Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  “I never go anywhere without it—like you and your spare glasses. We all have to look out for ourselves. But that’s not planning anything.”

  He didn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t even hear me.

  The trolley stopped short, throwing me momentarily against Frank. For an instant our eyes met and I saw that his were filled with hate. Was it the hatred of the lion facing his tamer or his prey? Something had gone wrong. Quickly he focused away. For the rest of the ride he sat in a pool of silence until we reached the end of the line. Not a word. But his silence didn’t fool me. I had already seen the hate. I knew I must not let down my guard for an instant or he would spring. I suddenly felt afraid.

  When the trolley stopped at the end of the line we began our six-block trudge through the snow-piled streets to the dreary house we lived in. I carried the anemones; Frank carried my suitcase, his head bent in accusation.

  How dare he accuse me! “What did you expect?” I shouted. But the only reply I got was the thump-thump of my suitcase against his leg.

  Why was I so afraid? Wasn’t I free? I swore to get out of there. Fast.

  Too late I realized I ought to have gone to a hotel; too late I saw that the distance between the beds was not enough. Even in a separate bed I would be trapped under his ego.

  I tried to keep the conversation calm, but Frank would not stay calm. I saw it all: first he would talk about principles and then he would call me names. And if the argument didn’t go his way he would shift the grounds and latinize, exaggerate his consonants and patronize. Already he was whispering, “Quiet! Do you want Frau Werner to know what you are?” and I, losing my own control, was shouting, “I don’t give a shit what Frau Werner thinks! Or what you think either! I care what I think! And what I think is I’m leaving this house and this country and you and Frau Werner!”

  “Shut up, you whore! You bitch! You selfish, castrating bitch!”

  The names they use! My God, I thought, how did I get into this? I had expected it to be so easy. Hadn’t he threatened a thousand times to leave me if I was “unfaithful”? Talk about deceit! It was his word that was worthless. Always insisting that a bargain is a bargain—what about his side of the bargain? There should have been nothing to it: my confession and punishment, a quick D-and-C, pack up, back on the Orient Express, and out of there. Otherwise time would go by and money would be wasted. I had little enough money or time to waste any more of either on him. I refused to listen to his names. I would not let him manipulate me with assaults and arguments.

  “You are trying to make me kick you out, but I won’t,” he threatened. “I’m still your husband. I have rights. If you want to leave me you’ll have to do the leaving. I can’t stop you, bitch. But I’m not going to help you. Not one cent! You can whore your way around Europe!”

  I decided not to answer. I didn’t need his permission, of course, but why point it out? The Fulbright money was his, but the rest was mine, earned on nine-to-five jobs he would never have taken, though he was willing enough to live off it. Perhaps after a night’s sleep he’d be calm and more sensible.

  I asked Frau Werner about getting a bath though it wasn’t our night to use the tub. She said of course, she’d run my water. I slipped out of my clothes, and as I reached for the towel she had placed on the doorknob, Frank came up behind me, yanked the towel out of reach, almost knocked over the anemones, and unfastened my bra. The lion raises his paw. As the bra hung loose from my shoulders he slipped his hands underneath and started to fondle my breasts.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I wanted to swat at his mosquito fingers and get on to my bath, but I hesitated. There was something desperate in his fast breath on the back of my neck, and I was afraid to fight. “You belong to me. You’re my wife,” he mumbled into my neck, at once proclaiming his strength and my duty.

  “Stop it,” I said. I tried to shake him off my shoulders, but he hung on, squeezing my nipples in his fingertips. I began to struggle in earnest. His breath on my neck made me very nervous. “Please, Frank. No fair.”

  “‘Please Frank, no fair,’” he mimicked, adding, “bitch!”

  I tried to stay calm. He was very angry. Daddy. As I hesitated to use my nails on his wrists he pushed me onto one of the beds and deftly pinned my wrists over my head. With a wrench of his head he shook his glasses off; they dropped to the floor. I had a picture of myself as a comic-book victim, strangling on my own bra, which was flopping around my throat, and I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to laugh. But Frank looked so helpless without his glasses, dewy-eyed and unfocused, that bitch or no, I struggled not to laugh at him. Controlling my own impulse to be cruel, instead I said, “I’ll scream!”

  “Scream then,” he mumbled. And transferring both my wrists to one of his hands for an instant, he prepared with a minimum of undressing to rape me.

  There was no way out. I could hardly suppress the laughter any more. I tried to think of other things. I wondered if Frau Werner was listening at the door and if the bath would overflow. “Don’t! You’ll be sorry!” I cried mainly for the record, hoping not to smile, and then finally, as Frank ignored my wants and his kisses began to tickle unbearably, “For God’s sake, Frank, at least let me take off the bra and put in my diaphragm!”

  But nothing doing. “Forget the diaphragm,” he said, and to the accompaniment of my finally unsuppressible laughter, off we went on our last trip together.

  Well, so what? He’d done it so many times—what did one more matter? I’d be leaving soon enough. He could do what he wanted: I still had that last word in reserve.

  Two days later, when the petals had started falling off the anemones, my last word was still there where it had always been—in reserve. Though I had spent my life trying to arm myself with final words, I had never been able to pull a bye-bye without having a big hello ready for the next guy. Even as a kid, the thought of spending a Saturday night alone could produce in me such anxiety that I’d go out with anyone just to have a date. In fact, from the eighth grade on, no matter how I talked up freedom, I had never managed to spend more than four consecutive months without at least one man to count on, and frequently two, in case one ran out. In high school they called it “boy crazy”; in college, where everything accelerated, “oversexed.” To me it was life insurance.

  If I could know for sure I was still beautiful, I thought, it would be easy to leave. If I had been certain of it in Spain, maybe I wouldn’t have come back to Munich at all. Maybe I would have sent Frank a long letter and stayed in Madrid, or else got hold of a good mirror and a good doctor and gone straight to Italy. But as it was, I knew my looks were slipping. When I got a look in Frau Werner’s bathroom mirror under a decent light I was appalled by my reflection. Was it the mask of pregnancy or worse? There was suddenly a pale, almost imperceptible fuzz on my upper lip that had not been there in America. Probably from those hormones I’d taken in Spain. I needed a cure. If I couldn’t get rid of it or if it spread, I was finished.

  Smug Frank didn’t notice a thing. In his myopic eyes I was still as lovely as ever—that was his insidious power over me. I could tell from the way he took my arm proudly in public and looked around to see who noticed that he still thought me beautiful. Maybe I should have been grateful, like a junkie getting a fix, but I resented it. Not that I was squeamish about trading on my looks when there was nothing else around to trade on. No, it was just that I would need another fix and another, when all I wanted was out. It was impossible to get younger. My chances of leaving would only be worse next year. It was maddening to be stuck there with Frank on account of a faulty epidermis. I was a coward.

  No doubt I had made a mess of things. There I was, after all my resolve, still in Munich. I kept thinking that if I could find one disinterested man to call me beautiful, maybe I could believe it and muster the nerve to leave. Since looks were everything, my only asset, I really had to be sure. Frank’s word was not enough. All the other assets that I had so carefully cultivated in my
youth I had abandoned somewhere, half-formed, in the flood of matrimony, and now at twenty-four I was too old and frightened to go back and reclaim them. My early promises had all been broken; now all my fragile eggs were in this one worn basket.

  There had once been a brief time when I did know I was beautiful. Back in junior high, just after the War, I had had what I considered proof. But even then being beautiful mattered so much that I always suspected I was just passing my prime, like a miser who counts his riches every night and wakes up in the morning thinking himself poor. Even then mirrors told me very little: all I ever saw when I looked in one was me. The me I had examined in my bedroom mirror when I was a stringy, buck-toothed, pigtailed kid yearning to be beautiful was the same me Beverly Katz had cursed in envy in junior high (“You can’t expect to get away with this shit forever! Someday you’ll pay!”), the very me who was foolishly tweezing hairs in a seedy Madrid hotel the night before leaving Spain for Munich. My mirror image always had to be interpreted. And for that I sought my reflection in someone else’s eyes.

  Mid-Depression, when I turned five, my family moved to Baybury Heights, Ohio, one of Cleveland’s coming brick-and-frame neighborhoods sprinkled with vacant lots and apple trees. My arms were just long enough to reach bottom branches and I quickly took to the trees. But even then, a carefree tomboy roaming free, I longed to be pretty. Every girl did.

  “Climbing Sasha,” my father called me as I sped through breakfast so I could race to the woods behind our house. Skinny and agile, I scaled the trunks with ease, spending my first summers in the green branches and on the moss beneath. All the kids could manage the apple trees, but only I could scramble straight up to the top of the Spy Tree, a lone slender birch, and see on a clear day all the way downtown to Cleveland’s one skyscraper, the Terminal Tower. “Can you see it today?” my brother Ben would call from below. “Is it foggy or clear?” yelled up Susan McCarthy, who lived next door. And they would just have to take my word for it. I took my lunches in the treehouse with the McCarthy kids. After supper, if the boys let me, I played touch football on our quiet street or kick-the-can with everyone in the neighborhood.

  Tomboy or not, I spent my indoor time dressing up in my mother’s clothes and putting on lipstick and nail polish with the other girls. There was a hummingbird in the hollyhocks behind our house, the most delicate, lovely thing I had ever seen; I wanted to be like her. Even though it hurt when my mother brushed my hair each morning before school, it was worth it to have braids on which to tie pretty matching ribbons. I hoped the ribbons wouldn’t get dirty as I climbed Auburn Hill to school past the boys waiting in the vacant lots to pelt us with snow or mud, depending on the season.

  Once I started school I learned I would have to choose between hair ribbons and trees, and that if I chose trees I’d have to fight for them. The trees, like the hills, belonged to the boys.

  Before and after school, the boys would fan out over the school grounds and take over the ball fields, the apple orchard, the skating pond, the “Mountain” for king-of-the-castle, while we stayed on the concrete playground in the shadow of the school building. There we played girls’ games under the teachers’ protective eyes. We could jump rope, throw rubber balls for a-meemy-a-clapsy, practice tricks on the bars nestled in the ell of the building, play jacks or blow soap bubbles—all safe, dependable, and sometimes joyous games which the boys disdained because we did them. Best of all, we could trade our playing cards.

  When the recess bell rang, while the boys raced past us to the fields, we’d take out our card collections, separating the packs, slipping the rubber bands that divided them onto our wrists, fan out our cards for each other to see, and begin trading: the mate of a pair of kittens for a horse or Pinky; a pair of parrots for a drummer and a ship. Our trading cards were nothing like the boys’ silly baseball cards, commercially manufactured for collecting and sold with bubble gum. Our girls’ collections were made up of real adult playing cards, one of a kind salvaged from broken packs, which we valued for the charm of the pictures on their backs. Though my collection, being new, was one of the least impressive in the school, I treasured it all the same. It had few sets of four, hardly an unusual pair (though I had a better than ordinary collection of Shirley Temples), but there was at least one card in every category, and like life itself the collection had an open future. No card was so odd as to lack a fixed and perfect place in my endlessly adaptable collection. I loved them all.

  And like my cards, I too was adaptable. Though in my summers and on my street I had wandered freely, taking to the woods and the very tips of the trees, in my first weeks of first grade I learned to stay uncomplainingly in my place on the steps or in the shadow of the school. I learned masculine and feminine.

  “Go on to the Mountain, girls, it’s a gorgeous day,” Mrs. Hess would urge as we stood on the steps at recess trading cards. Or, “Why don’t you play some freeze tag? You need the exercise.” But we knew better. We knew that going near the ball fields or behind the backstop or near the basket hoop or in among the fruit trees or around the Mountain or near the skating pond were extremely dangerous expeditions, even if we went in a pack—for that was all boys’ territory, acknowledged by everyone. Despite Mrs. Hess’s prods and assurances, we knew that at any moment out there a pair or trio or more of boys might grow bored with their own game and descend on us with their bag of tricks. If a girl was spotted on their territory the boys felt perfectly free to: give her a pink belly, or lock her in the shed, or not let her down from a tree, or tie her to the flagpole, or lash at her legs with reeds, or chase her to the ravine, or look up her dress, or trip her, or spit mouthfuls of water in her face, or throw mud at her, or “accidentally” knock her down, or hold a hand over her nose and mouth, or pull her hair, or pummel her with snowballs, or “wash her face” in snow, or mess her books, or tear her clothes, or scatter her trading cards, or shout obscene words at her, or throw stones at her, or splash mud on her dress, or invite her to play on false pretenses, or just hit her or spit on her or twist her arm behind her back, or not let her drink at the water fountain.

  And it was not only the bullies like Mel Weeks and Bobby Barr who did such things to us. All the boys did them sooner or later, and some boy did something to some girl every day. They did it for fun. They did it to prove themselves. They did it because they hated us. If sometimes a boy got it too, it was only from another boy, never from a girl; the terror went only one way. And every boy longed, if only secretly, to be as powerful as the feared and respected bullies.

  We knew better than to tell Mrs. Hess. The one time I ran crying to her with my dress ripped after Bobby Barr had pulled me out of an apple tree, she hugged and comforted me with a double message: “I know, dear, those are rough boys. Why don’t you play with the girls?” There was only one thing for a girl to do: stay in the shadow. Prudently I gave up football, trees, and walking to school unaccompanied for acceptable “girls’ things,” until, before I was ten, like everyone else I unquestioningly accepted the boys’ hatred of us as “normal.” Just as the Cortney kids wouldn’t play with me because I was a Jew, the boys wouldn’t play with me because I was a girl. That was the way things were. Like our trading cards, we were valued only in our place among our kind. In fact, from the moment we got kicked out of the trees and sent into the walk-in doll house back in kindergarten, our movements and efforts had been so steadily circumscribed, our permissible yearnings so confined, that the only imprint left for us to make was on ourselves. By the third grade, with every other girl in Baybury Heights, I came to realize that there was only one thing worth bothering about: becoming beautiful.

  • • •

  With the U.S. plunge into World War II the gap between the girls and the boys grew to a chasm. While they were learning to spot enemy planes, launching the U.S. fleet on the playground, and deploying platoons over the skating pond, we, bored breathless by the war, pored over movie magazines, made scrapbooks, joined fan clubs, and planned, should the wa
r last long enough, to become U.S.O. hostesses. Instead of collecting cards (somehow fewer and fewer people had time to play cards, and the cards themselves, like other luxuries, were beginning to disappear from circulation) we collected the foil inner wrappers of chewing gum, chocolate bars, and cigarette packs, which themselves all became scarcer and scarcer until they too, like the Cheshire Cat, finally disappeared entirely. We lived instead on the sweets of patriotism, quietly accepting the consolation of the decade: “That’s tough.”

  “What’s tough?”

  “Life.”

  “What’s life?”

  “A magazine.”

  “Where do you get it?”

  “At the drugstore.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “Ten cents.”

  “I only have five cents.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “What’s tough? …”

  My father, an energetic attorney, sat on the Draft Board, making our family eligible for a prestigious B-card, which entitled us to an extra monthly ration of gasoline, and weekly donned his Air Raid Warden’s helmet. My glamorous mother rolled her own cigarettes using begged tobacco, served meat substitutes without complaining, and set up a cozy blackout shelter in the basement of our house, decked out with all the comforts of the surface. Once she gave a “blackout party.” On the radio, newscasts were as numerous and tiresome as commercials; even my beloved Hit Parade was constantly interrupted with important bulletins and flash announcements of bombings and landings. At school we competed by grade and sex to collect, sort, stack, and reclaim old newspapers, magazines, flattened tin cans, toothpaste tubes, foil balls, rubber tires, rags, old clothes (for the Russians), canned goods, and scrap metal. (The girls seldom won.) Anti-Semitism became temporarily taboo. Life changed in a thousand little ways. But however distracting the regimen of war, the overriding change in my life was the addition to my face of unsightly orthodontal braces in the late spring of 1942, coincident with the Battle of Midway.