Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  Of course, I would let no one in on my plan. By some weird hypocrisy, it was considered as crass for a girl to improve herself by trying to get a better man as it was considered laudable for a boy to improve himself by trying to get a better job—even though everyone acknowledged that a girl’s only purpose was to marry, her only hope to marry “well.”

  There was another, even more remarkable, passage in the book. “Between fifteen and eighteen,” reported Dr. Watson, summarizing his vast scientific researches,

  a female changes from a child to a woman. At fifteen she is but the playmate of boys and girls of her own age. At eighteen she becomes a sex object to every man.

  Every man! By all means, I must perfect my glance. But there was more:

  After thirty, personality changes very slowly owing to the fact, as we brought out in our study of habit formation, that by that time most individuals, unless constantly stimulated by a new environment, are pretty well settled into a humdrum way of living. Habit patterns become set. If you have an adequate picture of the average individual at 30 you will have it with few changes for the rest of that individual’s life—as most lives are lived. A quacking, gossiping, neighbor-spying, disaster-enjoying woman of 30 will be, unless a miracle happens, the same at 40 and still the same at 60.

  I no longer believed in miracles. I would have to take matters in my own hands. How foolish the others were to expect that all they had to do was sit around and wait for their prince to come along, all the time developing God-knows-what ruinous habit patterns! I copied the entire passage into my notebook. “Don’t believe everything you read,” my father had warned, but I believed. The passage, with its time schedule, seemed to have been written expressly for me.

  Watson’s revelations tempered all I had discovered at Ohio State. There, the college girls, like the high school ones at home, were already planning to marry on graduation, if not before, and settle immediately into their ways. Their hopes were all pinned on it, their habit patterns already determined, their lives set. But it didn’t have to be so. According to the learned Watson, if I played it right I still had fifteen years—as many again as I had already lived—before my life would be set. Precious years to use carefully. I would not, like the others, become a “quacking, gossiping, neighbor-spying, disaster-enjoying woman”! I would not be like all those other women, so despicable to everyone, even the lofty Dr. Watson. I would make myself the exception, refusing to let that habit system take hold. If I could preserve my looks, I wouldn’t even have to marry until the last moment. I would fight and resist. I would arm myself like the boys with psychology and biology and a way to earn money. I would be somebody. I would be fastidious in my choice of “environment,” vigilant in my cultivation of habits. Thanks to my mother’s looks and my father’s books, I already had a good start. But a start, I knew, was not enough. It was the end that mattered. If, as the girls always said, it’s never too early to think about whom to marry, then it could certainly not be too early to think about who to be. Being somebody had to come first, because, of course, somebody could get a much better husband than nobody.

  Three

  It was the zither player in Munich’s Café am Dôm who gave me the confidence I needed to leave. I was touched that he remembered me at all. I hadn’t been to that café since before Spain, more than two months earlier. Yet, as soon as I walked through the door he started making a big fuss over me, smiling and playing his one American song, “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” It was silly enough in English and on the guitar; it was preposterous in German on the zither.

  Eating my Florentiner and sipping my coffee, I laughed aloud instead of reading the mail I had picked up across the street at American Express. “Willkommen zürack, Fräulein,” he said. Where had I been these months? They had missed me. Had I perhaps found another café? He twisted his mouth into a mock pout, obviously unaware of all the changes I had seen in Frau Werner’s mirror; to him I was exactly the same Sasha I had been two months before.

  The very next day, armed with his admiration and the assurances of a Munich gynecologist that I was not pregnant, I made my move. I stuffed my suitcase with a new batch of pink pills and a list of doctors to see in Italy for injections to combat “insufficient ovulation”; an assortment of drip dries and a bottle of Joy; and Henry James’s Roman novel, The Portrait of a Lady. Then I boarded a train heading into the Alps for Italy. Free.

  My first free act was to remove my wedding ring. My second, vowing not to fall into bed with the first man to come along as I had in Spain, was to select an empty compartment. I would treat myself well and share my bed with no one. Having forged for myself that rare treasure, a second chance, I was determined not to blow it.

  “Okay, we’ll call it a trial separation, if that will really make you feel better,” I had consented to Frank as I packed my things. “Six months? Eight? Whatever you say.” Why deny him the comfort of his technicalities, as long as he knew they meant nothing to me? I would never go back. Not to Frank or any of the old dead ends. I would go forward, wherever that might lead. Take care of myself. Write a glorious play. Travel. Practice discipline.

  As we penetrated deeper and deeper into the Alps, reaching the German-Austrian border, I was glad no one but a border guard entered my compartment. I wanted to be alone. Like Isabel Archer, whose long sad story I began, I “held that a women ought to be able to live to herself in the absence of exceptional flimsiness and that it was perfectly possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex.” My muscles were tired of smiling at Germans.

  When we stopped for the passport check at the first border town in Italy, I leaned eagerly out the window. The signs were written in a new language. Bella. Bellissima. The Italian guards with cheerful smiles had more brass on their uniforms than the Germans; their very language had a certain lift. The officer who checked my passport returned it with a grazie and a flourish that raised my spirits. Outside the sun shone. When he left my compartment and I opened my bag to put away the papers, at last, unable to resist a moment longer, I took out my compact and looked into my mirror.

  There was a small pimple on my chin, nothing much; but at least the fuzz on my lip didn’t show. Probably no one would ever notice it indoors. If I remembered always to keep my back to the light—Sasha, you worry too much. Though I knew it would vanish, the pimple gave me a little pang. Through the years I had learned to accept my imperfections and take them in my stride. Yet it still took a while for me to get used to every new one, however minor or temporary. It was like wearing out a favorite pair of shoes—inevitable and rectifiable, but sad all the same. And the new pair would have to be broken in. Time was when I would have stayed house-bound over a blemish, or at least not given into it without a fight, but I had long since learned. Life goes on. Does Queen Elizabeth cancel her engagements when her skin erupts? Shortly after my own coronation I learned that, like everyone, I too would be growing older and uglier every day. Time was always running out, as Dr. Watson said. Only six years left till thirty. There was nothing to do but make the best of it.

  The first imperfection of my skin—the first beginnings of my slow, extended decline—had appeared the summer I turned sixteen on the night of a large family dinner party at our house. I admit I behaved badly.

  That night my father’s newest employee, a clerk fresh out of Harvard Law whom I was very eager to meet, had been invited to dinner. My summer vacation had already started, and while I was itchy to get into it, I hadn’t yet formulated a plan. I knew I couldn’t waste another summer hanging around the Baybury Pool where everyone thought I belonged to Joey. If I got some kind of a job or did volunteer work I’d meet new people, but they’d most likely all be girls. My parents had forbidden me to take a job away from home, so my father’s hiring Alan Steiger, a young lawyer from out of town, was an omen. It might even be my answer.

  We were already finished with cocktails. I had sipped a Mary Jane—lemonade laced ever so ligh
tly with red wine—prepared by my mother. The family, seated around the dining table extended to its largest and covered with the best white damask cloth, had begun patiently watching my father struggle through the carving of some thick roast. Alan Steiger sat across the table not noticing me. In his mid-twenties, he seemed exactly what I wanted—if only he could overlook my being sixteen. I tried to show off for him silently, presenting my prize-winning shiksa profile as I watched my father carve.

  I wondered if my father had spoken to him about me, and if so, whether he had mentioned my coronation. It seemed unlikely. My father was proud of my looks, but like my mother’s, he accepted them as a mysterious gift he had been blessed with. Even if he had been able to forget his work long enough to promote my interests, he would have considered it immodest. His way of helping his women was as a critic.

  “Why don’t you tell your hairdresser to do your hair off your face, Laura? You look so much better with it off,” he would say, brushing my mother’s hair off her forehead with his hand, as she presented her newest coiffure. “Sasha, you have such a lovely neck; why don’t you keep it clean?” “Your seams are crooked.” “Aren’t you going to fix your hair?” “Are you sure that dress is appropriate for the opera?”

  He cared about us, but otherwise, the details of social and domestic life were a mystery to him which he would attend to only on the express insistence of my mother. If my mother’s gentle reprimands didn’t bring my brother or me around, my father might be called in to assist. If my mother was still dressing when guests arrived, my father might, with apologies, serve the hors d’oeuvres. It was my mother who planned vacations, purchased gifts (even for my father’s clients), selected their friends, and arranged their social life. All domestic jobs—even such traditionally “masculine” jobs as barbecuing, fixing things, and tending bar—were so unpleasant to my father that he pleaded and practiced ineptitude, as now he was doing with the carving. Too aloof to trouble about sharpening the knives, even for company, he hacked away at the roast with more energy than skill. I was seated next to him, disgusted. A dinner party on a damask cloth, launched by a butcher! He had had this lawyer for weeks, and only now had he got around to bringing him home.

  He leaned over and dropped the first hacked slice of meat onto my plate. Then, on his way back up, he began to scrutinize my nearby face. With more disapproval than curiosity he suddenly said, “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That—on your cheek—there.” He pointed at me with the carving knife.

  I winced away. I knew perfectly well what he was talking about. What he had picked out publicly to confront me with was something that, after causing me no end of anguish that afternoon, I had decided was simply a pimple—a round, brown, ephemeral blemish which I had clumsily tried to cover up with dabs of my mother’s make-up snitched from the jars lined up on her crowded dressing table. But, a novice in such methods, I had succeeded only in altering its color. It was no disguise for my father’s eagle eye, though it might easily have hidden the imperfection from Alan Steiger.

  I could think of no response to the accusation but to deny the existence of the thing. “What are you talking about?” I said. “What’s the matter with you?” To cover my fury I delivered my reply in a hoarse whisper, but my father would not let go of it. He reached over to me with an index finger on which he had deposited a generous dollop of spittle and started to rub, as though I were some child with chocolate smeared on my face.

  “What in the world are you doing?” I screamed. I jumped up from the table and, throwing down my napkin, fled from the room and my father’s inexcusable indignity.

  “Sensitive Suzy,” I heard him murmur behind me as he returned, I suppose, to butchering his meat. “It’s a stage she’s in. Next thing you know she’ll be crying.”

  Upstairs in my room I boiled over. I was sixteen, no child. Furious, I hated my father for pointing. The presence of the ugly thing on my face seemed to me unquestionably his fault. He might produce another, and another. I had to get away.

  Under my mother’s fluorescent lamp I wiped off the makeup with cold cream and squeezed and squeezed, to determine if my blemish were indeed a simple pimple. I was too red in the face to return to the dining room, even for dessert. I decided then and there to run away.

  Joey’s older brother Richard had said I could get a waitress job at some fancy hotel in Lake Placid, New York, where he had been tennis instructor the year before, just by mentioning his name. Because I was that pretty. “With my pull and your looks …” he had said, trying as usual to get at Joey. But why not? Wasn’t I “that pretty”? I wouldn’t ask my parents’ permission.

  Before my resolve could dissipate I got a suitcase from the back of my mother’s closet, the one I had used for my weekend at Ohio State with Cookie. Into it I stuffed all the nylon underwear I could find, plus a shift, shorts, sandals, a bathing suit, my Emerson’s Essays (“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string …”), and my fairy tales. Counting my money, I figured I had enough either to buy a train ticket or uniforms, but not both. Well, I would just have to charge the uniforms at Halle’s then, on my way to the station, and reimburse my father for them later, out of tips. I would be sure to keep a strict account. I absolutely refused to need anybody.

  I dialed Joey’s number to tell him the news, then decided against it and hung up. Why tell anyone? Why not burst suddenly, dramatically, onto the scene, missing? Joey, Cookie Margolis, Alan Steiger—none of them were of any help to me now. I needed space, I needed to breathe and stretch. Had I spent those years developing my powers only to be thwarted and humiliated in the suburbs of Cleveland? Instead I dialed the railway station to check the schedule (I would be able to catch a sleeper the following afternoon), then settled down to compose a very righteous, very ironical farewell note to Daddy. If I mailed it from downtown, it would arrive in the following morning’s mail just before my mother started upstairs to wake me. Finding me missing from my bed, she would probably reach impulsively for the telephone to notify the police when, suddenly, by her hand she would notice my letter and, ripping it open, read it with vast relief. How glad she would be! Better not to ruin the effect, I decided, by mentioning just yet about charging the uniforms. Since it was only the beginning of June, Halle’s wouldn’t be sending out the bill for nearly a month.

  I woke early to find the train hurtling madly along a mountainside just as though it weren’t clinging for dear life to a narrow ledge hewn in the side of a deep gorge. So close were we to grazing the rocks that if I had waggled my fingers out the window they would have been torn off at the knuckles. Out the window on the far side of the coach, deep-blue sky stretched as far down the precipice to the distant crags below as it stretched upward to the clouds. No flat cornfields here, among these colossal heights and depths! This was the world, this New York State. Here was no Ohio!

  As the miles between me and Baybury Heights multiplied, I felt certain that if the train veered off the track, I could summon the Blue Fairy to come and carry us—engine, caboose, and all—on up into that endless blue.

  I had been secretly grooming myself in my provincial court to confront this wide world for a long time. Taking brazen risks, I had developed my charms and cultivated my powers and finally claimed my rightful crown,. all for this moment. “We must go alone,” says Emerson; and “I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.” I was ready now to follow Candide across the seas, to climb like Rasselas over the mountain. Hereafter I would choose whom to love, how far to go, when to stop. Not this summer would I tremble at the sound of an approaching car, or worry over my reputation. I would neither submit to being dry-humped nor pretend to virginity. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world
.” This summer, with Emerson to back me, love would be beautiful and I would be free.

  The train passed Saranac Lake, moving from the mountain into ripe green hills, and approached the Lake Placid station. I had really escaped! As we slowed to a stop, I straddled my suitcase and studied my reflection in the window, frantically trying on pseudonyms. Emerging in a moment from the train’s cloud of smoke I could be whoever I decided.

  Boys in bright livery patrolled the platform, announcing their hotels. Capturing clients, they strode down the platform, packing as many as five suitcases under their arms while the customers they had managed to snag followed along behind them unencumbered. I, Alicia Alexander, admired how skillfully they worked, though none of them solicited me.

  “Anyone here for the Belleview Palace?” I finally heard and answered, “I am,” to a uniformed pimply-faced youth a year or two my senior.

  He stopped and looked at me skeptically, without a glimmer of recognition. “Richard Ross sent me,” I explained. “I’ve come to be a waitress.”

  “Oh,” he said with an echo of disappointment. He made no move to take my bag. “Get in the back then,” he said, steering me with a toss of his head to a waiting station wagon.

  I climbed in and waited. If this kid were from Baybury he would have been happy to take my bag. In a few moments he was back empty-handed.

  “There’s hardly ever anyone on this early train during the week. For me it’s a no-tip trip. But a first-class hotel like the Belleview Palace has to send a car down anyway. You’re lucky—other hotels, you’d have to take a taxi.” He started up the motor and off we drove straight into those luscious hills like nothing in Ohio.

  As we rounded a bend and began climbing toward an imposing white structure rising out of the apex of one of the hills, bugles in my head played a fanfare. The Belleview Palace Hotel. Me. On a concrete gash through acres of lawn we drove to the stately entrance.