by The Radical Element- 12 Stories of Daredevils, Debutantes
“I see,” Mother said after a pause. “I didn’t know you were taking a journalism class.”
But then, thankfully, she left well enough alone. By the end of the episode, my fingers had the posture of Quasimodo and the living room looked like it had been feted by a ticker-tape parade, but I thought I might have a good idea of how the show was constructed.
Although now, staring at the blank page in front of me, it dawned on me that it was quite hard to come up with a whole new scenario and then . . . make it funny.
I stared up at the piece of paper I had pinned above my small desk.
“Women aren’t funny.”
— James Powell
That lit the appropriate fire.
I placed my pencil emphatically back to the end of Ethel’s line, closed my eyes, and plucked the first word that came to my mind.
Carousel. “Did you hear about the new carousel in the park?”
I wrote it out slowly, realization dawning that a walk in the park might help me air out my ideas. Or, better yet, maybe I could go over to Sandra’s. I’d already told her all about my harebrained scheme to submit a script to Mr. Powell, and she’d loved the idea. She’d always been my collaborator anyway, bringing my work and ideas to life with her perfect delivery. Maybe that was what I needed: a sounding board.
I got up from my desk like a woman possessed, marched out of my room, and went to grab my coat from the hall closet.
“Rosemary,” my mother called from the dining room. I quickly pulled on my coat and had my hand on the doorknob when she appeared, the click of her heels alerting me too late to her presence.
“I need to get back to the tailor about your fitting.”
Drat. Sometimes, I could swear that woman was a hawk in a previous life: swift, silent, attuned to when its prey, aka her daughter, was at her most vulnerable. Though to be fair, my head was in the clouds often enough that I usually wasn’t in any position to fend her off.
“We should go tomorrow . . . Rosemary, what on earth?” she exclaimed as she looked me over, her beautiful face pursing into that look I knew all too well and her hand now on the hip of her immaculate yellow-and-white-striped dress. “What is this about now? Please don’t tell me you’re thinking of setting up another . . . play.” She said the word play the way she would say the word rodent. I already knew how she felt about my attempt at staging an impromptu show with Sandra in Prospect Park last summer. Though, honestly, that lake was just begging for an Ophelia by way of Mae West routine.
But I had no idea what she was so upset about now. There was really nothing wrong with my shoes, or skirt, or . . . oh.
Apparently, in my haste, I’d grabbed the first bit of greenish fabric that I saw in the hall closet. Which was not my woolen peacoat, but my father’s jacket. My father’s army jacket, with gold, red, and blue emblems on the pocket, brass buttons on the lapels, and sleeves that came down about a foot past my fingertips.
Well, now, that was . . . funny, actually. I wondered how Sandra would have reacted if she saw me in it — it might have led to a good bit. Perhaps some other time, I thought, as I took the coat off and hung it back in the closet before turning to face Mother.
“I made the dinner reservation at the St. Regis. Would you ring up Julian to let him know?” she asked.
I sighed. Of course she would want to talk about the ball, something I hadn’t given a thought to in hours because I’d been preoccupied with more pressing matters, like what sort of trouble a redheaded housewife could get up to.
“Yes, but . . . what if we skip dinner?” It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to spend extra hours with Mother and Father and Julian, my escort and the dull son of one of my mother’s childhood friends, whom I’d only met a handful of times and spoken even fewer words to. The restaurant at the St. Regis Hotel was also far too pricey. I took a closer look at my mom’s dress and realized the white was slightly dingy from too many washings. The last thing we needed was to spend more money we didn’t have. Especially on something as trivial as a pre-dance dinner.
“Rosemary!” Mother exclaimed. “Dinner before a cotillion is tradition.”
“But what if . . . I don’t know. We could have dinner at home. Two of the girls from cotillion class are doing that.”
It was true. Annie’s and Josie’s families were each throwing a small dinner party in their honor at their respective homes. But I saw my mother looking uncomfortably at our narrow entryway and that lone fancy end table, and I knew she wouldn’t want anyone coming here.
“We could just pretend we did,” I said quickly, putting my hand on her arm and looking her in the eye. “No one would have to know we didn’t have a real dinner party.”
For a moment, when she looked back, I knew we understood each other perfectly, the unspoken dialogue between us a current that was pinging back messages in the same language. But then she looked away, and the cable line snapped.
“Don’t be silly, Rosemary. It’ll be a lovely dinner. Mrs. Chambers has simply raved about the salmon, and your father has been looking forward to it for weeks. Would you please just ring up Julian to let him know?” The bright smile was back on her face, now that she was assured of my compliance.
I nodded, watching her swish back into our tiny parlor. I didn’t know how accurate Mrs. Chambers’s feelings about the fish were, but I knew for a fact that my father hadn’t looked forward to much since he had worn that army jacket himself.
For all her poise, sometimes my mother seemed to me a woman huddled over the tatters of things that had long disappeared: a stately childhood home; a maiden name that vaguely stirred up ideas of grandeur for people of a certain age; a boy she loved who, for all intents and purposes, never came back from the war at all.
It was like she couldn’t bring herself to accept that she lived in this apartment building in Brooklyn with the Powells, and the Chavezes, and everyone else on this block — not the slightest bit of difference between us.
But me, I had always lived here. And I’d never once wanted the Park Avenue address.
At least not by marrying into it.
It was one tedious phone conversation and half an hour later that I made it out of the house. By then, any flits of writing inspiration seemed to have left me completely. I was going to go over to Sandra’s anyway; I needed a pep talk.
As soon as I walked down my stoop, I was met by a wave and a big smile from someone else — someone who had apparently been waiting for me to appear. Tomás jogged up to me. I could feel my cheeks lifting to match his.
“How has it been going? The writing?” he asked, and my face fell. “Oh. Not good?”
I shook my head. “I seem to be stuck. I just can’t think of a good setup. I had Ethel ask Lucy if she’s heard about the new carousel in the park and then . . . I have no idea what happens next.”
“Oh,” Tomás said, his eyebrows furrowed.
“Can you think of anything?” I asked hopefully. Sometimes Sandra would throw out random ideas, and one of them would catch, blooming joyously into something unexpected as it filtered its way through my mind.
“Umm,” Tomás stammered. “So they go to the carousel. And they ride it. And they get dizzy . . . and maybe one of them gets sick?”
Clearly this was not one of those times. I smiled politely. “Maybe.”
“Oooh, or how about they go to the carousel. And then they argue because they both want to ride the same animal. Maybe the . . . giraffe!” he exclaimed, laughing, as if that were clearly a punch line.
I had to laugh, too, at his enthusiasm. “A giraffe, huh?”
He nodded.
“It’s an idea,” I said noncommittally, not wanting to hurt his feelings.
He looked at me shrewdly. “I’m not helping, am I?”
“Not really, but you’re making me smile. And that’s more than has happened all day.”
“I will take that.” His dark-brown eyes looked into mine and, in the quiet that ensued, I knew what was suppos
ed to happen next. Every movie I’d ever seen and daydream I’d ever had about this very moment told me.
But he hesitated; I could tell he was wondering if he should.
I thought of my mother, who was inside the house, only a few feet away. She might look out the parlor window. What she would think if she saw me kissing the boy next door — who didn’t have a name or a fortune? Who didn’t even have the right color skin?
And then I thought about what I wanted.
I closed the gap between us and let my lips meet his.
My mother didn’t see us. I could tell because she didn’t come running out in a fit and proclaim her plan to ship me off to a Swiss finishing school.
Sandra seemed a little disappointed that the Alps weren’t in my immediate future. “Just how great would it have been if she had seen you, Rosemary? It could’ve been your chance. Your big moment to give her a piece of your mind.” Sandra had just put the needle on the Doris Day record when I’d told her what happened. She hadn’t harped on the fact that I’d kissed an extremely handsome boy, but, rather, that I had done it where Mother might have seen.
Sandra had wanted me to stand up to Mother for years. She’d even offered to act as my stand-in. Playing the role of Rosemary and reciting the lines I’d write, she would tell Mother to “put a sock in it,” as she so gleefully put it. I admit, I was twistedly curious to see what Mother’s reaction to that might be . . . though in a fly-on-the-wall, purely scientific sense. The actual thought of being on the receiving end of Mother’s reaction made me repeatedly swallow like a nervous contestant in an amateur fire-eating contest.
“I just need to get through this dance,” I told Sandra. “And then, maybe, Mother . . .”
Sandra raised her eyebrows at me.
“Okay. Definitely. I will tell her.”
My plan after high school was not to marry some Rockefeller and settle down on the Upper East Side like Mother wanted. It was to move to Los Angeles with Sandra and try to make it as a writer in Hollywood while she got her acting career going. I’d even looked up some screen-writing programs there, particularly at the University of Southern California.
“And besides,” I continued, “today wasn’t about defying Mother. I just . . . wanted to kiss him.”
Sandra smiled at that. “Well, all right, then. Good for you. And how was the kiss? Did it live up to expectations?” She came over and flopped down on her bed next to me.
I grinned. “I wouldn’t mind going back for seconds.”
Objectively speaking, the girl in the mirror looked pretty good. It was the dress, mainly. The silvery white taffeta did something to my pale skin, made it glow and even look a bit tanned as opposed to the tinge of gray that tended to settle in after a long New York winter. The appliqué beaded flowers on the full skirt, in a smoky shade of blue, caught the light and glinted at unexpected moments. And the corset kept everything in its proper place as long as I was supposed to resemble a certain antiquated timepiece made of glass and sand (which Mrs. Fenton had assured me I was). But I couldn’t breathe, the scratchy fabric made my skin feel like it was being stung by a thousand tiny bees, and keeping my balance in the strappy silver high heels meant scrunching my toes in a way that made them turn purple.
Mother did not care one jot about any of these complaints. “You look lovely, Rosie,” she whispered when she saw me. “You know, the night I came back from my deb ball, I didn’t sleep a wink.” Her voice was far away. “I couldn’t stop thinking about dancing with your father. I was doing all the steps in my bed the whole night.”
The night hadn’t even happened yet, but I knew I wouldn’t feel any of those things. I couldn’t dance very well as it was, never mind in those shoes. I was going to spend the whole time trying to keep the curtsies and salad forks straight in my head. And the only boy I’d want to dance with certainly wouldn’t be there.
I felt a pang when Mother grazed my shoulder and breathed out the word “lovely” one more time. It was easy to feel frustrated with her, angry at her, for not understanding me at all. For not looking at me, the person I was instead of who she wanted me to be. But at the same time, I was the one who kept my true self hidden, who followed her every instruction with meek protests, who let Sandra say the lines I wrote, who kissed the boy I wanted to kiss but hoped Mother hadn’t seen.
In that moment, looking at her face in the mirror, the glass was showing me a side of us I wouldn’t have been able to reach on my own. Maybe she really thought becoming a society wife was what would make me happy because I had let this fantasy of the girl in the mirror go on for too long. Maybe if I was the one writing the lines, it was time for me to speak them, too.
The girl in the mirror placed her hand over her mother’s and made a silent vow to herself.
I would go to this ball for her. I would do my best to be the polite well-bred girl she had taught me to be. But then I would leave that girl at the dance, shedding the snakeskin that had never fit my coils. And I would breathe . . . in every sense of the word, I thought, as I envisioned breaking the boning in my corset with Jacob’s baseball bat first thing tomorrow.
My mother had the cab drop us off in front of Tiffany’s. Ostensibly, it was because she wanted to start off the evening by gazing at the famed window displays. She’d always said they put her in the right frame of mind: peaceful, elegant, and just a little bit detached from the vulgarities of real life. But I knew that she didn’t want anyone to see us pulling up in a regular old yellow taxicab instead of an elegant town car. And even that taxi had required careful saving up.
Mother sighed in contentment as soon as we glimpsed Julian Dupont waiting for us in front of the St. Regis. A bland smile was already punctuating his classically handsome face. His sandy-blond hair was parted neatly, with just the right amount of pomade to keep it in place. His tails grazed below the knees just as they were supposed to, and his white bow tie was perfectly centered. It was hard to imagine that anyone in Julian’s carefully curated life had ever looked at him and felt the inexplicable revulsion that was oozing out of my pores. But I was surprised it didn’t stain my dress.
He said and did nothing that veered one iota from that rehearsed exterior. He was a perfect gentleman at dinner, steering the conversation from the weather to the meal and back to the weather again. He made two feeble jokes, which received raucous laughter from Mother, polite chortles from Father, and very strained smiles from me, after Mother kicked me under the table. It was undoubtedly the most painful when he was trying to be funny.
For just a moment, the conversation steered toward baseball, and I thought I saw a hint of something that might resemble passion, or a personality, or simply a sign that he wasn’t a Macy’s mannequin brought to life. But a minute later, we were back to what a chilly March it had been, and I was left wondering whether I had willed that spark out of sheer boredom.
I winced when the bill came and I glimpsed the twenty-five-dollar tab. It seemed a ridiculous price to pay just to be seen.
After we left, Mother and Father let us walk ahead of them over to the Park Lane Hotel, obviously hoping for some sparkling conversation to take place between Julian and me. A couple I had seen at dinner was walking ahead of us, clearly headed to the cotillion, too. She was radiant in white, a matching fur shrug contrasting with her sleek black hair. He was tall and wearing a tuxedo, and they were walking arm in arm. Together, they looked like they might have stepped out of a black-and-white Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie.
“So what do you think?” I turned to Julian conspiratorially as the pair floated down Fifth Avenue. “Are they Russian spies? Or automatons?” I nodded toward the couple, whom I had decided to christen Natasha and Bot Wonder.
“Sorry?” Julian looked at me blankly.
I pointed to them. “They’re too perfect, right? So either they were sent here by the Ruskies,” I said in a bad Eastern European accent, “to infiltrate New York City as American teenagers, but their only frame of reference was the m
ovies, so they look like they just stepped out of one. Or they are, in fact, robots and we have a lot more to worry about than a silly little war with Russia.”
Julian’s expression did not change, except for maybe a slight tinge of confusion that snuck onto his perfect mask of a face. I waited a beat before I felt I had to explain. “It’s just a game, a joke,” I said, which of course ruined the very nature of either.
“Oh,” Julian replied, and, after a moment, bestowed a small smile upon me.
The rest of the night was almost too boring to mention. We arrived at the ball; I was announced; I curtsied; I danced (poorly). Then we were entertained by a pair of professional dancers who glided across the floor, further driving home just how badly I had failed in my attempt to do the same.
But just then, the most glorious, wonderful thing happened.
The girl dancer wore a dainty little mask over her face, pale pink rhinestones framing her large blue eyes. I suppose in the story of their dance, they were supposed to be at a masquerade ball. And that’s when I was struck with an idea. A funny idea. An idea I thought I could easily turn into an I Love Lucy episode.
What if Lucy went to a masquerade ball because she heard there was going to be a television talent scout there, and she wanted to get Ricky booked on a TV show? Only, of course, there would be a case of mistaken identity, and the person Lucy was trying to woo would actually be a masked thief, there to steal from all the finely bejeweled ladies at the ball. Lucy would inadvertently spend the entire ball thwarting him. She would be a masked hero! I could almost imagine the orchestra playing a version of The Lone Ranger theme song, a wink to the audience.
My mind churned. I wished I had a pen and paper. I looked ruefully at all the tiny and dainty purses my fellow debs had brought and knew I’d be hard-pressed to find one here. I took to staring off into space instead, trying to commit to memory all the one-liners and sight gags that were suddenly whizzing around in my brain. Julian had to ask me to dance three times before I heard him. I only said yes because saying no would’ve required extra conversation that my brain simply had no room for, and also because I caught my mother’s frown and remembered my unspoken promise to her. I owed her one last glimpse at the daughter she wished she had.