Marion Winik - Rules for the Unruly: Living an Unconventional Life

We hope you enjoyed reading this Touchstone eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Touchstone and Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

Thank you for downloading this Touchstone eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Touchstone and Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

OtHeR BOOKS By maRION WINIK

te LLING first comes Love t H e LUNCH-BOX CHRONICLES

Touchstone

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2001 by Marion Winik

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Touchstone and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Diane Hobbing of SNAPHAUS GRAPHICS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Winik, Marion.

Rules for the unruly : living an unconventional life / Marion Winik.

p. cm.

1. youthConduct of life.

BJ1661.W56 2001

170'.44-dc21

ISBN 0-7432-1603-2

ISBN: 978-0-7432-1663-0 (eBook)

fo R CRISPIN sa R twe LL ,

my R o L e m OD e L

Local conditions always put a limit on what an observer can see. Faint stars become lost in the glow of city lights. Heavy traffic on a nearby street may cause a star image to shiver. If the telescope is pointed at a planet that appears just over a neighbors roof, heated air rising from the roof may turn the planets image into a boiling blob. Gusts of wind, clouds suddenly rolling in, and inconveniently located trees are other hazards.

The observer with a broad open horizon, free from interfering lights, is lucky.

R . N ewto N maya LL , ma R ga R et maya LL , a ND J e R ome wyckoff,
t H e sky OB se R ve R s g UID e

In all the time since that excellent June afternoon when I screeched out of my high schools parking lot after graduation, I never expected or hoped to see the place again. As you probably know, few bullets have more momentum than a departing senior. Yet here I was, ricocheting back twenty-five years later, and did it feel weird. First of all, the place looked exactly the same: the low, sprawling redbrick building with its neat shrubs and swept sidewalks, the silver lettering on the wall beside the entrance. As I stepped uncertainly through the steel-and-glass doors, a smiling woman nabbed me.

Marion, she said. Im Sue Henderson. Sue had graduated from Ocean Township two classes ahead of me and was now the school guidance counselor; she was responsible for my reappearance at our alma mater. She thought that as a former recipient of the Spartan Scholar award who had gone on to become an author and minor celebrity (I can hardly express how minor), I might have some advice for the honoreesthings I wished I had known back when I was in their place.

Me, a role model? I seemed to recall that even back while earning academic honors, Id come pretty close to getting kicked out of there. Then Id gone on to blaze a trail of even more erratic behavior by a supposedly smart person, all of which I had described in print and on the air to as much of the civilized world as I could get to pay attention. Did she perhaps have me confused with some more presentable graduate?

If so, too bad. Tickled by the idea, I accepted before she could change her mind.

I hadnt realized, though, what an eerie experience coming back would be. As I entered those linoleum-and-locker-lined halls, I was swept into a crowd of kids whose faces seemed oddly familiar, though their clothes and hairstyles were a lot better than anything we used to wear. The girls in particular seemed to be ready to star in their own sitcom. With shocking instantaneousness, I was sucked back into the unbearable and constant jealousy of other peoples figures that had been such a feature of teenage life for me. Apparently I had been the victim of some horrible injustice when the tiny perfect butts were handed out, and nothing had happened in the intervening decades to improve the situation.

So when Sue asked if Id like to take a look around, I shuddered. Oh no, I told her, Ill just wait here. If the person I used to be and the emotions I used to feel were lurking in those halls, I wasnt eager to encounter them. Just looking at the bulletin boards, the bathrooms, the school store, and the gymnasium door from a distance was enough. I didnt want to see the ghosts: myself in the hideous blue-bloomered gym suit; myself failing the impossible quiz in chem-physics; myself with Billy Donnelly and the Garelick brothers smoking Salems in a car in the parking lot; myself finding a note from my sister in my locker saying she had run away from home with Kyle Henderson but dont tell Mommy.

High school was the only world we knew back then, the only world there was, but at least it was a captivating one, full of every kind of soap opera, rumor, and gossip, every dark secret and bright, paradoxical surface. At lunch you could find a gang of us having chocolate malts and cheeseburgers at the Towne Bite Shoppe, like nice wholesome teens. At night the scene shifted. We were out behind the Dumpster at the Y or downstairs in somebodys basement, and there wasnt a wholesome thing about it. Our class really did win the homecoming float competition four years in a rowand my pal Lou really did get sent away to a place called the Institute for Living for running a drug laboratory in his bedroom. (My mother has never forgiven me for lending him her pressure cooker.) Like little Amish girls, my sister and I spent hours and hours sewing patches on our jeans and baking giant hand-iced cookies in the shape of bunny rabbits and baskets of flowers. Unlike little Amish girls, we were usually stoned out of our minds at the time.

Just standing there in the lobby of the high school, it was all coming back to me. The dialogue in the first lesson of French 1 (Michel? Anne? Vous travaillez? Euh, non, nous regardons la tlvision, pourquoi?) . The modern dance moves choreographed by our assistant gym teacher Miss Dombrowski to Carly Simons Youre So Vain. The hideous floor-length dress with lavender and white Mbius strips printed on navy polyester I wore to the junior prom, escorted by that Johnny-on-the-spot Kyle Henderson. The difference between sine, cosine, tangent, and cotangent. (Actually, no. But I did at least remember that trigonometry existed.) And then there was the night our friend Eddie Brown died driving home from a little beer party in the ASPCA parking lot.

The things that happened to me in this place were so big and so confusing I could hardly put them all together in my head. I had had the most hilarious fun and the best friends in the world, and I had also been abandoned, rejected, and desperate. I had worked hard, and I had gotten by offering as little cooperation as possible. I had been pregnant. I had been suicidal. I had been Islander #2 in South Pacific . I had aced the SATs and gotten suspended for smoking. I had worn out my David Bowie records, many black leotards, and seven pairs of red Converse high-tops. Then around Christmas of senior year, I had renounced it all and taken up Zen meditation.

Most of all, I had felt suffocated and wanted to GET OUT OF THERE so bad I could taste it. It seems to me now I had this feeling for most of my teens and twenties, pretty much no matter where I was. I was in a very big hurry to move along, to get on to the next thing, to escape. But as I gradually learned, most of what I wanted to escape was actually inside me, and it would be a whole lot of rushing and running later before I made peace with who I was and what I wanted out of lifebefore who I felt I was inside began to correspond more closely to how others perceived me. And before I found the love that was what I was really so desperate to find.