Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
Page 26
Onto the table we march in chronological order. The judges sit in a row below. “Cinchy,” I think when I see their faces: I have slept with them all.
There are Spinoza, Emerson, and Alport, all nodding their heads sagely. There are Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dr. Watson, withholding judgment.
Spinoza looks forlorn, like poor Geppetto.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Spinoza?” I whisper respectfully, leaning over the edge of the runway. “Or is it Doctor Spinoza?”
“Nothing, my dear, nothing,” he says, pausing to wipe his spectacles. “Actually, I am serenely happy. As should you be. Because of your dedication to Truth, your shiksa nose has not grown in the slightest. If your ears are not the daintiest, it is because you do not perceive them under the aspect of eternity. But if you stop to listen, you will agree, their essence partakes of the ears of God. Hearken to the divine Muzak and you will hear for yourself. Q.E.D.”
As I stand up he gives me Winston Churchill’s V. (Or is it Roosevelt’s?)
“Go on out there, baby, and trust thyself,” says Emerson, more sanguinely. As usual he is using his time to good purpose. He is practicing the knots in the Boy Scout Handbook, open on his lap. I fear he doesn’t really care about us.
Alport beside him, his long legs getting in his way, smooths his mustache and tracks me with his eye. I go limp. He says nothing, but I know he is pulling for me. How I love him!
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dr. Watson, however, don’t even seem to recognize me. “Hi, boys,” I say, waving a handkerchief and smiling.
My cheek cracks a little more each time I smile, like a split lip. I apply Chap Stick. I know I ought to let it heal, but I also know I can never win with a straight face.
“Hey—don’t you remember? It’s me! Sasha!” I shout. “We had some beautiful times!”
But they are straining to see the contestants coming up behind me. I try to gain their attention by several bumps and a grind. All I get, however, is Watson, pinching my ass and pushing me aside. “Seen one, seen them all,” he spits out contemptuously.
“Keep your filthy hands off me, you old letch!” I sneer, “and don’t be disrespectful!” But if he hears, he does not seem to care.
“Fellow eminent judges,” he begins. “Science says a thing of thirty is a bitch forever. Unless a miracle happens.”
They applaud.
“Tell you what,” he continues. “I’ll get my friend and colleague, the celebrated Dr. Spock, to send us up some youth. He’s got them divided up by age into hundreds of sections. In any case, science says this number”—he points to me—“is dis-qualified.”
At least, I note, it gets me some attention. I begin waving again, gaily, wildly. But now when I smile I feel the crack deepen dangerously, as above it my bones begin shifting. The crack is a veritable fault in the landscape. Perhaps we will have to evacuate the area.
“Her ears are not the daintiest,” says Schopenhauer.
“Burn them off,” says Nietzsche.
“Why not allow her to dispose of them herself?” interrupts my friend Emerson.
“That’s not really fair, you know,” I protest (softly).
But already Beverly’s bunnies have taken over the table and are multiplying to beat the band. I am clearly outnumbered. Already in a single season they have far surpassed my lifetime record of twenty-six, and they have barely begun!
Watson wastes no time lining up all the bunnies in neat regular columns as fast as they can reproduce. At a nod from Watson the orchestra lets go with a drum roll, then launches a treacly rendition of “Stardust”—all strings and woodwinds, no timpani or brass.
“One-two-three ready?” says Watson, as the bunnies settle down to pick up their cues. "Now.
"Science says hands up
Science says hands down.
Hands up, hands down,
Science says hands down.
"You, you, and you. Disqualified. Ready? Now, once again:
"Science says legs down
Science says legs up
Legs down, legs up
Science says legs up."
I play the game too, but my heart isn’t in it. It lacks tenderness. And my ears are burning: no doubt someone is talking about me.
“Didn’t I tell you that you were disqualified? Why do you always have to be different?” says Watson, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me with all his might. (He doesn’t believe in spanking.)
“But I didn’t miss,” I protest.
“Maybe not. But you have made the toilet overflow. You have an ugly pimple on your chin. Your time is up. You are ready for your comb-out.”
Gail the sitter was still out with the children when I got home. Thank God. I went straight to the bathroom, ran water on my brush, and, ignoring the underwear I had left soaking in the sink, began brushing my hair. It had been teased and sprayed like an uptown matron’s. All a waste. I had to undo it.
I brushed and shaped the short ends, urging them over my curved fingers till they dipped on my forehead and rose pertly at my crown as I remembered. The water mixed with sweat. In the bathroom mirror under ordinary indoor incandescent light, my skin was again passable, but my hair, which didn’t depend on light, was not. No, not even after I finally got it right, caught exactly the tousled Baybury look; then my face was wrong.
I should never have cut it. Suddenly I understood why older women wore their hair in styles of decades past. They were not ignorant; they were trying to objectify their memories, like women living through their children. But neither could be done.
No, it was not hair after all that made the difference. It was something else, something elusive. Talent? Skill? Perhaps—but they were past developing. Skin, then? Could a little make-up used sparingly help after all?
Though I had always had contempt for make-up—always considered it a frivolous indulgence or a deceit—I decided the time had come to reconsider. At least to experiment. A secret-formula unguent to protect against weather, a cleansing lotion to remove it, a touch of mascara on the tips of the lashes, something odorless and lubricating at night. A quarter ounce of prevention to be applied daily, for a start, to touch me up like a photograph.
Of course, I would conceal the jars among the babies’ Desitin Ointment and cotton balls. What I did with my skin was no one’s business but my own.
Andrea rushed in, spilling acorns. “L-l-look, Mommy, l-look,” she said, “for dow and de squirrels.” My Andy: she stammered, she talked like the Bible, and she had a plan, all at once. She brought so much to observe and sort out, there was room for almost nothing else.
Jenny was in Gail’s arms, fussing.
“I would have come back sooner, Mrs. Burke, but the baby was asleep and I didn’t want to wake her,” said Gail. “Did you have your hair cut?”
“Yes.”
“It looks nice.”
Jenny was holding out her arms to me, squirming for me. “Uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn.” I took her.
“Thanks, Gail. How did it go?”
“Oh, fine. The carriage is in the hall. I changed Jenny twice. The only problem was, Andrea talks so fast I can’t understand her, and it makes her mad.”
She said it as though Andy were deaf. “I know,” I said. “Here, watch Jenny a second and I’ll go get your money.”
I put Jenny down on the floor and instantly she began to cry. I felt the knot in my stomach. Andy trailed me to the bedroom, tugging on my skirt and trying to explain something. “In a minute, pumpkin,” I said.
I opened my purse, saw the clipping, put it back in my drawer, got out the money, and with Andy still dogging me returned to pay Gail and snuggle the baby.
“Now, Andy,” I said, sitting on the floor with Jenny in my lap after Gail had gone, “now, darling, tell me.”
It was mostly at beginnings that the stammer came. As though she wanted the words to come out not in sequence but all at once as angels speak, under the aspect of eternity. The stammer was just a stage, of course,
and would pass in time, like everything else. But it had to be handled properly all the same.
She told me her plan. Acorn cakes and sugar-water tea. These things and many more. I understood her perfectly.
Peter, Peter pumpkin eater
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.
Put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.
We practiced consonants in the guise of song; drank tea and baked acorns in mime; bathed and fed Jenny; ate; read together; prepared for bed. And in all that time, Andy, who plucks a speck of dust from the air, who sees the single blade of grass growing miraculously out of a brick, who divines moods before they erupt and catches discrepancies as they occur—in all that time Andy never once noticed my haircut.
Or did notice but didn’t care.
Even if I had recaptured exactly the glow and look of the Baybury Queen, would Willy have started coming home in time to join us for dinner? I doubt it. A highchair did not go with candlelight, nor mashed bananas with white wine. Our island life was hard for him to adapt to. We talked baby talk and read picture books, by common standards primitive. We cried unpredictably and often, stifling him. We had tantrums and provoked wrath. We lacked spontaneity. We read recipes and stammered. We examined Jenny’s stools. We bugged him, we bored him to tears, we were united against him.
Perhaps when the girls were older, as Dr. Spock suggested, and more conventionally charming? But then I would be older too. And if Andrea never stopped sucking her thumb? If the children died?
No. It was all there in black and white in all the texts I had ever studied. Baybury boys are taught it is weak to need a woman, as girls are taught it is their strength to win a man. It was as clear as the girls Willy watched on Sundays in the ads in the Times Magazine and on the paths in Central Park. Times were moving; so were we all.
“Well?” I asked, smiling weakly, already knowing Willy’s response.
He looked injured.
“Oh God, Sasha. What have you done?” He raised his hand to his eyes as though warding off a blow.
“I told you I was having it cut,” I said in my defense. An extenuating circumstance. Could it really be that bad? It had once looked so right short. It had never been particularly luxuriant long. “Don’t you like it at all?” I asked.
“How could you do it?” he whispered.
Were those tears in Willy’s eyes? That was going too far. “Christ, Willy,” I cried, “it’s just hair! It’ll grow in again!”
But it was only out of habit that I reassured him, for I knew after it grew back in it would never be the same.
I turned my back to him and left the room. And felt his eyes on me still as I picked up the phone and called Roxanne.
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Contents
Cover
About the author
Dedication
Introduction
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Serpent's Tail