Puberty and the dating question — two tellings that run in opposite directions

pivotal · UNDATED (Joelle's puberty through the B.U. scholarship)

• When: UNDATED (spans Joelle's adolescence in Shiny Prize up to her departure for Boston University)
• What: What happened between father and daughter when Joelle hit puberty exists in two accounts that must not be merged, because they move in opposite directions. Notkin's account (to the U.S.O.U.S. interviewers, secondhand): things got "first strange and then creepy" — "specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger instead of older": ever-more-child-rated films at the Cineplex, refusal to acknowledge menses or breasts, interdiction of "everything from brassieres to Pap smears," baby-talk, the childhood diminutive "like Pookie or Putti," and strong discouragement of dating — capped by his campaign against her scholarship to a Boston University he maintained was "full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Bam-Bams, unquote." In Notkin's telling it was only at college that Joelle "began even to suspect" her puberty-long lack of social life "might have had as much to do with her Daddy's intrusive discouragement as with her actaeonizing pubescent charms" — suspicion moving toward the Daddy. Joelle's own memory (scene 150) moves the other way: "Until that cookout and confession she'd somehow thought it was her own personal Daddy, somehow, discouraging dates and male-female approaches" — at the Boosters' cookout a drunk All-Kentucky lineman confessed the whole team's paralyzing horror of her prettiness, and the discouragement theory dissolved; the hedge ("somehow,... somehow") is hers, kept as printed. The narrated courtship history sides with neither: "She'd been shunned theretofore, both at B.U. and Shiny Prize–Boaz Consolidated: the beauty had repelled every comer" (scene 068). What Joelle does remember from her Daddy on the subject is a warning, not a ban: "the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies, so to watch out" — a caution she says intensified her own discomfort about her beauty (scene 150). Which account (if either) is right about the Daddy's role in her shunned adolescence is left exactly as open as the text leaves it.