The Last-Chance Prom
Another Installment of Boardinghouse Reach... and a new poem
Here’s how the invitation read for the Last Chance Prom.
What: Our dream prom
Why: Because your last prom sucked. Because nobody asked you. It was the punk era. Your mother made your dress. Bad skin. No friends. You were too cool. Hated disco music. Bullies beat you up. Expelled. In jail. In Katmandu. Didn’t have a thing to wear. Were a hippie. Your only date was your baby brother. Too broke to rent a tux. Too cool to dance. Too stoned to stand. Were a total nerd. Were pregnant. Hated everybody. Parents wouldn’t let you. Because we can.
Some artist friends of a friend put on a party for everyone’s inner teenager on a chilly clear night in November at a warehouse workshop in San Francisco’s apparel district. Picture the balloons and confetti caught in a net on the ceiling, the soft strobe of multicolored lights, the prom limo (with taped-on cardboard fins and uniformed chauffeur), the official “make-out” car (with a cardboard placard advertising this purpose), the punch bowl, the sheet cake, the DJ high above in the loft, the slightly self-conscious guests—ranging from their twenties to fifties—arriving in their thrift-shop prom dresses and rented, begged or borrowed tuxedos. The tall couple in their late thirties, perhaps, impeccably attired and each sporting a pale white bird in their hair. The radiant hostess, a vision in red tulle topped by a red-sequined hat supporting a matching stiletto shoe (“For height,” she demurs).
My friend and hairdresser, Dominique—the reason Colby and I were invited in the first place—looking like Whistler’s White Girl ten years later, divorced and living it up in the demimonde.
I wore a pale green polka-dot Jessica McClintock that I found at the Salvation Army, spanking new, for $8.50. I wore pinned to my pale blue satin sash a color-coordinated strip of condoms. One of Kyle’s small plush animals—a chicken, as it happened—peeked out from my décolletage.
Everyone warmed up, both physically and emotionally, as the records started spinning. By the time the dance contest was announced, Colby and I had already been dancing nonstop for two hours to the sometimes disconcerting array of tunes that seemed to jolt one back and forth between two decades.
I never went to a dance in high school, for several of the reasons listed on the invitation. I’ve always loved to dance, but it was only recently that I had begun to dance with dedication, taking three or four classes—usually Brazilian or hip-hop—per week.
I vaguely knew that the judges were patrolling the dance floor, touching couples being eliminated from the contest. In the back of my mind, I noticed that we hadn’t been touched yet—but I was having too much fun and dancing too hard to pay much attention.
The music stopped, and there was a series of announcements I couldn’t quite make out above the cheering, squeals and applause. I took it that the winners had been chosen, and I clapped for them whole-heartedly.
And then there was another announcement I couldn’t quite hear and Colby was shouting at me, “You won, sweetheart! You won first prize!” (Typical of Colby not to claim any part of the credit for himself.)
It was rather like a private fantasy in which other people are magically, at one’s own behest, participating.
Colby and I wafted up the stairs to the loft, from where we waved, threw kisses and danced a last dance high above the crowd.
My whining, wounded inner teenager was, in that moment, forever assuaged. And let it go on record that I want to be buried with my prize ribbon.
How I Saw It Then
The panic with which a man tries to avoid being devoured by a woman he loves is matched by the woman’s desire to achieve oneness with him. Women are cursed by an irresistible urge to merge in relationship.
From the moment when they think that this particular guy might be Mr. Right, they engage in a great unconscious conspiracy to weave their lives together. Work begins on the mental scrapbook memorializing all their “firsts”—first kiss, first dinner date… I needn’t elaborate.
With the avidity of an athlete in training, she begins building up her roster of things they “always” do together: morning tea, late-night suppers at a particular restaurant, walking his/her dog on Saturday afternoons.
She’s not even sure at this point that she wants to spend the rest of her life with this man. But just as a woman can’t tell how a dress will look on her until she tries it on, she also knows that she must immerse herself in any given relationship before she can know if it fits her.
Men can—and usually do—buy their shirts straight out of the package. If the neck and sleeve are the right number of inches, then, by God, the shirt will fit just as well as any shirt ever will.
Unlike women, who wear their brand-new clothes as soon and as often as possible, men like their old clothes best. A man may be having a rollicking good time with the sexual excitement a new romance entails, but there’s part of him that can’t wait to get back to his old routine after each adventure in bed.
The woman, on the other hand, can’t get enough of being together. It takes her a long time to try on this particular pair of shoes. She needs to look at them from all angles and in different kinds of light. If the shoe store would let her, she’d run, walk and dance in them on every sort of terrain before deciding whether they’re the right shoes for her.
She has to imaginatively project herself into a full-blown, lifelong version of this relationship before she can know whether or not it’s a keeper. If she’s of breeding age, she imagines and perhaps even secretly names the children they’ll have. She sees herself sitting hand-in-hand with this man at high-school graduations. She pictures how sweetly they’ll walk through the park together when they’re old.
If the woman lets the man in on the thoughts she’s thinking, his befuddlement will only be equaled by his sense of dread. She’s more or less imagined his life up to the moments following his funeral. It seems to him that she’s sucked up his very soul in a single voracious gulp.
But the woman was only fishing. She felt a tug on her line. She doesn’t know whether this is the tug of a little fish that she’ll throw back into the river, deeming it too inconsequential to keep. Or the Big One she’s been standing knee-deep in cold water waiting for all her life. The magic fish who will make all her wishes come true. The fish of fairy tales.
She must use all her skills in landing this one, just in case.
And there the man is, gasping, looking shell-shocked and completely out of his element. All he wants is to put on some comfortable clothes, go down to his favorite watering hole and order a nice cold beer. This gorgeous, sexy, irresistible woman has completely exhausted him. He needs some time alone, some time completely and utterly without her.
This is the part a woman has the hardest time accepting with grace and goodwill. She doesn’t take kindly to having her probationary fantasy interrupted. She sees the man’s withdrawal not as a dash to re-gather his sense of self, but as an out-and-out rejection of their entire imagined life together. It’s as if they’ve already been married for 25 years and he’s announced suddenly that he wants a divorce.
She gets an evil look in her eyes at this point, wondering whether she shouldn’t just coat him with breadcrumbs, toss him into the frying pan and eat him for lunch.
***
From time to time during the two years Colby and I were boyfriend and girlfriend, I would get utterly exasperated with him. He was good-hearted, generous, insightful and wonderful in so many ways. And he categorically refused to be the man I knew he could be in our relationship. Peter Pan is very charming—but the woman who tries to plan her future with him is a fool.
We would fight and then make up again. He’d buy me presents and then borrow money from me. He spent huge amounts of money hiring musicians to play the music he composed, making CDs that no one bought and dreaming of becoming a rock star. He would fall asleep on the couch with his belly bulging out between the waistband of his jeans and the bottom of his T-shirt. He would lose his temper and scream at me: he’d say that Kyle was a brat and Stewart was a wuss, and I was a control freak. All three things were true, to some extent—but I didn’t want to hear him screaming about it. And I felt that someone who was sleeping in my bed and eating at my table but not paying any rent had no right to scream at me at all.
I’d kick him out and then, after a few days had passed, he’d call to invite me out to lunch, or I’d call because I missed him—and the whole cycle started all over again.
Two years of living with me—living with anyone—was a long time for Colby. He was much better at living day to day than I was. I knew the boardinghouse wouldn’t last forever—and I wanted to know what would become of us then, and what we would be to each other, and whether he would be there for Kyle and me.
Unprotected What if our words lose their buoyancy? What if the lifeboat made of words becomes water-logged—and starts to sink? What if the metaphor melts, and I find myself unprotected in the sea, never a very good swimmer, by nature a bit delicate physically. I’ve always wrapped myself up in a fantasy of specialness. But I am made of bones and blood like all the rest— a mammal conducive, for a finite span of time, to neural electricity. Am I brave enough to contemplate the depths, the darkness, the everything that isn’t me? To trade my little horde of neural sparks for the timeless nuclear explosions and implosions of infinity? Copyright ©️ 2024 by Barbara Quick
