A cunning freak, I learned to keep my knowledge and ambitions to myself. In school, I tried to pass as smart instead of studious. I refused to learn typing and shorthand out of the same wisdom that had led my father to study them. I wanted to be admired, not a secretary. I realized that for a girl “business skills” were sure to lock the very doors they had opened for my father. Instead, I cultivated other, more useful skills. Without neglecting to brush my hair assiduously according to the instructions in Seventeen, I used my electives on math and commercial law, and mastered forging my father’s signature for report cards and excuses. I started a notebook, with sections for words to learn, quotations to contemplate, reforms to accomplish. Ten resolutions each New Year’s Eve. In everything I set myself records to beat, as I did at night with my joy button. What I couldn’t master, like spelling, I disdained, claiming I could always use a dictionary. I wouldn’t compete unless I could win. Borrowing from Marcus Aurelius a philosophy of sour grapes, I hedged all my bets: I wanted to be the smartest since I couldn’t be sure I was the prettiest; I wanted to be the prettiest since I couldn’t be sure I was the smartest. With a vanity refined to perversion, I cut school to hide that I cared to be smart, telling no one about my books, and I affected sloppiness to hide how much I wanted to be beautiful, locking away my beauty charts in my desk drawer. I began to look for trouble so it wouldn’t take me by surprise. If I asked for it, I thought, maybe I could control it.
Unlike other truants who cut school to shoplift, go to the movies or a burlesque show, miss a test, or play pool, I had another purpose. I went downtown where no one knew me and, standing at a bus stop on some busy corner, I tried to stare down strange men on buses that passed by, testing my audacity. I would stare at someone till I caught his eye, then force myself to continue no matter what he did, until I stared him down and made him look away. I wanted to beat the boys at their own vile game. I would rather hate them than fear them; best of all I would make them fear me. I wanted to pick my mark, hold his eye, control his mind, bend his will to mine. I didn’t dare try it in Baybury. Instead, I cut school and went downtown to play my Bus Stop Game. It was a dangerous game, for I could never tell when a man would call my bluff by leering back and force my eyes into humiliating retreat. But I had to do it: it was part of my nameless joy-life. If I succeeded at the Bus Stop Game by outstaring my mark, I rewarded myself with my button’s joy; but if I failed by looking away first, I forbade myself to touch it. My father’s daughter, I was very strict.
Eventually I got so good at the game that I was able to board the buses and try it on passengers from whom I couldn’t escape. I selected the most frightening men to root out my fear. I wanted to make my eyes into such powerful beams that I could bend strangers and enemies to my will. I studied audacity, determined that if I couldn’t be sure I had the power that comes with beauty, I would have another kind of power.
But it all turned out to be unnecessary. One balmy Friday night in early October—a Round Table night—I suddenly got the proof I had lacked that I was indeed beautiful.
The seventeen girls of Sigma Lambda Tau (the best sorority? the second-best?) all sat cross-legged in a circle on the plush cranberry carpet of Maggie West’s living room. The previous Friday and the following were for business; but this one was for Round Table only: pure confrontation. Around the circle clockwise the word would pass, exploding in scandal, wrath, or outrage. One at a time the month’s transgressions and oversights would be named, complaints registered, warnings given, accusers faced.
In our pleated skirts and cashmere sweaters over white dickies, we sat fiddling with our charm bracelets and straightening our sox, waiting for the President to start. Some of us gave last-minute orders to the pledges, writing merits and demerits in their conduct books. Others of us checked our new breasts in their Carousel bras like tips of sausages in their casings, looking from one to the other: were the straps adjusted evenly?
Beverly Katz, President, whispered something surreptitiously in someone’s ear, then, smoothing down the pleats of her baby-blue skirt, called the meeting to order. How was it, I wondered, that her pimples did not affect her eminence? Neither her big bosom (best bust) nor her sly black eyes that so perfectly expressed disdain explained her mysterious authority. She ruled by mean glances, not good looks. I studied her, wondering why everyone laughed when she cracked those jokes I never got; why even I laughed.
“Okay, let’s get going. You wanna start, Sally?” said Beverly Katz, turning to the girl at her side. And off went Sally, around the circle, loosing her rhetoric on us, passing compliments and hurling insults. When she finally came to me, she frowned and hesitated a moment; then, changing her mind as I held my breath, passed on to the next sister. I was still cringing when she began on my neighbor in a voice that, like everyone’s, emulated Beverly’s. “I’m not saying who told me,” she said, “but I happen to know …”
I tuned out, relieved. Why had she even hesitated over me? How could I have offended her? From my bayside perch I tried only to please, giving offense to no one. I went to their meetings, observed their taboos, admired their figures, studied their styles, always keeping my mouth carefully shut. My joy-life was secret. I wanted only to belong.
Some of the girls—perhaps the guilty ones—hung on Sally’s words. Others scanned their notes, rehearsing for their own turns to talk, soon to come up. Between turns Beverly Katz popped bubbles or cracked jokes, though, as everyone knew, she had little reason to be jovial. It was already three weeks since she had received her S.L.T. pin back from Iggy Friedman, tackle, with whom she was certainly still in love and had probably already gone too far. And without Iggy, as everyone knew, she would never be re-elected President.
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 no
t 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.
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen Page 6
