Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  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!

  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.