Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl Read online

  I didn’t believe the past world was better than my present-day life, but I connected to—aspired to—the glamour, the iconic images, which seemed unimpeachable and monolithic. There was a stillness about the past, a clarity, the way it had been somewhat defined and dissected, in the rearview mirror; it was there for the taking, for the mining. The old songs, the old movies, the black-and-white pictures created a visual and aural time machine. It wasn’t that I imagined I had another life—it was that I didn’t have to exist in the here and now. It was a total, freeing effacement.

  Yet I was simultaneously trying to forge connections with people who had a pulse—just not with people whom I actually knew or who lived anywhere near me. In the ’80s, there was a currency to having pen pals, and the more exotic the location of your pen pal, the better. My epistolary cache was not geographically impressive. I’d made friends with some kids at camps with whom I kept in touch, but they merely lived on the other side of Washington state, or ten minutes away but went to a different school, which might as well be across the ocean when you’re young and don’t have a car. The farthest the mail came for me was from British Columbia, where a girl I’d met through a soccer exchange program lived. In comparison, friends of mine were getting letters from exotic, far-flung places like France or Vietnam. They’d bring the thin, light-blue airmail envelopes to school and we’d fawn over the foreign stamps and careful handwriting—So tiny! Is that how beautiful English could really be?—the way one would over kittens. A competitive spirit ensued. I thought about what could top a correspondence from Europe or Asia. Why, one from Hollywood, of course.

  In the back of the teen magazines I was reading, like Bop or 16, were addresses for all the film and TV stars I loved—not home addresses, of course, more like Ralph Macchio, c/o some studio or agency, or a PO box where you could ostensibly reach Ricky Schroder. So I started writing letters to them. But the plan bombed. I wasn’t getting letters back, not even a stamped signature on an 8 by 10. The venture soon became less about competing with my peers and more about my own sense of invisibility and need for validation. I was so desperate to be noticed that I gave up on Hollywood’s Brat Pack, as they were known, and started in on those I imagined to be less fatigued by fame: the stars of daytime soap operas.

  And those people wrote back. Genie Francis from General Hospital, Drake Hogestyn from Days of Our Lives, Doug Davidson from The Young and the Restless. Handwritten notes on postcards! Smiley faces! Autographs!

  The niceties were even more notable because what I had written to these actors were inappropriately long letters explaining how I didn’t get along with my mother, or about her illness, three or four pages, all of it maudlin. They could have reasonably assumed I was pitching a plotline for an upcoming season of their show. Or maybe their mailboxes were actually full of letters expressing a dissatisfaction like mine, of feeling mismatched and misshapen, at odds with a place, with a body. Maybe these actors had a bin labeled “Misplaced and Transferred Hopes” where they put notes like mine. I’m surprised their gracious replies, their autographs and notes, weren’t accompanied by a list of child psychologists in my area. It’s true, I wanted help, but being acknowledged sufficed.

  A response, any response, implied that I existed, that I was not a weirdo, that I’d be okay. I could have gone to a school counselor or even talked to my parents, but I needed someone on TV or in the movies to reach out to me, not because they were famous but because they were so far away, it was like being seen from outer space. Suddenly I didn’t feel small; I was bigger than the house I was living in, larger than my town. Thanks to them, I somehow belonged to the world.

  I always think about these moments when fans approach me, or write letters, or send messages on social media. I try to recall the sturdiness that comes from recognition.

  —

  My other form of validation was through performance. Performing gave me something to do in a given moment in a room. It was a heightened way of relating to people; I could act out feelings instead of dealing with them. Few interactions didn’t involve me hamming it up in some way. My sister, Stacey, was my first sidekick, with whom I’d record radio plays or lip-synch for our family using a cane as a microphone. If I was at a friend’s house and needed to get home, I insisted on first performing a mock ballet, complete with my friend’s ballerina outfit, despite having no dance training whatsoever. Cue “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” That would be followed by a juggling act consisting of two tennis balls and an apple to the tune of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.” I loved the ability to be commanding and silly, to focus and control a situation, to elevate the mundane into the theatrical. I wanted people to listen, to witness, or simply to notice me. I held people hostage with this need for attention. It was both an imposition and a plea.

  If the following accounts of my attention seeking seem dizzying and unrelenting, that’s because they were. I was an anxious child, prone as a baby to colic and frequent tears, and later to fist-pounding, leg-kicking tantrums. My mother likened my melodrama to the silent-film actress Sarah Bernhardt, as if my frustrations and feelings weren’t normal but calculated, contrived. Bernhardt’s excuse for her theatrics was that she had no sound in her films, whereas mine was an effort to drown out an encroaching family muteness.

  At night I’d wake up terrified of fire, death, and disease. The smell of toast, my mother in the kitchen and hungry at three a.m., wafted upstairs. Smoke signals of distress that hung over my sleep. I’d check the pillow to make sure all my hair wasn’t falling out. I researched fire escape ladders and calculated the jump from my second-story bedroom window to the nearest tree branch. I’d drag my bedsheets down the hall, sneak into my parents’ room, and sleep on the floor. Or I’d crawl into bed with my sister, who would wake up and kick me out. I didn’t want to be alone. My brain rarely quieted. In a family video featuring an anniversary message to my grandparents, my voice never falls below the volume of an NFL coach. I won’t stop stepping into frame. I didn’t want the recording to end.

  When I was five or six years old, if my parents had friends over, I would request that I be allowed to sing along to one of my father’s records before going to bed. It was a warped suburban version of the children in The Sound of Music serenading and charming the adults with “So Long, Farewell” before their bedtime, except that I was singing along to the Eagles, a tune likely about cocaine or driving recklessly in a California highway fast lane. “We stabbed it with our steely knives, but we just couldn’t kill the beast,” I yelped, off-key. Lullaby, and good night. I bowed, then dragged my baby blanket to my bedroom.

  With a recorder on our couch in Bellevue.

  I acted as a neighborhood impresario, trying to gather the other children to put on plays or perform hokey talent shows. One summer we formed Lil’ “d” Duran Duran, a Duran Duran cover band, except that we only mimed along to the music. We nailed scrap wood together to form guitars and keyboards and painted them with leftover house paint—thus all the instruments were gray—drawing black squiggly strings with Sharpie pens, the keys on the synthesizer uneven rectangles like a bad set of teeth. We practiced every day on my neighbor’s deck. (West Coast suburban decks are their own strange art form, elaborate and multilayered, like wooden wedding cakes. Check out old issues of Sunset magazine if you want to see how a hot tub might look nestled into a corner or how to plant geraniums between benches for a touch of color. Stain your deck every year.) There was a boom box connected to an extension cord that snaked out from the kitchen, “The Reflex” and “Rio” blasted on repeat with the help of someone hitting the rewind button. Misty and Ricky, an aged German shepherd and an Aussie mix, were our only audience. Our “drummer,” Peter, was hard to track down, even though it was his deck on which we were rehearsing. I was both Simon Le Bon, the lead singer—not lip-synching but singing along over the music—and our band’s promoter. I asked my dad to photocopy flyers for our show at his of
fice. He obliged. But after two weeks of practice everyone but me lost interest. The members of Lil’ “d” returned to other summer activities: catching up on soap operas, front-yard water slides fashioned from tarps and a garden hose, tanning while reading V. C. Andrews books, and badminton.

  In elementary school, our music teacher occasionally designated a day for sharing. Kids would bring in their parents’ ABBA records, or we’d sing along to a Beatles song scrubbed clean of drug references (“We say ‘hi!’ with a little help from our friends”). One week I decided to perform a dance to the McCoys song “Hang On Sloopy.” Children, even less so than adults, often have little concept of genre or even of a song’s actual meaning; all songs are kids’ songs once they hear them. I liked “Hang On Sloopy” because it sounded like it was a tune about the dog “Snoopy.” And so I wanted to do a dance for Snoopy, and thus for everyone else in my fifth-grade music class.

  The dance I choreographed—and I use the term “choreography” loosely, the way you’d call adding milk to cereal “cooking”—was a combination of marching and punching, and probably resembled aerobics being done by a penguin. I was not graceful. I was coordinated, athletic, and fit, but very gawky. I wore an oversized raspberry-colored T-shirt, the sleeves too long to be called short and too short to be called long, more like flaps. My gangly arms, spiky-haired on account of a misunderstanding I had had about shaving and what body parts to apply a razor to, poked through the sleeves/tubes/flaps like prickly noodles. I tucked the shirt into cream-colored shorts with an elastic band. If not for a fresh knee scab, one might not have been able to tell where my pale legs began and the shorts ended. I can still recall Mrs. Pappas going up to a boy named Braden—whose mouth was only capable of one expression, a smirk—and saying, “Try not to laugh.” But I danced anyway. I hung on, like Sloopy.

  In a junior high government class, our teacher held a mock trial. I played the mother of the accused. The roles were set: a defense attorney, a prosecutor, the witnesses for each side, the judge, the jury. It was a routine classroom exercise that would take up a few days of our time and help the students learn about the judicial process. Our teacher handed out sheets of evidence for the lawyers to consult, while the rest of us sat around, bored, waiting to take the stand and answer a few questions before returning to a slouched posture and watching the clock. Deciding that the event needed an infusion of energy, and dissatisfied with the binary and predictable outcome of the trial—guilty or not guilty, how banal!—I decided to stage a confession. I waited for a lull in order to amplify the drama. Then I stood up from my desk and shouted, “My son is innocent. I am the killer!”

  All heads turned toward me. There was laughter but I didn’t care. My teacher looked dumbfounded as I strolled up to take the stand. This was my trial now. I then extemporized a ten-minute confession that explained where I’d hidden the weapon and outlined my revenge-based motive, all told with a shaky voice and a trembling lower lip.

  I felt victorious. I had pulled off something both ridiculous and unpredictable. But not everyone was pleased. My classmate Tim, the defense lawyer, took me aside afterward, eyes brimming with tears. He told me that his dad had a brain tumor and on top of that I’d just ruined his chances of winning the case. I felt horrible about his father but vaguely satisfied that I had rescued our class from another mundane afternoon of expected outcomes. As a performer personality seeking attention, this was a frequent intersection of emotions.

  In high school I held a series of “How to Host a Murder” parties at my house. In case you are unfamiliar, HTHAM was a series of role-playing mystery games with near-legitimate sounding names like “The Chicago Caper” and “Grapes of Frath.” I’ve played almost all of them. The game requires eight guests—there are four male roles and four female roles—all of whom are assigned characters, each a suspect in a classic tale of mystery and suspense. One of them—gasp!—is the murderer. As a surprise to absolutely no one, not a single male friend of mine ever wanted to participate, so four of my girlfriends always had to come to the party dressed in drag. Also unsurprisingly, I took the game very seriously.

  I sent out the invitation weeks before. I asked that my friends dress up, and costume suggestions were included in the invite. After all, this wasn’t a low-rent, fly-by-night, wear-what-you-want-and-add-a-name-tag situation; no, we had to embody our characters. If that meant you had to go to a costume shop to rent a flapper dress or hit up a thrift store for a vintage military uniform, so be it. Bowler hats, swords, briefcases, golf clubs, garter belts, pearls: yes to all of it.

  How to Host a Murder party.

  I didn’t slack with my hosting duties, either. I got out the special-occasion candle holders and polished the silver, onto which I placed pizza bites, piping hot from the microwave. I rinsed off the crystal champagne flutes—to my knowledge this was the only time they were ever used—and filled them with sparkling cider. For “Powar and Greede,” which took place during the Golden Age of Hollywood, I replaced our framed family photos with magazine pictures of movie stars from the era. Good-bye to the Brownsteins posing in front of the fireplace, trying to keep our dog Buffy in frame; hello, Lana Turner! And Elizabeth Taylor and James Stewart looked far more sophisticated than any gap-toothed, mosaic-vest-clad school photo my sister or I had ever taken. I even went so far as to autograph the celebrity photos, making the signatures out to the host of this particular game, the towering head of Powar Studios, W. Anton Powar.

  Brownstein family holiday card. Redmond, Washington.

  Before the festivities began, I banished my father and sister to the TV room. I pressed play on the mixtape I’d made containing the decade-appropriate music and dimmed the lights. The guests arrived and we mingled in character for a while. We gave toasts, ate sliced cheddar atop buttery crackers, and admired one another’s outfits and accoutrements. We slow-danced, girls with mustaches swaying back and forth with girls in dresses. Then we sat down on Ethan Allen upholstered chairs and solved a murder.

  I suppose I had reached my limits of mere participation and pretend. I wasn’t really creating anything; I was facilitating, implementing, setting up situations that could be both fantastical and fantasy. It was ultimately silly; it was a game. What I loved was the role-playing, the gender ambiguity, the hints of sexiness and bravado, the moments that deviated from the rules and structure. Dressing up and performing allowed me to play at and try on identities, teleporting me into adulthood, into other worlds, into characteristics that would feel foreign in my own skin and my own clothes, but not if I was someone else.

  I had yet to find the medium or the vessel through which I could harness my anxiety and restlessness—my yearning to be understood, into something both pointed and vast. That shape needed for my creative hunger would come eventually.

  It took a while for me to get there.

  But first I should go back and explain how I ended up hanging out with the kind of people who played music.

  —

  In elementary school, I was confident and thus well liked, popular even. I was an early-round draft pick for teams in PE class, I won the spelling bee, I attended every crucial water park birthday party and sleepover, I was active in music, sports, and school plays, and I was elected vice president. (My campaign speech included lines like “Girls just wanna have fun, but they want to be politicians, too.” And, “We built this city on rock ’n’ roll, but we should build this school upon leadership.” When I finished talking, I played recorded snippets of all the songs I’d mentioned, in case anyone had the nerve or cluelessness to miss my clever puns and pop culture references.)

  By sixth grade I had two best friends, one of whom, Tammy, was the first person I knew whose parents were divorced. She lived with her mom. Tammy was also the first kid I knew who lived in an apartment. At that age I thought apartments were built specifically to house the single or the newly single, a divorce dormitory of sorts. Tammy was cute and tough,
with freckles and an upturned ski-jump nose, her bangs bleached tangerine from hydrogen peroxide and sprayed into an upright, frozen wave. Her mom was a smoker, also a rarity to me in the Pacific Northwest suburbs, but I liked the lived-in quality the smell of nicotine brought to their place, a gritty, world-weary sophistication. Plus, we stole her mom’s cigarettes so that we could smoke in parks and on weekends. Smoking for me meant blowing outward like you would on a kazoo. In my mind it still looked cool, and I was too afraid to inhale. I credit this early exposure to cigarettes with removing any desire to be a smoker later in life. (Parents, take note.)

  When Tammy arrived at Benjamin Rush Elementary, the rumor was that she had already lost her virginity. She tacitly and vaguely confirmed this to be true, though I still think the whole story might have been fabricated. I figured it might be a case of crafty social maneuvering on her part, a self-mythologizing that is granted to—or required by—kids who transfer schools. Or maybe Tammy was trying to suggest that she had some form of street cred, which is one way a kid with lower economic status gets on equal footing with the middle-class kids. Anything that smelled of real-life experience or hardship (the more exotic and subversive, the better) the comfortable suburban kids held in high esteem. This notion of personal transformation and redefinition is what drew me to Tammy: there was a boldness, a mystery, and a whole lot of not giving a shit.

  It was Tammy who orchestrated my first kisses and make-outs. Together we attended summer camp: me, so I could shoot bows and arrows, sing Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” in a round, and make lanyards; her, so she could meet boys from other schools and gargle with someone else’s tongue. Eventually, I decided that holding hands with a guy in a turtleneck and shorts in the middle of the woods and dancing to Depeche Mode in the mess hall was more fun than canoeing or collecting clams on the beach, though it was always in the back of my mind that I hadn’t showered or been able to go to the bathroom for over five days.