Chapter 1 Perfect 10 I like to say that I was raised in Berkeley, California, by a pair of pot-smoking hippies. This is factually true, but it gives the wrong impression. Tie-dyed shirts, Birkenstocks, unwashed hair, co-ops, free love. Berkeley in the sixties, basically-the identity to which the city still so desperately clings. This creates an easy shorthand for a childhood lived outside the norm, but the abnormal aspects of my childhood can''t be summarized by such a clichZ. We lived in a Craftsman in North Berkeley on a busy two-level street bisected by the Hayward fault line. You could walk a couple of blocks-down a secretive sun-dappled path, beyond the fence that neighborhood kids had, in a united act of delinquency, covered with discarded bits of bubble gum-to nearby Solano Avenue. There was a small movie theater with a vintage marquee, a progressive bookstore, and a wide array of "ethnic" restaurants, as some graying white hippies would imperiously call them.
It was small-town living in a not-so-small town. One that trumpeted its liberal politics and famous history of war protests, and above all embraced the giddy spectacle of people doing their own thing-like Pink Man, a guy who donned a head-to-toe hot-pink bodysuit and silver cape and rode around town on a unicycle. "Berserkeley," I called it, smiling proudly. Across the sparkling blue-green bay was San Francisco, or the City, which I understood as a kid to be kooky in its own way. Although, all I really knew early on was Pier 39 with its kitschy souvenir shops and stinky, raucous sea lions-essentially, the opening credits to Full House. Despite the setting, my childhood wasn''t organic greens and whole grains. It was Lay''s potato chips and party packs of Pepperidge Farm cookies (see: pot-smoking hippies). My mom had brought her Midwest roots with her to the crunchy Bay Area, so we didn''t go to farmers markets, join a co-op, or grow vegetables in our garden.
We didn''t even compost. Instead, we bought Coca-Cola by the case and went to Disney on Ice. My parents rebelled in other ways, though, like the pot, and my last name: Clark hyphen Flory. It was what so many people did in their milieu at the time, which paved the way for plenty of jokes about a future Berkeley populace full of double and triple hyphenates. It''s such a small thing, that hyphen, but it represented the kind of partnership that they wanted to have: emphatically, sometimes inconveniently equal. My mom ran her own graphic design business in San Francisco and woke while it was still dark out in an attempt to beat traffic across the bridge. That meant my dad, a programmer at a Berkeley tech start-up, got me ready for school in the mornings when I was little. He supervised tooth brushing, poured my bowl of cereal, and combed out my long mass of hair.
A "rat''s nest," as he called it, often developed overnight, and he would take me out onto our sunlit porch so that he could delicately pick at it with a comb, whistling to himself while French-braiding my hair, a skill he had picked up from some moms on the playground during his paternity leave. Even in our sensitive, liberal climate, my dad was unusual for a man. In my mom''s circle of predominantly queer women friends, I would hear things like, "He''s a special guy, your dad." He was stereotypically masculine-deep booming voice, copious body hair, towering stature-but quick to tear up at little things, like a thoughtful gesture or a dramatic movie scene. During college he had trained to become a peer counselor as an extracurricular activity and went through emotional workshops where, as he put it in his characteristically confident and unselfconscious way, "I got really good at crying." Right on up until puberty, I spent every Sunday afternoon adventuring with him-rock climbing, windsurfing, skateboarding, hitting balls at the batting cages. It was our version of church, the objects of worship being nature, sun, and sweat. Sometimes he brought me to a sprawling park in the Berkeley hills, where we climbed through a creek looking for water skippers, threw whistling Frisbees on the grass, and picked blackberries from gnarled thickets.
My tan scrawny legs were often caked in dried flecks of mud, my feet slipping and squishing in soaking wet Keds. In those days, time with my dad always carried the thrill of possibility. We were going to go do things in the world. Things that made me burst through the front door with an exciting proclamation. I threw a Frisbee! Look how many blackberries we got! I scraped my knee, but I''m okay! He never treated me like a princess, but then he did build me a castle-a large wooden structure that sat in our front yard, looming over our five-foot fence, with a drawbridge, stairs, and even a turret. He painted it gray to approximate the color of ancient stone and flew a rainbow-colored windsock at the top. But if I was a princess, he made sure that I was a roller-skating, creek-jumping princess who kissed banana slugs, and without any hope they would turn into a prince. Then again, I also was a princess who stopped using her castle when spiders moved in and spun pillowy nests of eggs in every corner.
But he tried, really, he tried, to counteract every other message I might absorb about what it meant to be a girl. My mom was what many men pointedly called a "strong woman." That''s because, you know, she was smart and had opinions, but also because she made it clear she was not ever going to be stepped on, especially by any man. "Watch it, buster" was a signature line, said if my dad impishly overstepped even small bounds, like lightly teasing her about the trivial talk show she had on or stealing a bite off her plate. My mom had developed this defensive posture growing up with a 1950s caricature of a dad who worked too hard, drank too much whiskey, and, in her words, "ruled like a tyrant" She was no tyrant with her "little bunny." From those early years, my mom lingers as a sense memory of safety and comfort: her hair-sprayed perm pressing against my cheek as she hugged me, the drip of wet washcloth held to my feverish forehead, the smell of Kraft singles melting onto a sizzling pan as she made me a grilled cheese. All the pain she experienced as a little girl and beyond? None of that for me. Maybe her daughter wouldn''t have to be such a "strong woman.
" My mom didn''t exactly identify as a feminist-she preferred the term humanist in part because she felt there was something pleading and fragile about feminism-but the definition of the word described her fundamental belief: men and women are equal. That belief fueled her arm''s-length relationship with feminine presentation. Her closet was filled with loose-fitting blouses, stretchy black cotton pants, and sensible flats with flexible rubber soles. She didn''t own anything more than a modest kitten heel. During the workweek, she put her hair in curlers, unwrapped her flowy tops from the dry-cleaning plastic, and applied chalky makeup that dusted the top of her dresser, but she made a point of telling me that she had to do this to be "professional," not because she wanted to or believed in it. For my mom, makeup in particular was a drag, and a kind of drag. She didn''t work out or diet, either. My friends'' moms owned pastel-colored dumbbells and aerobics VHS tapes, while mine proudly called herself a hedonist, stocking the freezer with Drumsticks.
My mom thought it was silly for women to punish themselves for aesthetics, whether it was aggressively counting calories or wearing blister-causing high heels. When I asked in fourth grade to buy a razor to start shaving my legs, she told me, "Once you start, it''s hard to stop," as though hair removal was a gateway drug. Even absent any great feminine suffering, she made a value judgment about relying too heavily on your looks. After one of my dad''s old college friends came for a visit with a busty girlfriend wearing a low-cut bodysuit, my mom remarked dryly, "She led with her chest." My mom led with her mind. That phrase "Beauty is pain"? The message I got from my mom was "Beauty is dumb." My dad seemed to agree. One night, channel surfing across the Miss USA pageant, with its parade of women clad in neon swimsuits sashaying before a panel of judges, he tsk-tsked and shook his head.
"Some people have such a limited idea of what makes a woman attractive," he said. "Your mom is the most beautiful woman I''ve ever met." At the time, I was twelve years old and entering puberty''s hormonal assault. I had a thick mat of blunt-cut bangs that dusted the very tops of my eyelids-my awkward attempt at hiding the mountain-scape of zits on my forehead. I wore baggy T-shirts, wide-legged jeans, and skater shoes, feeling that it was safer to dress like a boy than to attempt to look pretty. My dad was trying to assure me that I didn''t need to look like these women. He was always finding these teachable moments, casting aspersions on titillating Victoria''s Secret catalogs and emaciated Calvin Klein models. I would roll my eyes, as any young person does when cornered with one of their parents'' life lessons, but it made me hopeful that the boys at school might see beyond my not-so-secret pimples and tomboy style.
It also gave me hope about the adult world, the world of men, ahead of me. I don''t remember many specifics about what my parents told me about sex. By sixth grade, it had become one of the topics I cared about most-I was always sneaking off during family trips to the bookstore to read snippets of Our Bodies, Ourselves-.