'Nor, Quitted Once, Can It Be Quite Recalled'

I think we have fetishized age thirteen. It’s linguistic: the first -teen, as though that were some rite of passage. I remember awaiting that age with trepidation, uncertain what was expected of me. I knew contemporaries who were already shaving and one who was pregnant. (Where have you gone, Leona?) I was beard-less and girlfriend-less, and ashamed of both. Literature-wise, I had recently given up on science fiction and was reading Camus, Kafka and Updike.

 A friend tells me about her daughter who just turned thirteen. A few problems, nothing criminal, have emerged. She asks for advice, which always makes me itchy. It can be dangerous. Besides, I know nothing about girls. I had only a brother. My father had two brothers, no sisters; my mother, five brothers, no sisters. The Y-chromosome was king in our lineage. Girls are still exotic to me. I’ll turn it over to someone with experience. Here is “Portrait of Girl with Comic Book,” a 1952 poem by Phyllis McGinley originally published in The New Yorker. She had two daughters:

 

“Thirteen’s no age at all. Thirteen is nothing.

It is not wit, or powder on the face,

Or Wednesday matinees, or misses’ clothing,

Or intellect, or grace,

Twelve has its tribal customs. But thirteen

Is neither boys in battered cars nor dolls,

Not Sara Crewe or movie magazine,

Or pennants on the walls.

 

“Thirteen keeps diaries and tropical fish

(A month, at most); scorns jump-ropes in the spring;

Could not, would fortune grant it, name its wish;

Wants nothing, everything;

Has secrets from itself, friends it despises;

Admits none of the terrors it feels;

Owns half a hundred masks but no disguises;

And walks upon its heels.

 

“Thirteen’s anomalous – not that, not this:

Not folded bud, or wave that laps a shore,

Or moth proverbial from the chrysalis.

Is the one age defeats the metaphor.

Is not a town, like childhood, strongly walled

But easily surrounded; is no city.

Nor, quitted once, can it be quite recalled –

Not even with pity.”