So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(26)

The delivery of the poem quickly became a group project. One of our (presumably amused) friends had been designated the sober watcher, and we conveyed our desperate need for her to drive us to his house. It would be an epic journey for an epic poem! I think part of her job was to go along with our whims provided they weren’t harmful to ourselves or others, so she agreed. Overcome with our sense of our own generosity, on the way to Jon’s house we realized we needed to stop at Grand Union market to buy several chocolate cream pies that we would leave on people’s doorsteps, including one for Jon. She also complied with that request. (Well, it was more of a demand.) When we reached his house I included my poem on top of his chocolate cream pie and skipped back to the car, laughing hysterically at the beauty of it all.

I never heard from him, and I didn’t care. But fast-forward to November 2013. No longer am I a free-spirited college student with an Eddie Vedder haircut and a basic knowledge of Japanese but a newly married woman with a sick cat, an impressive political career, and a basic knowledge of Japanese. While DK and I were visiting my family for Thanksgiving in Rhinebeck, our cat Shrummie had a stroke, so we went on another epic journey, though this time my mind was only altered by years of exhaustion and frantic concern about my cat.

We were sitting in the waiting room at the vet when I heard the doctor say to a nurse, “Mastromonaco…I think my husband went to high school with her.” It was Jon’s wife. She helped Shrummie get back on his feet. I got them and their kids tickets for the Easter Egg Roll at the White House. Though none of us ever mentioned the poem, or the chocolate cream pies, I like to think that acid—ingested responsibly, with supervision preventing physical and social catastrophe—had something to do with the feelings of warmth and goodwill shared by all.





The Woman in Red Leather Pants



In the days leading up to Sally Davis’s1 twelfth birthday party, there was a lot of whispering in the lunchroom. Those of us invited—which included people like me, as well as some of the popular girls, who, in a coup for Sally, were known to be attending the party—were specifically privy to the rumors. Most of us knew where they were coming from: none other than Jessica Laramie, Sally’s best friend. Instead of seeming like a red flag—why would Sally’s best friend want to spread rumors about her?—this only made the gossip seem more credible. But ultimately the whispers were too suggestive to mean anything to our twelve-year-old brains other than: intrigue!

The gossip didn’t come to a head until the actual party. All us girls were sitting at Sally’s house, in her front room. We’d dropped off our presents in a pile for her to open later. My gift was a Rick Astley tape; I loved Rick Astley and likely had the same one at home. Everything was going well until Sally left the room for some reason. It was then that Jessica decided to drop her bombshell. “I figured out what’s wrong with Sally,” she said conspiratorially. For me, and I’m sure for many of the other girls present, the only indication that something was wrong with Sally had come from Jessica. But Jessica’s confidence in stating it meant we all had to pretend that we’d noticed something wrong with Sally, too. Because we were impressionable middle-schoolers, this quickly morphed into us thinking there actually was something wrong with Sally.

“She’s a lesbian.”

Everyone in the circle was shocked. Jessica had been talking smack before, sure, but it was only here, at the actual party, that she had dared use the word “lesbian.”

“Yes,” Jessica continued gravely. “She’s…that way.”

The evidence? Sally had sleepovers, and at the sleepovers girls would sleep in the same bed.

Which, by the way, is typically what happens at sleepovers. But the seductive power of the gossip was greater than the steady force of logical reasoning.

Now, before I get into my (shameful) involvement in this story, let’s unpack the motivations at play here. Sally had invited popular people to her birthday party, and they attended. Jessica wanted those girls to be her friends, so she started telling people that Sally liked girls in order to make us uncomfortable and not want to be around her. This also doesn’t make much sense, except when you remember that popularity in school doesn’t work the same way it does in adulthood. In adulthood the seas often rise together; that’s what networking is all about. Your friend moves up a level, and you suddenly start getting +1 invites to fashion shows. In school it’s more of a zero-sum game: Some people are chosen, and their friends get left behind. Jessica saw Sally’s possible ascent as immediately threatening to Jessica’s own prospects.

Like most of the other girls in the room—I won’t speak for everyone!—I was overtaken by a vague but potent outrage when I heard that Sally was (allegedly) a lesbian. At the first opportunity, I snuck over to the present table and took back my Rick Astley tape. When I got home I threw it in the trash, to really establish my conviction that she didn’t deserve a present.

A few hours later, though, I began to feel bad. Was Sally really a lesbian? And if she was, what would be wrong with that? She hadn’t done anything but invite a bunch of people to her house and feed us cake and pizza.

I’m pretty sure Sally never knew what happened that day, thank God. To this day, she has no idea she missed out on a sweet Rick Astley tape because of stereotypical Mean Girl posturing. Because we were all mostly good people, the angels on our shoulders eventually prevailed, and the gossip didn’t circulate beyond the party. For days afterward, I thought about how sad I’d be if people said things about me that weren’t true. (I still get upset about mild professional rumors I hear about myself—and I’m talking really mild.) I think I’ve always understood that anything I hear about extremely personal aspects of other people’s personal lives—illness, divorce, pregnancy, and other potentially devastating topics—shouldn’t be spread. But this taught me that the reverberations of gossip can continue even if nothing actually comes of it.