Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  There we were, except for the absence of a little boy, the perfect family (flash! snap!). Lacking only an audience to make us real.

  “Sit still, darling. I’ll put the birthday girl to bed myself tonight,” said Will, elevating Andy to his shoulder. He whinnied like a stallion and cantered her off to bed.

  “Don’t forget her poem—she can’t sleep without it,” I called. “And two diapers for night time.” (The sleep crises of Section 284, long since resolved by ritual poems, had been superseded by other crises, other Sections.)

  “This whole family needs jollying,” said Will, returning to the living room to lift dozing Jenny from my arms. By the look in his eye and something in his voice, I knew he planned a bedtime treat for me as well.

  All forgiven. For once I would leave the dishes on the table till morning and go to bed unclothed. We would take it slow and all over, calmed by champagne, kissing and rolling, forgetting the formula and the new receptionist. Though I was no less exhausted than other nights, no less tense with the children in the next room ready to waken before we’d finished, still tonight I would try to relax.

  “Relax, will you? Where’s the fire?” Will had often urged, popping in and out of me in the early mornings as I lay poised to answer the baby’s first cry. It was as it had always been. If I wanted to kiss and snuggle and embrace, I had to be prepared to screw. One thing had to lead to another, whether there was only a little time or a lot. Touching and holding, for which I yearned, were only prelude for men. As Baybury girls learned at twelve, boys always go as far as they can and never backwards.

  “Kids are God’s contraceptives,” Willy quipped to his friends, “always waking up just when you feel horny.” Tonight, though, I would back Willy in letting them cry if they woke too soon. For once I would not fake orgasm in the interests of my offspring, but with the abandon of former days that made sex into love, I would try to scale with Willy those treacherous peaks we had once managed to climb so perfectly together.

  Unless Jenny switched to her panic cry, or Andy asked to be taken to the potty.

  The main cue for the mother is to remain friendly, encouraging, and optimistic about tomorrow. She can talk about how she, Daddy, brothers, sisters, friends, use the toilet, how the child is growing bigger every day, how nice it feels to be clean and dry. I don’t mean a whole sermon every day, just a reminder.

  All this takes a lot of patience. Some days the mother will be irritated and angry that no progress is apparent. If you see you are making no progress, drop the effort for a few days or weeks. It’s better not to punish. If encouragement doesn’t work, stronger methods will only set you back further. (Section 379.)

  Nine

  Leave it to the philosophers to have a weighty German name for the question of whether or not to procreate. Zeugungsproblem. An aspect of axiology, a branch of ethics. Hear the learned professors contemplate the consequences of birth for the race of Man, the metaphysical implications of existence, and not one word about the effects of procreation on a woman’s body.

  Schopenhauer, the profoundest of pessimists, meets the gloomy Byron on a holiday stroll through Venice. The two giants greet each other, remark the shimmer of the air, the futility of life, while their inamoratas, each leaning on her lover’s arm and shifting her weight from foot to foot, looks the other over, smiles sweetly, twirls her parasol, straightens her skirts. Ah, sighs Lord Byron, how painful this life. Aye, nods Schopenhauer, we must put a stop to it. They part, the one to suicide, the other to misogyny.

  But see what the tiniest baby will do to the woman. Stretching her belly and waist into the ghastliest shapes before it even emerges from the womb, ruining her breasts, turning her pink nipples brown. Producing spots at the hairline, dark hairs down her midline, bleeding gums, stretch marks, varicosities, blues, alterations of the hormones and perhaps the DNA—and that’s only the beginning. In time comes the ugly crease in the brow between the eyes hewn by incessant anxiety and sporadic rage, the rasp in the voice, the knot in the gut, the regret. Fear alters the features, and in time the sweetest child will make a shrew of her.

  Schopenhauer, the misogynist, resolves his Zeugungsproblem by remaining a bachelor and sometime celibate. He rises punctually each morning to write his books, blames his mother, takes his meals in his favorite restaurant, in a temper shoves an old woman down a flight of stairs, and discourses at length on the futility of life and the deception in women.

  It was partly because of the way Willy noted the girls on the street that summer, partly because of the new fashions, that I finally decided to cut my hair. The sixties had started while I was having my babies, and I felt I had to do something about it. The threat of abandonment or another woman had crept into the nursery, and I was going out of my mind.

  I did not act on impulse. I spent a long time thinking it over, studying the ads and my old photos, before I finally made an appointment with a hairdresser and hired a sitter. And even then, I would never have had the nerve to go through with it if Willy, who had declared himself against the haircut, hadn’t left town for a week to supervise a computer installation in Waterbury, Connecticut. He said.

  At first I tried to reach Andrew, the man who had regularly cut my hair when I was at Columbia before I had married and let it grow long. He would have known exactly the look I wanted. But I was told on the phone he had long since left to open a shop in Queens, and I accepted an appointment with a Mr. John instead.

  Standing on an Eighth Street crosstown bus edging through traffic, I was fairly optimistic about the results. My reflection in the bus window was not unattractive. It skipped the details and gave no hint of texture. Depending on how I chose to focus, I could see at a single spot on the windowpane my nose or a building across the street.

  I had never been one to dwell on my failings: Rather, since the miraculous removal of my braces back in 1945, I, raised on Emerson, had always believed that whatever faults surfaced, there was always some cure, some program or remedy to apply, to reverse the symptoms. A diet, a haircut, sun, sleep, exercise, a change of scene, a new lover, a husband, determination, suicide if all else failed. Through the years I had found my own standards more exacting than others’; and examining my reflection as we stopped to take on passengers, I was reasonably confident of the expedition’s outcome.

  The moment I sat down before the beauty parlor mirror, however, surrounded by regular customers and Muzak, I knew I was making a mistake. Reflections in a dirty window are one thing; in a fluorescent-lit mirror another. There was a crease beside my mouth it was useless to deny, and other shocking imperfections. Not in my skin only. My very bones had shifted: narrower cheeks, more prominent cheekbones. The hairline was new, and there were several small, as yet inconspicuous moles destined to enlarge. I had evidently undergone some reversal of luck.

  The operator covered me—hands, purse, and all—in a green smock, then looked me over in the mirror. “A Cap Cut, I think,” he suggested.

  “Okay,” I said, “but short enough that I won’t have to set it.”

  “Aren’t you down for a shampoo and set?” He checked his book.

  I did not believe in hair setting. It was a fraud, like a wig or a padded bra. They all corrupted the user, robbing her of dignity. The women in the mirror surrounding me, staring at their green-smocked reflections, their hair wrapped in towels, set in rollers, teased, straightened, frizzed, dyed; eyebrows red from plucking, lips foaming with peroxide, hands soaking in softener—they had all been robbed, like the mannequins in Rome and the secretaries in offices.

  “No. Just a cut.”

  “Well, I’ll wet you down then. You could use a styling. With that much hair I’m going to have to charge you for a styling anyway.”

  I suddenly recalled the sorry fate of Veronica Lake and her famous “peekaboo bang.” When the peekaboo bangs of thousands of women working in factories during World War II began getting caught in the machinery and fouling the War Effort, the Department of War asked Miss
Lake to set an example by changing her hairdo for the Duration. A patriot, she complied. It ruined her. Directly she changed her hair, she fell into obscurity and then oblivion.

  Mr. John sprinkled water on my hair and my fluff flattened, leaving only my naked face.

  Under the circumstances, I thought, a haircut might prove a disaster.

  He reached for his scissors. I gripped the arms of the chair underneath my smock. I tried not to wince as Mr. John picked up my long front lock and made his initial snip; watched horrified as pieces of me fell to the floor. Remnants of my past, to be swept away by a porter’s broom, too late to get back.

  “Remember,” I cautioned, "very short. But soft. Not severe.

  Though I aimed to convey only reasonable concern, something in my manner must have betrayed anxiety, for Mr. John, holding scissors poised midair, gently reprimanded my reflection with:

  “Why don’t you wait till I finish before you judge?”

  A new operator, I thought, inexperienced. Too late to change, and Will expected home tomorrow. I held my head absolutely still as he proceeded to cut, my features frozen as though caked-in mudpack.

  Mr. John hummed with the Muzak, then paused to examine his work.

  “Shorter at the ears,” I instructed. “I’d like a more tousled look.” No going back.

  Mr. John ignored me, pursuing some ideal of his own.

  “I may have a picture here of the look I want,” I admitted at last. And as casually as I could, I brought out from under the green smock my old graduation photo that had been reprinted years before in the Cleveland Post with the Former-Prom-Queen caption. With pride and shame I tried to present the picture as though, despite its yellowed crumbling edges, I had clipped it from some ad in last week’s News.

  “More like that.”

  Mr. John glanced at it quickly without recognition and shrugged.

  “Of course, I’ll cut it any way you say, but frankly, your ears are not the daintiest.”

  There was a blinding flash as for an instant the mirror lit up with revelations.

  My ears, never before worth noticing, were suddenly to be regarded! Like my skin and my hair, heretofore unobjectionable, suddenly my ears, too, were factors in the total picture. How the considerations proliferated!

  The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore,

  The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,

  But I don’t remember where, or whhhh-en,

  sang Mr. John to the Muzak, snipping away. Of course I was glad to have escaped detection in that old clipping, but I was vexed to discover that we no longer bore any recognizable resemblance to each other. Perhaps, as Mr. John suggested, it was time to be restyled. All the magazines proclaimed times had changed. The sixties were news. What had been in was out; what out, in. Taking the clipping out of my drawer the night before, I had even then sensed an anachronism, like my paltry total of twenty-six lovers on the coded list beside it, now regularly surpassed by every industrious contender, like the four-minute mile.

  I made no protest as Mr. John severed my remaining locks, wrapped the stumps in tissues and rolled them on rollers, then stuffed my ears with cotton and shoved me under a dryer.

  “Want me to bring you some magazines?” he mouthed, as a barrage of hot molecules battered my ears, drowning out the opening strains of Muzak “Stardust.”

  Oh, why had I neglected to bring a book? The truth was, years had passed since I had read a book. I had looked things up and read reviews on Sundays, had even browsed in bookstores on Eighth Street with Willy after the movies. But in my daily life of clutter and climax my attentions had been so splintered, my concerns so manifold, that the concentration required to read a book through had evidently atrophied in me, and except for survival manuals like Dr. Guttmacher’s and Dr. Spock’s, never intended for reflection anyway, books were but titles to me, like lovers’ names, documents of my biography. Even the tiny volumes of the Little Leather Library, now collectors’ items, were stored safely away with the baby clothes to be handed down to a daughter. The most I managed was now and then a poem from a quarterly, to commit to memory and replay for solace.

  “I said, would you like some magazines?” repeated Mr. John, raising the headpiece for a moment so I could hear him.

  “Yes, thanks.”

  He returned with a handful of slick paper. And within moments, there I was under a dryer leafing through magazines, without even a book to distinguish me, as though I too had come to be patched and repaired, styled, shampooed, and set. Rather than simply trimmed.

  Does she … or doesn’t she? Hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure.

  Starting at puberty in Seventeen magazines all my life I had noticed ads for skin care and hair rinses, but I had never understood them. Not that I had been smug—I had simply not believed in cosmetics, not known what all that talk of pores and textures was about.

  Radiant color that never rubs off on pillows, towels, collars, or him.

  Suddenly under the influence of the extremely hot air, the pages of McCall’s and Glamour yielded intelligences I had frankly never suspected. At last, in my thirty-first year, I began to understand those ads for the first time in my life.

  Can a cream really make dramatic improvements in aging skin? Is such an achievement possible? Today, Science tells us, the probability exists as never before.

  Perhaps such things, like sex and motherhood, can be understood only when it is too late. Are not the products promoted in the magazines intended to halt precisely those developments that cannot be halted? Afflictions like acne have nothing in common with this other condition, despite surface appearances; one, time alone will cure; the other, time will only worsen.

  Gives you back that flat tummy of your teens.

  Gone forever that flaky caky feeling, washed away with Beauty Bar.

  Suddenly under the dryer I saw that those very remedies I had come to count on—haircuts, diets, sun, lovers—would produce in time such terrible symptoms of their own that more cures, more tricks, more devices would be necessary to control them. Bleach your hair and it will turn out coarser; shave your legs and it will grow in thicker; have a mole removed and two more will pop out. My own once-radiant skin had begun to show imperfections which to camouflage would be to aggravate. It would dry out in the sun, hang loose if I dieted, puff up if I slept; and even if I did nothing at all, the pores would enlarge, hairs sprout, dimples crease, pimples scar. The whole process was out of control. Once the grey got a start in my hair, it could only spread. And a lover—the ultimate cure—a lover was absolutely out of the question for the simple reason that I could not bear for him to see my thirty-year-old thighs quiver!

  It was all coming startlingly clear. The hot air waves bombarding my head and burning my ears were no doubt transmitting cosmic messages. In the Ladies’ Home Journal at last I began to see the necessary connections between causes and effects that had eluded me in all my study of philosophy. Perhaps every stimulus, as Dr. Watson testified, had its response and every act, as Spinoza maintained, its consequences given from the beginning of time, but the responses and consequences were not those I had grown to expect. Who would have predicted that the crooked smile I had artfully cultivated for its power to charm would leave an entirely different mark beside my mouth? The particular fate I had spent a lifetime fleeing across two continents and decades had been here waiting for me all the while I was looking back over my shoulder. Neither course I had followed had saved me from it. To find myself at thirty locked under a dryer eagerly studying ads in magazines while I worry about the sitter and my husband is away on a business trip; now, after my schemes and triumphs, my visions and dares, to be, without income or skill, dependent on a man and a fading skin—it can only be the fulfillment of a curse!

  Beverly Katz and her big bust float into the dryer. She is dressed as a bunny. Her face is a large clock; her hair is teased to resemble ears. Seven little bunnies hop behind her.

 
“I told you so,” she throws at me, her black eyes flashing disdain.

  Her bunnies begin pulling at her tail. “Stop it, now. Stop it or I’ll tell Daddy!” Then to me: “I told you you couldn’t get away with that shit forever, it was only a matter of time.”

  I smile, and my cheek cracks in a jagged line beside my mouth, like a crack in the sidewalk.

  “That should teach you to smile,” she says.

  “Why you little bitch,” says the Blue Fairy, suddenly materializing. Her blue gown is sadly out of date. By now she is my mother’s age. She grabs Beverly by the tail and, pinning her second hand, washes her mouth out with soap (Beauty Bar). Give it to her, Blue Fairy!

  Meanwhile, with their mother otherwise occupied, the little bunnies have begun trading cards and pulling at one another’s tails. Each time a trade is consummated, they multiply. Soon there are fourteen. Or is it twenty-eight?

  “I’m sorry! Glub glub!” shouts Beverly, her mouth filled with soap.

  The Blue Fairy, with a touch of her wand, transforms the soap to a special-formula antibacterial anti-acne unguent (twenty-seven dollars the quarter ounce) with which she gently swabs Beverly’s face. The second hand stops. The minute hand stops. Only the hour hand continues on its inexorable course.

  “Blue Fairy, the anti-acne unguent works like magic,” says Beverly gratefully. “Oh, how can I ever thank you enough?” She spits several soap bubbles from her lips, then says: “I know what! I’ll get my patron, the eminent Dr. I. Friedman, to put in an extra large supply for Valentine’s Day. At fine cosmetics counters everywhere.”

  Yes, I decide, I must have some! But there is no time to run out for so much as a gram: the judging is about to begin!