Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  Now to other news. I am happy to write that your brother Ben has just opened a new branch of his store, this time in Medina, Ohio. That makes it a real chain, and of course, we are terribly proud of him. With Marnie pregnant again (and little Michael ready for school—can you believe time goes so fast?) it is almost too much good news at once. It would be awfully nice if you could find the time to drop Ben a note of congratulations. He has always been so fond of you. After all, you are only a year apart in age. Even now he seems as much concerned about you as we are.

  Your father wants to add a few words, so I’ll close now,

  With all my love,

  Mother

  Dear Sasha,

  As a lawyer I think your announced decision to let Frank sue you for divorce is hasty, if not downright foolish, and I urge you to reconsider. For the time being you must be very careful with whom you are seen in public and where, for until you are legally separated or finally divorced, your husband still has rights. Even though you and Frank are living apart, your character can be damaged and your settlement jeopardized if you are indiscreet. It may not, as you claim, matter to you now, but it does matter to the world. For this and other reasons, it will matter to you eventually, whether you recognize it or not. Better for you to divorce him. Think it over.

  We would be very happy if you decided to come back to Baybury. Your room is still here, and it is such a long time since we’ve seen you. We always miss our little girl, but especially now. We are frankly uneasy thinking of a beautiful girl like you living alone in New York City.

  Let us know what you decide.

  Love,

  Dad

  Another letter to hide, another piece of me to lock in a drawer for solitary contemplation—perhaps in the nightmare hour each evening between the time I arrived home from work and the time Willy, armed with flowers and excuses, appeared for dinner.

  W.B.’s Favorite Veal Scallops Marsala

  Marinate wafer-thin slices of veal in marsala, garlic, pepper. Precook mushrooms in butter; season. Sauté veal in butter; add mushrooms, basil, strained marinade. Just before serving, squeeze in juice of one lemon, sprinkle with parsley. Serve with noodles.

  Hollandaise Sauce for Asparagus

  Melt one stick butter. In blender put three egg yolks, two tablespoons lemon juice, salt and pepper. Cover and blend for an instant. Turn to low speed, uncover and gradually add hot butter. Yield: three servings.

  We went at our thing with a vengeance, prepared to turn inside out to change. Loyalty was our credo. Not content to stand bare before one another like ordinary lovers, we stripped off secrets, then skin, as though we hoped by mingling our innermost nerves to become one flesh. Each observation one of us made became the other’s illuminating insight; each casual metaphor became the other’s poem. Believing words could bind, we found it impossible to give promises enough.

  “Promise me we’ll never spend a night apart.”

  “I promise. Swear you’ll never glance at another man.”

  “I swear.”

  By Schubert and candlelight we drank perfectly chilled white wine, dipping artichoke leaves into a single bowl of melted butter, then slipping them into one another’s mouths. We drank café filtre out of our own tiny porcelain cups, bought for Valentine’s Day. By shamelessly juggling history we discerned that despite a world of striking differences, we had in fact been born for each other, all it took was faith.

  “Always,” we whispered, and “forever.” Until midnight or so, when Will turned me on my side, set the alarm clock for more love in the morning, and tucking his knees behind mine to make us like a pair of spoons stacked in a drawer, snuggled us off to sleep.

  The ride from the new Cleveland airport where Ben picked me up in his Bonneville sedan through the periphery of town was jarringly disconcerting. So much new. “But where’s Clark’s? Is that another Halle’s?” I asked. Ben, proudly proprietary and with no sense of loss, pointed out now a new shopping center, now abandoned corners. The broad, once deserted Route Eighty, where we had had our “chicken” races in high school in souped-up Fords and where the boys had driven us to neck, was now lined with neon drive-ins, car lots lighted like Christmas trees, glass motels. Ben too—bigger, flashier.

  Once we ascended the hill into Baybury Heights, however, everything was magically the same, as if some fairy had cast a spell. Pungent autumn leaves raked into piles on tree lawns, rock gardens separating driveways from next-door lawns, basket hoops on garages with nets torn from overuse, folded evening papers carelessly tossed on welcome mats by some ambitious new version of Ben—all preserved. I held my breath so as not to disturb it.

  “Before I drop you off, Sash,” said Ben, lowering his voice conspiratorially and slowing the car as we turned onto Auburn Hill, where I had been pantsed, “there are a couple of things I think you ought to be aware of. The folks are really very upset about this divorce, more than they’ll show. Mother’s done a lot of crying. I’d appreciate it if you try and act normal. For their sakes.”

  “Normal! You’re kidding, Ben. This is 1958—millions of people get divorced. It’s not an abnormal thing to do nowadays!”

  “Calm down, will you? I’m not saying you’re abnormal, honey. Personally I couldn’t care less. I happen to think getting divorced may be the smartest thing you ever did, though it’s none of my business. Myself, I never thought Frank had the balls, if you’ll excuse my language, to handle you, and personally, I don’t see any reason for a couple to stay together if they don’t have kids. For my money, you can live any way you damn please, you can be a prostitute if you like, it’s your own business. But the folks are kind of old-fashioned, that’s all. Let’s face it, this is a conservative town. I’m not saying you’re abnormal. I’m just saying, try to stay off the subjects that might upset them, that’s all. ’Cause they’re understandably a little shaky about you. Living alone in New York and all.”

  “I told you, I’m not living alone.”

  “Listen, Sasha, it’s your first visit back in what? five years? So why not try to make it nice for the folks? I mean, you don’t have to mention the guy you’re living with.”

  I held my tongue. In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. Ben looked at his watch.

  “If you can manage till after dinner when I bring over Mamie and the kids, I’ll take your bag in then. I promised to see a salesman at the Baybury store and I’m already late.”

  Why argue about who carries the bags? Why disturb the universe?

  “Sure, Ben. See you later. Sorry I held you up.”

  “It doesn’t matter, hon,” Ben laughed. “This time I’m the customer, and the customer’s always right.”

  I stepped out of the car onto the sidewalk. So many more cracks to avoid treading on than I remembered. So few unmarred surfaces. Slowly I walk up the front path through the red Baybury leaves. They rustle like music, smell like incense. It is almost twilight. Mother will be in the kitchen whipping cream for Ben’s hot chocolate, expecting him to return any moment, cold and ravenous, from his paper route. Then she will go upstairs to “freshen up” for Daddy while Ben and I stretch out on the floor before the radio with our secret decoders ready for action. Exactly on time, he’ll come in, puffing a bit from the hill and after a little tease present Chiclets to me and Ben. He’ll brush my hair out of my eyes and tousle Ben’s as we—whispering, “Shhh!”—move in closer to the radio. “Now what do I smell for dinner?” he’ll say sniffing at the air playfully. If it’s before six, he’ll get no players, but if it’s six or after, Ben and I will throw him off the track with transparent subterfuge. “I sure hope it’s not liver!” Finally he’ll settle down in “his” chair, open the evening paper Ben ceremoniously presents to him, and send us off with a kindly, “Okay kids, I’m going to look over the paper now. Call me when dinner’s ready.”

  I push the bell. Chimes ring in the hallway. I feel a chill run through me, knowing how warm and light it will b
e indoors. Tonight someone has already taken in the evening paper. The porch light goes on over my head. They have heard me. The same chimes, the same light they had installed in 1938 to replace the ones that had been ripped out by the vacating occupants. “Why’d they want to do that? What good could it do?” my father had asked sadly, discovering every window in the house broken and every light fixture demolished on the eve of our moving in. “Why would anyone want to do a thing like that?”—shaking his head. Who? I had wondered. Why?

  The house, like all the houses in the neighborhood, had been a Depression bargain, bought cheaply from a bank that had foreclosed on some unfortunate’s mortgage. We were lucky to be able to buy it, my father said. But like every Depression treat—even the ice cream cones with double cups, four scoops, and chocolate sprinkles, all for a nickel—our luck was someone else’s loss, our treat someone else’s hunger. And even the miraculous hummingbird in the hollyhocks behind the house—at whose expense did she come to us? What would I have to pay?

  Footsteps, and now the door. My face, still tanned from the summer, feels split like the sidewalk. I pray she will know me, even as for an instant she looks and hesitates.

  “Sasha! Darling Sasha! Come in! Abe—where are you? It’s our Sasha!”

  In a rush of joy she hugs my shoulders and kisses me, cheek at a time, then both together, demolishing time and distance. “Abe! Abe! Come down!” And to me: “Come inside. Give me your coat. Let me look at you.”

  There she stands, gentle, aging, still beautiful. How strange that I should have to bend down to kiss her. “But didn’t you expect me?” I ask. “It was Ben who dropped me off.”

  “Yes, I knew you were coming. But expecting you isn’t having you. Oh, Sasha, I’m so happy you came. You look so lovely, so sophisticated. Why, you’re skinny as a reed, and I’ve put on all this weight.” She touches her hand to her generous bosom in a gesture of hopeless apology.

  What can I say? If the sample of my urine Willy took to the lab after dropping me at the airport stimulates a frog, this talk is all gross irony.

  “It’s the dress, maybe, mother. I always weigh the same.”

  But at once I realize my skinniness is there only as an ideal, and quickly I take my cue. “You look beautiful to me, Mom, you don’t look heavy at all. You still glow, you never change.” We reserve this kindness for each other, and partly out of sympathy, partly out of love, we almost believe in it.

  “She’s right, you know,” says my father coming in and throwing one arm lovingly around each of us. “You really are quite as beautiful as you ever were; you look like a girl.”

  My mother and I both smile awkwardly, looking away, not quite sure which of us he is complimenting, not quite wishing to know.

  “Still negative? Are they sure? Shit, Willy! Then why haven’t I got my period?”

  “I can’t exactly say, but I’m sure there’s a reason.”

  Maybe a mustache again or the clap? Oh no! Must my body pay every time I fall in love?

  “You can go to your doctor and find out as soon as you come back to New York. I’d have thought you’d be glad it isn’t positive.”

  “If it were positive, at least I’d know what to do about it. I’m so sick of this! There is never a time when someone I know isn’t suffering over a fucking missed period! It’s disgusting! Anyway, I don’t even have a doctor.”

  “We’ll find you a doctor.”

  “I hate doctors.”

  “For Christsake, Sasha, don’t worry. Don’t I always take care of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m going to get you out of this one too. You just have to have a little faith in me.”

  “What did you do last night? It was practically unbearable here without you.”

  “Went to a movie.”

  “Alone?”

  “With Hector.”

  “What are you going to do tonight?”

  “Go to a movie.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Another movie.”

  “Do you miss me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m going to come home and see.”

  “I think that’s a splendid idea.”

  “Aren’t you going to the club with Ben and Marnie? Don’t you want to meet some young people and see some of your old friends?”

  “No.”

  “Let her alone, Laura, let her do what she wants,” said my father. “If she wants to be different, let her. She hasn’t changed a bit.”

  I withdrew into a book as I had always done—only this time I went gingerly, encumbered by recollections. All my early tutors were still here, quietly waiting on the bookshelves to be singled out and posed a question. It seemed years since I had asked one; my time to question had passed. Dipping again into Aristotle and Watson was like the first drag of a cigarette after years without smoking. Dizzily, I pondered again my childhood puzzle of which one to take to a desert island.

  On my brother’s block I bumped into Sally Harris, a childhood friend. Her face was worn; it was a shock to see her. (It shouldn’t have been; we were all closer to thirty now than to twenty.)

  “Sally Harris?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Sasha. Sasha Davis.”

  For a moment we stood scrutinizing each other. She had more lines near the eyes than I, none around the mouth.

  “Of course! Sasha! But your hair is so long now!” she said. She still wore hers short, as we all wore it in the high school yearbook. “I’m Sally Colby now.”

  “Buddy Colby?” I asked.

  She nodded, giggling. “How long is it since I’ve seen you? I remember the class predictions: you were going to be a lawyer. Did you make it?”

  “No.”

  She looked too hastily at my hands. “You’re married too, of course. Do you have any children?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Oh yes, we have three. But you will, you will,” she said generously.

  We eyed each other, comparing. “You really haven’t changed a bit!” we lied to each other.

  She recited who had married whom, and how many children they had.

  “Joey Ross? Who did he marry?” I inquired.

  “Joey? He married a girl from the West Side. Martha something. I don’t think you’d know her. Sweet girl. It turned out she couldn’t have any children, so they adopted a couple. A boy and a girl.”

  “What does Joey do now?”

  “We don’t see them much. I think he’s still in the shoe business.”

  Things were more or less as I remembered them at home. Upstairs I went from room to room touching things as though they were alive. The woods in the back had shrunk and I could see from the window in my mother’s room that the treehouse was gone. On the wall over my mother’s dressing table (even more crowded with jars than when I had lived here) all the photographs had been carefully rearranged. Color photos of Ben’s children indistinguishable from baby pictures of us; all the graduations; generations of weddings; Ben in a football pose, me at the pool. The pictures of Frank had been discreetly removed, but there were several Frank had snapped of me in Europe.

  I was pleased with how little I had changed in the photos. Surprised, too, considering that never, not even in my prime, had I photographed well. Even the face in the mirror was passable: if there were creases lurking, they hadn’t surfaced yet. Perhaps, I thought, I ought to consider cutting my hair again; short hair had always been so becoming.

  My mother walked in, made-up and dressed. “Do you like my rogue’s gallery?” she asked. She was wearing an expensive pajama set, and her skin had the pink smell I remembered. Had she dressed for me? When I was a child she had always, even in the midst of vacuuming or doing the laundry, put on a girdle, stockings, and a dress just to run out to the store.

  “Quite a collection here,” I said.

  “Yes. The family keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

  I thought of the parasite perhaps even now
clogging my womb, like the Kotex clogging the toilet, the monthly nightmare: How, oh how, to get rid of it? At the bottom of all my bad dreams was one or the other, an overflowing toilet or a bloodstained chair. I wondered if my mother still menstruated, if she and my father still made love—if they ever had.

  “Is it your perfume or powder that smells so nice?” I asked.

  “On me? I don’t know. I use both.” She began opening bottles for me to smell.

  “Do you really use all this stuff?” I asked.

  “From time to time, yes. What do you use?”

  “Nothing much. Sometimes a little mascara.”

  “And nothing at night?” She looked alarmed.

  “No.”

  “You should use something on your skin at night, Sasha, you really should!” She lowered her voice. “When a woman gets past twenty-five she should think about her skin. Things change so rapidly if you don’t take care.” As she spoke her hand fluttered to her throat, where make-up is useless. “I never go to sleep without putting some of this on my face.” She held out a bottle to me, an offering. “And for a woman my age, I still have a remarkably good skin. Want to try some? It feels very good. Go on, dear, take it with you. You’re leaving today and the stores are closed; I can always get more.”

  I had been so proud of her beauty. And now to see her reduced to this, hooked on medicines, careful of light, trying to warn me of what was coming. I wanted to put my arms around her, to hug and console her. Perhaps the weakening of the senses of the aging is an adaptation for survival. Perhaps we grow weak in the eyes and hard of hearing the better to preserve our illusions.

  Roxanne told me about a way to abort myself with a speculum, a catheter and syringe, sterile water, and a friend. (Not till months later did I learn it could be lethal.) “There’s nothing to it. I’ve done it twice myself. You just have someone squirt a little sterile water into the uterus, you wait, and in a few days you abort.”

  “What if you don’t?”

  “Then you do it again.”