Zibby Mag

By Julie Metz

A hostile world, sexual discovery, and a rare moment of understanding between my mother and me.

I hear her. But I try to ignore that she just spoke my name. I should get my ass up from the dinner table where she and I are seated in front of empty plates and head to my room before this goes any further. Conversations like this never go well. I’m prepared, as always, for a battle.

I hate watching my parents chew their food, grinding and gnashing like cows chewing cud. We chew and swallow. The dishes are washed and dried. Then my mother and I fight. Then homework and bed.

I am sixteen. Moody and surly. Next year I will get a Farrah Fawcett wing cut, but on this evening my face is still framed by a mass of dark uncooperative frizzy curls.

At school, I wear glasses and keep my head down. The rest of the time, I wander around New York City half-blind, because I imagine that I’m prettier without glasses and prettier is what I long to be. The world is gentler out of focus, like an Impressionist painting.

I’m unhappy in my skin. I slice the tips of my fingers with a razor when I’m alone in my room. There is comfort in the bloodletting, though I know this habit marks me as troubled. In fact, I must be diseased. No one has noticed my fingertips. I cover them in Band-Aids and if asked, I blame paper cuts. I’m continually surprised that my mother, who seems to notice everything, never comments on the number of Band-Aids I use.

I find it hard to speak about my school, a private girls’ institution on the Upper East Side, a world away from our rent-controlled apartment on the much shabbier West Side, where side streets conceal single-room occupancy apartments, homeless men scrounge for leftovers in trash cans, and drug dealers command corner phone booths.

We wear regulation blue skirts and white blouses. I’ve existed on the social margins for four years. On wintry afternoons, in overheated classrooms, my mind drifts out of the dusty windows, joining errant leaves as they swirl upward in arcs and waves.

I try to lose my parents in public. No, despite the obvious resemblance, I am not with that odd couple studying the Constable landscape in the adjacent gallery. My father has bushy, gray 19th-century sideburns; he wears shorts, long white socks, and paint-stained sneakers. My mother is roundish in high-waisted jeans and a plaid button-down shirt — cringe-worthy in 1976.

I do love the Constable painting and wish with all my heart that I could make something as beautiful and true as his landscapes, languid under portentous clouds.

Conversations with my mother never go well. She has a practiced way of baiting me, speculating about my failures as though wishing they would happen. Most of all, she hates my only friend, Lucy, who lives in a cavernous apartment a few blocks from my school but attends a different one on the West Side. Lucy gives me the confidence to break my mother’s many rules. My mother understands this all too well.

“ — and that girl you hang around with!” she’ll say, mid-argument.

“Lucy — she has a name!”

“Why don’t you have friends at your school?”

“Because I don’t belong there.”

“Your attitude is the problem. You need to change that, young lady.”

“You don’t understand anything. You don’t have to go to my stupid school. So just leave me alone.” I slam my door. It’s quiet at last. Out comes the X-acto knife, wads of toilet paper, Band-Aids.

Each day, after my last class ends, I climb the stairs up to the art room, where I knead mounds of clay and turn pots on the wheel. The kindly art teacher never sends me away. Some days the hunks of clay transform into elegant vessels with the magic of the wheel. On other afternoons, hidden air bubbles foil my attempts and I find myself smashing the twisted bowls and cups on the ground.

I wait for Lucy to get home from school so that I can retreat to her apartment. Her mother, an advertising executive, is rarely home or otherwise drinking in her room, leaving us alone. Once she wandered into the kitchen stark naked, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

Lucy has two older brothers who give us weed. I have a serious crush on the younger one. Lucy and I sit on her bed and smoke and listen to her favorite record of the moment, “Honky Tonk Chateau.” We talk about boys. Most of my boy talk is utter fantasy, but I aspire to make it a reality.

Last summer, Lucy went to sleep-away camp and hung out with a counselor. I spent three weeks in Maine with a family friend whose house rules proved easy to elude. My first sexual experience — with a guy who worked at one of the local inns — was not blissful, but I nevertheless felt I’d crossed a necessary line into womanhood. My adventures remain a well-kept secret, the details withheld even from Lucy. The guy, who lives in Massachusetts, hasn’t answered either of my two letters. I will not send any more.

Conversations with my mother never go well. She has a practiced way of baiting me, speculating about my failures as though wishing they would happen.

On weekends, my parents often let me stay in the city, instead of traveling with them to our small house in rural Connecticut. Maybe they are as fed up with me as I am.

I get to stay with Lucy instead. There are smoky parties in Harlem apartments and trips to bars where the waiters will smirk at (but not reject) the brazenly fake IDs we bought at Playland in Times Square. Perhaps most thrilling are our treks into Central Park at night with Lucy’s dogs.

We scream our songs as her two eager golden retrievers pull us toward the park entrance, jumping and leaping across a nearly silent 96th Street, dodging the rare yellow cab ferrying late-night partiers. The windows of the elegant buildings lining the street are dark at 3 a.m.

Life in Lucy’s orbit had been a secret bliss. That is until my mother confronted me one Monday evening after dinner. One of her colleagues lives on 96th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and on one very early Sunday morning she awoke to yelling and singing. Lucy called out my name at the most inopportune moment, as this infuriated woman leaned out the window of her apartment, wondering who these goddamned rowdy teenagers were. She recognized my name — and then me — from the times I’d visited my parents at work. What were the odds of that? More than bad luck. The black hand of fate.

“You humiliated me!” my mother shouted.

For just a flash I could imagine the embarrassment at her office. Her colleague thinking that my mother was raising a bad kid. I remembered the thrill of racing with Lucy and the dogs to the park. What song were we singing? A rage began to percolate as we rehashed our script.

“And that girl you hang around with!”

My friend, my only friend. Lucy doesn’t come here, she doesn’t want to. I need Lucy and her apartment in the afternoons and the weekends.

“Why don’t you have friends at your school?” My mother continues.

When I count down the few blocks between my school and Lucy’s apartment, I imagine that all of this —school and its daily humiliations, the city, my family, my inconsolable mind — is illusory. That if I shout out loud enough it will all vanish.

But by the time I get to Lucy’s house, I feel like I’m somewhere real. The heavy dark furniture rooted to the parquet floors, varnished paintings on the walls, narrow hall leading to her bedroom, soft and receiving cotton bedspread below a Che Guevara poster, the aroma of tobacco and stale potato chips. It all feels real, and therefore so do I.

My mother and I are back at the dinner table. I focus on my empty plate. She says my name again. She is wearing one of her trim wool skirts, cut and sewn from a Vogue pattern. As sensible and serious as my history teacher. What deep pile of shit am I in this time?

As if anticipating the coming storm, my younger brother, Simon, has already retreated to his room. My father is working in his studio with a paint-spattered transistor radio. Dvorak or the Mets game. Hard to tell when the door is closed. I’ve never understood how he can follow a baseball game while making art — the two have nothing in common. I’ve heard him cursing when his team screws up a play. I wish I could focus on even one thing with such dedication.

I don’t know why I lingered at the table tonight. I should also be in my room, struggling with math homework. Or I should be in my parents’ closet, what passes for a private phone booth in our apartment.

When I count down the few blocks between my school and Lucy’s apartment, I imagine that all of this — school and its daily humiliations, the city, my family, my inconsolable mind — is illusory.

I did not get up after the meal and now she is speaking to me and I have to answer. I stop fiddling with my cutlery and look up from my empty plate. I see that she doesn’t look angry. Her face has a soft expression, which confuses me.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” she says.

I mumble something in response.

“I think — ” she begins, then takes a breath. “I think you had sex this summer.”

How could she have known? I haven’t told anyone besides Lucy. Has this bitch read my diary? Too shocked — and maybe impressed — to deny the truth, I blurt out, “How did you know?”

“I noticed that you’ve been sleeping in the nude.”

I have been sleeping nude, and not just because it is still a warm Indian summer in Manhattan. She’s been watching me and has seen the change.

“I hope it was a good experience,” she says.

“It was okay,” I reply, startled by her words. I still don’t know why the guy hasn’t replied to my letters and I’ve been feeling bitter and depressed about the whole thing.

“I’m sorry to hear that. It should be beautiful.”

I’m afraid to say more for fear of betraying my disappointment.

“I’d like to take you to see my doctor,” she says. “A gynecologist. I think it’s time.”

So that’s what this is all about. No judgment, no punishment, no stinking pile of shit. Now there is an inch or two of common ground between us. She doesn’t seem like a person who can penetrate the thick wall I’ve tried to build between us. But she has.

She takes me to her gynecologist. The doctor is a man, not so great. Even more awkward, this is the very same doctor who delivered me and so I must endure their banter about my long and pain-inducing journey into the world sixteen years earlier.

But on the plus side, once the ordeal of the stirrups and cold speculum is over, my mother pays for my birth control pills without question or judgment, until I rethink contraception at college. There, a biology student in my dorm tells me that I should switch to a diaphragm. I accept her medical advice, even as I privately acknowledge how grateful I’ve been for those pink pill packets, and that my mother had seen me so clearly.

As I enter my early twenties, I will accompany friends to Planned Parenthood for abortions, women who still cannot tell their mothers that they are having sex. I will struggle with that damned diaphragm; on a few occasions, it springs across a bedroom like a flying saucer flinging a spray of spermicide in its wake. It’s a hassle, but like the packets of pink pills, the diaphragm is my freedom and I never forget it.

Long before the time when I will have a teenage daughter of my own, but many years after that evening at the dinner table, I will know what to call my mother’s effort to connect with me.

It was a brave, heated moment of love.

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Julie Metz is the author of the newly released memoir Eva and Eve and the New York Times bestselling memoir Perfection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. She has written for publications including: The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Dame, sheknows.com, Salon, Tablet, Slice, Redbook, Glamour, Next Tribe, MrBellersneighborhood.com, and Coastal Living. Her essays have appeared in the anthologies The Moment, edited by Larry Smith, creator of “Six-Word Memoirs,” and The House That Made Me, edited by Grant Jarrett.