The teachers loved Mack, too, but in a slightly exasperated way that Mack found comforting. He used to think that their affection for him was due to his mother, who everyone knew had raised him on her own yet attended parent-teacher conferences with none of the belligerence or accusatory concern of so many other parents. Geoff said that Mack’s mother was especially great because even though she made it clear Mack ought to be working harder and getting better grades she actually just let him do whatever he wanted (which meant that Mack had never been particularly rebellious at all).
As for the prom, Mack supposed he should ask Tilda. She often spent time with him and Geoff at Carl Loam’s house, and he was used to her sarcasm and her long spurts of laughter. She was basically one of the guys, except that she wasn’t. She was a girl, and this was impossible to ignore, especially when she wore that green knit sweater that was just slightly too small. Tilda was tall, like Mack, with a big, somewhat horsy smile and a mess of reddish hair that she barely bothered to comb. Now that the weather was hot, she kept wearing shorts to school. There had been one steamy day, a year before, when Mack looked over and saw she’d hiked her rayon skirt up above her knees, onto her thighs.
That image returned to him often, the fabric piled there lightly across her freckled flesh. There were plenty of other images around to tantalize him—the postcards in Carl Loam’s room, for instance—but it was the memory of Tilda with her skirt piled up that always set Mack off.
Plus, he liked Tilda, truly—more than any other girl. The problem was, she had an even bigger crush (it was obvious) on him, and that was always a bit of a turnoff.
Each afternoon, during seventh period, in Fourth Year French, Madame Lipsky held an update. She looked at everyone through those huge, tinted glasses, from under her huge, tinted hair, and said, Whoever doesn’t have a date yet, raise your hand. She was in her forties and wore shoulder pads in all of her blouses, which usually tied in floppy bows at the neck. Her skirts were always long, and her leather boots scrunched down around her heels like the skin on a bulldog’s face. She wore bright rouge and eyeshadow and slightly purple lipstick. Somehow, on Madame Lipsky, this combination looked perfectly acceptable.
Already people were pairing off. Bernard Leeson, who would do anything for an A, within a week had asked Jessica Schneck. Even girls who hadn’t yet been asked were spending hours after school at Nancy’s Look Great! Shop, examining rainbows of eyeshadow, requesting special antiperspirant for delicate fabrics, researching nail polish and face powder and adhesive cups that could keep anyone’s breasts perky under a strapless dress for up to eighteen hours. There were lipsticks that doubled as blush, and hair rollers you heated up before clipping them in. Mack heard all about these innovations during gym class, where, adorned in team pinnies soaked with the previous classes’ sweat, the girls formed little gangs in the outfield to discuss whether they wanted baby’s breath or ivy in their corsages.
When it came to boys like Mack, Madame Lipsky appeared to expect them to take their time. But one Friday she told the class, “We have a problem.”
The students braced themselves for another assignment.
Carmine Bocchino, Madame Lipsky explained, had asked five girls and still didn’t have a date.
Carmine wasn’t even in their French class. He had a speech impediment and was in the “slow” track. But the kids in the “slow” track were constantly picking on him, because he was short and scrawny and talked funny. And so he didn’t really have any friends. In fact, no one had ever given him any thought at all until the business about the prom.
Within minutes it was clear to everyone in Fourth Year French what the problem was: Carmine had reached far out of his league. First he had asked Natalie Lopez, the editor of the school paper, who was petite and extremely pretty and not the sort of person even Mack would ever feel comfortable approaching. When Natalie called Carmine the next night to tell him an official No thank you (it had taken her a whole day to formulate a polite, well-worded rejection of just the right tone), Carmine waited approximately two minutes before phoning Trini Prince, who had starred in every single school play except The Man Who Came to Dinner (and that was only because she had mononucleosis that semester). Trini, too, asked Carmine if she could call him back, and, after practicing the lines briefly, delivered her refusal in a kindly and optimistic yet firm manner.
At school the next morning, Carmine had cornered Molly Lang, the star of the girls’ basketball team (and a good foot taller than Carmine); she told him she was waiting for “a special someone.” And so Carmine had moved on to Geraldine Crowley, the head cheerleader, and when she said a flat-out Sorry, no, went straight to Belle Gardner, who was seven months pregnant yet hadn’t lost her habit of threatening to beat up anyone who annoyed her. She told Carmine that if he didn’t get away from her that second she would beat him up.
All of these facts emerged in a matter of minutes, as the girls of Fourth Year French began sharing information they had promised never to reveal to anyone.
“Natalie told me right afterward; she couldn’t believe he had the nerve to ask her.”
“Trini was so shocked, she had to rehearse her lines with me.”
“Geraldine was totally grossed out; we had to go buy her some aspirin.”
“I was right there at my locker when Belle grabbed him by his shirt.”
(No one could figure out, though, who Molly Lang’s “special someone” might be.)
But with Madame Lipsky so concerned, no one dared make fun of Carmine. No one said he had been foolish to ask all the school’s best girls. After all, wasn’t he doing what all the boys wished they could? They forgot that they had ever thought of him as ridiculous. His predicament began to seem, even to them, slightly tragic.
Now the Fourth Year French girls who didn’t have dates were preparing polite rejections, trying them out on one another, since it seemed you never knew when or where Carmine might pop up. Madame Lipsky told them to shush, to listen up, and to think.
“We need to put our heads together,” Madame Lipsky said. “I’m not asking any of you girls to be Carmine’s date, but we need to do some work here. I want you to go home and brain-storm, and let’s see what we can come up with.”
But as quickly as the problem had arisen, it seemed to disappear. The gossip stopped, the chain of proposals ended, and there were no more Carmine-in-action sightings, no more stories of polite, shocked refusals.
Mack supposed Carmine had given up; that was what Mack would have done. But Geoff said someone must have said yes.
“Nah, you think? To Carmine?”
“Someone must have.”
“But who?” Everyone wondered. But no one was friends with Carmine, and so no one asked him.
“What about you?” Geoff asked Mack one weekend, when they were out in the woods behind Geoff’s father’s house, smoking Mack’s mother’s cigarettes.
“What about me?”
“Have you asked her yet?”
“Asked who what?”
“Tilda. Don’t play dumb.”
“Should I ask her?”
“Why not? Prom’s in two weeks. We can all go hang out at Leslie’s aunt’s place on the Cape.”
Mack tried to pay attention to the thoughts that came into his head. Some of them were images from when he was with Tilda: making that DNA replica for Mr. Bunuel’s class, or doing disgusting things with the soup at lunch. Some of them were things she had said to him when they were horsing around, and the times when she had made it obvious how much she liked him. There were images of her neck, which Mack sometimes imagined kissing, and her hips, which he sometimes imagined touching, and the way her cotton shirts sometimes clung to her chest. And then there was the rayon skirt piled across her freckled thighs. Not knowing what else to do, Mack said, “Yeah, I’ll ask her tomorrow.”
When he did, the next morning, out by the flagpole before the bell rang, Tilda’s face dropped and her eyes lowered. She looked annoyed. “I alread
y have a date.”
“You do?” This possibility hadn’t occurred to Mack, and so he sounded even more incredulous than he felt. “But you never said you did.”
“Do I have to tell you everything I do?”
“Who is it?”
“Carmine Bocchino.”
Mack laughed. “No, really, who is it?”
“I just told you.” Tilda’s face was red.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” When she shook her head, Mack said, “You don’t even know him.”
“He at least asked. He at least had the nerve to come up to me and ask. He didn’t wait a whole month because he was too lazy to get off his ass and do something that takes guts.”
Tilda looked like she wanted to say more but suddenly turned and walked quickly away. The bell rang, and everyone funneled into the building for the start of yet another day.
The morning was even hotter than usual, and already the classrooms were filled with that stuffy excitement that blows in with the end of the school year. The only thing left was final exams, and yet with weather so sunny it didn’t seem exams could possibly matter. Nothing did, this time of year, with flowers sprouting out all over the place and teachers sneezing from hay fever. The heat made it impossible to concentrate, and everyone smelled. All Mack could think about was Tilda. He spent all morning staring out of windows, the air filled with a melancholy scent. He felt something growing inside him, something uncomfortable, unbearable. He thought he might burst.
That afternoon, in seventh period French, Madame Lipsky took the weekly tally—Whoever doesn’t have a date, raise your hand. She didn’t look surprised at the fact that Mack was the only one with his hand in the air. “What’s the problem here? Are you waiting for the moon to be at exactly the right angle? Are you waiting for a drum roll? Are you waiting for a sign from God?”
Mack felt the heat in his cheeks. He said, “The girl I want to take is going with someone else.”
He was sweating now. Someone in front of him was snickering. Mack didn’t dare look at Tilda to see her reaction.
Madame Lipsky shook her head. “I’m sorry, did I miss something? Is there something someone forgot to tell me? Is there some new policy here?” She walked right up to Mack’s desk and said, “Since when does everyone get to go with the person they want to take?”
When Mack didn’t say anything, she continued. “You are going to a dance. You are going to spend approximately eight hours in the company of a girl who for all I know you won’t speak to again after you graduate three weeks from now. There’s probably a perfectly nice and deserving girl in another classroom at this very minute just waiting for someone to take her. Since when does it have to be the love of your life?”
Mack felt a trickle of sweat rolling down the side of his torso. He didn’t want to ask that perfectly nice and deserving girl. He didn’t want to take anyone but Tilda. This was so clear to him that he thought he might shout it.
Instead he spoke in his usual, lax tone. “Why shouldn’t it be? If the person’s out there and wants to go with me, too, but happens to have already said yes to some dumbass who got to her first, then why can’t we shuffle things around? Why do we always have to be punished for our mistakes?”
It wasn’t a terribly convincing argument, he knew, but, then, he had never done very well in any of his written essays, either.
Madame Lipsky squinted at him from behind her purple-tinted glasses. “Sometimes we’re punished, and sometimes we aren’t. But you, young man, have a decision to make.”
Mack, though, had made up his mind. He had decided to suffer. Because even suffering was easier than getting up and doing something about it.
After class, when everyone was zipping backpacks and slamming lockers shut for the day, Tilda found him. Her cheeks were red from the heat, and her sweat gave her a healthy shine. “Did you really mean what you said in class today?”
“Which part?”
“The whole thing, I guess.”
“Tilda, I’m just kicking myself for not asking you sooner. I know I was dumb. I’m sorry.”
Tilda looked down shyly for a moment. In a soft, guilty voice, she said, “I think I might be able to get out of going with Carmine. I mean, I’m sure I can figure something out.”
Mack felt his heart leap. He had made a mistake but had been saved. Wasn’t that the way it should be? Somehow he wasn’t surprised, and he realized that he had expected something like this. His whole life, it seemed, women had come to his rescue— his mother, his grandmother, his teachers. He was accustomed to having things work out.
And so he took it as a matter of course when, that evening, Tilda called to say, in her best hit-man imitation, “Alright, boss, the deed’s been done.” She sounded jokey, but Mack heard something else behind her voice.
“I’m really glad, Tilda.” Mack waited for her to say that she was glad, too, but she changed her tone completely and asked him about the math homework. When he had answered her question, she said a quick Thanks, see you tomorrow, as if the math, and not the prom, were her reason for calling in the first place.
Mack told her goodbye. The feeling that had filled his stomach, that had made him want to burst, was gone.
The next week at school, Mack saw Carmine everywhere. Ahead of him in the lunch line, in the hall between classes, in the parking lot at the end of the day. Always Carmine would look Mack in the eye, a flat, blank look that made Mack’s heart pause. He wondered what sort of lie Tilda had made up for Carmine. But when he finally asked her, at her locker one afternoon, she said, briskly, “The truth. You know what they say, honesty, the best policy, blah blah.”
She had been this way with him for days now, quick and dismissive, as if she didn’t have much time and would rather not waste it on Mack.
“And he was fine with that?”
“He said he had someone else he could go with. Look, I’d better get going. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“Tilda, what’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. You just seem . . . like you’re mad at me or something.”
Tilda nodded her head slowly, squinting her eyes as if filtering Mack’s words through them. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” she said. She stood there and looked, all at once, full of disgust.
“I don’t get it,” Mack told her. “What did I do?”
“Nothing,” she said. “That’s what. You had me do your dirty work for you. You sat back and let me hurt somebody in the most ignoble”—it was a word from the college entrance exam— “way. You didn’t have to hurt anyone. You got me to do it instead.”
Mack stared at her. “You’re the one who said you wanted to come with me. You’re the one who was stupid enough to say yes to Carmine in the first place.”
“What choice did I have? When you sit there and do nothing? Was I supposed to ask you? Why don’t you do some of the work for once?” Tilda shook her head and walked away. She didn’t speak to him for the next three days.
The day of the prom, Madame Lipsky took a final tally. She nodded with approval and told Mack, “I knew you’d do the right thing.”
Mack tried to smile. He didn’t dare look at Tilda, even though she had, twice that week, spoken to him briefly and even eaten lunch with him.
“And your friends?” Madame Lipsky asked the rest of the room. “They all set? Everyone’s paired off?”
“Except for Carmine Bocchino,” a girl called out. “I heard him in the cafeteria today. He said his date backed out and he can’t find anyone.”
Mack gave Tilda a covert glance. She looked surprised.
“Who was his date?” people were asking, but the girl said she didn’t know.
“He didn’t say her name.” (He hadn’t said any of the others, either, of course, but each of them had told someone.) “He just said he’d been stood up.”
Madame Lipsky’s face reddened and her mouth tensed. “This is unacceptable.” She shook her head,
bit her lip. “We can’t stand back and let this happen.”
Mack looked at the floor. He felt himself sweating. A crumpled note landed by his foot.
“HE TOLD ME HE HAD SOMEONE ELSE TO GO WITH!”
Prithi Desai raised her hand. “My little sister’s never been to a prom before. She’s a freshman. I’m sure she’d want to go.”
“Where is she now?”
“Math, maybe? I’m not sure.”
Madame Lipsky was scrawling something on a piece of notepaper. “Go to the office and find out. And find out where Carmine is. And when you’ve talked to her, go tell him.”
The room filled with a sense of emergency. Since their class was seventh period—the last class of the day—Madame Lipsky wrote passes for the rest of the girls, too, so that they could go home and set their hair.
“Go, now, get going, make yourselves beautiful,” she cried, shooing them out the door. The girls filed out of the room, even the ones who had never done anything with their hair and probably wouldn’t tonight. Tilda collected her books and gave Mack a cold look. Glumly she told him, “See you at five.”
Mack watched her and the other girls funnel into the hallway. With a piercing, explicit pang, he wondered if Tilda would ever truly like him again, the way she had liked him before.
In a few hours she would be by his side, in a magenta dress that tied in a halter behind her neck. She would dance with him, and with Geoff, and with Carmine Bocchino, whose date would spend most of the night with her sister instead. Carmine would go around with a fancy camera taking pictures of everyone, roll after roll, as if this were a wedding or some other occasion warranting an entire photo album. He would request a dance with each of the girls who had originally refused him, and they would each say yes, even Belle Gardner, since it was one thing to dance with him and another altogether to be his date for the night. They would dance. Across the country they were dancing—teens in ill-fitting tuxedos and strapless gowns, smiling for cameras, arms around each other, waiting for the flash. They had been dancing for months now, to “Twist and Shout” and “Pump the Jam” and “What I Like About You” and to songs they complained could not be danced to. Since April they had been ordering special creations from florists. All of May they had been doing fancy things with their hair. For the rest of June they would pile into limousines, drink cheap champagne, hold hands with people whose hands they didn’t usually hold. In every state in the Union they would dance, had danced, were still dancing, in auditoriums and gyms laden with crepe streamers and balloons, in rented banquet rooms, and on fold-out dance floors. The dancing would continue for a few weeks more, and for years and years.
Calamity and Other Stories Page 5