Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  “We’ll find you a doctor.”

  “I hate doctors.”

  “For Christsake, Sasha, don’t worry. Don’t I always take care of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m going to get you out of this one too. You just have to have a little faith in me.”

  “What did you do last night? It was practically unbearable here without you.”

  “Went to a movie.”

  “Alone?”

  “With Hector.”

  “What are you going to do tonight?”

  “Go to a movie.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Another movie.”

  “Do you miss me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m going to come home and see.”

  “I think that’s a splendid idea.”

  • • •

  “Aren’t you going to the club with Ben and Marnie? Don’t you want to meet some young people and see some of your old friends?”

  “No.”

  “Let her alone, Laura, let her do what she wants,” said my father. “If she wants to be different, let her. She hasn’t changed a bit.”

  I withdrew into a book as I had always done—only this time I went gingerly, encumbered by recollections. All my early tutors were still here, quietly waiting on the bookshelves to be singled out and posed a question. It seemed years since I had asked one; my time to question had passed. Dipping again into Aristotle and Watson was like the first drag of a cigarette after years without smoking. Dizzily, I pondered again my childhood puzzle of which one to take to a desert island.

  On my brother’s block I bumped into Sally Harris, a childhood friend. Her face was worn; it was a shock to see her. (It shouldn’t have been; we were all closer to thirty now than to twenty.)

  “Sally Harris?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Sasha. Sasha Davis.”

  For a moment we stood scrutinizing each other. She had more lines near the eyes than I, none around the mouth.

  “Of course! Sasha! But your hair is so long now!” she said. She still wore hers short, as we all wore it in the high school yearbook. “I’m Sally Colby now.”

  “Buddy Colby?” I asked.

  She nodded, giggling. “How long is it since I’ve seen you? I remember the class predictions: you were going to be a lawyer. Did you make it?”

  “No.”

  She looked too hastily at my hands. “You’re married too, of course. Do you have any children?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Oh yes, we have three. But you will, you will,” she said generously.

  We eyed each other, comparing. “You really haven’t changed a bit!” we lied to each other.

  She recited who had married whom, and how many children they had.

  “Joey Ross? Who did he marry?” I inquired.

  “Joey? He married a girl from the West Side. Martha something. I don’t think you’d know her. Sweet girl. It turned out she couldn’t have any children, so they adopted a couple. A boy and a girl.”

  “What does Joey do now?”

  “We don’t see them much. I think he’s still in the shoe business.”

  Things were more or less as I remembered them at home. Upstairs I went from room to room touching things as though they were alive. The woods in the back had shrunk and I could see from the window in my mother’s room that the treehouse was gone. On the wall over my mother’s dressing table (even more crowded with jars than when I had lived here) all the photographs had been carefully rearranged. Color photos of Ben’s children indistinguishable from baby pictures of us; all the graduations; generations of weddings; Ben in a football pose, me at the pool. The pictures of Frank had been discreetly removed, but there were several Frank had snapped of me in Europe.

  I was pleased with how little I had changed in the photos. Surprised, too, considering that never, not even in my prime, had I photographed well. Even the face in the mirror was passable: if there were creases lurking, they hadn’t surfaced yet. Perhaps, I thought, I ought to consider cutting my hair again; short hair had always been so becoming.

  My mother walked in, made-up and dressed. “Do you like my rogues’ gallery?” she asked. She was wearing an expensive pajama set, and her skin had the pink smell I remembered. Had she dressed for me? When I was a child she had always, even in the midst of vacuuming or doing the laundry, put on a girdle, stockings, and a dress just to run out to the store.

  “Quite a collection here,” I said.

  “Yes. The family keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

  I thought of the parasite perhaps even now clogging my womb, like the Kotex clogging the toilet, the monthly nightmare: How, oh how, to get rid of it? At the bottom of all my bad dreams was one or the other, an overflowing toilet or a bloodstained chair. I wondered if my mother still menstruated, if she and my father still made love—if they ever had.

  “Is it your perfume or powder that smells so nice?” I asked.

  “On me? I don’t know. I use both.” She began opening bottles for me to smell.

  “Do you really use all this stuff?” I asked.

  “From time to time, yes. What do you use?”

  “Nothing much. Sometimes a little mascara.”

  “And nothing at night?” She looked alarmed.

  “No.”

  “You should use something on your skin at night, Sasha, you really should!” She lowered her voice. “When a woman gets past twenty-five she should think about her skin. Things change so rapidly if you don’t take care.” As she spoke her hand fluttered to her throat, where make-up is useless. “I never go to sleep without putting some of this on my face.” She held out a bottle to me, an offering. “And for a woman my age, I still have a remarkably good skin. Want to try some? It feels very good. Go on, dear, take it with you. You’re leaving today and the stores are closed; I can always get more.”

  I had been so proud of her beauty. And now to see her reduced to this, hooked on medicines, careful of light, trying to warn me of what was coming. I wanted to put my arms around her, to hug and console her. Perhaps the weakening of the senses of the aging is an adaptation for survival. Perhaps we grow weak in the eyes and hard of hearing the better to preserve our illusions.

  Roxanne told me about a way to abort myself with a speculum, a catheter and syringe, sterile water, and a friend. (Not till months later did I learn it could be lethal.) “There’s nothing to it. I’ve done it twice myself. You just have someone squirt a little sterile water into the uterus, you wait, and in a few days you abort.”

  “What if you don’t?”

  “Then you do it again.”

  When I told Willy, he hit the roof. “Are you kidding? That’s insane! We’ll find a proper doctor to do it, thank you.”

  “But Roxanne’s done it three times,” I said exaggerating. “She says it’s easy.”

  “Just thinking about it makes me sick.”

  “Come on, Willy. You’ll help me, won’t you?”

  “Not that way. I’m going to find you a doctor.”

  Roxanne knew an intern whom she got to do it at his apartment in the Bronx. He pulled all the blinds and locked the doors while she boiled up the instruments.

  “What a tight little twat you have,” he said as Roxanne directed a flashlight between my legs. Each leg hung over a kitchen chair instead of being fitted into stirrups. I was ashamed. “It’s a pleasure to work on you after the gaping smelly cunts that come into the hospital. If you could see them, you’d never want to have children.”

  “What do children have to do with it?”

  “Believe me, having babies wrecks your plumbing. Now hold still a second. I don’t want to hurt you if I can help it.”

  An instant of pain, and the catheter was in. “I wouldn’t want to have children even if it was good for my plumbing,” I said flatly.

  “Don’t you like kids?”

  “I love kids. Other people’s.”
r />   “Hey, will you relax? That’s better. Don’t you have any maternal instincts?”

  “I have an instinct of self-preservation.”

  “You’ll feel different when you fall in love. That’s when they all want their babies. Now hold very still one more sec. Here comes the water.”

  “But I am in love.”

  “I doubt it,” he said.

  It was a familiar line, about love and babies. I’d been bucking it all my life. If it were true, as the scientists claimed, it would be smarter to live without love. The only power a woman had against a man was the possibility, never more than problematical, of leaving him; with babies even that defense vanished. No; plumbing aside, maternity was vulnerability itself, sentencing a woman at best to the plight of Mrs. Alport, and at worst to grubby isolation.

  Sensation without pain, I felt the liquid enter me. “When I’m in love,” I told him, “I rely on my convictions.”

  The very night I decided to try out my mother’s lubricating skin lotion (“What’s that godawful smell?” said Will as I got into bed. “Just some face lotion.” “Well for Christsake, Sasha, can’t you go and wash it off? You smell like a filling station!”)—it was that very night, sometime after midnight, that I awoke with unbearable cramps. I was exploding, coming apart at the seams. I rolled around and doubled up and moaned.

  “What’s the matter? Sash?” asked Willy in his sleep.

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  I thought it was food poisoning or appendicitis. Then at last I felt I had to take an enormous crap.

  “Where are you, Sash?” called Willy, feeling me absent from the bed.

  I sat on the toilet and pushed and pushed. Then out it popped, my first baby.

  I looked down. It was suspended over the water in the toilet bowl, swinging from my body, its head down.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh Willy!” I cried. I covered my mouth and screamed.

  A nightmare. I looked again. It hung there like a corpse.

  “Willy, please! Come quickly! It’s a baby!”

  I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had thought at two or three months it would still be a fish with gills, or a tadpole. But it was a real baby, with a human head, only blue.

  “Oh God! It’s hanging here! Please help me.”

  “Now listen, Sasha,” Willy was saying softly, “you’ve got to pull it out of you.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a baby, Willy!”

  “I know honey, but you’ve still got to pull it out.”

  “Oh I can’t.” I was all atremble.

  “You’ve got to.”

  “I can’t.”

  It was too awful: the first baby I produced in this world I deposited like a piece of shit straight into the toilet.

  “Try darling. Pull it out. Trust me.”

  At last, I pulled it out of me and dropped it into the water. It had always lived in a liquid medium. I couldn’t look at it, my own child. I flushed the toilet. Then I dissolved on the bed in a shudder of tears and afterbirth.

  “It was a baby. I can’t believe it. It was a baby,” I moaned. Will stroked my back as I wept and bled.

  “Do you think you’ll be all right for a few minutes while I get the car? I’m going to take you to a hospital.”

  “I’m all right,” I sobbed. “I’ll get blood all over the car.”

  “Fuck the car,” said Willy.

  “I’m all right,” I repeated. “I don’t need to go to a hospital.”

  “Do as I tell you!” he shouted.

  When we got to the hospital, a doctor prescribed three kinds of pills and a bed in the maternity ward.

  “Don’t leave me here, Willy. I don’t want to stay here.”

  “Don’t worry, honey, I won’t leave you.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re not permitted on the ward,” said the nurse. “You can visit tomorrow.”

  “What are you going to do to her?” Will asked the doctor. “Can’t you do something now so I can take her home?”

  “Can’t do anything till tomorrow,” said the doctor.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve ordered some pills to control the bleeding, and antibiotics and a tranquilizer. If she’ll stop with the hysterics there may be a chance we can save your baby.”

  “But there is no baby, doctor,” said Will. “She miscarried.”

  The doctor looked skeptical. “You sure?” he asked.

  “Of course I’m sure. I saw the fetus myself.”

  “Did you bring it with you?”

  “Bring it? No!”

  The doctor shrugged and turned away.

  “It’s flushed down the toilet,” said Willy frantically.

  The doctor shook his head. “That’s really too bad,” he said. “If you’d brought it with you we might be able to clean her out tonight. But if she’s not hemorrhaging and there’s no fetus and I do a D-and-C at three a.m. with no one from the regular staff around, I could get into a lot of trouble. You understand. I wish I could help you out—”

  “Take an X ray,” said Willy desperately. “You’ll see there’s no baby inside her.”

  “We can’t take an X ray.”

  “Why not?”

  “An X ray might damage the fetus.”

  At the end of that winter my divorce came through. Though I had sometimes talked of staying single (“Why do we need the paper? We’ve got our love”), it wasn’t a week before I was carrying red roses to City Hall, already knowing the next step.

  Babies.

  Why? For the very reason I had refused them in the past: babies could bind.

  The abortion, though we seldom spoke of it, had exposed my bluff. I had demanded it in the name of independence, yet ostensibly I had renounced independence. If my commitment to Will were serious, the best way to prove it was by making a baby. Without a career, I no longer had a reason not to. Willy expected it, poets encouraged it, it was part of the package. And as a job, motherhood seemed to offer more possibilities of advancement than the Clayton Advertising Agency’s research library.

  “Make it a good wedding, won’t you?” said Will winking at the J. P. “The last one was just practice; this one is going to count.” We wanted all the cement we could get to make it stick. Flaunting our devotion, we proselytized for second marriages. I was twenty-seven: unless the rust of my life had wrecked my plumbing, I had three years left to change. And Willy, a ripe thirty-one, had the rest of his life to help me.

  We never celebrated our wedding anniversary, arbitrarily determined by the date of my final decree. Instead, at least till our second child was born, we celebrated the anniversary of that season we met, replaying those days like the album of a favorite show, complete with costumes.

  “Don’t ask questions, just try it on,” said Will, presenting me with a large box from Lord & Taylor. “I saw it in the window and had to buy it for you. It’s like the dress you were wearing at Hector’s party that first night in New York. You were so beautiful I couldn’t take my eyes off you. Go on. Try it on.”

  As usual, Willy was right. It was like, but better made than, the one I had bought for the party. It was perfect for the occasion. Starting with champagne on whatever liner was moored in the harbor (a fifty-cent donation to the Seaman’s Fund would get us on board), progressing to turkey and gherkin and Jimmy Witherspoon at Hector’s on the first Saturday night of each December (with me in a black silk dress), we repeated the steps of our marathon. Our first lunch together at the restaurant with the pommes soufflées (I in my off-white turtleneck), the American Beauty roses, our first champagne cocktail at the Monkey Bar (same sweater), our miraculous chance meeting at the Museum of Modern Art where, lunching in brown wool with Roxanne, I had spotted Will sitting alone across the room watching us. (“Is that him?” asked Roxanne. “Yes.” “He looks all right, but you’d better be sure.”) And then finally our first embrace at the Motel on the Mountain in Tarrytown,
New York, in the other black dress that zipped up the back. Precisely three days before Christmas, only months after I had resigned myself to a life without love.

  “Goodnight, I love you,” said Willy every night, molding us into spoons. And though I had said the phrase to others out of courtesy or caution, now for the first time in my life without feeling sly or dirty or bad, I too could affirm before closing my eyes, “Goodnight, I love you.”

  Eight

  Without daring to reconsider, we made Andrea in the new year and I bore her in the fall, entering the park world in the winter, bundled up. The books I had taken from the library in preparation proved, like The Questions Girls Ask and Girl Alive, to be mere parodies of life; but there was nothing else to go on. Child care was neither discussed in society nor taught in school. However contemptuous I’d been of the prospect of Spock, I was grateful for him now. He had the latest word and a good index.

  It would be good for every baby weighing 10 pounds or more to be outdoors, when it isn’t raining, for 2 or 3 hours a day, as long as the temperature is above freezing and the wind isn’t bitterly cold. (Dr. Spock, Baby and Child Care, Section 244.)

  The old lady who fed pigeons peered into the carriage, but otherwise I was alone on a deserted bench, paralyzed by the fragility of my overwhelming charge, afraid to move for fear of waking her, afraid to take my eyes off her lest she sleep and die. During her brief sleeps I studied her like a difficult text, trying to fathom each mysterious tremor and start, praying she would not wake too soon. When she did wake—always grievously ahead of schedule—I leaped to jiggle the carriage as I had seen the neighbors do, trying to shake the sobs from her throat and the knots from my gut.

  If you live in a city and have no yard to park the baby in, you can push him in a carriage. Long woolen underwear, slacks, woolen stockings, and galoshes make your life a lot more pleasant during this period.

  In summer it would be different. She would be older then and I would not fear her death so much as her life. But now each sob my Andy suffered was on my hands. In my breast lay the power to soothe or torment her, but also dangers. If ten minutes of jiggling the carriage didn’t get her back to sleep, that would be ten wasted minutes, six hundred useless sobs tearing at my raw conscience. It would take ten more minutes to get home from the park, and another ten to get the carriage up the stairs and our wraps and clothing off.