I had dark lipstick on too, like Ms. Doman’s. She had told us she was going to bring her husband. And since we all wanted to be married to her, this was interesting for us.

Everyone was there—and I mean the entire school, every teacher, student, sibling, parent, and custodian, all crowded in the hallway outside the auditorium. Mrs. O’Henry was all dressed up in a long maroon dress with buttons shaped like flowers, and she waved to my parents and me. Then I saw Ginger and some woman with enormous hair. When the woman turned, I stared. Her face looked like plastic that had been melted and molded, and now could never be moved. She was weirdly ageless, and resembled, in the way that all victims of plastic surgery do, Michael Jackson. Maybe it’s the absurdly tiny noses that make people look like that, shadows of their original, real noses hovering above the new ones. Like the way you have limb anxiety when your leg gets cut off but you feel like you still have a leg. Maybe you break your face’s heart when you chop off parts of it, and it longs for the other half of its original nose. The woman with Ginger had eyebrows so high up across her forehead that they looked suspended by puppet strings. I wondered how she closed her eyes to sleep, because she had practically no eyelids left.

“Hey, Judy, this is my mom,” Ginger said, and the woman reached out and shook my hand and then my mom’s hand, and after I recovered from the shock of Ginger having a mom who looked like that, I thought how her hands betrayed her, looked like they belonged to a fifty-year-old woman who had been married and divorced twice and was raising Ginger alone. Her boobs, on the other hand, looked like they were about to torpedo off her chest and puncture anything in her path. My mom took a tiny step back.

“Hi, I’m Mimi,” said Ginger’s mom.

“Hello,” my mom said, in her flat voice, and I was furious at her for acting like a snob, even though I was stunned by Ginger’s mother too. My mind was surging forward. For one thing, as soon as I met her mom, I thought maybe Ginger had a scholarship too. For another, maybe she wore sweatpants and stuff all the time because she didn’t have that much money to buy fancy clothes. For a third, maybe she was insecure, embarrassed of her mom. Of course, it was sweet that her mother would show up at the senior voice concert when Ginger wasn’t even in it. Maybe she just wanted to see the school. Or had Ginger been hiding her from us and now her mom had found an excuse to meet everyone? I would have to analyze with Molly, who was smart about other people’s parents. Sarah was too mean about Ginger to be able to help.

“Thank you for having Ginger over,” Ginger’s mom was saying, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how weird it was that Ginger’s mom wore so much makeup and had such a crazy-single-lady look with the big painted nails and everything when Ginger was so pretty in her sweatpants without trying. And then I thought how Goth Sarah was the opposite of her mom too, because her mom was all plain while Sarah was so Goth. This made me wonder if I was the same as my mom or different, and maybe it’s just because it’s hard to see yourself, but I couldn’t decide. The truth is, even now, I don’t know if either half of me is like my mom. Is the regular Judy half of me like my mom, even if the dwarf half isn’t? Even if I weren’t a dwarf, would I be like her? When I think about it, it gets hard to say what either of us is even like.

I did know one thing: my mom was being unfair by thinking just because of the way she looked that Ginger’s mom couldn’t be doing a good job. My mom never said she thought that, but I could tell. But she was wrong, because I know now that Ginger’s mom is actually a good mother, and maybe my mom had an after-school-special idea about her just because she wants to be younger than she is. Of course, I kind of had the wrong idea about Ginger and her mother too, so maybe I am like my mom.

I saw Kyle walking into the auditorium by himself, and was thrilled that he had come, even though it was impossible to know who he’d come to hear; I mean, all of his friends were seniors, so it could have been anyone in SV.

Then Ms. Doman came in with an old man, and I wondered who he was—her dad? A new teacher? Then I saw that he had his hand on the back of her waist, and a jolt of terror shot through me like an arrow. That hundred-year-old man was her husband! My mom made her way over to them, dragging me by the hand like a five-year-old.

“You must be Ms. Doman,” she said, and I was embarrassed that she would say such a boring thing to the most brilliant teacher in the school.

“Are you Judy’s mom?” Ms. Doman asked, holding my mom’s gaze like a movie star in love.

My mom nodded and put her arm behind my head, which is her way of putting an arm around me. This way, she doesn’t have to crouch down, but also doesn’t appear to be patting my hair like I’m a pet of some sort.

Ms. Doman leaned forward, glanced around politely, saw that no one but her ancient husband was in earshot. “Judy is the best student I’ve had in twelve years of teaching,” she told my mother. I thought my mother might leap into her arms.

“Thank you so much for telling us that. We’re very proud of her, of course.”

Mr. Doman harrumphed and Ms. Doman opened up the side of herself that was next to him. “Judy, Ms. Lohden, this is my husband, Norman Crump.”

“Norman Crump?” my mother asked. “
The
Norman Crump?”

“The one and only,” Ms. Doman said, half sweetly and half bitterly, as if she knew he was famous but wasn’t impressed anymore after years of having to pick his undershirts off the back of her desk chair or something.

“It’s nice to meet you both,” Norman Crump said in a gentle way, and I felt bad for having had mean thoughts about him before he’d even opened his mouth. What was wrong with me? As if to make it worse, he turned to me. He had an afro of gray hair around his head, and wore round frameless glasses. I wondered if he had been cute when he was young, thought probably only in a so-ugly-it’s-lovable way. He had a big, weird-shaped nose right in the middle of his face; it looked like someone had made it half an hour before out of modeling clay and put it on him as a disguise.

“Emma has shown me some of your writing,” he said. “I hope you’ll be a writer someday.”

“Really? Thank you!” I was unable to mask my babyish delight, even at hearing him call Ms. Doman “Emma” in front of me. I tried to recover my dignity, but made everything worse by adding, “I mean, coming from you, that means a lot.”

Norman Crump is a Michigan hero. He’s a writer who sets all of his novels in Ann Arbor, and describes the town perfectly every time, making it seem like the center of the universe, instead of just a top-ten university town like Madison or wherever else college students gather in the Midwest to drink beer and get educated. He always has young people having sex in unmistakably Ann Arbor locations: the stadium, Gallup Park, on the steps at Hill Auditorium. Maybe he and Ms. Doman frolicked all over the town when he was young. Although when he was young, she wasn’t born yet. So maybe he did it with someone else and then married Ms. Doman as soon as she turned eighteen. Old famous writers always marry their students. Maybe Ms. Doman had been the prettiest and most promising one in his class, so he had married her. I couldn’t think of a polite way to ask how they’d met, although I was curious. What if I asked and he had been her nursery school teacher? No one wanted to have that conversation.

My parents went into the auditorium, where we saw Mr. Luther taking a seat by himself. He was so wrong for being a schoolteacher. It was like he was a sea sponge, removed from its natural habitat and unable to survive in the world he had picked. I hoped he was gay and had a boyfriend, but was just too shy to bring him. I hoped the boyfriend was sweet and sociable and helped Mr. Luther interact with whatever world they lived in when he didn’t have to be at school. As long as he wasn’t just alone all the time, living in the math room, slinking out from behind his desk to attend our events. I told my parents to go sit with him and headed backstage, where all the seniors were chattering giddily and putting on lipstick. Alan was rubbing Amanda Fulton’s shoulders and bare neck. I stood in the wings, waiting for Ms. Vanderly to gesture to me and Carrie to come out, and trying to breathe deeply even though every time I did, I inhaled so much dust from the thick dark red curtains on the stage that I thought my throat would close off entirely like a clogged bathtub drain. Ms. Vanderly was on stage introducing us, and then she turned a beaming smile toward the wings. Carrie and I looked at each other, nodded, and walked out snapping. We started the whole concert with the intro to “Take Five,” and honestly, I was so nervous I felt like I might black out. But the audience was dark enough that I could pretend they weren’t there, that the blazing above me was sunshine coming through my bedroom window, and I bolted that introduction out, all the boo boo shoo be doo bops, listening for Carrie’s voice and trying to make sure we matched, that I wasn’t drowning her out. I could hear her slight, high voice like a glittering string above mine, and I relaxed. We sang, “Still, I know our eyes often meet / I feel tingles down to my feet,” and I could feel Ms. Vanderly’s proud eyes on us from the wings.