Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  When the recess bell rang, while the boys raced past us to the fields, we’d take out our card collections, separating the packs, slipping the rubber bands that divided them onto our wrists, fan out our cards for each other to see, and begin trading: the mate of a pair of kittens for a horse or Pinky; a pair of parrots for a drummer and a ship. Our trading cards were nothing like the boys’ silly baseball cards, commercially manufactured for collecting and sold with bubble gum. Our girls’ collections were made up of real adult playing cards, one of a kind salvaged from broken packs, which we valued for the charm of the pictures on their backs. Though my collection, being new, was one of the least impressive in the school, I treasured it all the same. It had few sets of four, hardly an unusual pair (though I had a better than ordinary collection of Shirley Temples), but there was at least one card in every category, and like life itself the collection had an open future. No card was so odd as to lack a fixed and perfect place in my endlessly adaptable collection. I loved them all.

  And like my cards, I too was adaptable. Though in my summers and on my street I had wandered freely, taking to the woods and the very tips of the trees, in my first weeks of first grade I learned to stay uncomplainingly in my place on the steps or in the shadow of the school. I learned masculine and feminine.

  “Go on to the Mountain, girls, it’s a gorgeous day,” Mrs. Hess would urge as we stood on the steps at recess trading cards. Or, “Why don’t you play some freeze tag? You need the exercise.” But we knew better. We knew that going near the ball fields or behind the backstop or near the basket hoop or in among the fruit trees or around the Mountain or near the skating pond were extremely dangerous expeditions, even if we went in a pack—for that was all boys’ territory, acknowledged by everyone. Despite Mrs. Hess’s prods and assurances, we knew that at any moment out there a pair or trio or more of boys might grow bored with their own game and descend on us with their bag of tricks. If a girl was spotted on their territory the boys felt perfectly free to: give her a pink belly, or lock her in the shed, or not let her down from a tree, or tie her to the flagpole, or lash at her legs with reeds, or chase her to the ravine, or look up her dress, or trip her, or spit mouthfuls of water in her face, or throw mud at her, or “accidentally” knock her down, or hold a hand over her nose and mouth, or pull her hair, or pummel her with snowballs, or “wash her face” in snow, or mess her books, or tear her clothes, or scatter her trading cards, or shout obscene words at her, or throw stones at her, or splash mud on her dress, or invite her to play on false pretenses, or just hit her or spit on her or twist her arm behind her back, or not let her drink at the water fountain.

  And it was not only the bullies like Mel Weeks and Bobby Barr who did such things to us. All the boys did them sooner or later, and some boy did something to some girl every day. They did it for fun. They did it to prove themselves. They did it because they hated us. If sometimes a boy got it too, it was only from another boy, never from a girl; the terror went only one way. And every boy longed, if only secretly, to be as powerful as the feared and respected bullies.

  We knew better than to tell Mrs. Hess. The one time I ran crying to her with my dress ripped after Bobby Barr had pulled me out of an apple tree, she hugged and comforted me with a double message: “I know, dear, those are rough boys. Why don’t you play with the girls?” There was only one thing for a girl to do: stay in the shadow. Prudently I gave up football, trees, and walking to school unaccompanied for acceptable “girls’ things,” until, before I was ten, like everyone else I unquestioningly accepted the boys’ hatred of us as “normal.” Just as the Cortney kids wouldn’t play with me because I was a Jew, the boys wouldn’t play with me because I was a girl. That was the way things were. Like our trading cards, we were valued only in our place among our kind. In fact, from the moment we got kicked out of the trees and sent into the walk-in doll house back in kindergarten, our movements and efforts had been so steadily circumscribed, our permissible yearnings so confined, that the only imprint left for us to make was on ourselves. By the third grade, with every other girl in Baybury Heights, I came to realize that there was only one thing worth bothering about: becoming beautiful.

  With the U.S. plunge into World War II the gap between the girls and the boys grew to a chasm. While they were learning to spot enemy planes, launching the U.S. fleet on the playground, and deploying platoons over the skating pond, we, bored breathless by the war, pored over movie magazines, made scrapbooks, joined fan clubs, and planned, should the war last long enough, to become U.S.O. hostesses. Instead of collecting cards (somehow fewer and fewer people had time to play cards, and the cards themselves, like other luxuries, were beginning to disappear from circulation) we collected the foil inner wrappers of chewing gum, chocolate bars, and cigarette packs, which themselves all became scarcer and scarcer until they too, like the Cheshire Cat, finally disappeared entirely. We lived instead on the sweets of patriotism, quietly accepting the consolation of the decade: “That’s tough.”

  “What’s tough?”

  “Life.”

  “What’s life?”

  “A magazine.”

  “Where do you get it?”

  “At the drugstore.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “Ten cents.”

  “I only have five cents.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “What’s tough? …”

  My father, an energetic attorney, sat on the Draft Board, making our family eligible for a prestigious B-card, which entitled us to an extra monthly ration of gasoline, and weekly donned his Air Raid Warden’s helmet. My glamorous mother rolled her own cigarettes using begged tobacco, served meat substitutes without complaining, and set up a cozy blackout shelter in the basement of our house, decked out with all the comforts of the surface. Once she gave a “blackout party.” On the radio, newscasts were as numerous and tiresome as commercials; even my beloved Hit Parade was constantly interrupted with important bulletins and flash announcements of bombings and landings. At school we competed by grade and sex to collect, sort, stack, and reclaim old newspapers, magazines, flattened tin cans, toothpaste tubes, foil balls, rubber tires, rags, old clothes (for the Russians), canned goods, and scrap metal. (The girls seldom won.) Anti-Semitism became temporarily taboo. Life changed in a thousand little ways. But however distracting the regimen of war, the overriding change in my life was the addition to my face of unsightly orthodontal braces in the late spring of 1942, coincident with the Battle of Midway.

  Until I donned my dental armor it had always been my mother’s comforting word against everyone else’s that I was pretty. Though I sat before my three-way mirror by the hour studying myself, I couldn’t figure out whether to believe my doting mother or the others. I would scrutinize my features, one at a time, then all together, filling in the answers at the end of our common bible, The Questions Girls Ask, but I always wound up more confused than when I started.

  Does your hair swing loose? Do you tell your date what time you must be home when he picks you up? Do you brush the food particles out of your teeth after every meal? Do you avoid heavy make-up? Do you stand up straight? Do you see to it that your knees are covered when you sit down? Are your cheeks naturally pink? Do you consume enough roughage? Are your ears clean? Do you wear only simple jewelry? Do you protect against body odor? Do you powder your feet? Do you trim your cuticle? Are you a good listener?

  It seemed as impossible for me to know how I looked as it was important. Some people said I looked exactly like my mother, the most beautiful woman in the world; others said I resembled my father who, though very wise, was not particularly comely.

  But once the grotesque braces were on, all my doubts disappeared. It became obvious that my mother’s word, which she didn’t alter to accommodate my new appearance, was pure prejudice. While to her, busily imagining the future, the advent of my braces only made the eventual triumph of my beauty more certain—indeed, it was for the sake of my looks that t
hey had been mounted at all—to me they discredited my mother’s optimism.

  Sometimes at night, after a particularly harrowing day at school, after receiving some cutting insult or subtle slight, I would cry into my pillow over my plainness. My mother took my insults personally when I told her about them. “What do they know?” she would say, comforting me. “Why, you’re the prettiest girl in your class.” And when I protested between sobs that no, I was awkward, skinny, and unloved, she would take me in her arms and promise me that someday when my braces were removed they would all envy me and be sorry. “You’ll see,” she would say, stroking my lusterless hair, her eye on some future image of me or some past one of herself. “Just you wait.”

  I longed to believe her but didn’t dare. Before bed each night I would walk to the gable window in my room that seemed to form a perfect shrine and on the first star I saw wish with a passion that lifted me onto my tiptoes to be made beautiful. I performed the rite just so, as though I were being watched. I thought if I wished earnestly enough my life would change and everything I wanted would come true. My grandmothers, teachers, uncles and aunts, and especially my father, were always encouraging me with their constant homilies: if at first you don’t succeed try try again; hard work moves mountains; God helps those who help themselves. Nor was there any lack of precedent: from the seminal Ugly Duckling, a tale which never failed to move me to tears, to Cinderella and Snow White and Pinocchio, there were deep lessons to learn. All those step-daughters and miller’s daughters and orphan girls who wound up where I wanted to go likely started out having it even worse than I. I wallowed in fable, searching for guidance. White-bearded Aesop stretched his long bony finger across the centuries to instruct me in prudence, while from Walt Disney’s Hollywood studio I learned how to hope. “Someday my prince will come” echoed in my ears even as it stuck in my throat. From my first glimpse of the evening star until the ritual wish was over I would not utter a syllable; but pressing my hands tightly together like a Catholic at prayer to dramatize my earnestness, I would summon a certain Blue Fairy, blond-haired and blue-eyed and dressed in a slinky blue satin gown, to materialize. “Star bright, star light, first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.” I believed she would one day grow before my eyes from the dot size of the star to life size, and landing on my window sill reach out with her sparkling wand, which would glint off my braces and illuminate my darkened room, and touch me lightly, granting my wish. I had actually seen her only once, in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, but I believed in my power to summon her. If it wasn’t ludicrous for my simpering brother Ben to see himself a general, it couldn’t be ludicrous for me to wish for a minor miracle of my own. When I had finished wishing, I would stand in my gable until I could spot five other stars (on a clear night ten), then climb solemnly into bed.

  If during those years I wore braces there was ever any sign that I might turn out lovely, no one except my mother noticed it. Certainly not I. Each morning I examined myself anew in the mirror for the fruits of my wishes; each morning I saw only the glum reality of my flaws. Faced with my reflection, I shuddered and looked inward. Those steel bands that encircled my teeth like fetters and spanned my mouth like the Cuyahoga Bridge were far more remarkable, more dazzling, than any other aspect of my countenance; exhibiting obscenely the decaying remains of the previous day’s meal, no matter how thoroughly I had brushed my teeth the night before, they completely monopolized my reflection. The pain they produced in my mouth was nothing to the pain they caused in my heart.

  At night I scanned the sky for stars; by day I studied them in the world. Hurrying home from school, I would pore over the movie magazines, cutting out the photos of the stars I loved and pasting them lovingly in my scrapbooks. Like the boys with their total recall of batting averages and lineups, I knew by heart the films, studios, ages, husbands, and measurements of every star I loved. I had my favorite studio, my favorite actress, my favorite singer, my favorite actor; and my preferences, like those for trading cards in years past, were strong and inexplicable.

  With my classmates I would play guessing games about the stars until dinnertime.

  “I’m thinking of a certain movie star whose last initial is B.”

  “Is it a woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she at Warner Brothers?”

  “No.”

  “Is she famous for her legs?”

  “No.”

  “Is her first initial J?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it Joan Blondell?”

  “No.”

  “Is it Joan Bennett?”

  “No.”

  “Is it Janet Blair?”

  “Yes!”

  On weekends, standing in the tub shampooing my hair, in secret I would pile my frothy curls high on my head before the mirror in the style of Joan Fontaine or Alice Faye for long magical moments while the bath water grew cold around my shins. Then rinsing out the soap at last and rendering my hair limp again for another week, I would return as my poor self to the tepid tub. There was no getting away from me for very long.

  I placed all my faith in the miracle. I wished nightly on my star and daily on dandelion puffs to be beautiful. I wished on fallen eyelashes, on milkweed, on meteors, on birthday candles, on pediddles, on wishbones, on air. Seeking some sign of the coming miracle I told my fortune with cards and drew prophecies from tea leaves. “Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief”: only a beauty could land one of the desirables. I examined my palm, my horoscope. I avoided stepping on cracks. I depetaled daisies. I knocked on wood, set the knives and forks on the table exactly so, whispered magical syllables and incantations. I ate gelatin to make my nails hard and munched carrots to make my hair curl. I crossed my fingers, bit my tongue, held my breath, and wished steadfastly for the single thing in the world that mattered.

  Then suddenly, in August 1945, as the boys of Baybury Heights reeled in ecstasy over the impact of the A-bomb and the girls of my class assembled their wardrobes for the coming encounter with junior high—on the very eve of my entering a new world—the Blue Fairy, that lovely lady, came through. My braces came off, and the world was mine.

  My problem was, when I looked in Frau Werner’s mirror, I couldn’t be sure what was the matter. The symptoms of my malady were elusive. Nothing so dramatic as a pimple stared back at me—only a much less promising reflection than I was used to: wearier, older. Even the fuzz on my lip was visible only sporadically, depending on my mood and the light.

  It had all started in Spain—I think. I had gone there to fulfill myself as a woman and had come away wondering if I was turning into a man. My body, after only a few doses of hormones, was playing tricks on me as it had at puberty, and I could do nothing but sit by and watch. Growing a mustache at twenty-four was serious; I was unequipped for a man’s life. Would I need electrolysis? Were my barely adequate breasts diminishing? Should I get a padded bra? If a few artificial hormone pills could transform me like this, imagine what a pregnancy would do! I would never, never have a baby. It was unjust that the slightest alteration of my chemistry might ruin me for life. My twenty-fifth birthday was rapidly approaching; I ought to have had five years more to prepare for old age. But at the rate I was deteriorating, I might not have five months.

  If only my “hormonal imbalance” were nothing but a severe attack of insecurity. But no, I had had tangible symptoms in Spain, aside from my looks. Something had happened. I had missed my period, and felt pain when I urinated, and experienced incontinence. Wetting my pants could not, at my age, be attributed to insecurity.

  “You’ve got to find me a doctor, Manolo. I’ve got to have a pregnancy test.”

  “Yes, yes. Next week we go to Madrid.”

  “I can’t wait for Madrid. There must be a doctor in one of these towns! People have babies everywhere!”

  Our life was so slovenly that the simplest task was impossible to accomplish. Always, next week
in Madrid. No program, no discipline, no sightseeing since I had been traveling around with the little Teatro Clásico Español. Three weeks of nothing but eating, drinking, fucking, Flamenco, and getting high, stealing an occasional extra hour of sleep while Manolo was rehearsing or on stage. No bath, no mail. If I wrote letters, no stamps. All my planning for nothing. I was going out of my mind with indecision and restlessness, thinking always, I must leave tomorrow, but always unable to pack today. It was a bad life for me.

  When I’d left Munich to test my independence and soak up Spain, I had thought nothing bad could happen to me there. I had crammed Spanish history and Spanish art, read travel books and Frank’s Don Quixote, preparing to make of the trip an Experience—and an opportunity. If I could somehow manage on my own, I thought, then I would leave Frank; but if I found after a month that I really couldn’t manage, I would resign myself to staying wifely home for good. A simple, economical plan: the worst that could happen was I would enjoy a month in the south and be back where I started, no different than before.

  It hadn’t turned out that way. I had not been able to manage on my own—couldn’t even mail a letter or visit the Prado. But if I could feel for a man what I felt for the stranger Manolo, then how could I possibly return to my dreary husband? Compromise was one thing, hypocrisy another. I couldn’t do it: couldn’t stay in Spain, couldn’t return to Frank, couldn’t survive alone. That left me nothing. Nada.

  Manolo was impossible. He sapped my will and made me ill besides. He was in the midst of a life I could have no part of, except as a spectator. When my symptoms did not improve on their own, I started nagging him to find me a doctor. His intentions were lofty, but his memory was like a child’s. As we never stayed more than two nights in any town, we were always ready to leave before Manolo decided to act. It was not until I had wet four different beds in four different villages that, pulling into the middle-sized city of Valladolid, Manolo agreed to go in search of a doctor.