Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  If Beverly Katz was at twelve o’clock, then I was at nine o’clock. Around the circle passed the word, coming closer to me. Each girl in turn had a chance to speak her mind to all or none, as she was moved. From Sally to Sue to Maggie to May. Six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight o’clock.

  “Sasha?” said Beverly, popping a bubble.

  I shook my head. My thoughts, questions all, were too tentative to expose to them, the slightest of whom seemed so certain, so powerful. As always, I passed.

  On we moved toward the ultimate moment after Round Table when the Cokes and potato chips would be passed around, a record would be started on the phonograph, we would separate, the doors would be thrown open, and the boys, who had been waiting noisily on the lawn outside, would at last be invited in. We were all needles for that moment. Rumor had it that the football team was gradually defecting to Alpha Phi Beta. Not many of them had shown up at our meeting the week before, and without the right boys we’d never get the right pledges, and then before we knew it S.L.T. would be going down; perhaps it was already slipping. As the last few sisters spoke, we shifted on our pastel skirts and plucked at our sweaters, combing our hair and checking our bras again, till finally, circle completed, we were back to the President.

  “Before we adjourn,” began Beverly, holding everyone back with her black eyes, “I have a few things to say myself.” She turned directly to me. Smoothing the pleats of her skirt she rose on her knees and measured the distance between our eyeballs before going into her venomous trance.

  I was ready. Our eyeballs met. Now.

  “You don’t seem to care who you step on to get a guy. You think you’re pretty hot shit. But watch out. We’re all on to you now. We know how you operate!”

  I take off, slowly at first, then at increasing speeds, swimming through space.

  I hear my mother shouting in comforting farewell from some vast distance, “Just you wait, someday they’ll be sorry!” while “Liar! Schemer!” resounds in my ears.

  Sitting on pastel clouds receding rapidly, the sisters glance at each other with assenting smiles. They are passing a long bubble pipe from cloud to cloud, all in cahoots. In their center a black-eyed medium sings out the prophecy, Katz’s Curse. (Of course she is only a medium with acne and not responsible for what she says.) “You can’t get away with this shit forever!” she shouts.

  I am shocked. Can she know about the Bus Stop Game? My joy button? If not, what can she be talking about? Jimmy Brennan’s thing? Iggy’s phone calls?

  “Glub, glub, glub,” she mouths, diving under a circle of whitecaps and up through baby-blue waves.

  At last I come to rest on my rock. Up she swims to my face inside a huge, expanding bubble. “You think that just because you’re beautiful you can do anything you please and get away with it. But you can’t! Someday it’ll all catch up with you and then you’ll pay! You’ll pay for everything!”

  The bubble bursts, drenching us all.

  Everything? I wonder, as in the bubble’s circular wake the prophecy echoes like a curse.

  Though I decide it is a sane prophecy, the conclusions reasonable—no one should expect to get away with anything indefinitely—I nevertheless begin to tremble.

  When the wave recedes, Beverly sits down again, being careful that the pleats in her skirt are smooth. She surveys the circle with triumphant eyes and everyone smiles back at her. I smile too, trying not to offend.

  I remember something, but I don’t know what. It is something strong and delicious, stuck between my teeth. Strong enough, I wonder, to sweeten the rue? I suck it out and roll it over my tongue, and then I realize: Beverly Katz has called me beautiful, and not one word about nose or skin.

  She gets up to open the door. Out come the Cokes.

  Surely I must be beautiful if she hates me for it! Well, let her hate me then, what do I care? Obviously this hatchery is not the world.

  In come the boys. “Hi.” “Hi.” “Hi.” “Hi, Sasha. Who got it tonight?” says, of all people, Iggy Friedman.

  “I did,” I say, surpassing protocol, and trying to master my pain by naming it. “From Beverly.”

  “Gee. That’s too bad.” Iggy looks down, slightly embarrassed. I shrug. Nat King Cole proposes that it’s only a paper moon hanging over a cardboard sea.

  “C’mon,” says Iggy, touching my elbow. “I’ll take you home tonight. We can go to Lenny’s for a Lennyburger and you can tell me about it if you want to.”

  I taste sin. “Swell,” I say. “Just let me get my sweater.” For the first of what will be many times, I toss my head with a hint of defiance, like Veronica Lake. Beverly Katz may not see me, but she will hear.

  I return in a moment with my sweater. “Ready,” I say flashing my prettiest smile. And linking my arm in Iggy’s I walk with him out the door.

  What but destiny or extraordinary luck could have kept me apart from them, clinging to my rock? To have swum along with them once would have meant forever. I would make my way differently. With an eye at the end of each of my rays, I was better off a starfish. After having studied all the fairy tales and Candide and Rasselas, I knew there were some who crossed over the mountains and seas. At fourteen I believed that somewhere there must be a vast green ocean, deep and mysterious, with other currents more swift and powerful than those of this bay. There were some who escaped. Let my sisters curse me then, since their love was out of the question. Beautiful, I could try for the ocean.

  Music was splling out of the cafeteria into the corridors of Baybury High. “Stardust,” the S.L.T. theme song, announced that the annual S.L.T. Bunny Hop, celebrating spring and the big basketball game, was now under way.

  I loved dances. But even before we arrived at the dance, I was already giddy from the evening. In a series of brilliant maneuvers beyond the hopes of anyone in Baybury Heights, my own Joey Ross had demolished snotty Shaker Heights and led Baybury to victory by scoring one spectacular basket after another. Of the eighty-one points scored by Baybury High against Shaker High’s bleak thirty-four, Joey, still a sophomore, had made forty himself. After such a dazzling performance, he would surely be made captain of the team.

  I floated out of the gym on Joey’s arm, madly in love. “Great game, Joey,” called Rooney Rogoff on his way to the locker room, snapping his towel at us.

  “You too, stud,” said Joey.

  Hand in hand we mounted the stairs to the cafeteria. On the landing Joey shot one hand to the wall to trap me; then pressing his sinewy body flat against mine, he kissed me hard. When his tongue glided into the corners of my mouth I went limp like warm butter; I could have melted right down the stairs. “Don’t,” I managed to say. “They’ll be judging us soon.

  “So what?” said Joey, “you’re gorgeous.” But he lowered his arm obligingly and in we went.

  The darkened cafeteria was undulating with mute couples grinding to a very slow instrumental. A canopy of paper streamers hung overhead. “Great game, Joey,” someone said as we walked through the door.

  “How ya doin’?” Joey answered modestly.

  “Great game,” said my friend Eloise the ticket taker. It was useless trying to hide my rapture.

  At the opposite end of the large room Freddy and Fink (More sound than you think/With Freddy and Fink) had set up their amplifiers and turntables and were playing records on request. Behind them the girls on the Dance Committee were putting last-minute decorations on the table that would serve as a platform for the coronation. Tonight a new Queen would be chosen. My stomach sank when once again I remembered the contest, but Joey grabbed me around the waist and pulled me onto the dance floor and made everything all right again. Pressing thighs, eyes closed, we melted together and swayed as one. Nearing the open window where the April breeze was puffing out the cafeteria curtains like parachutes, we floated slowly down to a standstill and kissed again. Oh Joey.

  The music stopped. “Great game!” said Nat Karlan, one of Joey’s Keystone brothers. They twined their arms over each
other’s shoulders and moved away. But not before I overheard Nat whisper to Joey, with an intimacy I never achieved, “If you don’t get in tonight, friend, you never will!”

  I was stung by the thought. Of course: those forty points overwhelmingly weighted the scales. Tonight Joey would have a powerful advantage. But even if I managed to resist again tonight, who would believe me?

  In the five months I had been going with Joey he’d come closer to “getting in” than anyone else, but I had always managed to resist. What happened to the girls who gave in, and even to those only suspected of giving in, was an unthinkable nightmare. I had myself sat through the now-famous S.L.T. meeting in which Renee Thomas had been expelled for allegedly going all the way. Only a year had passed and already Renee’s name was legend. Girls sneered at her, boys abused her, her name appeared in all the graffiti, freshmen gaped at her in disbelief. She would never marry in Baybury. She’d have been better off dead. If only she had heeded the warnings that one thing inevitably leads to another.

  Between me and Joey already one thing had led to another—kissing had led to French kissing, French kissing to necking, necking to petting, petting to bare-titting, bare-titting to dry humping—but somehow, thank God, I had always managed to stop at that penultimate step. When the Sunday morning telephone wires buzzed with intimate questions (“What did he try?” “How far did he get?”) I bluffed my way through them with respectable answers, always a few steps behind the truth. But how long, I wondered, could I be believed? And how long could I go on holding out?

  I knew there was some Renee in me, as there probably was in each of us. Renee, too, it was said, had started out by falling madly in love. So precariously did I totter between yes and no—from the first delicious kiss that made my knees go limp, to the very brink—that this new possibility appalled me. If you don’t get in tonight, friend, you never will.

  Actually, I had grown to dread necking with Joey, it had come to be such a struggle. Whatever I did, he wanted more. It wasn’t even safe to neck in my house any more, where my parents trusted me. Gone were those long, voluptuous hours of kissing on my living-room sofa or in the car at Shaker Lakes when I could abandon myself to Joey’s sweet mouth, love his sinuous arms with my fingertips, and tickle my palms on his crew cut. The kissing and French kissing and petting I had so enjoyed had been reduced to a five-minute warm-up before the struggle, and I had been forced to trade abandon for vigilance.

  “Please let me, Sasha.”

  “I can’t, Joey.”

  “Please.”

  “No.”

  Now, after five kisses or ten, he’d slip his hand under my sweater or skirt and begin to tinker with me mechanically, then pin me under him on the back seat of his father’s car and proceed to please himself. He was much too strong for me. In the beginning he used to lie on top of me so I could hardly move or breathe and rub his stiff clothed body against mine for a few minutes until a series of jerks let me know he was done and I could breathe again. I was bewildered by the shame and the thrill of it. Later he stopped short of the jerks, turned suddenly away, opened his pants, and came into his handkerchief. Once he secretly unzipped and rubbed his bare penis on my thigh without my knowing until, suddenly aware, I managed to push him off and make him finish by himself.

  Though he never again forced me to touch it, he started taking it out and begging me to feel it with my hand or let him rub it on my leg, and he would whine when I refused. “Come on, Sasha, you’re torturing me,” he would say. But it was really he who was torturing me, squeezing me between two guilts. I cowered whenever a car approached. I felt that if anyone ever discovered what Joey did with me in that car, I would have to run away. Poor Mother. Poor Daddy. Poor, poor Sasha.

  It disgusted me to see Joey close his eyes and groan in ecstasy, his handkerchief over his crotch. When I had melted from his kisses it had been for love of him. But he certainly couldn’t be groaning for love of me, it was all for himself. It was a tossup which was worse: to be appreciated as a mechanical ejaculator with all the attendant risks, or to be despised as a prude.

  I had become so anxious over our sex that though we were going together and were therefore permitted to neck, I tried my best to avoid it. Passionate as I was, I looked for excuses to go straight home from a date. When Joey invariably parked the car anyway, I kept my coat buttoned all the way up as an act of protest. But of course, my protests went unheeded. I didn’t dare get Joey really angry for fear he’d spread things about me. The girls’ axiom about the boys was true: they always go as far as they can, and never backwards. By fifteen I knew love was a dangerous emotion. It was dynamite. I knew it was safer to be a sex reject than a sex object, but it was already too late for me to choose.

  Freddy and Fink put on a fast record. Joey stepped back with his arm around his buddy Nat, while a Deltan twirled me off into the crowd. Athlete Joey, like all Keystones, danced only slow; the articulate Deltans danced as fast and as smoothly as they talked. As girls were divided by their looks and permissiveness, boys were divided by their accomplishments. I would have been a Deltan if I’d been a boy; maybe that was why I fell in love with a Keystone.

  Whirling and bobbing and double-stepping, I danced with one Deltan after another. Couple after couple dropped off the floor while I danced on. Around us the circle of spectators swelled until it seemed the whole school was there. Breathless, pulse throbbing, I kept on going, to record after record, until Fink stopped the music and Freddy announced a break. I felt my face flush burgundy. Everyone exploded in applause. An intoxicating evening.

  Freddy and Fink moved the coronation platform and mike into the center of the floor. “One-two-three-testing, one-two-three-testing.” Time for the contest.

  While the judges arranged their chairs in front of the platform, I ran to the girls’ room with the three other finalists to primp and calm ourselves. My God, I thought, looking down the long mirror at those beautiful older girls, I haven’t a chance. They seemed so poised, while I was falling apart. Long eyelashes, a tiny nose, and glowing skin simply couldn’t be enough. The one power I had developed to perfection, the power of my glance, I didn’t dare use on the judges. There was not a single way to improve my chances: I could only stand up and be judged.

  As soon as we walked back into the cafeteria, Fink played a few bars of “Stardust” through the amplifier to set the ceremonial mood. Freddy caressed the mike and announced the contestants’ names and fraternal sponsors. When he called my name I stepped up on a chair, then out onto the platform. Somehow I managed a smile for the eight judges below, two from each fraternity. Please let me be chosen, I prayed, climbing down again and taking my place beside the other contestants before the judges. I felt helpless, like a passenger riding in a “chicken” race.

  Fink put on a slow ballad and a few couples danced in the corners. The judges consulted with Freddy, then whispered gravely among themselves. Feeling foolish, we whispered together too, not daring to look out, plucking at our sweaters nervously, waiting. “Who wants to be Queen anyway?” we said, hating each other. I needed to go to the bathroom again.

  Freddy ran up to us. “Would you mind walking back and forth across the cafeteria once, girls, so these guys can get a better look at you?” he said.

  “Oh, no!” we squealed. Didn’t they see us every day? But of course, one at a time, we paraded before the judges. I remember making a little deferential curtsey at the end to camouflage my trembling knees—and I remember to my shame hearing someone laugh.

  An eternity passed before Freddy ran back up to the front and tenderly took the mike in his hand. Fink stopped the music. “Okay, folks,” said Freddy, “your attention please.” He frowned and tapped the microphone until it hummed. Then he began again, laying on the famous Deltan smooth.

  “There’s such a stack of pulchritude up for Queen tonight that our judges have had a hard time making up their minds between these four gorgeous glamour girls.” Everyone moved in a little closer. “But I’m
happy to announce that they’ve finally reached a verdict.”

  He nodded to Fink, who started “Stardust” over again from the beginning, a little louder this time. Everyone fell silent. All suckers for ceremony.

  My hands began shaking so hard that I clasped them behind my back. I wondered about my blushing skin. I had to go to the bathroom desperately. I thought about how it would feel to be Chinese or to live on the West Side, and then snapped back to Baybury Heights. Though I knew the decision was already settled, so there was no longer any possibility of influencing it, abandoning all prudence, I offered up one last wish to the Blue Fairy: Make me Queen and I’ll never ask for anything more.

  “I have the pleasure,” said Freddy like a professional, “to present to you the new Queen of the S.L.T. Bunny Hop—I might even say the Basketball Queen of Baybury Heights.”

  Not me, throbbed my temples. Never me.

  “—that beautiful miss from Sigma Lambda Tau, the Keystone’s choice, the sweetest profile in Ohio, the Queen of the Bunny Hop, Sasha Davis!”

  The music blared. Me! I couldn’t believe it!

  “That’s you, Sasha,” said Freddy, hugging me tightly and bending over to plant a loud kiss on my cheek. He pushed me up onto the platform. “Get up there now, honey, it’s all yours!” I didn’t dare take my eyes off him. “You’re the Queen, Sasha,” he yells up from below. “Smile!”

  The others have disappeared. ‘I’m all alone on the platform. The silver S.L.T. crown is on my head, and my arms enfold a huge bouquet of daffodils, tied with a blue satin ribbon on which are stitched in gold the letters S-L-T. In a circle below me everyone is singing out our song to the tune of “Stardust” and watching me. I smile till my gums show. I feel tears stream down my cheeks. Cameras are flashing. I feel so foolish and so happy. I am the Queen.