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Growing Up 101

Pam Munter

    It was a different time. I was a different person.
    My friendship with Margie began in 1958 when I acceded to my mother’s wish and joined a girls’ social club my first year of high school. Never a joiner or even a competent conversationalist, I dreaded it, but Mom was right. I was a solitary bookworm who lived in movie theaters, spending most of my time outside of school in Hollywood-flavored fantasy.
    The Harlequins club was sponsored by the YWCA and one of many that dotted the social landscape of University High School in West Los Angeles. Almost immediately, it was apparent that the group of eleven randomly elected girls was informally divided, both by level of sophistication and extraversion. I belonged to the mousy four, having little to say and lacking the confidence to say it. When it came time to elect a president, there was a unanimous choice.
    “I think we should elect Margie,” came the voice of one of the extraverts.
    “Yay. Yay. Yeeeees!” Not a shred of doubt appeared on any of the faces.
    She was an outspoken organizer, a nascent cruise director on the verge of ordering everyone into the pool. Her social skills befuddled me as I watched her integrate the two factions, roping all of us into the social activities of her choosing. The type of games mattered less than the fact she was in charge, be it a board game, charades, or something else. Already at 15, she had a persona any Fortune 500 CEO would envy.
    Even then, I wondered if her demeanor might be compensation for her pock-marked face and the involuntary tic that made her seem as if she were in random agreement. Like the rest of us in the throes of adolescent development, she was likely trying out a self that turned out to be a perfect match to her adult personality. In contrast, I was a pudgy, acne-faced girl with unruly blonde hair, not having a clue about what lay ahead. Margie always seemed to know.
    I disliked high school, feeling like an “other” in a world of shared jokes, and counting the days until graduation, ceremoniously ripping off each page of a calendar on the wall in the journalism office. I had not planned to go to college, thinking I would get a job at a movie studio and slowly work my way to the top. Of course, I didn’t know my aspiration was ridiculous. It would be more than 20 years before a woman ran a major film studio. However, over the summer, I relented and half-heartedly enrolled at a local community college, majoring in theater.
    My father was a long-time employee of Douglas Aircraft, the major employer in Santa Monica, and found me a summer job there as a clerk/typist. Since early high school, I had struggled to survive menial, minimum-wage jobs - answering phones for a music school, folding fabrics for a yardage store. Babysitting jobs were happily accepted, and I routinely cleaned houses and mowed lawns. I wasn’t satisfied being a typist but delighted that the union wage was four times paid by any other available job
    At the Douglas medical intake appointment, I entered to see Margie sitting in the waiting room. She jumped up and gave me a warm hug. She told me she was a student at Cal (the University of California at Berkeley), majoring in history. Her father also worked for Douglas and had gotten her the same kind of job. That happenstance morphed into daily conversations, commiserating about the sexist men for whom we worked. We were both out of our element and acerbic observers of the passing scene. I was taken by her intelligence and quick wit, instantly connecting in ways beyond our reach in high school. It was just the two of us against “them” and, for the first time in our relationship, I had her full attention.
    We were efficient and completed our allotted work in about half the time expected by our bosses. So, though we worked a building away from each other, we managed to spend an inordinate amount of time communicating. I was writing a musical comedy revue in my “spare time” on the job, and I’d send her drafts via the company mail, which we’d discuss in subsequent and prolific follow-ups.
    “I’m going to insert a song in here about the family leaving for Jamaica. Too early for an ensemble piece? What do you think?”
    “Not at all. It’ll liven up that first act. I can see that as a big production number. Let me know when you have lyrics. I’d love to see them.”
    It made heedless fun out of what could have been a summer of drudgery. On weekends, she would come over and hang out and I was often invited for dinner with her family. To me, the setting resembled an affable 50s family sitcom. Her mother jokingly pointed out the bowl of Tums and Rolaids at the center of the table at the beginning of each meal, knowing it was unlikely that anyone would require such relief. I adored her mother, who was warm and witty like Margie, gracious and welcoming.
    Both our mothers were funny extraverts, our fathers taciturn engineers but the family similarities ended there. She was an only child; I was the eldest of two. Her parents exposed her to a world of art and literature, discussed politics and history at the dinner table, and routinely engaged in literate conversation. My parents were not interested in those topics. In fact, there wasn’t much conversation between them at all, and even less about the outside world, other than my father’s remarks disparaging racial and ethnic groups. My mother took me to the movies (which informed the rest of my life) while my father tinkered in the garage. At night, they watched television in the den. The only museums I visited were on school field trips, and I can’t recall attending a concert or a play with them during my childhood. Margie burst into her adolescence full of confidence while I turned inward, controlled in large part by my mother’s anxiety and chronic tendency to give me unsolicited and often unwanted advice. There was always something she wanted me to do or be.
    “Don’t forget your raincoat.” It was pouring outside. I noticed.
    “You should run for class president.” Really? Introverted me?
    “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” I didn’t know it yet, but my personality was far more aligned with vinegar than honey. Good thing I wasn’t courting flies.
    In September that year I transferred to UCLA, just a few miles from home, and worked part-time for a PR agency in Beverly Hills. Margie and I exchanged long, chatty letters. When she invited me to visit her in Berkeley, I jumped at the opportunity. A natural writer, she had tantalized me with colorful forays into the exciting demimonde of San Francisco just across the bridge, along with escapades while existing with five other girls in an apartment off campus.
    “Last night, we all piled into the car and went to the Red Garter. We sang along with the band. We closed up the place.”
    “We taped over the toilet seat, but Greta didn’t realize it until it was too late. Drunk. Even she had to laugh at that one.”
    They sounded like scenes out a movie, certainly nothing from my life. I was eager to experience it and them in person.
    The airplane window was a blur of lights as we taxied near the San Francisco International Airport sign. I was agog, ready for adventure, if a little anxious. I had lived a quiet, contained life, traveling mostly with my structured, conventional family - naïve, untested, and decidedly unworldly.
    Margie and Rich, her boyfriend, picked me up at the airport in his ancient, rickety Citroen. My heart galloped as we crossed the Bay Bridge into Berkeley. Questions raced through my head. What would this be like? What could happen? Would I fit in? My black-and-white existence was already cracking open, but I couldn’t identify it yet.
    Several of the girls were at the apartment when we arrived. Margie had given me the rundown on each of their stories in her letters: Molly, tall and gaunt, was about to join the Peace Corps in Kenya; Dori was a normless hippie before it had a label. She would come back from the local market with pilfered steak dinners and toilet paper. I would be sleeping in the attic, in the dorm space where all the beds were located. It resembled cozy Army barracks, not at all what I expected. There was a single bathroom downstairs with two toilets, one of them sequestered behind swinging doors for privacy. Again, my thoughts conjured a movie set in teenage girls’ apartment. Life was a fiction I was trying to make real.
    Margie had lots of friends, both at Cal and in LA. She gathered and curated them as one would fine art. They provided her social ballast, I decided, a respite from all the studying.
    The first night, Margie and her friends took me to the Bear’s Lair on campus. It was dark, crowded, noisy, and full of smoke. Everyone seemed to enjoy the folk music and drank lots of beer, which encouraged the boisterous singalong. An inveterate ham, I joined in, abandoning any self-consciousness. I didn’t know all the lyrics to the folk songs, but when they started up with show tunes, Margie and her friends looked to me for help with the words. It was fun to be included.
    Lunch the next day was at Larry Blake’s on Telegraph, close to the university and an easy walk from the apartment. On another night, we reconvened with friends at Larry Blake’s, this time in the cellar and drank beer out of multiple schooners until the wee hours. It was more beer than I had ever consumed.
    She invited me to sit in on a couple of her classes, one in history, the other in cultural anthropology, demonstrating an impressive breadth of intellect to which I could only aspire. The schedule was frenetic; we were always in motion. I could feel doors opening everywhere, ushering in existential fresh air. I was surrounded by discovery.
    On the way to the airport in Rich’s beater, Margie turned to me from the front seat.
    “Why don’t you transfer to Cal for your senior year. It would be good for you. We’d have a blast.”
    “Oh, wow.”
    “Think it over. Transferring would be easy to do.”
    I had not considered entering this world, except in fantasy. It was seductive and terrifying.
    “Let me think about it. But, God, it would be so fun.”
    Since it was a University of California branch like UCLA, my previous classwork would count toward the degree, and I could graduate on time. I had almost completed two majors – political science and theater. At Cal, I could finish off a major in journalism as well, not available at UCLA.
    I told myself that it would justify the move north to my parents, but I knew it had to do with stretching my thinking and enlivening my world. The relationship with Margie felt unshakeable. Perhaps more than anything, I looked forward to spending quality time together. Our conversations were often profound and provocative, full of internal exploration. We discussed substantive things like art, history, music, and politics but the best times were when we explored our inner worlds, new territory for our developing adolescent brains.
    “What would you do if you had terminal cancer with six months to live?”
    “If you could be any famous person, who would you be? And why?”
    We pondered our family dynamics, our personal histories, our dreams – the things that one doesn’t share with people other than a trusted friend.
    The thought of a year wallowing in that level of intensity fueled my searching self. I was still trying to figure out who I was. What an opportunity this would be, one I could not pass up.
    My parents, my brother, and I drove up the coast in our yellow Ford station wagon, the back loaded with my books and records, and a minimum of clothes. I moved my stuff into a nook in the dining area, having been assigned a small closet and chest of drawers. I would share a tiny study with Margie, at the front of the apartment overlooking the independent movie theater across the street. My bed in the attic was in the middle of the lineup, right next to Margie’s. If this were a movie, it would be a close-up of a page turning.
    There was an air about Berkeley and Cal, different than my life in Los Angeles. It even smelled different - crisper, filled with the appetizing aromas emanating from the pizza restaurant down the block. It was sophisticated, urban, always in motion.
    The classes were demanding in a thrilling way, especially constitutional law, which intrigued me from the start. The teacher, a noted author and scholar, was blind and had memorized the seating chart. We knew he could call on any one of us by name to state the facts of the case. Using the Aristotelian method common in law schools, he continued the inquisition until we failed to answer correctly. To avoid the inevitable embarrassment too early in the questioning, my study time was spent pouring over the assigned cases. The anxiety was palpable, but I thrived on this cerebral duel. Through my many subsequent years of education, that class was the most intellectually pungent and rewarding.
    Margie, who minored in journalism, had raved about her favorite teacher, so I signed up for his class in editing. Unfortunately, it met at 8 a.m. three days a week. Because of our recreational drinking at Larry Blake’s, getting up early was a challenge I could not always meet. The teacher said I was likely to graduate with honors, given my output and GPA. I bargained with him: I’ll forego the honors if I can miss some of those early morning classes without penalty.
    My brain cells felt supercharged. I took exploratory classes in philosophy and sociology, along with the required classwork in journalism and political science. I realized I had been intellectually starved, skating through, seldom pushing myself to my limits. When I had time, I wandered through textbook stores, speculating what I could learn next. I couldn’t get enough.
    After reading the first couple of issues of the Daily Californian newspaper, I walked into the editorial office with feigned aplomb and announced I would be willing to write a weekly TV and film review column, just as I had done in high school as the editor of the paper. To add to this indecorous chutzpah, I said I expected no editorial cuts in my articles. Well, well. Who was this? Without protest, the editor agreed, and I began cranking out articles I could hardly wait to write. I befriended a woman in one of my journalism classes who possessed a rare and prized TV set, making it possible to review the new fall shows.
    Every day was full, I was dating interesting guys and reveling in the intellectual challenges. Dennis was an engineering major with a Cushman Eagle motor scooter, and we drove all over the Berkeley hills, sharing picnics overlooking the bay. Damian was my formidable tennis partner twice a week. Bert took me to dinner at the Cliff House in San Francisco. My foot was firmly placed on the accelerator in nearly every way, lurching toward something I no longer feared. Yet I knew there was something—someone—missing.
    In the midst of my own buzzing life, I hadn’t noticed that Margie had disappeared. We’d still talk during the daytime but when she didn’t return home most nights and sometimes even on weekends, I realized that she was staying over with Rich. I had no idea the relationship had moved to that level. The shock and disappointment were preceded by grief and embarrassment that I had missed that major development. Sure, I was naïve about such things; still, I had expected Margie and I would be spending tons of time together and that wasn’t happening. We talked about the new distance between us and had at least one tense conversation about it.
    “I thought you knew.”
    “Well, obviously not. You didn’t tell me.”
    “I didn’t think I had to. It was obvious.”
    Rather than empathize, she shrugged it off and couldn’t understand my response. I wasn’t sure I did, either. Her reaction made it worse. I felt callow and even stupid. Was I angry? Jealous? Envious? It was too complicated for me to process. What emerged most distinctly was a deep sadness.
    Remember, it was the early 1960s. Society was still tightly wrapped about sexual matters. Unrelated people didn’t openly live together. Gays remained in closets. Women had few rights. Girls were taught to wait for marriage to have sex. I knew what happened “out there,” but I had not experienced it up close like this. This was an unfamiliar world. My moral compass was rendered askew.
    The trust we shared was fractured by this major disconnect. I had assumed we shared the same values and experiences, and we didn’t. It felt like she had lied by omission.
    There was an additional complication. During the Douglas summer, Margie was invited on my family trip to Europe to celebrate our graduation in June. I wanted and needed to make this work somehow. A few weeks after the fateful discovery, I switched gears. I was in the wrong. She was right. I should have known. Why didn’t I know? My expectations had been unreasonable. How could I have been so naïve? Why should I feel abandoned and deceived? I had lost her, or at least my sense of her, and I needed to deal with it and move on. The punishing self-talk was my coping mechanism. It didn’t help.
    With this sudden disillusionment, her faults which I had earlier dismissed, became more intrusive. She had a way of casually patronizing me.
    “You haven’t read Thomas Mann?” she said with a dismissive sniff.
    “It isn’t always about you, Pam,” she scoffed when I lamented my grandfather’s death.
    She was judgmental in other matters, too, and with my faltering sense of self, I was unable to generate a defense. With Europe coming up, I couldn’t walk away, and I didn’t want to do that. There was still so much there. I knew it was a relationship from which I could learn, about myself if nothing else.
    And so, we all went to Europe - for two months, with my family. She criticized their itinerary choices, the foods we chose to eat, the nature of the conversations. I often felt in the middle of the dissonance, seeing all sides. Still, there were frequent laughs, inside jokes, memorable times.
    We were lost while driving around in a German city. Margie had studied German, the only one of us who knew the language. My father asked her to roll down her window and request directions from the man standing on the sidewalk. She dutifully opened the window and in loud, clear English, asked, “Can you tell us whereÉ?” We laughed for several minutes after that.
    I hung in as best I could, though I was feeling physically ill. I assumed it was psychosomatic, a residue from the year of stress. At Cal, I had unsurprisingly developed an ulcer. In Europe, the symptoms were different and unfamiliar. I was tired all the time and had to force myself to get out of bed in the morning. I later learned I had mononucleosis.
    Now and again, we escaped my family. In Germany, we went out for beer at night. In Spain, we guzzled Sangria in a noisy cafe and unexpectedly ran into friends from Cal. Fortuitously, the little trio started playing, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” In Italy, two men on scooters did their best to coax us into taking a ride.
    And I was still trying to catch up. At night, I read James Baldwin. She had told me he was an important writer.
    When Europe was done, she took off for graduate school in Wisconsin and I signed on as a copykid for the Christian Science Monitor in Boston. Neither of us lasted more than six months. We tried to reconnect in Los Angeles, living at home again with our families. We spoke of getting an apartment together. I avoided pursuing it, worried about feeling awful again, just when I was starting to sort things out. We drifted apart over the next few years.
    What happened was that I went into therapy. Among many other issues, I discussed Margie and my feeling of being unexpectedly pummeled, constantly sidestepping a fear of falling into a trap that would corroborate my inadequacy. The psychologist asked why I continued a relationship that felt so toxic. It was a valid question. When Margie made her episodic call to get together, I knew I had to speak up.
    “Let’s meet for dinner. You free Friday? We can meet at Sanford’s on Sunset.”
    “Uh. No. Um. Thanks. I don’t think it’s a good idea. And neither does my therapist.”
    I was clearly agitated, squeezing out the words, and not all that magnanimous. She took the news passively, not even seeking an explanation.
    “OK. Well, bye, then.”
    When I hung up the phone, I was shaking with loss and relief.
    Flash forward into a new century. Facebook arrives! I don’t remember who got in touch first, but we agreed to meet at a restaurant for dinner in Beverly Hills. In her Facebook photos, she looked like her mother. There were joyful comments from her many friends about a well-attended celebration for her birthday at a local theater hired for the occasion.
    I lived in Portland, Oregon, in Los Angeles for a few days doing research for a story I was writing for a classic film magazine. I had previously spent a quarter century as a clinical psychologist in private practice, a natural outgrowth of my curiosity about people, not the least of whom was myself. I had married and divorced, had an adult son, and was in a relationship. Margie still lived in the Los Angeles area and in a long-term relationship after losing her husband in a robbery. She had an MSW in social work and was heading up a major social service organization in the city. She was still that driven dynamo I had met as a teenager.
    I didn’t recognize her until our eyes met and she spoke. We hugged and sat at a table in the middle of the restaurant. She announced to the server that, since we hadn’t seen each other in 40 years, we were going to be there for a while. We caught up with our life details and divergences, and shared laughs about the irony that we both ended up working with people’s problems. Our careers were direct sequelae from the exploratory conversations of decades earlier. Both our lives had been touched by tragedy, which we shared with a familiar candor. There was no mention of our difficulties at Cal, nor the painful and awkward ending.
    I had brought her a copy of my first memoir, Almost Famous: A Life in and Out of Show Biz, and a Sinatra tribute CD I had recorded. She was mentioned in the memoir, of course - kindly, I hoped. While the meeting was cordial, there wasn’t an instant reconnection in the present. When I saw her walk away, I wondered if we’d ever meet again. Our dinner seemed to put a period at the end of the era.
    We have met again in LA a couple of times, the meetings many years apart. Each time has been better, warmer, more comfortable. Perhaps with age and the passage of time, it’s easy to overlook the stumbles and focus on the closeness – those wonderful conversations, shared adventures in college, in LA, and in Europe. In the previous decade, I had written dozens of essays, short stories, and a second memoir that didn’t mention Margie at all. Over a quiet dinner last year, I said I had never written about the year at Cal. She looked surprised.
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know. Not sure what I’d say. It was an intense year.”
    What I didn’t divulge was that, even after all these years, I was still embarrassed by my ignorance and neediness, feeling a residual sense of responsibility for the upheaval. I had come to understand it was about abandonment, an unforeseen salvo to my shaky sense of self.
    She smiled. “The time at Cal was the best of my life.”
    It underscored our differing perceptions and we quickly moved on to other topics.
    Years later, I wondered if I hadn’t been in love with Margie at some level. There were no sexual or romantic fantasies, then or now. My love affair, if it can be called that, was with the intensity and depth she brought out in me, qualities I found invaluable in my professional and personal life down the road.
    Before that summer with Margie at Douglas and the year at Cal, I worried that I might end up a middle-class housewife, dragging myself through endless Ground Hog days. In a sense, Margie helped save me from that. Our teenage friendship unleashed a cascade of exploration both within and without that altered the course of my life. The process of extricating myself from the disheartenment and despair gave me a crash course in learning about myself. She inadvertently had prodded me along the road to becoming, entering my life at a critical, developmental moment.
    If there were a class called “Growing Up 101,” I would be happy with an “Incomplete.” Self-exploration is a process that’s never done and seldom easy.
    NOTE: Names are pseudonyms

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