Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  “I have found a doctor, Sasha. We must take him your piss.”

  I jumped all over him. “Manolo, amigo, amor. Gracias, gracias.” I was halfway out the door, dragging him after me.

  “There will be time for me to take it to him after dinner. Now I am hungry.” He clapped his hands loudly and rubbed his palms together.

  We all ate together around a long wooden table in the pensión the troupe had taken over. Sixteen of us, like a family. The meal was as long as the table. First soup, then eggs, then fish, then rice with chicken, then a few leaves of salad—all digested with mounds of bread and gallons of wine. The Teatro Clásico Español seemed unaware of drinking water. And, finally, the smooth golden custard that ritually ended every Spanish meal, flan.

  After the flan I excused myself and went upstairs to pee in a bottle. When I returned to the table, everyone was already steeped in the seductive rhythms of Flamenco, accompanying Pepe’s high minor falsetto and José María’s and Tonio’s sensuous dancing with las patinas and castanets. Of course Manolo wouldn’t leave the table. He poured out more wine and struck his cupped right hand with the fingers of his left, Flamenco-style. “We have time for the doctor. I promise it,” he said. I could do nothing but clap too.

  It was the music and the meals, oddly both jubilant and solemn, which gave ceremony to our disjointed life. The meals always began in a hush, as though the crude plank or earthen floors of the rooms we gathered in were cathedral stones, and always ended in a passion of Flamenco, a communion. Everyone helped teach me how to eat eggs by jabbing the yolks with bread, how to drink wine from skins, how to clap out the palmas, stomping and clapping faster and faster until the music exploded in a frenzy.

  It was almost time to set off for the theater before Manolo suddenly remembered the doctor. “Dios mio! El doctor! Come!” he yelled, jumping up and draining his wineglass. Though of course it was too late, we set off.

  Fade-in on a muddy cobblestoned back street of a poor Castilian town, five minutes past curtain time with three figures, two on stiletto heels, hobbling along in search of the Teatro Principal, which seems not to exist. The figure in the center is the drunken leading lady, supported on one side by a Spanish youth who resembles the young Brando, and on the other by an American girl too far from home. She carries a bottle of urine in one hand. The street is filled with screaming, running children. The leading lady is babbling something about her heart; the bottle, lacking a top, is sloshing urine over everything including the leading lady, who, believing it wine, grabs for it.

  the young brando: Pugh! (dashing the bottle to the gutter).

  Oh, well—it doesn’t matter: the doctor has gone home, and the next morning the company is leaving town for good. There will be other towns, more urine.

  In Palencia at last we saw a doctor. (“Palencia? I’ll send Frank a postcard and he’ll think I’m in Valencia, right on schedule.” We had another good laugh, but I never got around to mailing a card, as I never managed to finish writing a letter.) The doctor reported that I was not pregnant. He diagnosed my malady as inflammation resulting from excessive sex, and prescribed large white pills and abstinence. As I sat across a desk from the doctor, afraid, Manolo translated his words to me proudly, sentence by sentence, allowing the doctor to admire his English and his cojones. A very accomplished young actor.

  I took the pills. But Manolo, living on an excess of everything, would not practice abstinence. “O mi amor, do I hurt you? I never want to hurt you. I am truly sorry,” he would say, aghast, his belly moving over mine. But he couldn’t stay off me. Whenever I got angry and threatened to leave, he’d leap around the bed laughing and grabbing at me, and maybe twisting my arm or dealing me a provocative slap, until I promised to stay; then we’d make love again. Once he stole my passport, threatening to tear it up unless I promised. I forgave him every time. I imagined he did it because he needed me to stay, as I needed him.

  I was sorry to need him, disgusted to know that I had thrown away my one Big Chance not five minutes after entering Spain. Unable to manage for five minutes on my own! As the train crossed the border from France and the entire motley Teatro Clásico Español had climbed on board, I had attached myself to this troupe. When Manolo, Veronica, Pepe, and José María had straggled into my compartment with guitar and castanets, I had imagined they were simply my first Spanish sights. Musical, like the movies. But after Manolo, as young as I and with my kind of looks, began trying out his English on me, it wasn’t half an hour before I knew that all he had to do was ask me to stay, and I wouldn’t leave the train in Madrid as planned. Maybe love at first sight is always desperation. Though I passed myself off as an adventuress, inside I knew I was really a coward. Worthless without a man. As the train pulled out of the Madrid station a few hours later, I leaned back on the plush seat in Manolo’s care. We squeezed hands until Madrid and all her guidebook wonders seemed as distant as Munich. What difference did it make, I thought, if I see Madrid now or later? There was all of Spain to see. Wasn’t it better to see it through native eyes, accompanied by Spanish music and Spanish love?

  I was not, as I had expected to be, an outcast. Rather, whoever didn’t accept me as just one more member of the troupe took me as something of a celebrity. I was in a class apart, too strange to need explaining, too odd even to need to remove my wedding ring. Americans were still a rarity in Spain in the fifties, especially female Americans traveling alone, and I was shielded by the sheer glamour of being la norteamericana loca. I was a wondrous creature who knew someone who knew someone who knew Tennessee Williams. To Manolo I was more: like some visiting mogul I was powerful, rich, worldly. An exceptional woman, like their own idols Ava Gardner or La Pasionaria. As notable as a man.

  My celebrity carried advantages. As an outlandish American I could, for the first time in my life, be as abandoned as I liked in bed. I could direct everything for my own satisfaction, and Manolo took great pains to please me.

  “You like that? Bueno! I will do it all the night long!”

  He caressed me all over for hours and hours, or kissed me exactly where I wanted for longer than I asked, while I lay back and let him; he did not find my breasts too small; he knew exactly when to enter me; he let me lead, let me set the rhythm; refusing to stop unless I commanded it. In a week I was more intimate with Manolo than I’d ever been with any man—partly, perhaps, because of the freedom the language barrier imposes; partly because of the sheer number of hours we logged in bed together; but mainly because for the first time in my life I was as much a person as my man. We were like Martians to each other, incommensurable and therefore equal. Ordinary standards simply didn’t apply to me. A creature apart, a Martian-American, I carried my own standards. I didn’t worry about how I looked to Manolo; I felt no need to hide from him the imperfections of my body: a Martian-American was more than beautiful enough for him, sufficiently blinded by love. No one dominated: we just circled around each other, coming together for our dance. No games to play, no roles to fit; neither rivals nor adversaries, we were two creatures exploring each other. Anything went.

  “Say dirty words,” he ordered, mounting me.

  “I don’t know any,” I laughed.

  “In inglés. Say them in inglés. I will say to you the names in español, and you will say to me the names in inglés. Then we will see.”

  It was too ludicrous to be humiliating. I was a new, important person. We called each other dirty names until his erection dissolved in our laughter and we went to sleep.

  Each morning after the company nightcap at three a.m. or so, Manolo and I would get into bed, taking with us wine, my Lucky Strikes, the Spanish marijuana he called “yerba,” and my dictionaries. Then we would start to talk. Manolo wanted to know everything about me and America. Mostly I told him about New York, for which he had a passion, but we talked also about Spain, Franco, the Church, evil, everyone in the troupe, Broadway, words, my husband, Manolo’s fiancée María, prices, prostitutes. He taught me Spanish
songs and I taught him English ones. For the singing lessons sometimes Pepe and Pilar and Tonio would come into our room and sit on the sagging bed with us—all the rooms seemed to belong to everyone—and then the next night we’d march through the dusty village streets with a crowd of children behind us, chanting our songs. Pepe could never learn to pronounce the “j” in “Jingle Bells,” as I could never pronounce the “y” in oye.

  “Sasha, oye,” he would say cornering me hopefully, while everyone got ready to laugh. “YYYYingle bells?”

  “No, Pepe, oye. JJJJingle bells.”

  Once Manolo and I retired to bed, there was no idea or subject we were willing to forsake for lack of vocabulary. Instead we wore out the dictionaries. Manolo would perch my reading glasses on his nose and attack the pages of the dictionary until it yielded up his meanings. He would curse loudly if his word wasn’t there, then try a substitute word instead. For both of us our English was getting better and better, while my Spanish remained nonexistent. “Wait for Madrid,” he’d say. “There you will see a dictionary!”

  When we woke at dinnertime, Manolo went straight to the washstand in the corner of the room where earlier a black-frocked maid had placed a fresh pitcher of water; then picking up the heavy pitcher and pouring a hard stream over his black hair, he would let out a mocking scream. I would wake to wash more decorously, splashing water first into the basin and from there to my face. He laughed at my strange Martian ways, but sometimes he copied me, as sometimes I copied him. Neither of us had a corner on virtue, though the maid, glancing back at me sprawled naked in bed across Manolo in the middle of the afternoon, found only me, to our amusement, wicked.

  Week after week of one- or two-night stands, long days in bed, going out for air only at night, hour after hour of teaching camp songs to Pepe and Pilar and the rest of the troupe, nights of finding where the gypsies sang on the stark edges of Castilian villages, making endless love, coming and coming—it was all very romantic in retrospect or in a letter. But at the time it was positively unhealthy. I was suspended over Spain like a puppet: no will, no baths, no drinking water, no clean underwear, no daylight. I began to neglect myself, then to languish. There was nothing for me to do but tag along. Help with the sets? No energy. Write a play? No discipline. Learn Spanish? No necessity. I taught Manolo English, but when it was time for him to teach me Spanish, we’d make love again. The troupe performed twice every night, at nine and again at midnight, and went to sleep at dawn. Knowing no Spanish, it was too boring for me to sit through the plays. But I couldn’t read, either, in the dark. The villages we played were seldom listed in the guidebooks. They almost never had churches worth looking at, and when they did, we’d leave before I could see them. The Spain I had crammed for was as distant as Frank. The post office was never open when we were awake. And what else was there for me to do in Spain but write letters and look at churches?

  I was superfluous. Learning Spanish or helping out with the sets was hardly different from rearranging the furniture or adopting a new hair style. Or buying a dress, giving a dinner party, having a baby. Love was always supposed to be enough, but it could hardly even replace sightseeing.

  If there had not always been that promise of Madrid, maybe I would have found it in me to leave. Several times I checked the train schedule and once I packed my bag. But there was always next week in Madrid. And Manolo.

  We traveled around Castille for more than a month before Veronica finally announced we were going to Madrid, and a seance Pepe held that night confirmed it.

  “Now,” proclaimed Manolo, projecting his voice to the sky, “I will show you Madrid! Now you will know España!”

  It was going to be worth all that waiting. We would bathe, walk the broad avenues “as grand as those of Paris,” sit in the luxurious parks, eat the renowned seafood which trucks rushed to Madrid from the coast every morning to delight a populace of very particular taste. We would tour the churches, the palaces, the museums. “Now you will see,” said Manolo, lifting me in the air.

  The first day in Madrid I had a bath and Manolo got his motorbike out of hock. After that he had no money left, not even for gasoline.

  On the road the company had paid for his bed, board, and bus or train fare from town to town (I, of course, had always paid for my own), and he had needed money only for wine, cigarettes, and dope. But in Madrid, unless he stayed with his family, he needed money to live, and unfortunately his meager pay was such that to live with me for only a week he would have had to be three actors. It was fine for me to pay my way as Martians might, but not his way too. Yet he had had to spend his entire accumulated wage in a single night, just getting his moto and showing me his old hangouts. Now he had no choice but to accept money from me.

  It ruined everything. By his standards of honor we were no longer on a par. Now he faced my dilemma.

  We checked into a cheap hotel near the railroad station. It was understood that I would finance everything. Then we drove all over the city at top speed on the moto, Manolo calling back the sights to me. As we whizzed past the Prado, circled the Royal Palace, and bounced through the serenely beautiful Plaza Mayor, where, I remembered from the books, Ferdinand and Isabella had held their court, Manolo shouted back the names and drove on. It was useless; even Madrid was beyond my reach. I looked, but saw only an enticing city receding at the rate of fifty miles an hour. Though I didn’t complain, Manolo felt my disappointment; he even resented it. Without the troupe, we were but one more poor madrileño and one rich tourist, living off each other.

  We began to hurt each other like ordinary earthly men and women. Manolo sulked and refused to bathe with me. I brooded, and planned to go sightseeing without him. With my cleanliness restored, I wanted more than ever to go to the Prado, to the Royal Palace, to Goya’s chapel, to a bullfight. Now that my urine was under control I wanted to go out clean early in the morning with guidebooks and an itinerary, and come back to bathe at dinnertime. But though we fought, I couldn’t leave. We were afraid that if we broke the spell even for a day we would discover feelings we didn’t want to acknowledge. Hoping to recapture what we had had on the road, we stayed in bed with our wine and dictionaries until hunger drove us out, and then we simply sat around in a café or tore through the streets of Madrid on the moto. In two months I had seen nothing of the land but the buff dusty hues visible from a bus window, and nothing of the towns and cities but the insides of cheap hotels. I hadn’t managed to visit a single museum. The longer I stayed, the more desperately I needed to leave. But our efforts pulled us deeper and deeper into our dilemmas, like quicksand, and we clung to each other.

  One evening in a well-lit bar off the Puerto del Sol where the whole company reassembled to plan the next tour, suddenly everything was settled. After he had ordered our wine and I had paid, Manolo looked hard at me and said, “Sasha! You are growing mostachos! Oye, Pepe!” he called across the room. “Ven a ver los mostachos de Sasha!  ”

  I showed no emotion at the time, but when we reached the hotel later that night, I packed my bag for good.

  “Do not go, please,” said Manolo sitting quietly on the bed watching me pack.

  “I have to go.”

  “Please stay.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Porqué?”

  “You know why. My husband is waiting for me. And I want to go to Italy.” I thought: hypocrite.

  “Stay. One day we will go together to Italy.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Stay until Thursday. We will see all the sights. I promise it. We will go to El Prado tomorrow at ten o’clock in the morning. Thursday we will go to Escorial. There are storks sitting on the chimneys. I swear it on my mother. I will take you there. On the Virgin. Thursday. You will see it. Please do not go.”

  But it was no use. I had to leave.

  On the train Manolo sat across from me in my dim compartment until the last moment. We held onto each other’s hands, already turning to memories.

  “Writ
e to me. I will come to you in Italy if you leave your husband,” he said. “Or maybe in the winter I will come to you in New York.”

  “Okay.” I smiled. We had planned it so often. “I’ll send you my address in Rome.” But I knew that Franco’s rare passports went to higher-ups than Manolo.

  The train started.

  “Goodbye,” I said, clinging to his hands through the compartment window.

  “Adiós.”

  We looked at each other through the window until we were specks in the distance. At least, I consoled myself as the train entered the hills, I wouldn’t again be subject to such scrutiny.

  Two

  They say it’s worse to be ugly. I think it must only be different. If you’re pretty, you are subject to one set of assaults; if you’re plain you are subject to another. Pretty, you may have more men to choose from, but you have more anxiety too, knowing your looks, which really have nothing to do with you, will disappear. Pretty girls have few friends. Kicked out of mankind in elementary school, and then kicked out of womankind in junior high, pretty girls have a lower birth rate and a higher mortality. It is the beauties like Marilyn Monroe who swallow twenty-five Nembutals on a Saturday night and kill themselves in their thirties.

  Pretty or plain, by the time you survive puberty, your job in life is pretty much cut out for you. In either case, you must somehow wheedle back into that humanity from which you have been systematically excluded since you learned to walk. Among the ruling fraternity whose members can often barely hide their contempt for you, you must find one sponsor willing to brave ridicule for love of you. You must make him desire you more than manliness. For boys are taught that it is weak to need a woman, as girls are taught it is their strength to win a man.