When summer ended and my junior year began, I had my first chance to branch out. Cookie Margolis of Elyria, Ohio, a premed student at Ohio State, invited me to the university’s great Homecoming Weekend, and, Joey or no, I accepted.
I had met Cookie in August at Geneva-on-the-Lake, the decaying summer resort on Lake Erie’s shore where the Baybury Heights sororities and fraternities rented cottages for two weeks every summer. With only one chaperone per cottage, and Joey stuck sorting shoes in Cleveland, I had found plenty of opportunity at Geneva to experiment with other kinds of Lake Erie fish. My sisters (virgins all, I believed) were so busy concentrating their efforts on our own Baybury boys that none of them noticed me searching the dance hall and the skating rink for odd species or wandering alone on the far end of the beach seeking adventure. Right there under their noses, if they had only troubled to look, they too might have found tall Cookie Margolis industriously cutting bait, his summer job. While they saw no further than their noses, I managed to bring off a hot romance, prudently remaining chaste in case they bothered to investigate.
It had not been easy, lying with Cookie on the cool sand under the stars hearing the wavelets lapping the shore like kittens’ tongues, for Cookie’s presurgical fingers melted me as easily as Joey’s baskets ever had. But I had resisted, knowing better than to start doing it with two boys at once. I laughed tears for my poor lost virginity reading the relevant passages of Girls Alive, realizing how recklessly I had upped the ante.
If you kiss Mike tonight, the next time you go out with him it will be natural to kiss him again. Each date with him you may go a little further in what will become a dangerous game, because you are releasing in him and in yourself emotions that you may not be able to control.
Meanwhile, you will go out with other boys and it’s easy enough to slip into the same habits with them. In no time you have earned yourself the reputation of being a girl any boy can kiss. And if any boy can—well, … you will have saved nothing special for the man for whom you eventually feel genuine love.
What had I done? They were talking about kissing, and here I was applying it to …! Fifteen years old! I was overcome by more than sufficient fear and remorse to enable me to resist Cookie. It was bad enough to be doing it regularly with one person; two was the road to nymphomania. I was too young, too young. Just as I knew for a fact that kissing led to French kissing, I knew that “sleeping around” at fifteen would lead to nymphomania at sixteen, and prostitution at seventeen, no matter how good my grades or my family or my intentions.
Once I reached Ohio State I saw it was worth all the pains I had taken getting my parents’ permission to go. That brief first glimpse of the larger world was a revelation to me, whetting my appetite for the future as much as ten Little Leather Library books.
From the time I had read my first fairy tale I had tried to imagine what it would be like to live elsewhere and free. Even as a small child my pulse had quickened each time we drove over the Cuyahoga Bridge to Cleveland’s West Side, past the huge Sherwin Williams Paints sign on which a can of neon paint spilled over a spinning globe bearing the legend Cover the Earth. There in that strange west world of Cleveland people had different kinds of names and houses and, I imagined, lives.
At Ohio State I saw it might be true. In Columbus girls lived in dormitories where, by signing in and out for each other and telling lies, they could come and go almost as freely as the boys, who of course had no curfews. No mother in her negligee, arms folded across her breast, to shout from the head of the stairs, “It’s two o’clock in the morning! You were due home at midnight!” No father reading in the study, waiting in the bright lights (which would reveal one’s shameful dishevelment) to embarrass one before one’s friends by saying with the excessive formality of anger controlled, “Young man, I cannot permit you to see my daughter again if you cannot get her home before one thirty a.m.” Although in their talk the dorm girls were almost indistinguishable from the girls of Baybury—all sweaters and romance and marriage—their freedom seemed vast in comparison. How I envied them!
There was an even greater difference among the boys. At the football game on Saturday the college boys drank rye or gin out of pocket flasks. Besides cars and athletics they talked of life, mechanics, medicine, and the future. At the great Homecoming Dance on Saturday night, more than a dozen of them danced with me. Even the ugly ones seemed as accomplished and desirable as Cookie Margolis, more fascinating than any Keystone or Deltan I had ever known. From Columbus, Baybury Heights, where I was going to be stuck for two more years, looked like a puddle.
On my last night in Columbus, weakened by rye, I succumbed to Cookie in the attic of the fraternity house. He shamed me into bed, insinuating that anything less would be ingratitude, and took me as I was protesting. Of course, I alone was to blame; but, ignorant of college protocol and no virgin, I simply hadn’t known how to say no. When I discovered a few weeks later that Cookie was in love with someone else, I knew I would have to keep up my grades so I could go to some other college than Ohio State. I couldn’t afford to start out as a freshman with a reputation.
I was getting impatient with the whole problem of sex. Why did everyone consider it so important? Love was important, but sex was nothing but trouble. The philosophers I read didn’t waste their time with it.
As long as I had to spend two more years in boring Baybury, I decided to use the time well. In a strange scientific book from my father’s shelves, Behaviorism, by the famous Dr. John Watson, I had discovered certain indispensable facts. “Personality,” said Watson in italics, “is but the end product of our habit systems. … The situation we are in dominates us always and releases one or another of these all-powerful habit systems.”
If our situation dominates us, I would have to get out of my deadening situation. If personality is a result of habit, I would have to start forming the right habits. I would shun the rat race and prepare for college. I would practice raising an eyebrow, perfect my seductive glance, and cultivate a crooked smile. I would get top grades and harden myself.
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 zurück, 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 lightly 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.
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen Page 8