The Little Black Dress

by Linda Palund

  “Don’t be shy, Lucy,” Sam said. “Lucy has won all the writing contests they have at Emerson Junior High, haven’t you, Lucy?”

  I was amazed Sam knew this, but I guess my little brother must have bragged to Sam’s little brother.

  “Well, that’s really saying more about the caliber of creative writing in the rest of the student body,” I answered.

  “I told you not to be shy about it. I read your last story from that contest in March,” he said. “I showed it to Steve too.”

  My face must have gone totally red. “You did? Why?”

  “Steve is organizing a writers evening at Shakespeare’s.”

  “What’s Shakespeare’s?” I asked.

  “That’s a hangout we go to in Santa Monica,” said Sam. “You’d like it too. You don’t have to be over eighteen to go there. They don’t serve alcohol, so it’s an all-ages kind of club.”

  “It’s like a beatnik coffee house from the fifties,” Steve added.

  “Anyone can go there and just be themselves,” said Sam. “It’s open twenty-four hours a day. We thought you might like to check it out.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, we did,” Sam said. “Steve’s putting together a group where aspiring writers, like yourself, can meet up and read short stories out loud to each other, like a poetry reading night.”

  “You should totally come down and check it out,” said Steve.

  “Totally,” agreed Sam.

  I didn’t drive then, of course, and I wasn’t going to take the bus, so my mom drove me to Shakespeare’s the following Wednesday night. Embarrassingly, she insisted on coming inside the club with me.

  “This is amazing,” she said as we made our way furtively down the steep steps. “I swear, I might have been here back in the sixties!”

  It was pretty dark down there, and it took me a while to realize most of the people hanging out there were gay couples. That’s when it finally occurred to me that Sam and Steve were gay. Then it dawned on me that they must have thought I was gay too!

  I sat there with my mom for the whole night, sipping drinks and listening to some pretty good short stories. Steve was the moderator, or whatever they call the guy who introduces the readers. He always had a kind word to say about each person’s story, and when it was over, he came and sat down at our table and chatted to my mother and me.

  “Next week, Lucy’s going to read a story, aren’t you, girl?” he announced to my mom.

  “Oh yes, absolutely,” she said.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never read any of my stories out loud.” I tried to back out, but my mom wasn’t having any of it.

  “Come on, Lucy,” she said. “You’re in drama class. You give readings all the time. And you played the rabbit in Winnie the Pooh last year. I know you’re not shy!”

  “Mom!” God, was that embarrassing. “All right, I’ll do it, but please stop talking about me, okay?” I begged.

  “Great,” Steve said. “See you next week, then.” He was about to get up, but then he thought of something else to ask. “Hey, so what do you think of this place?”

  “It does seem really cool,” I said. “My mom thinks she may have been here back in the sixties.”

  “She might well have been. It used to be open back then too. And remember, Lucy, it’s open all day, so you can just come here and hang out after school. It’s not that far away.”

  “Yes, Lucy,” my mom said. “This might be a good place to meet some interesting friends.”

  So that got me thinking. Did even my mom think I was gay? Was I really gay? And if I was, was I the last one to know? Did everybody else just assume I was gay? Okay, I had suspected it for some time. Probably since I was twelve years old, but I had never really thought about it, about my sexual orientation, I mean. That’s probably because I was a late bloomer. I hadn’t even had my first period yet. But I’d always known about sex. In fact, I knew a lot about sex.

  Being a shrink, my mother had a huge library of psychosexual pathology books upstairs in her office, and by the time I was eleven years old, I’d read every book from Havelock Ellis to the Kinsey Reports. She also had a collection of what she called “dirty books,” which were really some old pornography like The Story of O and Candy, which she hid under her mattress. Most of these made sex seem pretty ugly and were filled with a lot of male aggression. Everything about sex in them was hard and hurried and seemed pretty painful to me. But I liked the descriptions of the women, with their sweet-smelling voluptuous bodies and silken skin. Everything soft and warm and curvy was womanly, and I discovered, at the age of eleven, that it turned me on.

  Then, when I was twelve years old, I found some Penthouse magazines in a neighbor’s recycling bin while I was walking to Westwood Village. I took them and hid them in my shopping bag. I couldn’t wait to look at them, and I opened one up inside the ladies’ room at the first coffee shop I came to as soon as I reached the Village. The sight of all that naked womanly flesh made me feel strange and tingly and also very itchy, so that I had to rub my crotch with my fingers. That felt so good, I reached my first climax in the toilet stall at Coffee Island. It felt so weird and wonderful; I couldn’t wait to do it again.

  After that, I began to masturbate pretty much every day, sometimes just thinking about women and sometimes using the magazines I’d found. Then I began to read some of the other books in my mom’s library—psych books about sexual orientation—until gradually I began to get a picture of what might be in store for me. But I wasn’t ready to accept it. I was a kid. What did I know?

  But after that night at Shakespeare’s, I kind of liked the idea that I was different. I mean, I had always known I was different from the other kids in my class, but now I knew I was even more different than I had originally thought. I was more than a geek. I was queer. I was a lesbian. But of course I wasn’t going to tell anybody. That is, until the day I walked into Shakespeare’s with Carmen.

  Cedric brought us our coffee, smiling from ear to ear, just like the cat that swallowed the canary, but he left us alone after that. As soon as he had disappeared behind the counter, Carmen took one sip of her latte. Then she put it down on the table and cocked her beautiful head to one side and looked at me with a quizzical expression on her face. It was an expression I had never seen on her face before, and I feared the worst. Then she said it.

  “So, are you gay?”

  I wasn’t exactly startled, but I put down my own mug and looked back at her with kind of a half smile on my face, trying to collect my thoughts and figure out exactly what I was going to say. I had been planning this for days, but now my heart was beating like a tiny frightened bird trying to escape my rib cage. I didn’t know what to say. We were already so close. In the three weeks since she’d appeared on my doorstep, we’d been practically inseparable. We had slept in each other’s beds. We had tried on each other’s clothes and stayed up ’til all hours of the night listening to The Cure’s Disintegration album. We had shared a lot of secrets, but this was a secret on a whole other level, and I knew it. I took another sip of my coffee. It suddenly tasted as bitter and awful as it had the first time I’d tasted it over at Sam’s house.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, nervously fingering the handle of my mug. I looked up at Carmen again, wishing I could read her mind. “What about you?”

  Carmen took another sip of her latte and sat back in her chair and simply gazed back at me, not smiling, but not frowning either. Her beautiful full lips were drawn tight, but her eyes shone in the glow of our little café candle.

  “I don’t know either. I never thought about it until I met you,” she said, totally surprising me and making my heart flutter, as if the bird in my chest was about to break free.

  That’s when I reached across the table and took her hand again.

  “Let’s not worry about it,” I said. “Let’s just be friends.”

  She smiled then and shook her head, her lush hair swirling about her shoulders like
it always did. “Don’t be silly, Lucy. We’re already past that.” And then she did something really strange. She lifted my hand to her mouth, and she kissed the back of it, a wet kiss, so that I could feel the tip of her tongue against my skin. The touch of her tongue was like an electric shock that I could feel all the way through my body, from the tips of my breasts to the tips of my toes. If I had had any doubts before, I was certain now. I really was gay. And what’s more, I was in love with Carmen.

  From that day forward, Shakespeare’s was our home away from home. We tried to make it down every Wednesday night too, for the short story and poetry readings, and we took turns contributing our efforts. But mainly it was a refuge where we could cuddle in public and kind of show off our relationship. Otherwise, we felt like we had to hide it, although I am pretty certain my mother knew. I guess it was our peers we feared, and I know Carmen was afraid to upset her tipsy mother.

  On weekend nights, though, we usually went dancing at the Sugar Shack on Sunset Strip. They didn’t play that eighties disco crap or that awful manufactured R & B drivel everybody else seemed to like. They didn’t serve any alcohol either, but they sold a lot of Red Bull and JD Orange and Passion Fruit drinks. It was at the Sugar Shack that we got most of our exercise.

  Carmen was a dreamy dancer. I mean that literally. She danced as if she was asleep or on drugs, just dreamily graceful, every movement slow but in perfect time—as if she could make time stop. If I were asked to describe her dancing, I guess that would be my description: she danced in a way that seemed to make time stop. I had my own repertoire of fabulous Wendy-the-dancer moves, but I learned a lot from watching Carmen dance. Like how to dance as if you could stop time.

  If only I could really do that. Stop time, I mean. Then I could go back and save Carmen from her fate.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE LITTLE BLACK DRESS

  OUR RELATIONSHIP stayed strong even after school began in the fall. In a town like LA, this was a major accomplishment. My high school had all the usual bullshit every other high school had with its cliques and gossip, but multiply this by the duplicity and back-stabbing endemic to LA, and you realized it was nothing less than a miracle we could keep our friendship so solid.

  We also had to get past the issue of the little black dress. This was a mystery that took me a long time to unravel. At first I didn’t notice, because during the summer at home, Carmen wore all kinds of summery outfits every day, just as you would expect any good-looking teenage girl to wear: light gauzy dresses that made you gasp when you looked at her, shorts that clung to her round bottom and showed off her legs, and halter tops that barely covered her astonishing breasts. But whenever we went out, whether to the cinema, to the Sugar Shack, or even to Shakespeare’s, Carmen only wore one thing: her little black dress.

  She accessorized like crazy, though—beads and bangles, gold or silver necklaces, jet beads or rhinestones, fantastic earrings, hoops or drops, diaphanous scarves and wide belts, but always, always, the little black dress.

  So I wasn’t exactly surprised, on the first day of school, to see her prance down the walk in her four-inch heels, looking like a million bucks but wearing that same little black dress. I don’t know what I expected, but I hadn’t really thought she would wear that dress to school. I remained bewildered that she kept right on wearing it every single day, but I was too good a friend to make an issue of it. If that little black dress was destined to become her high school uniform, so be it.

  It turned out that was exactly what it was, for I am not exaggerating. She wore it every single day of the school week. Of course I wondered about it, but I didn’t dare ask Carmen why she wore it. I don’t know why, but somehow I knew this subject was taboo. We shared so many things, but this was obviously something she wasn’t ready to share with me.

  I thought about it a lot, though. Finally, I came to the conclusion the dress must have something to do with her father. After all, he had just died that year. Maybe in Virginia, the teenage girls had to dress in mourning for a whole year. But then, it also seemed especially weird to me that neither Carmen nor her mother ever spoke about her father, and I never saw a photograph of him anywhere in the house. They didn’t really seem to miss him. Still, maybe she actually was in mourning, and maybe that was the only black dress she owned. All I knew was that, every single day when we would meet up in front of one of our houses to drive to school together, there she would be, looking fetching, looking ravishing, looking gorgeous, but always in her little black dress.

  I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. I’m sure everyone at school wondered about that dress. This was LA, after all, the town where even five-year-olds had their hair done every two weeks and their noses done by the time they were eight. If you didn’t buy your designer clothes on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, you bought their knockoffs at Marshalls in Santa Monica. You simply did not go to high school wearing the same dress every day. But nevertheless, that is what Carmen did. The same exact dress, every single school day.

  So, yes, I wondered about that dress a lot. I wondered about practical things too, like how the hell did she keep it looking so fresh? Did she wash it by hand every night? I even wondered if she had more than one of the exact same dress. But what I really wanted to know was, what was its significance? What did it mean to Carmen?

  Anyway, after a few months, I finally got up the courage to ask her about the dress. That was a mistake, though, believe me, and I was so sorry I brought it up, but I couldn’t help myself.

  We were downstairs at my house, in the rumpus room, eating the popcorn Constanza had made for us and watching Gone with the Wind on DVD.

  I had been planning to ask her for weeks, and I thought I had worked out my best plan of attack. After all, we were relaxed now, we’d seen the film before and we both loved it, so we could talk during it, making comments all through the film, and I could practice my Southern accent. But now I tried my very best to be subtle as well as casual.

  “Hey,” I said, keeping my eyes focused on the screen, watching Scarlet cavort in her ragged gown after the Yankees had destroyed her beloved Tara. “I’ve been meaning to ask you.” Then I took a deep breath and tried to look as cute and casual as I could when I finally asked, “Why do you wear that same dress to school every day?”

  Carmen froze for a second in the middle of reaching for a handful of popcorn. Then she turned to me with a look of shock and fury. And there was something else too. Something close to rage was flaring up behind her eyes. But all she said was “I can’t believe you’re asking me that!” Then she threw down the big yellow bowl, so that the popcorn spilled all over the couch, and she stormed up the stairs and out of the house, slamming the door behind her.

  I sat there numbly for a few minutes, staring at the TV screen, watching Scarlett O’Hara turn her drapes into a ball gown, and then I cleared up the popcorn, switched off the TV, and went to bed.

  There were so many things I didn’t know about Carmen. So many subjects I had to steer clear of. We liked so many of the same things—the same books, the same movies, the same TV shows, and the same music—but there was still a huge part of her I feared I would never get to know.

  I was hopelessly in love with her. It may have been a schoolgirl crush, it may have been puppy love, but it was some kind of love. I loved her, and I didn’t want to ruin our friendship. So I went to bed early that night and fretted and worried so much I couldn’t sleep, and finally I had to sneak upstairs and steal a Valium from my mother’s medicine cabinet. She was out playing bridge, and my dad was working late as usual, so I was safe. Then I went back to bed and slept like the dead until my alarm woke me.

  The next morning, Carmen was outside my house at 8:00 a.m. as usual, leaning against my car and looking up at the perpetual blue of our autumn skies, acting like nothing had happened and nothing had changed. She was wearing her little black dress as always, with her amazingly lustrous hair piled on her head so just a few ringlets fell about her neck, making her loo
k deliciously disheveled.

  “Hey,” she said like she always said when she saw me, her face breaking into her wicked smile, her adorable dimples lighting up her face.

  “Hey, yourself,” I answered, practically stumbling down the walk with my arms full of books, trying to gauge her expression to determine if she was really all right.

  “Here, let me help you, silly. Ever hear of a book bag?” She took the top three books off my pile so I was able to click the opener for the car door locks, and we managed to dump the books into the backseat. Her book bag was lying on the ground by her feet. It was a retro shoulder bag we had found in Venice, and it had a picture of David Bowie from the Heroes album on the flap. I never did find one for me, and I was damned if I was going to use my old backpack.

  We were up close and personal now, bending over the car, our arms entangled in books and our hips touching, when she surprised me by putting her arm around me and giving me a reassuring squeeze. Then she surprised me even more by giving me a little peck on the cheek.

  “So, we’re good?” she asked.

  “Better than good,” I replied, straightening up and smiling back at her dimpled cheeks and bright eyes. I breathed a sigh of relief, wanting desperately to kiss her but knowing that was something we could never do in public.

  Then she shrugged her shoulders, picked up her book bag, threw it into the backseat on top of my books, and climbed elegantly into the passenger seat, her little black dress riding up almost all the way to her crotch. We were carpooling, and it was my turn to drive. It was all I could do to keep my hands on the wheel and not slide one hand up between her beautiful thighs, but that was all she ever said about last night, and I never dared ask her about that dress ever again.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DEAD FATHER

  BECAUSE CARMEN was so damned beautiful, she was exempt from any of the usual harassment high school cliques subjected most kids to, including me. Everybody wanted to be her friend, but she was surprisingly unpretentious and always cool, never giving away too much but just enough to be desired by everyone. I basked in the light of her favor and in the fact that she still gave me most of her attention, and everyone knew we were best friends, so I became cool by proxy—and that was all right with me.