Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  I ask for a cigarette. After it is presented and lit, back comes the arm. I try the radio. That too he manages to use against me. “You are too beauuuutiful for one man alone,” he croons and exerting pressure on my captive right shoulder attempts to probe me with an opening kiss.

  Disgusting! “You are too beautiful,” he moons, coming up for breath (true or not, it doesn’t matter), then presses his thick lips down on me for another. Our teeth touch.

  Enough. I start out straightforwardly, pushing against his chest with my hands to let him know how I feel and to give him the opportunity to withdraw nicely. It’s like pushing a mountain: he doesn’t budge. I pull my head back at the neck. (To pull back lower down, from the shoulders or back, would permit him almost effortlessly to flatten and mount me.) He presses in after.

  He lets the fingers of his right hand slowly down onto my breast, like a date at the movies, at the same time that he begins blowing into my ear. After taking the precaution of crossing my legs I reach up toward my breast and grab his fingers. But he must think I simply want to hold hands, for instead of pitching the battle over the breast, he slips his other hand up my skirt, carried away, I guess, by his vision of his irresistible charms. When he finds the passage blocked, he tries to open it by stroking my thigh, inching higher and higher. My earlobe receives a vicious nip (“baby, baby!”). Abandoning my breast to his right-hand flank, I bring in my remaining limbs to assist my legs.

  He’s not a rhinoceros but a squid! Somehow he has got both my hands, which had been pulling at his probing arm, off the field, and with one of his extra limbs has pushed me down prone on the car seat. Oh-oh. With a single hard thrust of his knee he can now break my defenses, wedge my thighs open, and make for the opening.

  “Stop!” I cry.

  “Oh baby, baby!” he replies, sucking on my ear and trying to slip his fingers inside my underpants. He thinks that a finger inside me will make me desire him; they all read the same bad books.

  Assessing my position I see that this man doesn’t care in the least that I reject him. He won’t hear of it. I must submit or outwit him; he cares only for cunt. How discouraging to have come these three hundred miles only to wind up struggling in yet another parked car. In flat Ohio they drive you fifteen miles out into the country; in the Adirondacks they take you up four thousand feet. In either case, once they turn off their motors and the lights it is very hard for you to get back home. “Scorn appearances,” says old Emerson, and here I am, hundreds of miles from my reputation just dying to scorn appearances, yet as terrified of this meat chef as of anyone in Baybury Heights. What is the difference? Having come this great distance to be myself and make love freely, must I still try all the old tricks to avoid being raped? What is going on? If Candide had been born a girl, would he too in this best of worlds have wound up being ravished on a mountaintop?

  Now I know time’s up. No matter how tightly I squeeze my legs, if I don’t get Jan out of there right now I haven’t a chance. “Power ceases in the instant of repose,” says Emerson. I can’t waste another instant using the wrong tactics. Anger is out. If I scream or slap this man he’ll slap me back and unzip. Pleas and flattery are useless too. He has long since faced his needs and dismissed mine with a simple there’s only one way to handle a woman—take her! No, I have only one resource with which to move him from his investment; only one trick in my arsenal stands a chance of working. If he isn’t to be paid off in sex for his trouble and expense he will have to be paid off in tears. It works on fathers, doctors, and teachers; maybe it will work on Jan Pulaski, making him, too, feel powerful and benevolent. If it doesn’t, I might as well save my dress and cooperate: I am vanquished anyway.

  I make myself cry, sobbing and sniffling.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing (sob). May I have your handkerchief?”

  Awkwardly he gets his silk hanky out of his pocket with his free hand and gives it to me. “Here.” More awkwardly still, from under him, I dab at my eyes.

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  I bawl away, no longer faking. “It’s just that—ohhhhh, I can’t tell you. Ohhhhh.” My face will be blotching up from all the tears.

  “Hey, now. What is it kid?” He sits up. “Does something hurt you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m so embarrassed. You see, I’m not what you think I am. I’m a … a virgin.” He removes his hand from under my skirt and I go to town. “I’ve never been touched. Alice isn’t my real name. And I’m not eighteen either. I’m not even seventeen yet. I lied to you, about everything. Oh, take me home. Ohhhhh.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  It is working. I press on. “Take me home Jan. Please. You’ve just gotta take me home right now. Ohhhhhhh.”

  “Okay, kid, okay, I’ll take you home. We’re going right back to the Belleview Palace. Just try to stop crying a little, will ya?” He turns on the motor. “Just leave everything to your old Uncle Jan.”

  “My father’s a judge,” I throw in to scare him. “He’ll be so mad!”

  All the way down the mountain I cried real tears. The virginity I defended was imaginary, but the innocence I mourned was not. I knew I might as well go back home.

  I finished out the month of July at the hotel so Fritz could find a replacement for me and I could announce my departure and collect my tips. Then, once again packing up my Emerson, I left the mountains for good.

  Back in Cleveland everyone treated me as though I were daring, accomplished, and beautiful: Queen of the Bunny Hop returning home in triumphal splendor. I alone knew I had really come back in defeat.

  I spent August in retreat, listening to Beethoven and studying the college catalogues, adjusting myself to my reduced circumstances while pretending to everyone that I had had an enviable and expanding experience. I so beguiled Alan Steiger with stories of my mountain adventures, and I so beguiled Angie through the mails with stories of my homecoming, that I actually began to believe in them. When I finished peeling completely and my skin began to glow again, I felt as though it had never stopped. My parents were as sweet and soft as applesauce. And the ugly blemish I had worried over in June had by September become a tiny brown mole, a permanent “beauty mark,” which eventually I came to accept, like something I had been born with.

  Every year until he died Mr. Winograd sent me an engraved New Year’s card at Christmas time accompanied by a short note which I always answered at length. He was my one remaining channel to the ocean. He made me very happy until, after I moved to New York four years later, he invited me to visit him in Westchester and I accepted.

  His butler picked me up at the station and delivered me to the Winograd mansion. I was shocked to see how wizened the old man had become. He had no voice left at all, and he stopped to rest every few steps. We dined alone under a magnificent crystal chandelier, laughing over old times. A mad Van Gogh watched us from the wall as we ate our elegant meal. For dessert we had a tall Baum Kuchen drenched in brandy, and throughout dinner we whispered little jokes about the service of the butler and the maid. After coffee, Mr. Winograd took me on a short tour of his priceless collection. Whenever he stopped to rest, I, towering over him, stopped too. When we returned to the living room, in a little burst of energy, sparkling and twinkling, Mr. Winograd presented me with a small eighteenth-century sepia drawing of a nude in a garden. He sat down—the better to watch my reaction, I thought. As I gaped in amazement, stuttering my thanks, he pulled me onto his lap.

  Now, looking back, I’m not surprised. Why else than for sex would a failing millionaire refugee be interested in a teenaged waitress? But at the time sex never entered my mind. I loved the old man and had thought he loved me a little too. I extricated myself as quickly as possible from his wispy embrace, and, begging to be taken to the station, left his drawing discreetly behind me.

  One morning about a year later, as I was pouring out the breakfast coffee for my new husband, Frank came across Mr. Winograd’s
obituary in the New York Times.

  “Say, Sasha, what was the name of your millionaire? Winograd? He just died, and listen to this.”

  It turned out that the story that had circulated about him at the Belleview Palace was all true—Nazis, diamonds, everything. His will divided his fortune among several nephews and a faithful nurse, and gave his paintings to the Metropolitan. I was not mentioned.

  “I’d have thought from the way you talked about him that he’d have left you at least one painting,” teased Frank in that smug way of his I could never answer. “You must have loved him more than he loved you,” he twitted.

  From the Times’s list of his maladies, it seemed that Mr. Winograd had died of everything. He was sixty-seven years old, and I had just turned twenty.

  Four

  Beneath the Pincio a pale mannequin bends

  Under the leaden burden of green eyelids,

  Proposes poses patiently and spends

  Her last lire on a pack of gum.

  Atop the dum-dee-dum Janiculum—

  It was no use. I had been working on the poem for three mornings and I had only got through the easiest of Rome’s hills. Even if I managed to do the Janiculum today, there would still be the Palatine, the Capitoline, the Esquiline, the Quirinal, the Viminal—impossible. An opening paragraph of a short story, one stanza of one poem, and the setting for a play. Not enough. If only I knew how they were supposed to end; if only I knew what I wanted to say. I was a failure.

  I snapped closed my notebook and looked across the piazza at the vivacious fountain. Young men in lean trousers and pointed shoes sat on the rim smoking while children played in the street. At least an hour more before I could begin picking a trattoria for lunch; too late to do a museum. Another morning shot trying to write, trying to be somebody. I might as well have gone to Pompeii with Frank’s Academy friends the Ericksons or stayed in Spain. The days were passing me by and I was closer to broke than to a solution. As I washed down my pink pill with my espresso, I wondered if I should see another doctor. Was the fuzz on my face spreading? I felt it with my finger. Insufficient ovulation—when would my treacherous body stop playing tricks on me?

  I finished my espresso, left a tip on the table, and put out my cigarette before crossing the piazza to the shady side. In Italy nice women don’t smoke in the street. In Spain I had ignored the customs, laughing when Manolo warned me I could be arrested for kissing in the street. But I had had a man to protect me then; now I was no longer up to it. My nerves were in such a state that I needed all my energy just to survive the ordinary indignities of walking alone; I wasn’t going to ask for trouble over a lousy cigarette. When in Rome … But of course it wasn’t just Rome; it was everywhere. Everywhere, harassed by day, afraid by night. Why? Eyes to the ground, I passed the young men smoking on the fountain’s rim and followed the ancient paving stones back to my hotel, self-conscious of every step. I stuck out all over.

  I knew it was supposed to be flattering to be hissed at, but it was not. At best—when I felt good about myself—it was annoying, like the aggressive solicitations of derelicts; there was no way to ignore it and every response was wrong. At worst—when I felt bad about myself, which was most of the time these days—it was a humiliating assault. A woman needed an excuse for walking the streets alone. Like blacks in white neighborhoods back home, we had to walk with our eyes to the ground. In fact, the only sure way to walk the streets unharassed was to be with a man.

  The obvious excuses—a guidebook, a novel—seldom worked. They didn’t even enable one to sit reading in the park. “Good book?” a man would ask, sitting down beside me on the bench in New York or Rome, and I would either have to insult him, jolly him, or get up and move on. Easier not to sit in the park. Once, back in New York, in the subway station late at night a drunk had started pawing a woman down the platform. I went to find a transit cop. When I returned with one, the drunk had disappeared, and the cop graced us with his wisdom instead. “You’re lucky this time, girls, but it should be a lesson,” he said. “You girls should know better than to wander around alone at two a.m. You should be home.”

  It was always the same story, in subways or suburbs. From my beginnings in Baybury Heights, a nice neighborhood where we moved because it was “safe,” it was always the girl who was kept in the house after school if a boy molested her, never the boy. Ostensibly she was kept in for protection, but how was it different from punishment if she couldn’t even play on the street? Since boys would be boys, they might be scolded, but no one ever kept them indoors; they could take care of themselves. No one ever said “girls will be girls”; for girls were expected to be ladies. Every Baybury girl was early taught her place through the ritual rape called “pantsing.” My own occurred one muddy March day in the third grade.

  My best friend Jackie was staying after school to practice on the bars that day, so I stayed too. We were practicing a new trick: over-and-over-two-legged. It was a hard trick, but I mastered it. On the bars practicing was what counted; lithe and limber, I practiced and was good. Over and over we went, skirts and hair flying down and then up, the skin behind our knees smarting from the friction with the steel, until the pain finally forced us to stop. We gathered up our trading cards and were just heading through the Victory Gardens for the road when Jackie remembered she wasn’t going home after all, she was going to wait for her mother at her cousin’s house down the street from school.

  My stomach flopped over as though I were still on the bars. Without Jackie, I would have to walk unprotected past all the vacant lots on Auburn Hill. I looked back anxiously for someone else to walk with, but there wasn’t a soul in the playground.

  Jackie and I started walking slowly down Cranberry Road. It was still wet enough from the previous night’s rain for a few worms to remain on the sidewalk, and we walked slowly to avoid them. I hated the sidewalk worms. Besides, the skin behind our knees smarted if we went quickly. But no matter how slowly we walked, I knew the moment was coming when we would have to separate.

  Finally we reached Jackie’s cousin’s house. With no visible regrets, Jackie turned into the drive, kicked at the gravel, and said goodbye.

  “See you tomorrow,” I managed to answer, as though it were any other day. And then, proceeding by myself to the end of the block where I turned reluctantly into Auburn, I began my lone descent of the hill.

  Dawdling as I walked, I pretended nothing could happen. What was there to be afraid of? Didn’t I know all the boys in my class? Not even they, I told myself, would want to hide in the weeds among worms. When I saw the grasses moving on the flat of the hill just before the descent, I began to think the whole walk home was a dream, that the sidewalk worms were really snakes moving the grasses. Please get me home, I begged of nobody I knew under my breath. Tensely I gripped my trading cards. I quickened my step as I neared the spot where the grasses moved, then marched past, eyes ahead, heart pounding, fingers crossed, not daring to look around.

  Just as I was ready to break into a gallop for the final stretch home, a red bandanna descended over my eyes, and I was dragged backwards off the sidewalk into the wet field.

  “Get her down!”

  “Get her ankles!”

  “Quick! Sit on her!”

  It was happening, then. I was going to be pantsed.

  “Somebody sit on her,” I heard again.

  “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” I cried, thinking I would suffocate under the blindfold.

  Someone pulled my arms over my head and pinned them down at the wrists, others took my legs, squeezing at the ankles, holding them from kicking until someone else sat on them.

  “Let me go!” I kept crying until my words melted into tears. I felt humiliated by my tears (cry baby! cry baby!), though I cried as much from rage as from fear.

  When I was finally able to catch my breath I began to fight, kicking and biting, as though there were some possibility of fighting free. But of course there was none.

  They
gripped my legs at last and, raising me from the buttocks, ripped off my underpants. Then they forced my legs apart at the knees and held them open for one endless moment, staring deep into my secret. No one touched, no one spoke; they saw, their eyes burning me like dry ice.

  It wasn’t shame I felt then, only hot, inexpressible fury. You, Melvyn Weeks! You, Bobby Barr! You, Richie Englehart! You, Nazi Richard Conroy! But in the end I was stripped even of my wrath. For the project of my pantsing, once completed, seemed to lose all its appeal to its perpetrators. Stripping me had been only a gesture, an afternoon diversion for a lazy day. Maybe the third-grade boys of Baybury Heights Elementary School already felt seen one, seen them all, or maybe they were only interested in power. For, a moment later, they pulled me shaking to my feet and pushed me back on the sidewalk as though they were my friends. They threw my pants and my trading cards after me, and ordered me on pain of “getting it” never to tell anyone what had happened. Then they ripped off the blindfold, gave me a shove, and diving quickly back to their hiding places in the wet field, finally set me free.

  Grown men didn’t do things like that to us—not in broad daylight, not without an excuse. They kept us in place with veiled threats and insinuations; and they only undressed us mentally, an indignity it was hard to prove. But walking alone was still a problem. In Spain, where no one had felt qualified to interpret my motives, my celebrity had kept me immune from judgment. In Munich I had been justified by having a husband. But here, as a single woman assumed to be in the running, I was subject to all the abuse the Romans could dish out. It is not always, as Mae West says, “better to be looked over than overlooked.” All those dashing Italians I had fallen for in my first enchantment with Rome—Giuliano, the guard at the Colosseum; Angelo, the guide; Mario and the other cowboys on the Piazza di Spagna who followed American women to the cafés of the Via Veneto and whispered extravagant phrases in their ears between sips of Cinzano-soda—those romancing Italians were so full of mocking adulation that they could barely conceal their contempt. I gave them up when I realized that for them I was interchangeable with every other presentable American of a certain age, even the poor starlets who hung around the Via Veneto. Romans collected Americans as Americans collected Romans: parasites all. I felt better now, knowing I could refuse them, but I still had to face them in the restaurants and cafés, at parties and on the street.