Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  When on the brink of puberty I emerged from behind my braces with a radiant smile, long black eyelashes, and a pink glowing skin, my troubles were only beginning. I suppose I should have expected a hitch: in the fairy tales too there was usually a steep price to pay for a wish fulfilled. The Blue Fairy had blessed my face all right, but suddenly there was my body. I loathed it. It frightened me, it was so unpredictable. It was nothing if not trouble. People were always ready to make fun of it. They made fun of it for not having breasts, and then they made fun of it for having them. It had once supported me in the trees and on the exercise bars, but I could no longer trust it. I hated walking on the street inside it. On the slightest provocation I blushed crimson, and then they made fun of it for that. My very blood betrayed me. What had my body to do with the me inside?

  One day I got out of the bath bleeding down there, and from the nervous way my mother said it was “natural” after I screamed for her from the bathroom, I knew for sure I was a freak.

  “Stay calm. I’m going to explain the whole thing to you,” she said. “It’s really nothing to get upset about, dear.” She smiled and patted my cheek as blood trickled down my rippleless thigh to my unshaven calf.

  I was way past being upset. I was so horrified by my sudden wound that I was detached, as though I were watching a mildly interesting home movie of myself. My leg had known blood before—there were scabs and scrapes along the shinbone and around the ankles, and cinders permanently imbedded under the skin of both knees—but never blood before from there. That it didn’t burn or sting like other wounds only made it more sinister. I was sure my curious finger had injured something. I was probably ruined. It was likely too late even to confess.

  “Sit down on the toilet and wait a minute while I go get something. And don’t worry, darling.” She sounded almost pleased as, leaving the room and closing the door behind her, she chuckled to herself, “Well, well, well.”

  I examined the water still in the tub, lapping gently at the dirty ring. A faint trail of blood led from the tub to the sink where I, a good girl, had stood avoiding the bathmat. Was there blood in the bath water too? Oh, no! There was blood on my fingers and now blood smeared on the towel which other days polished to gleaming my sunburnt skin, cleansed in the chlorine of the public pool. What was taking her so long? Everything I touched was getting soiled.

  Seated on the toilet, I looked down at myself. It was hard to see, not like my brother’s. The mysteries were inside—to keep us, I guessed, from seeing them. To use a mirror, even in this crisis, would have been suspect (suppose she walked in and saw me?), though indeed it might have helped, as my father had taught me it helped to watch the dentist in a mirror drilling out tooth decay. I had always hidden it so carefully, a mirror now would be doubly suspect. I could hear my father urging over the hum of the drill: watch and relax, reeeelax, let go, and the pain had somehow slipped away. But my father couldn’t advise me now. Anyway, if I relaxed now, wouldn’t the blood come streaming out? I tightened up.

  The blood wasn’t flowing, exactly. Every so often, when I thought it had stopped and formed a scab, more would ooze out without registering as sensation at all. Like cells seen through a microscope, the blood moved slowly, surreptitiously. It wasn’t the familiar color, either—it was ominously deeper.

  At last mother came back, carrying equipment. She locked the door behind her and shored me up with a smile. “Now,” she began. “This is called a sanitary belt.” She held it up. “It holds the sanitary napkin.” Like a stewardess demonstrating the oxygen mask, she held them up, the long bandage dangling by its tail from her index finger and thumb. Sterile.

  “Stand up, dear. Now, slip the belt around your waist. The tabs in the front and back. That’s right. There. Now the napkin. It absorbs the flow. I’ll keep them in here now, with the towels, so you’ll know where to find them each month.” (She smiled for the future: “I always tried to be a good mother,” I would someday hear her say.) “I’ll put it on for you this time, but you’ll have to learn to do it yourself. The side with the blue thread goes on the outside, like this. First you fold in the edges, like this, test it to make sure it’s secure, like this, then turn it around to the back and do the other end the same way. Not too tight or it’ll chafe. There. Now turn around. … Good! Now let me explain.”

  My mother’s textbook words droned on and curdled like sour milk. Every month? If it happened once a month for a lifetime, why had I never seen these bandages before? If it happened to everyone, why hadn’t my best friend Jackie, who had large breasts, told me about it? Now I knew I was an anomaly. One of my breasts was larger than the other, like one of my feet. Some of the girls had hair under their arms and between their legs, but not I. Instead of having hair down there I would have this awful bleeding. People would know. The sanitary napkin which hung between my legs was already molding to the shape of my thighs, a parasite sucking my blood. I shuddered. How could I possibly go out of the house wearing it?

  “… and passes through the vagina.”

  In our family we had never called it anything, and now she was calling it a “vagina.” Unutterable word. It was better than “cunt” or “pussy”—boys’ words—but for me they were all unutterable. Twelve years old and I had never called it anything but “down there.” Except for the one time I had furtively looked at it in a hand mirror, I had never seen one. I had caught flashes of my mother’s large breasts, and a rare glimpse of her pubic hair, but that was all. I had giggled over the hygiene book of a friend’s older sister (we too would have hygiene in high school), but there were no pictures in it—only diagrams of inside organs, like liver, uterus, bladder, and tubes, all as invisible as lungs, and as disgusting.

  Finished and self-satisfied, my mother put her arm around me and kissed the tip of my nose. “My sweet Sasha, one night you go to sleep a little girl, and the next day you wake up a young woman. You’ll be a lovely woman, Sasha.” But I knew I was not a woman. I was a child, frightened, unable to comprehend what was happening. Nothing had been explained; everything had at least two meanings. I tried to pass as normal, but inside I knew I was a freak.

  Submerging myself in junior high, I found all my classmates plunging recklessly into the pulsing Baybury swim. They dived and surfaced and turned in unison with the precision of mackerel, as though their medium were the world. How was it, I wondered, that they all seemed to know exactly what they were about, following currents I never felt? They politicked at lunch hour, dipping their ears into one another’s secrets, living on lemon cokes and loyalty, while I, watching from the edges, a starfish clinging to a rock, waited for the current to slow down enough for me to get the feel of it. One week they decorated one Barbara for her “perfect” legs and another week another Barbara, and I, studying those imponderables, couldn’t even understand what they meant. Were my legs good or bad? There was no knowing. I pretended to understand, acquiescing in my classmates’ verdict that Barbara H.’s legs were the best there were, like Susan S.’s sense of humor, and I whispered with the others as they swam by. But to me a leg was a leg, and, unsure of myself, I remained mystified. If I were really pretty, why, I wondered, did boys ridicule me? Why did girls whisper when I walked by?

  Actually, there was plenty for them to whisper about if they only knew. Between my legs I had found an invisible button of flesh, sweet and nameless, which I knew how to caress to a nameless joy. I was pretty sure no one else had one, for there was no joy button in the hygiene book, and there was not even a dirty name for it. Though I listened carefully, I never heard anyone, boy or girl, so much as allude to it, nor was it pictured on the diagram in the Kotex box. Once, my anxiety overcoming my embarrassment, I had tried to ask my friend Jackie about it. But lacking a name or description for it, I couldn’t even present the subject. When Jackie simply looked at me blankly, little beads of shame dampened my forehead, and I shut up. After that, I never dared question anyone. Evidently, only starfish like me had joy buttons. Accepting my differen
ce, I scrambled anxiously to keep it secret as best I could. Suddenly swimming out of my depth, I felt weighted down by more and more shameful secrets until it was difficult just to stay afloat. At night in bed I would swear to caress my joy button only once, and then, breaking my promise, give myself up to it. I expected something terrible to happen, but I couldn’t help it. Trying to control my controlling obsession, I led myself into strange nocturnal rituals and odd compulsions. The more I could prolong my caress before my joy button “went on,” the more often I allowed myself to stroke it. I would count the strokes and try to break my record. I was torn between prolonging the joy and getting it over with before I heard my parents coming upstairs.

  There were other secrets I was powerless to control. In the Majestic Theater where we congregated on Saturday afternoons to watch Frances Gifford in her leopard sarong enact another episode of Jungle Girl, the boys who scrambled to sit beside me sometimes tried to rest their hands on my thigh or, slipping their arms around my shoulders, dangle their fingers down on my breast. If they really liked me, would they handle me so? I knew I shouldn’t let them, but I was afraid to stop them and cause a scene. If I sat quietly and held my breath, maybe the other girls wouldn’t find out. The dilemma was too shameful to face straight on; nothing could make one scandal-proof. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, folded and unfolded my arms, and prayed the hands would go away but leave the boys.

  It was the same at the swimming pool in the summer: I was ashamed to be seen in a bathing suit, but more ashamed to be ashamed. I forced myself into the pool every day to disguise my shame, and blushed to be seen inside my body. And when I could I hunched my shoulders to conceal my breasts or hid under a towel.

  On the way home from the pool, there was no hiding. Walking home with the other girls we would run the gauntlet among gangs of marauding boys from other schools who hooted at us from passing cars, pulled up beside us, or followed along behind making lewd remarks. Frightened, we’d tense up, step fast, and keep our eyes straight ahead, pretending to ignore them until they finally got bored and left us alone. We had no other defense. Sometimes we’d be followed all the way home; sometimes we’d be threatened and cursed. The worst of it was not knowing a tease from the real thing. After a while I decided it was safer to take a bus than walk home from the pool or the movies, even if I had a long wait for the bus by myself. I lived farther out than the other girls and always had some distance to walk alone. Better to be insulted at a bus stop than followed on a lonely suburban road.

  One evening I was waiting for the bus alone, carrying my wet suit rolled up in a towel under my arm, when a station wagon full of boys pulled up beside me. As usual, I pretended not to see them, until someone called my name.

  “What’s the matter, Sasha, stuck up?”

  I looked up. Inside the wagon I saw Al Maxwell, an older boy from my block, and what seemed to be half the football team.

  “Want a ride, Sasha? Come on, we’ll take you home.”

  “No thanks,” I said politely, “I’ll wait for a bus.” I didn’t trust them.

  “What’s the matter, you scared?” said someone. They were all laughing. “Come on, we won’t hurt you.”

  I was flattered and frightened at once, the old dilemma. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t know how to refuse without appearing ridiculous or chicken or hurting their feelings. I wanted to be a good sport.

  I hesitated and looked behind me. There was no bus in sight.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” said Jimmy Brennan, a star, opening the door for me. “Get in.” When he smiled at me, I wavered. “Don’t worry,” he said kindly.

  I swallowed hard and got in.

  Ten minutes later we were driving on a road I’d never seen.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Oh, just for a little ride. Don’t worry.”

  When we were all the way out to Sharon Falls, halfway to Akron, they parked the wagon in the woods and Jimmy Brennan unzipped his fly and took out his thing. I started to cry. They said if I didn’t touch it they’d kick me out of the wagon and make me walk home.

  I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to stay a nice girl. Besides, I was terrified of Jimmy’s thing. Part of me wanted to see it with an evil desire, but I was afraid if I actually touched it I’d throw up. I saw it gleaming white out of the corner of my eye while the boys were busy making jokes, and I could tell it was hideous and enormous. Oh, why me? I hated myself.

  “It won’t bite you.”

  “You better touch it soon, or we’ll make you kiss it.”

  “If you don’t touch Jimmy’s, you’ll have to touch Al’s. His is much bigger.” They all laughed.

  “Touch it.” “Touch it.” “Touch it.” “We won’t tell.”

  I knew there were too many of them not to tell. I was going to have to touch it—there were so many of them and only one of me. I knew that the longer I waited the worse it would be. But even after my will had capitulated, it was a long time before I could bring myself even to look at it.

  It was hairy and repulsive. Quickly I turned my eyes as far from it as I could and jabbed at it with a finger on an outstretched arm. The smooth, slippery skin brushed my hand, slimy as worms. I squeezed my eyes closed until, satisfied, they drove me home.

  Inside and outside I was transformed by puberty. But though the evidence of it was all around me, I couldn’t understand my metamorphosis. The evidence was there in the corridors, on the telephone, at the movies, in Clark’s Restaurant at lunchtime, after sorority meetings on Friday nights. Yet it was all strangely inconclusive. Could it be that the prettier I grew the worse I would be treated? Much likelier, I thought, I wasn’t really pretty.

  People whose names I didn’t know said hello to me in the halls in tones I didn’t understand. People called me on the telephone and hung up when I answered. Football star Iggy Friedman and jitterbug champion Larry Bruder came to my house, ostensibly to study math with me or to practice dancing, but something told me they really came for some other reason that I couldn’t imagine. If I was really pretty I needed proof. Like those who will always think of themselves as fat no matter how many pounds they lose, I continued to think of myself as freaky. To protect myself, I remained aloof, a starfish on a rock.

  There were weekly opinion polls called Slam Books which told in black and white what people thought of each other; yet even they told me almost nothing. Filled between classes in composition books from the five-and-ten, one charm per page, when completed the Slam Books yielded one perfect Composite Girl. As early as the eighth grade my name began to turn up in their pages, and by the ninth grade it appeared regularly. But it was usually on the nose page, or under best complexion. True, my skin concealed me well enough, and I was pert in profile, but what about inside and straight on? My avowed distinctions were purely negative; they did not even photograph well. The excellence of my nose was its insignificance; the virtue of my skin was its odd refusal to erupt. When everyone else’s pimples cleared up, what then? Could my looks outlive the disappearance of their blackheads? Could I base my future on anything so trivial as skin? Unlike bust, charm, sex appeal, personality, poise, sense of humor, and hair, which as they grew in mass grew in value, my acknowledged assets were self-limiting. While the girls with positive charms, even immaterial ones, could look for daily gains, the best I could hope for was relief that no flaws had yet surfaced. There was nothing I could do to help. Baffled, I clung to my rock, filtering data from the passing stream, and withdrew further into myself. If I couldn’t control my body, at least I could control my mind. Self-control, my father said, is the key to the world.

  My father was proof of it. He had lifted himself from a ghetto high school to a position of eminence in Cleveland’s legal establishment by sheer will, or so the family story went. Now I realize that my father was merely filling his destined slot in the professional scheme of things for hard-working sons of frugal and ambitious Jewish immigrants: his older brother had become a doctor, h
is younger brother a dentist, and all his sisters teachers until they turned into wives. My father, the middle son, had of course to be a lawyer. But close up it is hard to distinguish ambition from destiny, and I heard only my family’s version. In high school my father had used his cunning to study shorthand and typing instead of shop, and landed a job as private secretary to one of Cleveland’s industrial tycoons. He played chess with the boss, attended law school at night, and in between, with that single-mindedness he passed to me, he learned at least ten new multisyllable words a day, practiced oratory before the mirror, and studied the classics of literature in the tiny nickel volumes of the Little Leather Library series. When the time came for him to take the bar exam, he passed with the highest score in Ohio. It was predicted he would have a brilliant career.

  My mother, as clever and ambitious as he, heeded the predictions and married him. Already loved by my father at a distance, my mother, the youngest and fairest of a family of lovely sisters on my father’s ghetto block, had no trouble at all—so went the story. In America beautiful clever girls do not long remain schoolteachers.

  They passed their hopes to their children. My mother, wanting happiness for me, gave me braces and dancing lessons; my father, valuing learning and success, gave me his library of Little Leather books. My brother Ben mastered the Baybury hills no-handed on his bike and managed a paper route; and I entered the Little Leather Library. I read and re-read each volume, fleeing from my baffling outer life. Their contents came in such small, sweet packages that I could digest them piecemeal and savor them at length. I never suspected that a book measuring three inches by four inches might be considered suitable only for adults or that in larger bindings those very treasures might have struck me as impossibly difficult. Starting with the fairy tales and the Arabian Nights, I moved easily through Candide, Gulliver, and Rasselas without noticing any difference in genre, and then on to the plays, stories, and essays my father had studied. While my brother played football and read baseball books, and my classmates read beauty books and movie magazines, I went through plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, and Molière; stories of Tolstoy, Kipling, Balzac, William Morris, de Maupassant; meditations of Marcus Aurelius; words of Jesus; addresses of Lincoln; essays of Mill, Thoreau, Shaw, Voltaire, and Emerson; dialogues of Plato; and even selected reflections of Madame de Sévigné. They were so fanciful and cerebral that they made me forget I was a piece of meat, albeit a prime piece according to the specifications of my mounting pile of Seventeen magazines. My father, glowing with pride to see me following behind him, discussed the classics with me as an equal, using long, latinate words (a language I dubbed “lawish”); and my mother, imagining me in a better college, saw me marrying a better man. To me, however, the little books imparted Truth, all dipped out of a single vat of life’s wisdom. My one-time belief in miracles mellowed to a belief in the printed word, and wide-eyed still, I read every romance as a parable for the future, every essay as personal advice. Coupled with looks, knowledge was surely power.