Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
Page 26
Jenny was in Gail’s arms, fussing.
“I would have come back sooner, Mrs. Burke, but the baby was asleep and I didn’t want to wake her,” said Gail. “Did you have your hair cut?”
“Yes.”
“It looks nice.”
Jenny was holding out her arms to me, squirming for me. “Uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn.” I took her.
“Thanks, Gail. How did it go?”
“Oh, fine. The carriage is in the hall. I changed Jenny twice. The only problem was, Andrea talks so fast I can’t understand her, and it makes her mad.”
She said it as though Andy were deaf. “I know,” I said. “Here, watch Jenny a second and I’ll go get your money.”
I put Jenny down on the floor and instantly she began to cry. I felt the knot in my stomach. Andy trailed me to the bedroom, tugging on my skirt and trying to explain something. “In a minute, pumpkin,” I said.
I opened my purse, saw the clipping, put it back in my drawer, got out the money, and with Andy still dogging me returned to pay Gail and snuggle the baby.
“Now, Andy,” I said, sitting on the floor with Jenny in my lap after Gail had gone, “now, darling, tell me.”
It was mostly at beginnings that the stammer came. As though she wanted the words to come out not in sequence but all at once as angels speak, under the aspect of eternity. The stammer was just a stage, of course, and would pass in time, like everything else. But it had to be handled properly all the same.
She told me her plan. Acorn cakes and sugar-water tea. These things and many more. I understood her perfectly.
Peter, Peter pumpkin eater
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.
Put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.
We practiced consonants in the guise of song; drank tea and baked acorns in mime; bathed and fed Jenny; ate; read together; prepared for bed. And in all that time, Andy, who plucks a speck of dust from the air, who sees the single blade of grass growing miraculously out of a brick, who divines. moods before they erupt and catches discrepancies as they occur—in all that time Andy never once noticed my haircut.
Or did notice but didn’t care.
Even if I had recaptured exactly the glow and look of the Baybury Queen, would Willy have started coming home in time to join us for dinner? I doubt it. A highchair did not go with candlelight, nor mashed bananas with white wine. Our island life was hard for him to adapt to. We talked baby talk and read picture books, by common standards primitive. We cried unpredictably and often, stifling him. We had tantrums and provoked wrath. We lacked spontaneity. We read recipes and stammered. We examined Jenny’s stools. We bugged him, we bored him to tears, we were united against him.
Perhaps when the girls were older, as Dr. Spock suggested, and more conventionally charming? But then I would be older too. And if Andrea never stopped sucking her thumb? If the children died?
No. It was all there in black and white in all the texts I had ever studied. Baybury boys are taught it is weak to need a woman, as girls are taught it is their strength to win a man. It was as clear as the girls Willy watched on Sundays in the ads in the Times Magazine and on the paths in Central Park. Times were moving; so were we all.
“Well?” I asked, smiling weakly, already knowing Willy’s response.
He looked injured.
“Oh God, Sasha. What have you done?” He raised his hand to his eyes as though warding off a blow.
“I told you I was having it cut,” I said in my defense. An extenuating circumstance. Could it really be that bad? It had once looked so right short. It had never been particularly luxurious long. “Don’t you like it at all?” I asked.
“How could you do it?” he whispered.
Were those tears in Willy’s eyes? That was going too far. “Christ, Willy,” I cried, “it’s just hair! It’ll grow in again!”
But it was only out of habit that I reassured him, for I knew after it grew back in it wouldn’t really be the same.
I turned my back to him and left the room. And felt his eyes on me still as I picked up the phone and called Roxanne.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgment is extended to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:
Chappel & Co., Inc.: Lines from Where or When by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers. Copyright 1937 by Chappel & Co. Inc. Copyright renewed.
Famous Music Publishing Companies: Lines from Lotus Blossom (Marahuana). Copyright 1934 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1961 by Famous Music Corporation.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: Excerpts from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot from Collected Poems 1909–1962.
Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.: Excerpts from Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock, M.D. Copyright 1945, 1946, by Benjamin Spock, M.D. Copyright © 1957, © 1968 by Benjamin Spock, M.D.
Portions of this novel have appeared in Aphra, Vol. 1, No. 2, Winter 1970, in Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter, 1971; and in Works in Progress, Vol. 6, April 1972.
copyright © 1969, 1971, 1972, 1985 by Alix Kates Shulman
cover design by Andrea Uva
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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