by Honor Moore
My mother ridiculed the whole procedure—the four hundred pennies I had to collect, the skits I had to concoct for the Tuesday night meetings, and my desperation to belong: “Honor is always saying she isn’t ‘popular,’” she wrote to Pam. She didn’t understand that she’d always been “popular,” having been born to the tribe with whom she played tennis, swam, rode, and went to boarding school—children of her parents’ friends, who in turn were the children of their parents’ friends, all the way back to the Arbella and the Mayflower. Much later when we were grown up and living in New York, a woman I’d admired from afar at Shortridge, who’d been a prom-queen candidate and a cheerleader, told me how her mother had managed her successful campaign for popularity, choosing clothes that would show off her hourglass figure, designing and sewing the formal gowns she wore to dances, coaching her in strategies of flirtation. My parents had removed their names from the New York Social Register to protest its racism and anti-Semitism, but the elite to which they’d always belonged would always be there for them to return to.
Andra picked me up at seven-fifteen and we walked to school. Down Washington Boulevard, across Thirty-fifth Street, over to Pennsylvania Street, and turn left. The school with its playing fields and terraces occupied a full city block. At the curb, kids who drove parked their cars, doors open in warm weather, hit parade spilling out onto the street. From the corner of my eye I saw Carol Stout, a cheerleader who had pledged GALS, Jolee Benfield, a Southern girl with blond hair and sparkling brown eyes who had pledged Subdeb, and Toni Grant, who’d pledged WOW. “She’s stacked,” was what the boys said about Toni. I’d watch furtively as she walked from one car to another, her skirt tight, wearing stockings—“hose”—and flat delicate shoes—“flats.” I was sure no one saw me, the girl who wore glasses, the girl with straight brown hair who got A’s. Toni didn’t seem to care much about A’s, and her hair was honey blond.
Jim Spencer was a senior, and late one May night, I sneaked out to meet him. He had a girlfriend, and maybe he ended up marrying her, but he was the boy that Faye, an ARC active, recruited when I complained I’d never “made out.” I was a little scared when she told me that her secret boyfriend Mac, the grown-up study hall teacher who drove a green MG, would pick me up at 2 a.m. Faye was quiet and her hair was brown; the popular girls, the cheerleaders, had hair turned fluorescent blond from swimming at “Rivvie” and eyelashes carefully blackened with mascara; they wore straight skirts that were never too tight, pleated skirts when they wanted to relax: Faye always wore very tight skirts. Jim wasn’t popular either, but his girlfriend with her careful bouffant was not the kind to sneak out in the middle of the night to drink and neck under a highway bridge with someone else’s boyfriend. His skin was sallow and he had a chipped tooth, but he had looked handsome posturing in pale blue brocade in The Doctor in Spite of Himself, the Molière play the school did that year, and for which I’d done props.
Exactly on time, Mac pulled up in his tiny green convertible, I slipped from behind the bushes, carrying a blanket, and Faye opened the door for me. In the clearing under the bridge, Jim was waiting in his pickup truck. We spread the blankets and sat down as if for a picnic, and then Mac opened a pint of Seagram’s 7 and we drank. We laughed for a while—I was waiting, the way you wait before a dentist starts drilling. Suddenly as we were all talking, my eyes dodging Jim’s, Faye and Mac knotted themselves into one of the blankets and fell away. Then Jim leaned forward and kissed my forehead; I couldn’t look at him. He touched my chin with his hands, guided it toward him and kissed my mouth. When he pulled back, he didn’t look at me, and then he kissed me again, shooting his tongue in through my lips and swishing it around. His mouth tasted stale. The whiskey bottle caught the dark light as his hand crept under my sweater and toward my breasts, as I resisted the deliciousness of the feeling of his fingers there, wanting and not wanting him to stop. Soon I was lying down—my clothes still on—and he was on top of me. I wondered as we kissed what Faye and Mac were doing, certain Faye knew how to do what I didn’t. Along with the talk about who was pledging what club and what percentage Negro the school now was, there was disapproving gossip about who went “all the way”—frightening rumors, if a girl suddenly disappeared, that she had left school to have a baby, not, as she’d claimed, to live with her lonely or rich or sick aunt in St. Louis.
It was almost light when Faye shook me awake and I pulled myself from Jim’s arms and got back into the boot of the MG. I had told Elly, the Dutch exchange student who was living with us, that I had to study late and would sleep on the porch. It was almost 5 a.m. when I fell asleep there, pulling around me covers from my bed upstairs, still tingling from the weight of Jim Spencer. Since I had to be at school at eight for the biology bird-watching trip, I set the alarm for seven, but when the hot sun woke me, I was hung over and the clock said five of eight. Without a shower or packing a lunch, I raced to school. The rented bus was still there, its engine idling, and Dr. R. Ruth Richards was standing at the door with a list in her hand, a faint smile on her face, as if she knew exactly what had made me late.
Therefore, with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven . . . My father is speaking the prayer that begins the most sacred part of the communion service, the prayers through which the bread comes to stand for Christ’s body, the wine, his blood. On my knees with the girls’ choir, I join him: Holy, Holy, Holy, we sing, the closest I come to being an actual part of what my father does. Had I been born a decade later, I would have been an acolyte, but in 1960, only boys were acolytes, and only men were priests; the girls’ choir sang the family service at nine-fifteen, the boys the more important service, at eleven. I do not even imagine the possibility of any of this changing as I work to sing like a boy, reach a high soprano behind my eyebrows, a pure, beautiful voice that seems to come from no body at all.
John Fenstermaker was playing the organ, and I was “in love with” him. At Shortridge he had given piano recitals, and my friend Laurie, who was a pianist herself, told me he might one day have a concert career. When he took his bow on the stage of the auditorium, I couldn’t clap hard enough. You could tell he was exhausted as he bowed, but also embarrassed by our praise. I agreed with Laurie—soon he’d be playing piano concertos with the symphony downtown at the Shriners’ Murat Temple. Right now, though, he was at the organ, and I was just feet away, in a row of girls singing, long purple robes covering our Sunday best. He was slender, even slight, with brown hair and big brown eyes. He’d never spoken a word to me, but right before he graduated just weeks ago, I started saying hello to him in the halls, and eventually he’d acknowledged me with a crooked, sleepy smile.
All glory be to thee, Almighty God, our heavenly Father. My father is now reading, genuflecting, standing, genuflecting again. He is at the altar, his back to us, bass repetitions of organ notes seeming to lift him from kneeling, candles flaming insistently upward. Now he strikes his chest three times as three times he repeats, Lord, I am not worthy, the enormous cross appliquéd across the back of his chasuble falling and rising as he prays and kneels and stands again. Soon it will be time to move from the choir pew to the altar rail for communion. For in the night in which he was betrayed . . . The disciples wait in the garden, in the dark. Someone asks Saint Peter if he knows Jesus, and Saint Peter says no, he does not, and in the brightness of the sanctuary my father lifts the bread with both his hands high over his head. And when he had given thanks, he broke it . . . I am so close to the altar I can hear the wafer crack apart and see my father’s hands open to touch all the bread and all the wine, as he continues the prayer. Now he is giving communion to himself and to the other priests, first bread and then wine.
So rapt was I that when the acolyte lifted his hand, gesturing to the choir to come forward, it was as if he were some sort of angel. With the others, I sidled carefully out of the choir pew and made my way reverently to the altar rail. Slowly I knelt, and my father moved toward
me, the color of his chasuble blinding, and when he paused before me, his eyes and voice betraying no recognition, he pressed a white wafer the size of a quarter into my outstretched palms: Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died—
John Fenstermaker was playing an interlude, Bach, something I recognized from my mother’s Wanda Landowska record, and as I crossed myself I tried to look as pious as he did, hoping he would look up and see me kneeling there, as Father Bolles, whose son I babysat, stood in front of me, not allowing his eyes to see me either as he extends the cool edge of the gleaming chalice to my lips, tipping it so I can drink the wine. This is my blood . . . Sweet and aromatic, it burns in my mouth and rushes down my throat, and as the organ grows softer and then louder again, I see John Fenstermaker lean back, allowing the music to take him. I cross myself.
As I rose to my feet, a hot emptiness clamped each side of the back of my head. John Fenstermaker began to blur, and I could hardly feel my hands; it was as if I had left them behind in that vibrating goldness. I turned and walked toward the pew, deliberately, as if I might fall if I wasn’t very careful. When I slid back into the pew, my eyes lowered, I crossed myself again, bowed my head, which was now throbbing fiercely, and leaned into my open hymnal, the page cool against my forehead.
John Fenstermaker went on playing Bach, then Saint-Saëns, and eventually I lifted my head and watched the congregation move up the stairs from the crossing and through the chancel. Crossing. Chancel. The words now seem alien, but at the time they were as familiar as “kitchen” or “bedroom.” Mrs. Bolles and Mrs. Rountree, the wife of the curate, moved slowly toward the altar rail, and I could hear their husbands murmuring, Take, eat . . . Drink this in remembrance . . . of me. Now John Fenstermaker played chords I knew would end in the minor key of my mother’s favorite hymn, and there she was, passing in front of me, her head bowed. I began to sing, hoping she would hear me:
Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.
That August, before we left for the Adirondacks, my mother organized a party with the mothers of two of my friends, and I asked her to invite John Fenstermaker. We set up the food and record player on the eating porch where I’d slept the night I sneaked out with Jim Spencer, and opened the French doors so the guests would spill out onto the terrace and into the fenced yard that enclosed the wooden jungle gym my father had assembled from a kit. Everyone brought 45s, and we danced to Fats Domino and Lloyd Price and Brenda Lee. John Fenstermaker arrived, and soon he and I were slow-dancing to Pete Fountain, arms slung around each other’s necks, barely moving. I could hardly believe it: I wanted a kiss, and we did kiss, slowly and sweetly. He didn’t call the next day or the one after that, but a month later, when I wrote my friend Christine from the Adirondacks, he was who I was dreaming of: “I play Pete Fountain every 5 minutes. Anyway I always wish I were still dancing with him.”
11
Thou Shalt Not
* * *
The spring of my junior year, a new girl arrived at the school, unheralded, from another part of town, or from out of town—no one knew where. She was very tall and she wore her skirts three inches above the knee, years before anyone heard of a miniskirt. Her mother made her clothes, altered what she did not make, and understood that her daughter’s looks were an asset. Cassandra understood that, too. Her mouth was beautiful, and, she said, “my nostrils flare.” She wore mascara and tinted her blond hair and her mother didn’t object. Mrs. Diehl was heavy and dark-haired, wore glasses and navy blue dresses. Mr. Diehl’s face seemed startled into a daze of perpetual confusion.
Cassandra always wore stockings, her garter belt was lace, and her underwear looked like a movie star’s. I couldn’t take my eyes off her legs, which she made a point of crossing and uncrossing in class, the tight nylon making a zipping sound. She was going to the Kentucky Derby, she told me; she planned to find a man there, and her parents had agreed to drive her. They were her awed spectators, and she looked so unlike them, she could easily separate herself. She made a game of it that weekend, she told me, pretending her father was her chauffeur, her mother the woman her real mother sent along to look after her. The hat she wore to the Derby was straw with a sweeping curvy brim, and she did “get” a man, an older one. He bought her a mint julep, and they smoked at the bar. She’d already gotten one letter from him and she thought she might write him back. She wanted to get out, she said. That’s why she needed a man. She was not going to live in a squat brick house on a not-perfect street in the Shortridge High School district of Indianapolis, Indiana. She was going to live in Europe.
“Why don’t you get your parents to send you to boarding school?” she said. “You’d be much happier.”
One day, soon after I met Cassandra, I asked my father what he thought of my legs. We were standing near the entrance to the dressing room of my parents’ bedroom. “They’re a little thick,” he said. I thought of Cassandra. “I have legs,” she would say, unbending one, then the other into the air. “And I’m going to be a model.” And then she would take me into her dreams: “Cassandra, I’ll call myself,” she said, “just Cassandra.” It didn’t faze her that she was utterly ignored by the popular crowd—she considered herself above them. All they wanted was marriage and a big house out near where Eli Lilly lived, the oldest, most elegant part of town. Cassandra considered that life simply the grown-up version of Shortridge. “I’m getting out,” she’d repeat, “and so are you.” I assumed I’d go East to college, but for now, despite what my father said about them, I wanted to admire my legs the way Cassandra admired hers—as if their perfection could be assigned a monetary value and she was aware when their stock climbed.
I was afraid to take her home. I thought my mother would be able to see what I saw and that she would then understand how much I thought about sex, that I had gone out in the middle of the night and let Jim Spencer put his hand inside my bra and had liked it even though it scared me. That in eighth grade, when I had Dorie McGee and Lucinda McCann over for the night on alternate weekends, we played man and woman, that I’d rubbed myself along Lucinda’s pale body as she pushed against me until the light changed. The day Cassandra came for lunch, she was wearing pastel colors, a short skirt, a little top, and my mother happened to be in the room with the celery green carpet, the room with the small white bed where Lucinda and I had curved in the dark. But I didn’t want to touch Cassandra, I mused. I wanted to be like her.
“How do you do, Mrs. Moore,” she said, shaking my mother’s hand. We had lunch at the table in the kitchen nook.
“And where do you live, Cassandra?” my mother asked in the formal voice she used when she was meeting a new grownup.
“My parents have acquired a house on Central Avenue,” Cassandra said brightly, cutting a small piece of her tuna sandwich, slipping it into her mouth. I thought her parents rented the house.
“What a wonderful name you have,” my mother said.
“Thank you,” Cassandra replied. “I’m named for my great-aunt.”
“And where does she live?”
“She died last year in New Orleans.” I had never heard of this aunt. Cassandra had always told me she’d been christened Sharon and changed her name herself at the age of eight. Now she was complimenting my mother. “This is a splendid house. Just splendid!”
“It’s big enough for all my children,” my mother answered. Luckily the children had an earlier lunch hour, and it was quiet. Cassandra had eaten only half her sandwich.
“I’ve enjoyed meeting Honor,” she said when we got up to leave. “She’s different from the other girls at school. So”—and she paused—“refined.”
Later I asked my mother what she thou
ght of Cassandra, and she said, “I think she’ll do very well with men.”
Cassandra became my teacher. When Danny Michaelis flirted with me and I was standoffish because he was a year younger, she told me I was crazy and instructed me to invite Danny to her house the following Friday night and tell him to bring Philip Prentiss, also a year younger. “We’ll listen to music,” she said grandly, “and have some lemonade.” When I arrived, she said she’d sent her parents away, and we went down to the basement to light the candles. “You sent your parents away?”
“Yes,” she said. “They do what I say because I am beautiful.”
When Danny and Phil rang the bell, Cassandra raced upstairs and I followed, watching her smooth her skirt before she opened the door. “Good evening,” she said. “Hi,” the boys said, grinning, twitching from one foot to the other. “We’re going to retire to the rec room,” she said. And then she opened the door to the basement, fluttering her long fingers, and led us down the stairs. Danny had big shiny blue eyes and pale hair, and Phil was so tall he stooped. We all sat down on the leatherette sofa, and Cassandra turned out the lights, but not before she put on Dave Brubeck and gave each of us a tall glass of lemonade—with a little whiskey in it, she said, just a little! “My father has an extensive jazz collection,” she said ceremoniously. I remember Danny and I falling back into the sofa cushions, his hand under my skirt, awkwardly pressing aside the elasticized suspenders of my garter belt. I could hear Cassandra kissing Phil, who, I was sure, had taken off his glasses. Danny and I kissed, and then he looked at me in the near-dark, touching my hair tenderly, as if I were a puppy. He wanted to be my boyfriend, and he wanted to take me to my junior prom. I kissed him again so he’d stop asking. In the light of day, I was on the honor roll, a second soprano in the A Cappella Choir and the Girls’ Ensemble, the president of the National Thespian troupe, and finally pledging Euvola. I couldn’t take a younger boy to the prom. I had to wait for someone else to invite me—I had no idea who.