Being Girls

Mother's Day

I was never a girlie girl--the kind in the frilly dresses, playing Barbies and dress up. I didn't want to be a boy, either. I was content with my horse models, my art-in-a-box projects like Silly Sand and gravel painting, and my horror movies. A "Creature Feature" junkie, I would stay up late at night watching the likes of "Dracula," "Bride of Dracula," and "Samson and the Vampire Women." My girlfriend, Mitsy, would sleep over, and we'd hold our crosses up while secretly rooting for the vampires.

My daughter isn't too different. She loves making papier mache stuff and watching scary movies with me. Oh, she pretends to want to be a boy, wears her Spiderman swim trunks without a shirt whenever I'm not looking, and wears her hair in the lowest position a ponytail can possibly be without any hair showing around her neck, but I'm not fooled.

The other day, I was polishing my nails a lovely shade of pink as she walked in the door. "Ooooh!" she squealed, and she plopped herself down next to me with her fingers outstretched on the table. I didn't smirk or make any remark, just turned and painted her nails. A few weeks ago, I had asked her if she wanted to paint toenails, and she cringed. But this day, I had caught her real mind. Her defenses were down. She didn't have time to weigh whether the boys would shun her like they do the other girls.

One of her boyfriends takes a lot of flack for being friendly with a girlie girl. And Quinny is the girliest of them, with her glorious pink ribbons and blonde hair, her two Quinny tails. The other boys seem to give him a hard time when he has a play date with her, but they don't seem to mind it when my daughter is the date. They date her, too. She's like them.

I have a feeling all that is about to change as she discovers her inner girl. Today, we visited the jewelry store so that I could have the batteries replaced in three of my watches. While we waited, my daughter peered into the glass cases of jewelry and commented on three diamond heart necklaces. We picked our favorites, and then she moved to the next case, where a blue topaz heart topped with two fairly large diamonds glinted. She declared it the best and decided she had to have it. Could we buy it, she wondered?

"It's nine hundred dollars!" I told her.

"So?"

"So: no."

"Anyway, it's only eight ninety-nine," she said, and then she whispered to me, loud enough for the owner to hear: "Maybe they will give us a discount." Unless the discount was $899, it wasn't likely, I told her, and she wasn't happy. What did she want with a heart necklace? That's for girlie girls.

"I like some girl things," she said. I pointed to her green muscle Nike tank and her red and grey boys' basketball shorts. "Not girls' clothes," she corrected me. "But girls' toys and stuff."

The owner of the jewelry store told my daughter that she would probably have to earn the necklace, since her birthday was long passed (the half-birthday scheme doesn't work), and then she showed us a catalog of imposters made with cubic zirconia. A $35 sterling necklace stole her heart. The owner wrote the number and catalog name on a business card and gave it to my daughter. She has put that card in a special place, where she checks on it every so often.

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There is little doubt these days that the mind is inseparable from the body. Boys and girls have different bodies and, therefore, different minds. But as they grow, the differences explode. (Without breasts and periods and vagina awareness, little girls are much closer to little boys.) As we grow, we become more attractive to the opposite sex, more dangerous, and more foreign.

While I value the friendships I have with the men in my life—old pals from college, poets and musicians, fellahs who've hung out at my house and taken me to dinner when my own man was away (and there are plenty of these)—they are nothing like my friendships with women.

It's not as simple as spending an overnight at each other's apartment, watching scary movies and painting each other's toenails. And it's not as predictable as the bitch and gripe sessions, the ones where you tell each other that if it weren't for sex and spiders, there'd be no need for men. It's more subtle than that. It's sharing peppermint frappuccinos while window shopping. It's pointing out the women you might be attracted to.

I once went with a girlfriend on a canoe trip to the Pokomoke River. We put it on the car ourselves, strapped it down, and drove two hours in the early morning. We took mind-altering substances, got the canoe people to transport us twelve miles upstream, and we spent the day on the river, portaging over downed trees, steering each other into giant black snakes that dangled from low branches, being awed by the owl beside us. We laughed at our bad hair and muddy clothes. We made noises at the turkey vultures. We raced other canoes. And when we were finished, we drove to the campsite, set up camp, cooked, and went to bed. In the morning, we walked down to the foggy dock with our coffee and listened to the bullfrogs sing. A man came fishing with his radio blaring. We asked him to turn it down, and he did.

It is still one of my best memories.

CeeCee, of the Pokomoke River trip, who also joined me on a slew of upside-down rides in Ocean City one summer and who taught me to water ski and sail and eat brats in 'sconsin, is getting married on July 4th in her hometown, on the same lake where I spent several summers with her family, skiing and taking cocktail cruises. I'm not going for many reasons, not the least being that we don't talk much anymore. Now that she talks with the dead and performs solstice rituals, she has new friends, and she doesn't have much time for me. Those things we say we want to do again, like take a weekend vacation and ride amusement park rides, probably don't excite her much anymore. We always have fun when we're together, and she always says I love you at the end of phone conversations. But she lives five miles away, and we don't see each other more than twice a year.

I suppose I could ride the Zipper with a man, but I don't know if it's right to go on a camping trip, alone, with one--especially if I'm married. And the eyebrows would raise if I split a room at the Philadelphia Sheraton with a guy I'd met on an Internet forum, like I did last summer with Joy. We giggled and watched Comedy Central and swam in the pool and the hot tub late at night. They're not particularly girlie things, no. (Well, maybe the giggling.) But they're things that imply something more when they are done with a man.

Men and women are different. I think a woman could, innocently, share a hotel room with a man. But a man could not. He is not wired that way. (If you don't believe me, watch any "Seinfeld" episode.)

Why does a girl need a girl? To give her an honest opinion on a cocktail dress for a black-tie gala. To discuss dysmenorrhea and fibroids and breast tenderness. To people-watch at the Renaissance Festival and choose plants at the Herb Festival and ogle shoes at Nordstrom. A girl needs a girl for spa treatments and conversation that includes whispering and pointing. And, OK, to talk trash about husbands at the Double-T Diner and paint toenails and giggle in their hotel room.

A girl needs a girl because a girl understands what being a girl is like.

On the day that my daughter becomes a girl, I know she will have her mother (by then an old girl), but mothers are for wiping tears and dispensing wisdom and, often, biting tongues. We aren't always camarades. She will need a girlfriend, too.