Fifteen

Philip Marlowe could never have survived these mean streets

In 2002, I showed my then-husband¹ a passage I had written about a teenage girl who accepts a ride from a man. Within a few miles, he stops the car on a deserted road and begins to masturbate, telling her that he can sense that she’s a “bad girl.” So the girl, who has just been released from a psychiatric hospital where she was placed by a judge for her role in the death of an infant, shares that story in the third person, as if it’s an urban legend.

“And they found a baby. A baby whose mother didn’t love her. And they took her away from her mother and they made a . . . safe place for her. But the baby was sick . . .

“His hand stopped moving.”

My ex said something like, “Jesus, where did that scene come from?” And I said: “Oh there’s nothing more hardboiled than being a 14-year-old girl who looks 18 walking down a street alone.”

I was 5-foot-9 by my freshman year of high school. The school bus — technically a city bus that the city’s public school students could ride for free with a monthly book of tickets — dropped me off on a busy thoroughfare about a mile from my house. Forest Park Avenue was a gantlet, a place where I was approached by males of all ages on my short walk home.

Most of them lacked finesse, just rolled down their car windows and gestured impatiently for me to get in, pretending they were doing me a huge favor by offering me a ride. Some were high, others drunk.

But one man waited for me along the fence that bordered a baseball field and launched into a speech about how he he had seen me walking there, day after day, and I looked (IIRC) so “nice” and “polite” and he just wanted to meet me and, oh, by the way, how old was I?

“I’m 15,” I said.

He began to stammer, unnerved. He said he assumed I was at least 17. His name was Ben. His face lives in my brain. (So do the other faces, actually.) I also remember exactly what I was wearing that day — a white skirt, a bright blue T-shirt. And I know I should like him best, but maybe I hate him the worst?

At the end of my walk was an empty house because my mother worked.² I would let myself and, on the days I encountered these men, I would go to the bathroom and lie on the bathmat and cry. Clearly something was wrong with me because why else would these men be trying to get me into their cars?

I don’t think it was coincidental that this also was a time when I read a lot of novels written in the 1950s and early 1960s. Lenora Mattingly Weber, Anne Emery, Rosamond DuJardin. These books were relatively chaste, although Weber took on the subject of petting — referred to as “more-thanning” — and made it pretty clear that her heroine, Beany Malone, did not have sex before marriage. (Her eventual fiancé, the literal boy next door, would say “Brakes” when things got too intense.) One of the vicarious pleasures in these novels was that there were clear rules for female behavior. These rules were made even more explicit in Ruth Doan MacDougall’s The Cheerleader, which was definitely not a children’s book³, but still laid out the schedule of sexual activity for what was acceptable if one wanted to be known as a nice girl.

I wanted to be a nice girl and a nice girl needed a rule book. Meanwhile, I had a few friends who were dating men in their 20s and we all thought that was just SO COOL.

Beverly Cleary, better known for creating Henry Huggins and my beloved Ramona Quimby,⁴ also wrote several books about teenagers. Fifteen, which I barely remember, was relentlessly pleasant, a nice novel about a nice girl who met a nice boy and, IIRC, the most traumatic experience was her first meal in a Chinese restaurant? (The far more interesting Cleary YA book is Jean and Johnny, in which a nerdy girl figures out that the popular boy she yearns for is actually kind of a piece of shit.)

I wish Cleary had lived long enough to write about an adolescent Ramona because I believe Ramona’s confusion and anger about the baffling rules of courtship could have bubbled over into something truly transgressive. This is a girl who once took a single bite out of every apple because the first bite was the best. She stole a dude’s lollipop. She was unapologetic about her appetites. (Older sister Beezus, not so much.)

My daughter is 15 now, encountering the confusion I encountered, although she’s seven inches shorter than I was at her age. Why are these men looking at me? she has asked me repeatedly. Has this always been happening or am I just beginning to notice? I don’t have any answers. I showed her The Last Days of Disco recently, which is rife with slut-shaming and double-standards, and she asked me: Was it really like this? And I said: Oh, yeah. And then I tried to explain what a big deal herpes was in the early ‘80s.

Recently, we were walking through a mall together and a salesman at Zales locked eyes with — well I thought it was me (because I make it a point to look VERY well-heeled when I am out and about) and she thought it was her (because she’s frigging gorgeous, although she doesn’t realize it) and now I think maybe it was both of us, as in: Hey, rich lady, come in here and buy that pretty girl a piece of jewelry.

As if we would ever shop at Zales.⁵

I took only one selfie this month, but it’s my Summer 2025 MVP, a Staud dress in linen that I bought after renting it from Rent the Runway. In fact, I think it’s what I was wearing at the mall that day.

Yes it’s very rumpled but is linen ever not?

Reading/read: Kaplan’s Plot, Jason Diamond; The Big Short, Michael Lewis; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein (with illustrations by Maira Kalman; Carousel Court, Joe McGinnis (audio); The Spinach King, John Seabrook (audio).

Rereading: The Serial, Cyra McFadden; Never Let Her Go, Ann Rule.

Me, me, me: The Wall Street Journal’s Tom Nolan released his list of the 25 best crime novels of the 21st century (so far) and What the Dead Know made the list alongside oodles of people I know and love.

1. Oh, wait, we were not officially married yet.

2. Sorry, Gen X, you were not the first latchkey kids.

3. The Cheerleader had a pretty lurid paperback cover, which I think helped obscure the fact that it’s actually a pretty astute examination of a particular kind of female ambition.

4. Ramona is my avatar on Bluesky.

5. Obnoxious. True, but obnoxious. Also I prefer to buy jewelry used when possible.