Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume by Jennifer OConnell Page B

missionary position (which was unlike any “missionary” I’d ever heard about) or nothing. He tells her that if she’d just make friends with the women at their country club and if she’d just take up golf and really give it a go this time, they’d all be a lot happier. Sandy tries. She signs up for lessons and makes efforts to be more social, but the disconnect from her husband and the attempts to lead a life that feels false send her into despair.
    A book about a suburban mom should have been boring as hell for a twelve-year-old, but my friends and I soon found out that Sandy was anything but dull. When her kids leave for summer camp, she gets her own summer vacation—one of sexual awakening. A motorcycle man in a stars-and-stripes helmet periodically appears on her front lawn and whacks off. She has a one-night stand with her sister’s husband (who also happens to be her gynecologist). She very nearly gets pulled into sex with the husband of her best friend, who is gamely trying to go along with his wife’s desire for an open relationship. She starts an affair with Shep, the old boyfriend with whom she’d been utterly smitten.
    Sitting in Ms. Hutchinson’s class, I was shocked and I was titillated. It wasn’t just the fact that the character in the book was having sex. (Since I’d been reading adult fiction for a number of years, I’d come across some generic descriptions of sex before.) Rather, the shock came from the frank way the book dealt with sex, anatomy, and desires. At one point, when Sandy’s old boyfriend draws her outside a party and kisses her, she thinks how grateful she is for the Tampax she’s wearing and for how it’s “holding in her juices.” Sandy talks about douching with vinegar, sometimes with wine vinegar for variety. Genitalia is described in exquisite detail, including its colors, scents, and sounds. The sex is rough, awkward, acrobatic, and sometimes downright unpleasant-sounding. And yet everyone seemed to keep wanting it.
    If I’d felt informed after reading Judy Blume’s other books, I now felt completely stumped again. Was this how adults thought about themselves and their bodies? Was sex not a sweetly physical act à la Forever? Was it something more sinister and much more raw?
    I started watching my mother and father for signs that some of the acts in the book were taking place in our idyllic ranch house. This seemed impossible. I studied our neighbors during block parties, wondering if they were cheating on their spouses or having furtive sex in the study. I stared at Ms. Hutchinson during class. What was she like in the evenings when she was at home? Did she have a husband with whom she did all sorts of crazy things? Did she want to do those things? (In the book, Sandy hadn’t always seemed too sure.)
    My friends were no help in figuring out these matters. We giggled over the descriptions and read earmarked pages over and over. No one appeared as bothered as me by the thought that this sexual activity might very well be going on around us. And the truth was that I wasn’t necessarily bothered by the thought of the sex—it was simply the thought of all these adults I personally knew having the sex. The concept was entirely too intimate. I couldn’t look at the bus driver without blushing. I couldn’t look at my dentist without imagining him naked with his wife. The only adults I could talk to without the pain of this knowledge were the nuns at our school. I knew they’d taken vows of celibacy. I knew they’d never have anything to do with the sexual world, and that was a relief, because since reading Wifey, sex seemed to be everywhere.
    Sometime during this heady period, I began to think about Judy Blume. The real Judy Blume. Before this, I’d given no thought to the person behind the curtain when it came to books. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Carolyn Keene?