Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  Then I put in a call to Baybury Heights.

  “Mom? Guess what? I’m getting married.” I can just imagine her face! “To Franklin Raybel. A graduate student in History from Indiana. … This coming weekend at City Hall, if we can manage it. … No, darling, of course not. Really, nothing like that. I’m getting married ’cause I want to. … Yes, really-really. … Oh, Mother, you’re so silly. … You’ll meet him and see for yourself.”

  I cover the mouthpiece and lean out of the booth to kiss Frank. What a nice gentle husband I’m getting.

  “Well, Mom, aren’t you going to wish me luck?”

  Dear Sasha,

  Just a note to offer my personal congratulations on the completion of what was obviously your thesis. The incorporation of outside intelligences is what this family needs badly, and my personal feeling is that you have likely done well. Lots of luck, and my best to your husband.

  Affectionately,

  Uncle Bob

  Dear Sasha,

  I knew all that talk about never getting married was just a cover. However crazy you behave sometimes, underneath you’re a sensible girl. And why not? You come from a sensible family. I look forward to welcoming Franklin into our family. It will be nice to have a brother, and maybe someday a nephew.

  Love,

  Ben

  Almost immediately, the habits of matrimony took over. I had used my dime-store wedding ring for the City Hall ceremony, but when it began to tarnish and itch, I gave in and bought a gold ring, the cheapest we could find. We stayed in our respective dorms for about a week, then moved into a rooming house together off Riverside Drive. To avoid confusion, I changed my name on my graduate records to Mrs. Franklin Raybel. Did I only imagine the philosophers treating me with a new respect?

  Except on weekends when we went out for Chinese food or heated Chef Boyardee spaghetti dinners in the communal kitchen (our room came with “kitchen privileges”), I continued to eat in the dorm where, with no refund forthcoming, my meals were paid for. But we studied together evenings, taking a break to walk down Broadway holding hands and returning to sleep in the same bed. No more sneaking around; no more blind dates; no more wasted hours on the telephone; no more lonely Sundays. I brewed us real coffee for breakfast, using the coffee grinder someone had sent us for a wedding present. We drank it in our room with doughnuts from the A&P, and on Sundays we’d spend half the day in bed reading the New York Times together. It was a pleasure to snuggle up at night to another body; it was a pleasure to be married.

  One day, not long after we had moved in together, a large envelope arrived in the mail from my mother. In it were a few late congratulations that had been sent on from Indiana, and two copies of a clipping from the Cleveland Post. The Women’s Page announcement of my marriage. The copy, though embarrassing, was the usual so-and-so, daughter of so-and-so, marries so-and-so, son of so-and-so; the couple will reside in New York City. The shocker was the large reproduction of my high school graduation picture which accompanied the article. The reporter must either have remembered me or have checked back into old Baybury yearbooks; for there under the picture, in boldface type, was the caption: sasha davis, former baybury heights prom queen, weds graduate fellow at columbia.

  I was overcome with shame. Frank had never seen a picture of my other self. Even I hardly recognized her with those shiny cheeks and that eager smile, those long thick lashes and carefully tousled hair. Had she said “cheese”? Was that Joey Ross’s Keystone pin on her sweater?

  She was someone else, not me. The picture was a gross distortion, at once too lovely and too crude. Studio pose, magazine lighting, years past. I tore it into tiny pieces and flushed them down the hall toilet, grateful Alport would not see it, grateful Frank was not home. (“Gee, Sasha,” Frank would say, focusing from the clipping to me, “You mean I’m married to a Queen of a Bunny Hop?”) But when I went back to our room and saw the second copy mocking me from the table, for some reason, instead of tearing it up, I folded it carefully into a square and deposited it with the rest of my past (my scholastic aptitude scores, my list of lovers in a secret code, my childhood poems) in a manila envelope I kept hidden among my sweaters. There was really no decent hiding place in my new life; I would have to rent a post office box for mailing things to myself.

  A little later Frank returned from his class. “Any mail?” he asked.

  “Nothing much,” I said, pouring us each a cup of freshly brewed coffee. “Just some more greeting cards from your relatives.” I wondered if the lie showed. My mother always said she could tell when I was lying. Something I did unconsciously gave it away. Like Pinocchio’s nose suddenly growing.

  “What do you mean, my relatives?”

  “Your Indiana relatives.”

  “Then what’s this big envelope from Cleveland doing here?” he asked.

  On our wedding day I had promised Frank grudgingly that I would not sleep with anyone besides him, though I’d made it clear that the promise was against my principle of free love. Now, hoping to throw him off the track, I exploded with a terrible precedent.

  “What is this, an inquisition? Can’t I even get a letter from my own mother without your thinking I’m having an affair? That envelope is what the cards came in.”

  Frank said nothing. Instead, he punished my outburst with a withering look and a perfectly pronounced French couplet the meaning of which I didn’t understand.

  “What does that mean?” I snapped.

  “Oh, never mind,” he said, satisfied to have made me ask. And with a sigh he picked up his book and withdrew.

  It was our first quarrel. It set a pattern for all that would follow, and of course there would be others.

  When we went to bed that night, Frank said, as calm as an afterthought, “Sasha, you’d better understand right now, if I ever find out you’ve been unfaithful to me, I’ll divorce you on the spot.”

  Though I wanted to be a good wife, from the beginning I found it impossible to subdue my desires. I was in fierce competition with my husband, though Frank, completely absorbed in his own studies, was probably unaware of it. He believed he had married an impulsive girl, even a supergirl, but not a separate, feeling woman. He was years ahead of me at Columbia, and though I read faster and studied better than he, I had too far to go to catch up. He was the darling of his department; I was nothing in mine. Though we had agreed to study like fury till our money ran out and then take turns getting jobs, at bottom we both knew it would be he who would get the degrees and I who would get the jobs.

  After the summer we took a cheap one-and-a-half-room apartment on West 108th Street. Together we built bookshelves of raw boards and stolen bricks, and slept on a Hide-a-Bed we bought at the Salvation Army Store. But once we were settled into our appropriate young-married quarters, Frank withdrew behind his glasses into his studies, and that whole year we never had one genuine conversation. Though Frank was a live-in husband, we were more like roommates than man and wife, and I had never wanted a roommate. Even during supper when we might have talked, Frank turned on the evening news, reserving his words for the young men in his department, with whom on weekends he never tired of discussing department politics.

  I began clipping recipes from the Sunday Times. I cooked Mrs. Fielding’s Texas Chili, Boeuf Bourguignon (I & II), Creole Jambalaya, Coq au Vin—all in quantity, as Frank let his single friends know they were welcome for dinner on weekends. We always had a wide range of homemade whiskey, too, since a friend who worked in a Bronx hospital gave us 200-proof lab alcohol by the gallon. We diluted it by half, flavored it with a shot of name-brand booze, poured it into reclaimed bottles, and defied anyone to tell it from the real thing.

  I enjoyed those Saturday nights. Frank took visible pride in me then, showing me off and openly admiring my cooking. Not one of those tyrannical husbands to criticize his wife before his friends, he called me endearing names in baby talk and sat beside me on the sofa stroking my neck or my knee over coffee. Even after they fell into
shop talk, while I cleared away the dinner dishes, he would send me affectionate glances for everyone to see. Sometimes his aroused affection carried over into bed on Saturday night when, after all the ashtrays were emptied and the paper cups thrown away, after his spectacles were deposited on the night table and my diaphragm retrieved from the drawer, he would roll on top of me to make love and tell me how happy he was to have me for a wife.

  Franklin Raybel’s Favorite Chicken Suprême Tarragon

  Stuff chicken breasts (skinned, boned, and halved) with tarragon, salt, pepper, parsley, lump of butter; secure with toothpicks; dredge with flour. Brown in butter on both sides. Add chopped shallot or a slice of onion, a whole clove garlic, tarragon, white wine, chicken stock, a soaked dried mushroom. Cover. Cook forty-five minutes, turning once. Remove breasts to a hot platter and keep warm. Reduce sauce and add two tablespoons heavy cream; cook to proper consistency. Add bits of butter at the end. Spoon sauce over breasts, dust with parsley. Serve with green salad and rice.

  Cucumbers in Lime Dressing

  Marinate an hour or so: sliced (or diced) cucumber in: juice of one lime, sugar, seasonings, diced (or grated) onion. Chill. Serve cold with curries.

  My first job after the wedding money gave out was as a bookkeeping machine operator in a Wall Street bank at sixty dollars a week. As Frank forbade me to be a waitress, and I dreaded being a salesgirl, there was little else for a twenty-one-year-old nontypist to do. Without typing I was chronically “overqualified.” Without typing I couldn’t even wangle interviews for the jobs listed in the Help Wanted Female section under College Grad, nor could I apply for the non-typing researcher, editor, or “trainee” jobs for which I supposed I was suited, listed under Help Wanted Male.

  My bookkeeping machine (Burroughs F212) was formidable. I named her Trixie. The work was taxing, but I liked the precision of it and, eager to master her, found a certain excitement in striking my balance at the end of each day. Until our debits and credits balanced exactly, until every decimal error had been discovered and rooted out, Mr. Calley, the department supervisor, would not permit his girls to go home. After my last deposit had been entered and the last check deducted, I would extract the subtotals, totals, and grand totals the machine had been storing up all day, push certain magic buttons, let the circuits run, and with suspended breath wait for Trixie to end her calculations and reveal in a small window on her face and printed on the record on her back two numbers which, if I had posted everything correctly all day long, would exactly, digit for digit, match. Even my disappointment when the numbers differed was exhilarating.

  At first I was slow in balancing, never passing a day without error. Sometimes it was seven o’clock before I descended into the West Side IRT subway station with my book in hand, and almost eight before I surfaced again near Columbia. But by attending to Trixie, setting myself records to beat and techniques to master, I gradually improved my performance until I was as good on my Burroughs as anyone. And as though the suspense were not intoxicating enough, the clattering of fifty cumbersome calculators all totaling at once in a single room provided me with a sense of solidarity against disaster I had never before felt in New York City.

  It was broken only by a fifteen-minute morning coffee break, when I made eyes at New York out the window, and a precious solitary hour for lunch. At lunchtime I explored the caverns of Wall Street, thrilled that I, Ohio-born and twenty-one, was living among skyscrapers and traditions. I saw where the Stock Exchange had been scarred in the twenties by anarchist bombs; I ate hamburgers with college educations. I heard actors rehearsing in lofts, saw pushcart markets, tasted Indian curries and baklava, listened to choruses singing Bach in Trinity Church at noon. When the weather was fine, I took a sandwich to Battery Park, on the very tip of Manhattan Island. There, watching the ferries and tugs and cruise ships passing in the harbor, I fancied myself a boy joining one of the crews sailing off to Jamaica or Barbados or even the distant source of all mental and sensual goodies, Europe. When the weather was foul, I sat in the lounge and read my book, still hopeful of one day knowing everything. Only at night when I returned to Frank who, having polished off yet another tome toward his degree, was ready to help me out cooking our dinner in time for the news—only then did I know that neither would happen.

  Not that Frank was to blame. Hardly. I had no doubt he felt almost as bad as I that I was no longer a student. Hadn’t he married me half for my brains? No, I alone was to blame for being too tired to study at night and too distractable to read anything but fiction on the subway in the morning. And when I wanted to go to the movies in the evening or walk in Central Park on a weekend afternoon, Frank was too much the gentleman to allude to my lapsed ambitions. He intended no invidious comparisons as he said, “Look, I’d really rather stay home and work. I’ve got too much reading to do. But why don’t you go on without me? You’ll relax, and I’ll be able to use the time.” I felt guilty even asking him to interrupt his work, and didn’t blame him for wishing me out of the way. My restlessness was not the easiest thing for a scholar to live with.

  So I went off with a neighbor, or a friend from work who lived in the Village and introduced me to pot, or alone. And sometimes, in the huge Grant’s Cafeteria on Broadway, or in the back section of the Thalia Theater, where I sat watching foreign films—sometimes I looked around for Prince Charming, just in case he too happened to be out alone catching a breath of air or taking in a movie.

  “Miss Raybel? Or is it Mrs. Raybel?”

  “Mrs. Raybel.”

  “Mrs. Raybel, it has come to our attention that you are a college graduate,” said the personnel manager, an elderly gentleman dressed by Brooks Brothers.

  What could he want? Mr. Calley, the bookkeeping department supervisor, patting me kindly on the rear, had assured me, sending me down here, that I was not to be fired.

  “In that case, we are going to offer you a promotion. We are prepared to transfer you to the Foreign Department at a starting salary of seventy-five dollars a week,” he beamed.

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “Translating.”

  I swallowed my surprise. French, my only foreign language, had always been my worst subject. “Translating what?” I asked.

  “Letters, documents, letters of credit.”

  I knew I couldn’t manage it, but the raise was substantial. “What languages?” I asked.

  “You’ll translate from all the languages into English. French, Spanish, German, Italian. Not Chinese,” he smiled.

  I nodded. What difference did it make whether I was unable to translate from one language or many? “My German may need a bit of brushing up,” I offered.

  “Oh, don’t worry. You’re a college graduate. You’ll pick it up,” he said. “We have some real foreigners up there to help you out. How’s your typing?”

  Real foreigners. Spanish sailors with bearded lips; Italians; German philosopher-refugees. “Pretty good,” I lied, praying to be spared the humiliation of a typing test.

  “Fine. You can start on Monday, then. Report to me first thing Monday morning, and I’ll take you up to Foreign and introduce you around.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Good day.”

  We shook hands, and I returned to Bookkeeping to say goodbye to the women in the department and try one last time for perfect on Trixie.

  At a party over the weekend I became acutely sensitive to the ubiquitous married we:

  “We love Indian music.”

  “We were shocked to hear about Artie.”

  “We thought from the review we would love the new production of Whim, but we walked out at intermission, we found it so bad.”

  When Frank used it about me, I shouted before everyone, “Speak for yourself!”

  It puzzled him, because the statement in which the offending word occurred was unobjectionable; in fact, true. But I felt misrepresented by it anyway. Trapped, suffocating in that abysmal we.

  I lasted less than a month in the
Foreign Department. A flirtation begun with the man at the next desk (a Wharton graduate on the Executive Training Squad whose assistant I was) ended abruptly when he was transferred to another branch. Once he was gone, I was ashamed of ever having taken up with him, even for a lunchtime diversion.

  Nothing was working out. Frank had bought me a five-language commercial dictionary at the University Bookstore, and I studied German by listening to the Threepenny Opera sung in the original German. The singer, Lotte Lenya, the composer’s extraordinary wife, became my new inspiration. I bought all her records. Most of her songs were about a prostitute, Jenny, who refused to be trampled on. “Wenn einer tritt, dann bin ich es”—“if somebody’s to do the stepping, it’ll be me.” After work and the dinner dishes, I would sit listening to her songs, following the record jacket translation of the lyrics, memorizing Lenya’s strange inflections. Sometimes I was moved to tears singing along with her, sometimes to fury. Even Frank peered suspiciously over his glasses when Lenya and I sang the one in which Jenny gets to decide who in the city shall be spared and who shall be killed (a fantasy twice removed, and doubly safe). Kill them all, says Jenny—alle! And when the heads roll, she says Hoppla!

  But it was the wrong German for the bank, and even the dictionary was of little use. The job turned out to be a typing job after all, and they were bound to discover I couldn’t type. I wondered if they would fire me before I quit, or if I would just stop going in to work one day. The prospect of being fired was depressing, but there was unemployment to collect if I stuck it out. I didn’t care; it was time to start exploring another section of the city anyway.

  When Frank learned that he was to receive the coveted Haversham Ellis History Fellowship for the following year, he broke precedent and called me at the office.