On my first-grade report card, my teacher wrote, “Jane does not take pride in her work. She spends too much time talking and visiting.” My mother wrote back, “I spoke to Jane about this and she has promised to do better.” I’m sure that never happened. I could no more stop myself from talking and cutting up than I could stop the earth from turning.
Whether at home or at school, I’d do anything to get laughs or attention. When the phone would ring, I’d rush to it and answer in a baby-talk voice that cracked the family up—“Well hellooooo, who’s calling, please?” Once, when I was about eight, my mom got on the phone after I’d answered it, and I could tell she was defending me. “Well, that was my daughter …. She’s eight …. I beg your pardon!” And she slammed down the phone. I am pretty sure the person on the other end asked if I was developmentally delayed.
My sister was embarrassed by my antics, but my brother, the quiet one, would be smirking in a corner. He was supremely dry in his humor, and because he was so shy, it snuck up on you. He’d come up with a particularly witty youthful retort like “someone’s got their panties in a wad.” I’d watch him walk away so pleased with his little quip that he’d relive the moment by mouthing it silently.
Once, again when I was about eight, my brother was listening to his transistor radio. He kept switching the earpiece from one ear to the other, which I thought was his idea of a joke. “You can’t do that,” I said. “You can only hear out of one ear.”
“No, I can hear out of both,” he answered. And that was how I discovered I was deaf in my right ear. I really thought that everyone could only hear out of one ear, because for as long as I could remember, that had been true for me.
I told my mother that I couldn’t hear out of my right ear, and she took me to the doctor to get checked out. Turns out I have nerve deafness, probably a result of a high fever when I was a baby. My parents had taken me to the hospital, where I was put on ice to bring the fever down, but the right ear must have been already damaged.
I didn’t think too much of it, since I’d been doing fine all this time. But I could hear my mom saying to the doctor in a hushed tone, “Will she live a normal life?” I think this was my mom’s constant concern for me, reflecting her Midwestern priority list, on which “normal life” came right after “food” and “shelter.” But I was thrilled with the diagnosis, because I was finally special—and getting some attention.
It came in handy, too—when I wanted to take revenge on a bully in elementary school. I was a safety patrol officer, which meant I wore an orange vest and helped kids cross the street. When one boy whacked me in the head as he crossed, I pretended he had deafened my one good ear. I made a big deal out of it, holding my head and looking scared, and they called the kid’s mom in. Someone yelled, “CAN YOU HEAR ME?” while I just shook my head and flailed my arms. That kid was in trouble.
AS MUCH AS I JOKED AROUND, AND AS LOVING AS MY parents were, I still always felt a weird, dark energy bottled up inside. Even as a very young kid, I had a sense I was missing out on something. My body was filled with a buzzing nervous tension that constantly threatened to erupt in what my mother came to call “thrashing.”
Whenever the pent-up energy got to be too much, I’d throw myself to the floor and pitch a fit. I’d flail my arms and kick my legs, rolling around like I was possessed. It wasn’t even that I was angry or upset—it was just that I couldn’t take the built-up pressure. I had to release that energy somehow, and the only way that I knew was to have a total spazz-out on the floor.
“Get up! Stop thrashing!” Mom would shriek. She had absolutely no idea what I was doing or why. But I couldn’t get up or stop—not until I’d spewed out whatever was bottled up inside me. It never lasted very long, as I wasn’t really that upset. It was more like this was something my body needed to do—a sudden physical cataclysm, like a violent sneeze.
The problem was, I just never felt quite right—in my body, with my family, in the world. As much fun as I had with my parents, sister, and brother, I still felt like an outsider, like no one understood me at all.
These feelings scared me, so I would joke about them. “I know you adopted me,” I’d announce gravely to my mother. “I know I came from the Greens, down the street.” There were no Greens living on our street, but that was part of the joke. I didn’t belong anywhere, to anyone. I was alone.
I not only felt out of place in my family, I also felt out of place in my own body. Growing up, I didn’t feel like the other girls seemed to feel. I wanted to be a boy. I loved Halloween, because I could dress up as a guy—I was a hobo, a pirate, a ghost who wore a tie, and one year I was excited to dress as Orville Wright for a book report on the Wright Brothers. I went bare chested in the summers until I was eight and my mom finally pulled the plug on that. She grabbed me off my bike and sent me into the house. “Put a shirt on!!” Watching Disney movies, I wanted to be the heroic prince—not the weak, girly, pathetic princess who always needed rescuing. I had no interest in being saved by a guy on a white horse.
Whenever I could get away with it, I’d sneak into my dad’s room and put on his clothes. I loved everything in his closets— his suits, his button-down shirts, his ties, his shoes. I’d dress myself up, fill his martini glass with water, and look at myself in the mirror, sipping my “cocktail” like the quintessential sixties man I longed to be. It was very Mad Men. (This past year I went trick-or-treating as Don Draper. Some things never change.)
I embraced the melodramatic potential of all these feelings clashing around in my body. “No one understands me!” I would cry, hurling myself onto my bed in tears. As I saw it, there was only one person in the world who ever understood me, and he had died on my fourth birthday. My grandfather.
I actually have no idea if Grandpa understood me at all, but this was a useful notion for an emotionally overwrought child to cling to. The family lore was that whenever I came over, he would shout, “Here comes the house wrecker!” He adored me, a truth that seemed obvious enough in one of the few surviving photographs of us together. It was taken in June of 1964, just before my fourth birthday. My sister and I are wearing matching dresses and playing near my grandfather, who is beaming at me with a look of pure love.
Grandpa beams adoringly at me. Oh, and Julie’s there, too.
The fact that he died soon after that picture was taken and on my birthday only added to the mystique, and for years afterward, whenever I felt sad or alone, I’d think to myself, If only Grandpa were alive. He would have appreciated me.
I just wanted to believe that someone, somewhere, understood me. And since Grandpa wasn’t an option, I went for the next best person: Mary Tyler Moore. I watched a lot of television and loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Soon, I began imagining myself as a character in it. I’d write scenes for myself, where I’d go to Mary for advice, and she’d look into my eyes and say, “Jane, you are so special.” In my scenes, Mary and I had a very sweet, tender relationship. She got me.
When I was twelve, the feeling that I was odd and misunderstood jumped to a whole new level. That was the year my friends the Stevenson twins gave a name to another feeling I’d been having.
Jill and Michelle Stevenson were in my class at school, and every year during spring break they went with their parents to South Florida. They told me about a weird thing they’d seen there. “Sometimes,” Jill said, “you’ll see boys holding hands with