My First Boy/Girl Party
Creative Nonfiction
Twice in sixth grade I was invited to the birthday parties of Popular Girls. It wasn’t their choice—their mothers had manners and made them invite the entire class. And my mother made me go, although I tried to make her understand these were pity invites. But my mother, who had been a Popular Girl in high school and had never known or understood anything else, wouldn’t hear of it. So I went to F’s birthday party at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour. Her mom ordered the birthday special—“The San Diego Zoo”—a huge 7 lb. vat of ice cream scoops covered with assorted syrups, whipped cream, nuts, and cherries, and dotted with plastic toy zoo animals, all carried in on a stretcher by employees wearing boaters to the sounds of a fire truck siren.
Then, near the end of sixth grade, K invited me to her birthday party. D and F were best friends and were popular in the classic sense. D had the pretty face, thick eyelashes, and long, straight hair the color of beach sand that was a hallmark of 1972. F was athletic, outgoing, and funny. But K had the kind of cool, uber popularity that a girl could only achieve when she didn’t give a damn whether she was popular or not. She had shoulder-length, dark brown hair. She was a tall and confident brunette who didn’t dress in trend-setting clothes but instead created the trends. She wore low-slung, bell-bottomed pants and form-fitting baby tees that showed off her long, lean torso. She didn’t wear makeup. She didn’t care what anyone thought of her. During my first-day-of-sixth-grade humiliation, she’d leaned back against a rail in front of the classroom and observed, cool and aloof, an eleven-year-old Uma Thurman in the making. I imagine she could have gone on to become a fashion model, but it’s a career I can’t imagine her choosing. She was way too cool to go the obvious route.
If you think my mother was excited when I was invited to F’s all-girl birthday party, you should have seen her when I was invited to a party where boys would be in attendance. The guest list included not only our sixth-grade class, but older boys from junior high and high school, because of course K knew older boys from junior high and high school, and of course they adored her and showed up for her.
I absolutely did not want to go to K’s birthday party. The thought terrified me. I suspected there would be goings-on that were way over my head. But again, my mother refused to understand that no one at K’s party wanted me there. They didn’t particularly like me or dislike me, but I didn’t belong. I was a quirky little mascot. I was the girl who won the spelling bee. I was the bookworm who won the Fire Safety Week Essay Contest and then humiliated herself by breaking down crying when she accepted the award in front of the entire student body, not because she was overwhelmed with happiness, but because she was again on display in front of everyone in a size 6X dress with Orphan Annie hair and knee socks.
To understand exactly how excited my mother was to send me to this party, you have to understand our relationship. It was complicated. My mother was one of the most popular girls in her class. Right out of high school, she and her best friend Pauline both got married and then got pregnant at the same time, and while they were expecting, they joked about what they would do if either of them had a red-haired baby. It was the worst thing they could imagine. And then I was born with a headful of copper hair, and the woman I called Aunt Polly all of my life brought black shoe polish to the hospital as a joke. They laughed about it my entire life. My mother did not know what to do with a skinny, freckled, red-haired daughter who was nothing like her. A girl who preferred books to most people. I was an alien to her. But parties, well, parties she knew. And when K invited me to hers, my mother seized upon it as her chance to turn me into the girl she’d always wanted me to be.
I was approaching twelve years old but looked decidedly six. My mother, who had heretofore leaned into my diminutive stature, decided at this point, as I was ending elementary school and about to start junior high, that it was time for me to grow up. She approached K’s birthday party like it was my debutante ball. We went shopping for clothes for the party, clothes which she picked out without my input and over my protests. A pair of corduroy bell bottoms that were way too big for me in the exact same butterscotch shade as our station wagon. She rolled up the hems and stitched them. A white tank top with a ridiculous picture of the Cracker Jack sailor saluting with his right hand while holding a box of Cracker Jack in his left. Something that, as a Navy brat, I knew was not realistic—you don’t hawk Cracker Jack in uniform. And a bra. A bra that I in no way needed.
Before the bra shopping excursion, my mother examined my chest in my bedroom while I cringed and tried to melt into the floor. “I think you need a bra,” she said.
“No, I don’t,” I said. I did not need a bra, and I did not want one. I put my blouse back on and asked if I could go outside to play. My mother had other ideas.
“Come with me,” she said. She marched me into the dining room, where my father sat drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and reading a newspaper. “Take off your shirt,” she said. “Show your dad.” I was horrified. So horrified that I refused—a rare instance of me standing up to my parents. I hoped my pluck would convince them how important it was to me that I not be forced to disrobe in the dining room. It did not.
“Take it off!” my dad said. He was angry and annoyed. I suspect he was most annoyed that he’d been pulled away from his newspaper, and now there I was making this interruption take much longer than necessary. And so I did what I was told, and together my parents looked at my non-existent boobs and, as he always did, my father took my mother’s side and decreed it time to buy me my first bra. I was old enough for a bra, but apparently I was not yet old enough for any dignity of my own.
In her hurry for me to grow up and become popular, my mother not only forced me to wear the bra, but stuffed it full of toilet paper against my will. I was mortified. I’d just seen these kids at school the day before—they already knew I did not have boobs, and they were not going to be fooled into thinking I had sprouted them overnight.
My mother gave me a makeover, too: seventies blue eyeshadow, blue Maybelline Great Lash mascara, and metallic blue nail polish. At the party, I kept my arms crossed over my chest, but I didn’t really need to. This kind of subterfuge was apparently acceptable. The kids in my class seemed far more willing to overlook my brand new boobs than they had been to overlook my first-day-of-school outfit. They seemed to accept that the school me and the party animal me might be very different people.
We played Spin the Bottle at K’s party, and that’s when I had what was technically my first kiss, with a super foxy older boy named Chris Miller who obviously didn’t want to kiss a creepy sixth grade girl who looked like a first grader with lopsided, tissue paper boobs and way too much blue eyeshadow. When he spun the empty Coca Cola bottle and it landed on me, he couldn’t hide the disappointment from his face. I was horrorstruck. But I was used to letting things happen, and he was a good sport. He leaned in to do his job while the rest of the circle laughed.
Monday morning at school, everyone went back to ignoring me. Thank God.
“I had no idea how to get guys to notice me. I still don’t. Who cares?”
—Amy Poehler
NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
“Lullaby” is here! You can read my short story inspired by “Your Song” in Better Off Dead Vol. 1: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. This story is set against the backdrop of the history of Pismo Beach, California, including prohibition-era speakeasies, Pismo clams, and stormy weather.
Bookshop.org delivered my copy of Absolute Pleasure: Queer Perspectives on Rocky Horror three weeks early! My friend Trey Burnette’s essay “A Rather Tender Subject” is featured.
“I always thought the saddest feeling in life is when you’re dancing in a really joyful way and then you hit your head on something.”
—Lena Dunham
SOME THINGS FOR READERS
I Wrote a Book (!!!) and I Can’t Wait to Tell You Everything
(Jaime Stickle for Jaime’s Substack)
For Three Weeks, I Was a Phone Psychic for Miss Cleo: It’s a fun story, but I can’t explain the guilt I still carry
(“Dialing In,” an essay by Heidi Diehl for Electric Literature)
Young Sheldon Room Tone
(fiction by Nick Mandernach for New England Review)
“A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.”
—Coco Chanel
SOME THINGS FOR WRITERS
How to Stop Gaslighting Your Memoir Writing Process
(Lisa Cooper Ellison for Jane Friedman)
Memory and Meaning in Two Voices: Writing a Mother-Daughter Memoir
(Riley Pickett and Harriet Riley for The Brevity Blog)
Lyrics in Books: Your Questions Answered
(Scott McCormick for Book Baby)
The UpMarket Fiction Formula
(Karin Gillespie for Pitch Your Novel)
“We women talk too much, but even then we don’t tell half what we know.”
—Nancy Astor
SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU SMILE
“If you retain nothing else, remember the most important rule of beauty: Who cares?”
—Tina Fey
Leanne Phillips
Writer | Book Coach | Editor
leannephillips.com
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Your story reminds me of why I would never want to go back to this time. Great read.
Great stuff :) !!