When I got home to my room later that evening, I walked in the door just as my multicolored Conairphone was ringing. Finally I had achieved my lifelong dream, to have a phone in my room and to have my own line. My teal-and-pink model was exactly the mechanism I needed to celebrate my tiny victory of independence.
“Hello?” I said, out of breath, hoping it was Jean Claude.
“Happy birthday, Maaaargot!” said my mother. “Do you have someone to celebrate it with? Don’t stay in that spooky cave of a room alone all night. You’re nineteen now. Can you believe it? You know, nineteen’s the age I met your father. No pressure!”
“Actually, Mom, I am not spending it alone.”
“Good, well, if it’s a date, no lesbian shoes. No man likes a girl in combat boots. No man. And eat a piece of meat if he offers it to you, don’t be rude like I know you will be at this year’s Thanksgiving. I’m done making special meals for you, Margot. You can eat the side dishes or cave in and eat the turkey. Would it really be that big a deal for you to eat a piece of turkey? What would happen? Really, Margot. I’m sure you would survive. You used to love the dark meat. Your father would never say this, but it hurts him every year when you refuse to eat the turkey after he’s spent so much time carving it. Do you want to hurt your father again, Margot? Did you find a ride home yet?”
“Actually, Mom, I have to get ready, but I’ll see you very soon for Thanksgiving. I’ll consider the dark meat. Okay? And I’ll find a ride. I have to go, love you.”
I hung up the Conairphone and began setting the mood for Jean Claude’s visit. I lit all my lavender candles, put on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and plugged in my blue Christmas lights. I swapped my leotard and tights out for some jeans and a ’70s men’s button-down shirt so I would look my hottest, unlocked my door, and experimented with various “sexy/mature/French girl” poses I could be in when I called for Jean Claude to “come in.”
Nine came and went, then ten . . . Maybe he was stuck in a place with no clocks and didn’t realize how late it was. Or perhaps he liked me so much he was just trying not to seem too desperate. But when ten-thirty came I started to believe he was blowing me off. Even though he was probably swept away in the depths of an elaborate oil painting he was working on, it was still rude. I waited for almost all my candles to burn out and for Joni Mitchell to sing her entire album, including an extra play of “Carey” in honor of what I was supposed to be named, before finally giving up. I blew out the last of the candles, and they bellowed black smoke. With less than two hours left to my birthday, blowing out lavender candles alone on the thirteenth floor was not the traditional make-a-wish moment I had hoped for. I should have swiped a piece of cake from the dining hall and allowed those theater dorks to sing Happy Birthday to me in perfect harmony.
Just then, I heard a faint knock on the door. I ran to my bed, laid down on my side, making sure my long blonde hair was tousled all to one side and called out, very casually, “Come in!”
Jean Claude entered and seemed oblivious to the remnants of the mood I had so carefully set and dismantled. The smell of lavender was now replaced by the smell of sulphur.
“Hi! Happy birthday! Want to go for a walk?”
A walk? What kind of a birthday seduction is that? Whatever, it was still my birthday, and a walk was better than being here by myself. I got up and grabbed my combat boots, then remembered my mother’s advice and reached for a sexier shoe choice. I put on my purple Converse All-Stars and we headed out the door.
Outside the dorm, we walked and talked about his latest art project and my extracurricular late-night choreography until it started to rain. It came down fast, and we hadn’t brought umbrellas, so Jean Claude pulled me under a blue campus safety light to keep me dry. I remembered from orientation that if you were being attacked you were supposed to blow your rape whistle, fight off your assailant, run under a blue light, and pick up the phone. Not exactly a sexy spot. But I couldn’t help but feel that standing under the rape light with Jean Claude was incredibly romantic, which made me feel guilty, like the time I first discovered I was mildly attracted to Lee Harvey Oswald. The blue light in the rain made me feel like I was Molly Ringwald at the end of a John Hughes movie, and when Jean Claude kissed me under its glow, I tried to stay focused on the kiss instead of thinking about how, unlike other women who had stood beneath this light before, I didn’t want this moment to end. Eventually it did end, though, and Jean Claude went back to his room for the night, claiming he still had a lot of work to do. As disappointed as I was to be falling asleep alone, replaying the blue-light kiss over and over in my head was a pretty superb image to fall asleep to. Overall, it was a good birthday.
November came, and I was really frustrated to leave Ithaca, Adriana, Jean Claude, and my dance classes to go back to Jersey for Thanksgiving. At college I was regal and graceful, but at home I would still be the only tall half-Jewish person to ever warm a bench at a church volleyball game. Also, I had let my mother down by not finding rides home and back to school for Thanksgiving break, despite her incessant reminders. I had been too busy working on that Pirates of Penzance set to think about finding a ride. And also, I didn’t know that many people yet. In the end I boarded a crowded, smelly Short Line Bus filled with strangers from my college and New Jersey–native Cornell students. The trip dragged on and on despite the ample supply of Beat poetry books I’d packed to pass the time.
“No complaining. You’re the one who just had to go to school five hours away, despite your scholarship to Rutgers,” my mother said when she picked me up at the station inconveniently located over an hour away from our house.
Back home, my old bedroom seemed incredibly spacious compared to my thirteenth-floor sanctuary. My former domain was about the size of a double-occupancy room at school. I had never noticed the extra floor space before. The clothes left in my near-empty closet seemed so out of style to me now, and not in a cool vintage way, but in a wearing-a-banana-clip-in-1991 kind of way. I sat there taking it all in before heading out for my big homecoming plans.
Adam and I hadn’t spoken since I’d blown him off with my puffed-up artsy proclamation, but I was hoping that enough time had passed and that Adam would want to be friends. I didn’t really know how that kind of stuff worked but I had admired Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine’s hilarious postcoital friendship and figured Adam and I would ease right into witty banter and private jokes and catchphrases like their classic “Hel-looooo.” Besides, I had needed something fun to look forward to at home to take my mind off my mother’s imminent force-feeding of dark meat, so I’d organized a group of high school friends to hang out with the night I got home, and included Adam. That way there would be other people there in case it got awkward, and he wouldn’t have to talk to me unless he wanted to. For all I knew, he was over it, but he might not be. Maybe I’d given him a lifetime aversion to soy meat as it now would forever remind him of getting redumped.
Truthfully, though, I really didn’t know what to expect. And it’s not like there was a big plan for how to spend the evening, which didn’t help. We gathered at my house, stood around a little, and decided we should drive about town and see where the night took us. We all piled into Adam’s car, the mood loosened, and everyone began rattling off about their awesome new lives away at school.
“Have you guys ever tried Jägermeister?” asked Derek, excited beyond belief to share his love for the black licorice–flavored shot. Everyone mumbled in agreement at Jäger’s awesomeness. I did not agree, as I had already had an overdose of black licorice every Christmas morning when I opened my stocking to discover a large pack of the British candy Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts, given to me by “Santa.”
“All environmental studies majors are required to spend a week tracking an animal of their choice. Everyone’s doing deer but I’m gonna try and do rabbits to shake things up,” said Eli, really excited to be in his element.
I couldn’t wait to tell all my former classmates back home about my new life
and how I was going to be a dancer.
“My teacher, a former prima ballerina, thinks I have star potential,” I said. I chatted on about ballet, not noticing no one was listening, until Derek asked the far more important question, “Guys, how are we getting beer tonight?”
I didn’t care. I was a long-stemmed beauty, and finally, being tall made sense to me. But as we drove aimlessly around the hometown we didn’t really live in anymore but hadn’t quite left, the carefree feeling of those last few months of high school was missing. Everyone was now too cool to engage in a buttercream fight or late-night Fudge Factory dance party. Plus, as we chatted about beer pong, keg-party hookups, and roommate drama, I thought I sensed tension between Adam and me. He didn’t say much, so it was hard to tell what he was thinking. And I was banished to the backseat, a major step down from the permanent shotgun I used to enjoy in his Toyota Corolla. As everyone suggested different places we could go to spice up the night, Adam barely acknowledged my presence.
With no real plans for the evening, we decided to do the nerdiest thing possible and stop by the high school homecoming dance. I didn’t really want to go to a high school dance (actually I didn’t want to go to a high school dance during high school either, for that matter). The last high school dance I had gone to was prom, and a teacher almost got beat up over my fashion choices, and I’d long ago figured school dances just weren’t for me. Besides, dancers didn’t go to dances. We lived a dancer’s lifestyle every day; why did we need to go to an organized function? I was sure that real singers never went to karaoke for the exact same reason. I didn’t want to make the situation tenser by being disagreeable, though, so I just sat in the back left seat and waited while everyone argued as to whether or not this would be cool or totally lame. In order to move things along, I opened the door, hoping everyone would follow suit and get out. And just as I had one foot in and one foot out of the car, Adam made a rash decision that this dance was “gonna suck” and attempted to drive off, running over my left foot in the process. I screamed, and Adam reacted by stopping the car directly on my foot, which was now at an excruciating angle.
As that ton of car sat on top of my left foot, I couldn’t help but think, I don’t think this guy wants to remain friends.
I screamed in pain, and the passengers in the overfilled Corolla yelled at Adam to “get the fuck off her foot.” I hoped this was all a dream. For years, my mother had told me my feet were too small for a girl my height and that was why I fell down so much.
“You tip over on those little hooves. They just aren’t big enough to hold your frame. Did you bind them?”
I had always loved that one part of me was below-average size (aside from my boobs and my pinhead), but it appeared that they weren’t small enough to avoid the treads of Adam’s Corolla. As Adam finally moved the car off my foot, after what felt like an hour but was probably about twenty seconds, I looked down at my once-dainty body part and knew it was about to swell to the size of a ham hock.
I cried in pain as a carload of late teens panicked and yelled at each other, making everything worse. Adam was speechless. He had just damaged the most essential body part of an aspiring dancer. He had accidentally screwed with what enabled me to do the thing I had dumped him for.
Despite my screams for him to take me to the hospital, Adam thought it would be a better choice to drive me to our friend Samantha’s house because her mom was a nurse. As if in her house she had an X-ray machine and Vicodin. He screeched into her driveway, made hasty and incomprehensible explanations to Samantha’s mom, and sped away with the others, wiping off his proverbial prints in the process.
While Samantha’s mom examined my foot, I felt obligated to explain the entire situation with a little more clarity. I told her that he had run over my foot but also that we had dated a few months at the end of high school and that maybe Adam would have been a little more sympathetic if I hadn’t once used the phrase “I make art with my body now,” and I suggested that while this was certainly not an act done on purpose, it was an excellent fuck-you. Samantha’s mom seemed to care less about the failed high school romance and more about my foot, which would now fit snugly into a clown shoe.
Eventually Samantha’s mom did the sane thing and drove me to the emergency room. Somewhere along the way my father was called. The doctor told us my foot was sprained very badly, my tissue was all swollen, and there might be permanent bone damage. She also said I would have to sit out of dance class for a while, and when I got the cast off I could do moderate dancing but “absolutely no relevé.”
No relevé? How could I dance without ever rising up on my feet? How could I be a “long-stemmed beauty” if I only had one working foot?
A few hours later, my dad pushed me out the door of the hospital in a wheelchair, angrily clenching his teeth and muttering something about auto insurance. I cried silently, worrying that Adam’s accident had ruined my chances of being a dancer, and on top of that caused my father’s insurance premiums to go up.
If there was a shred of doubt about how Adam now felt about me, he made it even clearer the next day, which he spent not calling to see if I was okay. I ate my Thanksgiving vegetable side dishes (my mother still holding her ground on not making me a ‘special meal for a rude meatless diet’) with my foot elevated and iced.
A few days later, I boarded the Short Line Bus on crutches, well stocked with unmalleable cold packs left over from my brown-bag school lunches. I wrote in my journal during the five-hour ride, trying my best to distract myself from the fact that I really had to pee. Using the world’s smallest and smelliest bathroom was not appealing to me on two legs, let alone one.
I had left college for Thanksgiving break really thinking I was hot shit. Maybe I deserved to be taken down a notch. Gawky girls like me didn’t have French boyfriends and aspiring careers as dancers. Girls like me date nerds with an edge and hobble around on crutches. Who was I to think that I could go from a disgraced weirdo wearing an orange unitard to a graceful artist who’s heard of the Internet?
Jean Claude visited me the night I got back and was very kind to me as I wept about the bone-crushing incident. Well aware that no man is attracted to a blubbering cripple, I tried repeatedly to hold it together, but nothing seemed to work. Turned off by my histrionics and possibly also by the giant plaster sock I was ordered to wear, he headed back to his room for the night without even bothering to sign my cast.
I returned to dance class the next day on crutches, making a grand entrance. The doors clanged as I swung them open and hobbled into the studio. I considered wearing dance attire anyway, but realized that would just make me more depressed. Besides, I didn’t want to stretch out the spandex by forcing my dance attire over my plaster boot. Instead I opted for my newest chic look, a skirt over pants, over crutches. I know most women wear either a skirt or pants, not both at once, but I felt the double garment was a cool college thing to do. I had seen many other girls around campus rocking this look and I wanted in.
All the dancers stared at me as I clunked into the studio. Girls with neat buns and perfect posture stopped bending gracefully over bars to take a look at my megafall from grace.
“Margot, my dear! What happened?” my teacher asked, gliding over to me with such grace I wanted to applaud.
“Well,” I began, positioning myself at the center of the studio, looking out at the twenty or so taut-bodied girls in pink and black. “I used to date this guy in high school, briefly, and he was a nerd. But then he got into Brown and went totally wild and didn’t care about school anymore, and so I found myself strangely attracted to him. No guys liked me in high school before because I was weird and artsy and really, really too tall too soon.”
The ballerinas all chuckled in solidarity. If I had been delivering this speech at the world-famous Apollo Theater, they would have been shouting things like “You said it, gurl,” and “Ummm-hmmmm,” but this was ballet, so they all nodded politely while practicing their turnout. I shifted my weigh
t a bit to ease the pain and continued.
“So the thing is, this nerdy guy actually liked me back. Before him, my only option was a guy who stalked me after a They Might Be Giants concert.”
The ballerinas laughed. This time harder. I was killing it!
“Oh, and also the Puerto Rican camp counselor I lost my virginity to.”
Silence. Too much. I needed to get back on track.
“So before I came here, we parted ways, the nerd and I, and I thought we were on good terms, ya know? I was going to theatre school, he was going into politics at Brown, not exactly a lifelong match but we had our memories. We spoke a little after I got here, and I told him how much I was into dance, how I was finding my niche, how we were going in different directions . . .”
My audience was rapt. Rapt. I continued.
“Then, I go home, and we’re hanging out, and I’m thinking all is cool between me and this nerd gone wild, and then he ran over my foot with his car.”
Silence. Did my audience think I was making it up? Did I lose them?
“Seriously, ladies, he ran. Over. My. Foot. With. His. Car. Conveniently just a few months after I told him I wanted to be a dancer. So, maybe we’re not on such good terms, right?”
Laughter! There we go.
“I mean, there’s no chance we can remain ‘just friends,’ am I right?”
The dancers all agreed.
“But now I’m wondering, how can I be a long-stemmed beauty with only one working foot? I guess my only choice is to take up flamingo dancing.”
Awkward pause. Silence.
“You know, because flamingos stand on one foot. Ladies, come on, stay with me here.”
One by one the dancers began to laugh, which eventually all came together as one giant laugh, which was the most pleasing sound I had heard since I’d snuck into that awesome Tom Petty concert. When the laughter subsided they made sympathetic faces at my horrendous luck. Throwing in the inside joke of “long-stemmed beauty” really sealed the deal. Then I brought it home.
Gawky Page 24
