Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  “Yes,” I whispered to him, unsure of its effect. “Yes,” I repeated softly between bites at the station sausage stand, gently, trying to suppress the note of triumph. But there it was on the counter between us, gaudy as the anemones, our basic matrimonial dispute: “No!” “Yes!” “I won’t let you!” “I shall!” “It’s a lie!” “It’s the truth!” “You didn’t!” “I did!”

  Unfaithful. It was a word he could understand, a concept he could manipulate, a clean, abstract, intelligible word, implying order. Order violated, but order all the same. Though he held his face in his hands while I finished my last bite of sausage, I knew he would be all right when I left. He would wring his hands and say to our friends, “She was unfaithful,” and he would believe in my corruption and his purity, and then he would get himself another wife.

  “You leave me no choice at all. That’s it, you know,” he threatened.

  “I know,” I said, accepting the gambit.

  He looked at me hard, frowning and biting his lower lip the way he did when he was working, and then he risked asking, “Don’t you care? ”

  Desperate question. What could I say to him? Poor guy, but it was him or me. “I guess I don’t love you any more. I don’t belong to you any more.” Well, at least it was the truth. I looked down into my beer. After a suitable number of seconds had elapsed I took a swallow. (Any sooner and he would have said, Put down your mug and listen to me! )

  “Haven’t I allowed you everything? How could you do this to me? Why?”

  To him. I shrugged.

  “Why did you feel you had to do it?”

  Do it. He was as slippery as sperm. No, no—I refused to defend! “I didn’t have to do it. I felt like it.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know, I guess because there wasn’t any reason not to.”

  “I’m the reason not to. Because you’re married to me. Because you made a commitment. You promised me you wouldn’t,” he said puffing up. Puff. Puff.

  Technically I had promised. But under protest. Now he would lose me on a technicality. I had promised only because he had insisted. To calm him. Lies.

  “But I didn’t have to tell you about Madrid, did I?” I said. “So the promise wasn’t really a reason not to do it, was it? It was only a reason not to tell you.”

  “Quite right. Yes. You promised at least not to tell me. But now you’ve told me. And now it’s too late. Why did you have to tell me? I wish we could wipe it out and forget about it.” Again, he held his face in his hands.

  Would it have been unkind of me to point out to him how often he had read over my shoulder my letters to and from my friends, trying to find out? Did he want to know or didn’t he? Generously, I pointed out nothing.

  “I told you because I know it will happen again. Because you won’t let me breathe. It will happen again and you’ll find out. I hate lies!”

  He blew his nose, snorting loudly. I was embarrassed. It would make red veins on his nostrils and blue veins on his neck. Was he going to carry on in the railroad station? On the radio someone was singing a Dietrich song:

  Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt

  Und das ist meine Welt, und sonst gar nichts.

  “If it’s okay with you I’d like to go home now,” I said, getting out my mirror. “I have a lot to do. I feel as though I haven’t had a bath in a month. I’ll try to be out of here in a day or two, three at the most. That sound all right to you?” I looked worse than I should; I had to see a doctor. I put away the mirror and stood up.

  “We’ll need to talk a bit first,” he said, trying to compose himself.

  “Okay. We can talk if you want.” It was the least I could offer.

  He gazed through to the back of my head, out of focus, saying nothing. I started to walk toward the exit. I knew he would follow me. He left some money on the counter and caught up, lugging my suitcase with one hand, the anemones, which I had forgotten, in the other. He slid up in time to hand me back the flowers and open the door. At the curb he took my elbow commandingly and guided me through the insane Munich traffic to the narrow island where the trolleys stopped. Never forgot his place or mine. Oh, well, I was too weary to mind; I would let him protect me from the traffic, Munich was such a cold and hostile city.

  On the island Frank gathered up his wits. “You don’t look changed,” he mustered with a faint smile.

  “Please. Let’s not talk about how I look. I’ve been sick. One of the things I have to do before I leave is see a good German doctor.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t really know. I saw a doctor in Madrid, but he didn’t help. These Catholic doctors …”

  “What did he say?”

  “Something about hormones. And he gave me some pills. I took them for a while, but now I’m afraid to take any more. I think it’s crazy to play around with hormones, don’t you? I just hope I’m not pregnant,” I said laughing and pushing my hair off my forehead.

  “Pregnant?” He blinked.

  “It’s really very unlikely; I always used my diaphragm. It’s just that I missed my last period. But that could be for a lot of reasons.”

  He looked around to see if anyone was listening to our conversation. “How could you?” he whispered. As if anyone there could understand us or would care. All the people squeezed onto the narrow concrete island were straining to see what number trolley was approaching or trying to keep the wind out of their faces. No one paid the slightest attention to us.

  A number-five trolley pulled up behind a number-six and stopped, bells clanging. Frank put down my suitcase and got out a sufficient number of pfennigs. The conductor punched two tickets methodically in several secret places and waved us on, giving the suitcase a shove.

  Settled in the back of the car, Frank looked hard at me. “You planned it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You took your diaphragm with you. You planned to be unfaithful.”

  Oh Christ. “I did not.”

  “Of course you did. Don’t lie.”

  I refused to answer. I was still saving my last word. It was not true that I “planned” it in the way that he meant. But when you came right down to it, what difference did it make whether I left him two months before or was leaving him then? Poor Professor, out of focus, worrying the wrong question.

  “I never go anywhere without it—like you and your spare glasses. We all have to look out for ourselves. But that’s not planning anything.”

  He didn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t even hear me.

  The trolley stopped short, throwing me momentarily against Frank. For an instant our eyes met and I saw that his were filled with hate. Was it the hatred of the lion facing his tamer or his prey? Something had gone wrong. Quickly he focused away. For the rest of the ride he sat in a pool of silence until we reached the end of the line. Not a word. But his silence didn’t fool me. I had already seen the hate. I knew I must not let down my guard for an instant or he would spring. I suddenly felt afraid.

  When the trolley stopped at the end of the line we began our six-block trudge through the snow-piled streets to the dreary house we lived in. I carried the anemones; Frank carried my suitcase, his head bent in accusation.

  How dare he accuse me! “What did you expect?” I shouted. But the only reply I got was the thump-thump of my suitcase against his leg.

  Why was I so afraid? Wasn’t I free? I swore to get out of there. Fast.

  Too late I realized I ought to have gone to a hotel; too late I saw that the distance between the beds was not enough. Even in a separate bed I would be trapped under his ego.

  I tried to keep the conversation calm, but Frank would not stay calm. I saw it all: first he would talk about principles and then he would call me names. And if the argument didn’t go his way he would shift the grounds and latinize, exaggerate his consonants and patronize. Already he was whispering, “Quiet! Do you want Frau Werner to know what you are?” and I, losing my own
control, was shouting, “I don’t give a shit what Frau Werner thinks! Or what you think either! I care what I think! And what I think is I’m leaving this house and this country and you and Frau Werner!”

  “Shut up, you whore! You bitch! You selfish, castrating bitch!”

  The names they use! My God, I thought, how did I get into this? I had expected it to be so easy. Hadn’t he threatened a thousand times to leave me if I was “unfaithful”? Talk about deceit! It was his word that was worthless. Always insisting that a bargain is a bargain—what about his side of the bargain? There should have been nothing to it: my confession and punishment, a quick D-and-C, pack up, back on the Orient Express, and out of there. Otherwise time would go by and money would be wasted. I had little enough money or time to waste any more of either on him. I refused to listen to his names. I would not let him manipulate me with assaults and arguments.

  “You are trying to make me kick you out, but I won’t,” he threatened. “I’m still your husband. I have rights. If you want to leave me you’ll have to do the leaving. I can’t stop you, bitch. But I’m not going to help you. Not one cent! You can whore your way around Europe!”

  I decided not to answer. I didn’t need his permission, of course, but why point it out? The Fulbright money was his, but the rest was mine, earned on nine-to-five jobs he would never have taken, though he was willing enough to live off it. Perhaps after a night’s sleep he’d be calm and more sensible.

  I asked Frau Werner about getting a bath though it wasn’t our night to use the tub. She said of course, she’d run my water. I slipped out of my clothes, and as I reached for the towel she had placed on the doorknob, Frank came up behind me, yanked the towel out of reach, almost knocked over the anemones, and unfastened my bra. The lion raises his paw. As the bra hung loose from my shoulders he slipped his hands underneath and started to fondle my breasts.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I wanted to swat at his mosquito fingers and get on to my bath, but I hesitated. There was something desperate in his fast breath on the back of my neck, and I was afraid to fight. “You belong to me. You’re my wife,” he mumbled into my neck, at once proclaiming his strength and my duty.

  “Stop it,” I said. I tried to shake him off my shoulders, but he hung on, squeezing my nipples in his fingertips. I began to struggle in earnest. His breath on my neck made me very nervous. “Please, Frank. No fair.”

  “‘Please Frank, no fair,’” he mimicked, adding, “bitch!”

  I tried to stay calm. He was very angry. Daddy. As I hesitated to use my nails on his wrists he pushed me onto one of the beds and deftly pinned my wrists over my head. With a wrench of his head he shook his glasses off; they dropped to the floor. I had a picture of myself as a comic-book victim, strangling on my own bra, which was flopping around my throat, and I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to laugh. But Frank looked so helpless without his glasses, dewy-eyed and unfocused, that bitch or no, I struggled not to laugh at him. Controlling my own impulse to be cruel, instead I said, “I’ll scream!”

  “Scream then,” he mumbled. And transferring both my wrists to one of his hands for an instant, he prepared with a minimum of undressing to rape me.

  There was no way out. I could hardly suppress the laughter any more. I tried to think of other things. I wondered if Frau Werner was listening at the door and if the bath would overflow. “Don’t! You’ll be sorry!” I cried mainly for the record, hoping not to smile, and then finally, as Frank ignored my wants and his kisses began to tickle unbearably, “For God’s sake, Frank, at least let me take off the bra and put in my diaphragm!”

  But nothing doing. “Forget the diaphragm,” he said, and to the accompaniment of my finally unsuppressible laughter, off we went on our last trip together.

  Well, so what? He’d done it so many times—what did one more matter? I’d be leaving soon enough. He could do what he wanted: I still had that last word in reserve.

  Two days later, when the petals had started falling off the anemones, my last word was still there where it had always been—in reserve. Though I had spent my life trying to arm myself with final words, I had never been able to pull a bye-bye without having a big hello ready for the next guy. Even as a kid, the thought of spending a Saturday night alone could produce in me such anxiety that I’d go out with anyone just to have a date. In fact, from the eighth grade on, no matter how I talked up freedom, I had never managed to spend more than four consecutive months without at least one man to count on, and frequently two, in case one ran out. In high school they called it “boy crazy”; in college, where everything accelerated, “oversexed.” To me it was life insurance.

  If I could know for sure I was still beautiful, I thought, it would be easy to leave. If I had been certain of it in Spain, maybe I wouldn’t have come back to Munich at all. Maybe I would have sent Frank a long letter and stayed in Madrid, or else got hold of a good mirror and a good doctor and gone straight to Italy. But as it was, I knew my looks were slipping. When I got a look in Frau Werner’s bathroom mirror under a decent light I was appalled by my reflection. Was it the mask of pregnancy or worse? There was suddenly a pale, almost imperceptible fuzz on my upper lip that had not been there in America. Probably from those hormones I’d taken in Spain. I needed a cure. If I couldn’t get rid of it or if it spread, I was finished.

  Smug Frank didn’t notice a thing. In his myopic eyes I was still as lovely as ever—that was his insidious power over me. I could tell from the way he took my arm proudly in public and looked around to see who noticed that he still thought me beautiful. Maybe I should have been grateful, like a junkie getting a fix, but I resented it. Not that I was squeamish about trading on my looks when there was nothing else around to trade on. No, it was just that I would need another fix and another, when all I wanted was out. It was impossible to get younger. My chances of leaving would only be worse next year. It was maddening to be stuck there with Frank on account of a faulty epidermis. I was a coward.

  No doubt I had made a mess of things. There I was, after all my resolve, still in Munich. I kept thinking that if I could find one disinterested man to call me beautiful, maybe I could believe it and muster the nerve to leave. Since looks were everything, my only asset, I really had to be sure. Frank’s word was not enough. All the other assets that I had so carefully cultivated in my youth I had abandoned somewhere, half-formed, in the flood of matrimony, and now at twenty-four I was too old and frightened to go back and reclaim them. My early promises had all been broken; now all my fragile eggs were in this one worn basket.

  There had once been a brief time when I did know I was beautiful. Back in junior high, just after the War, I had had what I considered proof. But even then being beautiful mattered so much that I always suspected I was just passing my prime, like a miser who counts his riches every night and wakes up in the morning thinking himself poor. Even then mirrors told me very little: all I ever saw when I looked in one was me. The me I had examined in my bedroom mirror when I was a stringy, buck-toothed, pigtailed kid yearning to be beautiful was the same me Beverly Katz had cursed in envy in junior high (“You can’t expect to get away with this shit forever! Someday you’ll pay!”), the very me who was foolishly tweezing hairs in a seedy Madrid hotel the night before leaving Spain for Munich. My mirror image always had to be interpreted. And for that I sought my reflection in someone else’s eyes.

  Mid-Depression, when I turned five, my family moved to Baybury Heights, Ohio, one of Cleveland’s coming brick-and-frame neighborhoods sprinkled with vacant lots and apple trees. My arms were just long enough to reach bottom branches and I quickly took to the trees. But even then, a carefree tomboy roaming free, I longed to be pretty. Every girl did.

  “Climbing Sasha,” my father called me as I sped through breakfast so I could race to the woods behind our house. Skinny and agile, I scaled the trunks with ease, spending my first summers in the green branches and on the moss beneath. All the kids could manage the apple trees, but
only I could scramble straight up to the top of the Spy Tree, a lone slender birch, and see on a clear day all the way downtown to Cleveland’s one skyscraper, the Terminal Tower. “Can you see it today?” my brother Ben would call from below. “Is it foggy or clear?” yelled up Susan McCarthy, who lived next door. And they would just have to take my word for it. I took my lunches in the treehouse with the McCarthy kids. After supper, if the boys let me, I played touch football on our quiet street or kick-the-can with everyone in the neighborhood.

  Tomboy or not, I spent my indoor time dressing up in my mother’s clothes and putting on lipstick and nail polish with the other girls. There was a hummingbird in the hollyhocks behind our house, the most delicate, lovely thing I had ever seen; I wanted to be like her. Even though it hurt when my mother brushed my hair each morning before school, it was worth it to have braids on which to tie pretty matching ribbons. I hoped the ribbons wouldn’t get dirty as I climbed Auburn Hill to school past the boys waiting in the vacant lots to pelt us with snow or mud, depending on the season.

  Once I started school I learned I would have to choose between hair ribbons and trees, and that if I chose trees I’d have to fight for them. The trees, like the hills, belonged to the boys.

  Before and after school, the boys would fan out over the school grounds and take over the ball fields, the apple orchard, the skating pond, the “Mountain” for king-of-the-castle, while we stayed on the concrete playground in the shadow of the school building. There we played girls’ games under the teachers’ protective eyes. We could jump rope, throw rubber balls for a-meemy-a-clapsy, practice tricks on the bars nestled in the ell of the building, play jacks or blow soap bubbles—all safe, dependable, and sometimes joyous games which the boys disdained because we did them. Best of all, we could trade our playing cards.