Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  I confess, my coronation was such an undiluted triumph that I took it down in one long, sweet gulp that went straight to my head. Rashly I forgot that in the fall there would be another queen and the following spring another. Barely fifteen, that April night I reached such heady heights that the triumphs of the rest of my life were bound to seem anti-climactic.

  Directly after my coronation I risked everything, celebrating with an act that wiped out months of restraint. Parked in our regular spot at Shaker Lakes, at last Joey got in. By allowing him to lie on me with his fly open, accepting his kisses with the delicious abandon of former days, I signaled that the struggle was over. It wasn’t the forty points, or even Nat Karlan’s prediction. It was simply that, being Queen, I dared to believe I could get away with it. There was something regal about going all the way.

  I didn’t get to remove my underpants, so eager was Joey to cross my threshold. He stretched the elastic of one leg and slipped his organ in; then with a little moan of joy he began humping me the same as always, plus in and out like an animal, wrinkling my skirt with his belly.

  This is it! I said to myself. This is love! Enjoy it! I knew my daffodils were being crushed; nevertheless I tried to enjoy it, at least to attend to this celebrated moment in the most touted of acts.

  It wasn’t unpleasant with Joey inside me, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant either. It didn’t even hurt. I was surprised not to be feeling much, for Joey had pushed his entire appendage, so much larger than a finger, inside my opening. I couldn’t imagine how it all fit in. Watching him move up and down on me in the darkness, I wondered: is this all there is to it? I had loved Joey to the melting point, but now I resented him. I received each thrust of his body like a doubt. Really all? When it was over a few moments later and Joey came groaning into his handkerchief as always, it struck me as hardly different from our usual sex. The only thing to recommend it was that it was ultimate. But, really, kissing felt much nicer.

  Joey sat up. “I love you, Sasha. You’ll never be sorry, I promise you.”

  He sounded so pious. I eyed him suspiciously. I wondered if I had done it all correctly, and if so, if it might not show or smell. Suppose some of the sperm had gotten in? Suppose Joey wouldn’t keep his mouth shut? As I saw him wiping away the last traces of sperm, looking proud and lavishing on his withered organ more care than it deserved, I suddenly felt the enormity of my breach. I was utterly vulnerable.

  I pulled down my skirt, hoping to become again inviolable. But there was clearly no going back.

  If I get away with this, I consoled myself, I can probably get away with anything.

  An hour later when Joey kissed me goodnight on my doorstep, I dutifully said “I love you,” knowing Joey’s new power to injure me. But for the first time, my knees did not go limp when he kissed me.

  I was no longer simply “Joey’s girl.” I was a Queen myself with a life of my own.

  I flush the toilet with sweaty palms, aware of the risk, and wait to face the consequences. At home and at school my Kotex disposal was down to an art. Even in public rest rooms there were almost always special containers, and if not—if I had to leave a soiled napkin rolled neatly in toilet paper on the edge of the sink or exposed unswallowed in a toilet bowl—I would not be around to take the blame.

  Here at Joey’s house I am trapped.

  I’d stayed at the table as long as I could, hoping to get through the agonizing dinner and wear my napkin out of the house. But when I felt the sticky blood seep through my underwear onto my thigh I realized that however skillfully I shifted in the chair or crossed my legs, it was only a matter of moments before it would penetrate to my skirt and thence to Mrs. Ross’s flowered cushion to disgrace me forever.

  Now, locked inside the bathroom, I am impaled on my monthly dilemma: how to dispose of it? I can’t walk into the kitchen past everyone at table, sheepishly carrying my dirty rag to the garbage can. I can’t snoop around the bedrooms for a wastebasket or a bottom bureau drawer to bury it in, knowing that eventually they will sniff it out and despise me the more. No; there is only one thing to do, however risky: flush it down the toilet.

  I send up a prayer and press down the lever. The water rises inexorably toward the rim of the bowl. I jiggle the handle, my pulse pounding. Past the normal water ring it rises, past the porcelain lip. Then just in time at the very brink the water crests, turned back by some Neptune of the sewer. It stands and waits, the Kotex caught in the toilet’s hole, its tail protruding like a drowning cat’s, and I draw breath.

  But it is a false reprieve, for whatever the dangers, I will have to flush again.

  Blocking my nose from the inside, I pull up the sopping Kotex by its tail. It is saturated. Slowly the water recedes: a blessing. With index fingers and thumbs I strip off the gauze and begin shredding the bloody pad; if the toilet won’t swallow it whole, I will feed it bit by bit.

  Another prayer, another tug on the lever, and at last the water whirls my clots and rags down the hole, letting me slip past one more month without facing disgrace.

  I fasten a new napkin, wash my hands with soap, fix my smile before the mirror, and return demurely to the table.

  School let out in June; after that we were doing it regularly every couple of weeks, except when I had my period or pretended to be having my period.

  Joey would pick me up at the Baybury Pool on his way home from work at his uncle’s shoe store. From the pool where I had spent the day developing a tan, we either went to the ball court at Eastwood Park, where Joey worked out shooting baskets while I watched admiringly with the other girls, or if he could get his father’s car we’d drive up to Shaker Lakes, where he worked out on me.

  Driving up the Lake Road giggling nervously over our destination, I received odd premonitions. I imagined the car crashing or the police stopping us for questioning.

  “Surprise,” said Joey one evening, opening the car door for me and tossing my swimming bag in the back seat. He seemed to be full of giggles himself for once.

  “What’s up?”

  “A present for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see.” He turned onto the Lake Road.

  “Tell me,” I pleaded.

  “Unh-unh. I’ve had it more than a week without telling you. You can wait a few minutes more.”

  As soon as he had parked the car at the shore of the lake and taken me into the back seat, Joey opened his wallet and took out a foil-wrapped Trojan condom. “Here,” he said, presenting it to me as though it were an orchid.

  I recoiled. I knew all about Trojans from dirty jokes, but I had never seen one. And here I was holding one. It was so unequivocal; what kind of a girl must he think me? There were two more in his wallet, leaving little ovals on the outside leather, dead giveaways.

  “My God, Joey! If you carry them around in your wallet, everyone will know!” I dropped it in his lap, offended. How stupid I had been to assume we wouldn’t get caught.

  Joey stroked his so-precious prick a few times to make it hard, then placing the rubber over the head of it, rolled it carefully down the shank. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I just say they’re for whores if anyone asks. Or for Renee. Everyone carries them for whores.”

  I slipped my underpants off one leg, and Joey moved on top of me. Being careful not to disturb the condom, he pressed himself inside me.

  Once in, it felt almost the same as without the condom. But it gave me the jitters anyway. When I heard a car pass on the road below, instead of just holding my breath and crossing my fingers as I usually did, I jerked so hard that Joey came out. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Hey, take it easy!” said Joey pushing it back into me with his fingers. He was annoyed. “If you jerk like that it’ll take twice as long.” Then, gently, he added, “There’s nothing to worry about, baby. They can’t see us way back here.”

  He was right. Unless someone actually parked, came up to the car, and caught us in the act, it didn’t matter
what people merely suspected. As long as I was willing to do it, Joey would be a fool to betray me, and without Joey’s testimony, no one could prove a thing. We were unlikely to be caught because Joey always did it very quickly and fully clothed, out of consideration for me. Even his carrying condoms proved nothing. I would deny everything if anyone accused me. Though I was uneasy whenever I saw people whispering at the pool, I realized it would take more than rumor to ruin a Queen.

  While half of me trembled at fugitive sounds, the other half was proud of my daring and happy to be done with the agony of anticipation. Fifteen, flat on my back with Captain Joey Ross pumping up a storm between my knees, I thought “Oh yeah?” to Beverly Katz and all the other S.L.T. girls. They dared not accuse the Keystone’s choice, one half of a perfect couple. Let them try to make Renee of me!

  But my feelings of triumph barely justified my nervousness or the plain discomfort of sex. The eleventh time we did it was more unpleasant than the first. I grew to dread it, but I could never come up with a good enough reason to get Joey to stop. “What’s got into you, Sasha? We never got caught before,” he would pout, and the record just kept on mounting. As the girls always said, boys go as far as they can, and never backwards. Watching Joey drop the sticky condoms into Shaker Lake, I was baffled that I could ever have thought I loved him. Oh, he was sweet in his way, and the biggest fish in Baybury, but he was my tormentor. Definitely not for me. As everyone said, it was never too early to think about marriage, and I had large inexpressible yearnings Joey could never satisfy. Whether or not he was the Captain, I was still the Queen. If only I could somehow escape from the back seat of Joey’s father’s car, I knew I could do much better.

  • • •

  “Marry for love,” said my mother, “but remember, it’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man.” Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief—if it was foolish for my brother to leave to chance which type he would be, it was foolish for me to leave to chance which type I would marry. My mother’s advice to me was as sensible as her comparable advice to Ben: “study hard and be somebody.” Both tips were perfectly suited to our possibilities.

  More beautiful by far than other mothers, my mother deserved to be listened to. Her cheeks had a soft pink smell, a ripeness, which made me happy just to be sitting next to her. I overflowed with pride when she showed up at school or when her picture appeared in the Cleveland Post from time to time as chairman of one committee or president of another; who would not want to elect chairman or exhibit on the social page such a perfect face? Even more in matters of love and matrimony my mother’s face, which could have enchanted any man, commanded respect. Having herself married well, she certainly knew what she was talking about. And in our own interminable adolescent discussions of whom to marry, no girl among us ever suggested that it would be better to marry poor, unless the alternative were not to marry at all. My mother was right. There was only one way for a girl to control her future: choose her man.

  There weren’t many things a girl could do to command the choice, but fortunately there were a few. First, she could make sure she did nothing to be kicked out of the market. Second, she could make herself available to the most eligible types. Third, and most important of all, whatever her natural endowment she could enhance her fine points to make herself as attractive as possible. It was no secret. Methods for achieving all three were spelled out for us in each new issue of Seventeen that arrived in the mail and in all the books, like Boy Meets Girl, Junior Miss, Girl Alive, we were given for our birthdays. But the instructions were only the beginning. It was up to each girl on her own to make, as my mother called it, “the most of herself.”

  When summer ended and my junior year began, I had my first chance to branch out. Cookie Margolis of Elyria, Ohio, a premed student at Ohio State, invited me to the university’s great Homecoming Weekend, and, Joey or no, I accepted.

  I had met Cookie in August at Geneva-on-the-Lake, the decaying summer resort on Lake Erie’s shore where the Baybury Heights sororities and fraternities rented cottages for two weeks every summer. With only one chaperone per cottage, and Joey stuck sorting shoes in Cleveland, I had found plenty of opportunity at Geneva to experiment with other kinds of Lake Erie fish. My sisters (virgins all, I believed) were so busy concentrating their efforts on our own Baybury boys that none of them noticed me searching the dance hall and the skating rink for odd species or wandering alone on the far end of the beach seeking adventure. Right there under their noses, if they had only troubled to look, they too might have found tall Cookie Margolis industriously cutting bait, his summer job. While they saw no further than their noses, I managed to bring off a hot romance, prudently remaining chaste in case they bothered to investigate.

  It had not been easy, lying with Cookie on the cool sand under the stars hearing the wavelets lapping the shore like kittens’ tongues, for Cookie’s presurgical fingers melted me as easily as Joey’s baskets ever had. But I had resisted, knowing better than to start doing it with two boys at once. I laughed tears for my poor lost virginity reading the relevant passages of Girls Alive, realizing how recklessly I had upped the ante.

  If you kiss Mike tonight, the next time you go out with him it will be natural to kiss him again. Each date with him you may go a little further in what will become a dangerous game, because you are releasing in him and in yourself emotions that you may not be able to control.

  Meanwhile, you will go out with other boys and it’s easy enough to slip into the same habits with them. In no time you have earned yourself the reputation of being a girl any boy can kiss. And if any boy can—well,… you will have saved nothing special for the man for whom you eventually feel genuine love.

  What had I done? They were talking about kissing, and here I was applying it to …! Fifteen years old! I was overcome by more than sufficient fear and remorse to enable me to resist Cookie. It was bad enough to be doing it regularly with one person; two was the road to nymphomania. I was too young, too young. Just as I knew for a fact that kissing led to French kissing, I knew that “sleeping around” at fifteen would lead to nymphomania at sixteen, and prostitution at seventeen, no matter how good my grades or my family or my intentions.

  Once I reached Ohio State I saw it was worth all the pains I had taken getting my parents’ permission to go. That brief first glimpse of the larger world was a revelation to me, whetting my appetite for the future as much as ten Little Leather Library books.

  From the time I had read my first fairy tale I had tried to imagine what it would be like to live elsewhere and free. Even as a small child my pulse had quickened each time we drove over the Cuyahoga Bridge to Cleveland’s West Side, past the huge Sherwin Williams Paints sign on which a can of neon paint spilled over a spinning globe bearing the legend Cover the Earth. There in that strange west world of Cleveland people had different kinds of names and houses and, I imagined, lives.

  At Ohio State I saw it might be true. In Columbus girls lived in dormitories where, by signing in and out for each other and telling lies, they could come and go almost as freely as the boys, who of course had no curfews. No mother in her negligee, arms folded across her breast, to shout from the head of the stairs, “It’s two o’clock in the morning! You were due home at midnight!” No father reading in the study, waiting in the bright lights (which would reveal one’s shameful dishevelment) to embarrass one before one’s friends by saying with the excessive formality of anger controlled, “Young man, I cannot permit you to see my daughter again if you cannot get her home before one thirty A.M.” Although in their talk the dorm girls were almost indistinguishable from the girls of Baybury—all sweaters and romance and marriage—their freedom seemed vast in comparison. How I envied them!

  There was an even greater difference among the boys. At the football game on Saturday the college boys drank rye or gin out of pocket flasks. Besides cars and athletics they talked of life, mechanics, medicine, and the future. At the great Homecoming Dance on Saturday night, more
than a dozen of them danced with me. Even the ugly ones seemed as accomplished and desirable as Cookie Margolis, more fascinating than any Keystone or Deltan I had ever known. From Columbus, Baybury Heights, where I was going to be stuck for two more years, looked like a puddle.

  On my last night in Columbus, weakened by rye, I succumbed to Cookie in the attic of the fraternity house. He shamed me into bed, insinuating that anything less would be ingratitude, and took me as I was protesting. Of course, I alone was to blame; but, ignorant of college protocol and no virgin, I simply hadn’t known how to say no. When I discovered a few weeks later that Cookie was in love with someone else, I knew I would have to keep up my grades so I could go to some other college than Ohio State. I couldn’t afford to start out as a freshman with a reputation.

  I was getting impatient with the whole problem of sex. Why did everyone consider it so important? Love was important, but sex was nothing but trouble. The philosophers I read didn’t waste their time with it.

  As long as I had to spend two more years in boring Baybury, I decided to use the time well. In a strange scientific book from my father’s shelves, Behaviorism, by the famous Dr. John Watson, I had discovered certain indispensable facts. “Personality,” said Watson in italics, “is but the end product of our habit systems…. The situation we are in dominates us always and releases one or another of these all-powerful habit systems.”

  If our situation dominates us, I would have to get out of my deadening situation. If personality is a result of habit, I would have to start forming the right habits. I would shun the rat race and prepare for college. I would practice raising an eyebrow, perfect my seductive glance, and cultivate a crooked smile. I would get top grades and harden myself.