Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (19 page)

After I hung up, I went to work on the leg myself with a piece of coat hanger that I fashioned into a clasp similar to the one we’d broken, only this one was roughly constructed so the jagged ends of the wire crossed. They scratched my thigh a bit, but that was nothing a Band-Aid couldn’t fix. So I looped it through the strap that wrapped around my thigh, and it held the leg in place.

On the evening of the prom I wore a cotton dress with a tiny floral print and a gold necklace with a pearl at my throat. My waist was small enough that a boy could wrap his hands around it and his fingers might overlap. The prom queen was a blonde with big blue eyes (was there any other kind of prom queen?). When I looked in the mirror, I saw a rosy-cheeked girl with golden brown hair and hazel eyes flashing brown to green. I decided I wasn’t so different from the prom queen.

The dance took place downtown. Inside you descended a wide staircase into a posh hallway. In the ballroom, tuxedos and gowns swirled. We stayed on the dance floor most of the night. The boys perspired so heavily that they peeled off jackets, bow ties, and cummerbunds. I was hot myself, but my shoulders were bare and the dress was light. My biggest problem was the strapless bra. It kept falling, and I had to sneak off to hoist it up from my hips. A few of James’s friends unbuttoned their shirts, but as usual, James hardly broke a sweat.

The band played “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” and the mob rocked in rhythm to it. James gripped my waist and bounced me up and down. The makeshift clasp in my leg broke loose. Worse than falling out, the coat wire slipped inside my leg and lodged itself on the bottom, so that James was bouncing me on the jagged wire, which was as sharp as an upturned nail. I threw my head back in pain, and James stopped. “What’s wrong?” he screamed over the music.

I pulled away.

“You didn’t,” he said. “I thought ...” He clapped a hand to his forehead. As I watched him register what was happening it occurred to me that my mistake was about to ruin his prom. James didn’t know what to do with himself, concern and fury all over his face.

“I’ll fix it,” I said, hobbling away. With each step the wire stabbed into me. I pushed off of people and tables, toward the powder room.

Inside the sitting area of the ladies’ room, girls gossiped about their evenings while passing liquor smuggled in purses. I leaned into the wall as I tried to sneak past them. “Are you okay?” said someone. Inside a stall, I crumpled onto the toilet seat.

“Oh, no,” said another girl, her voice lowering to a whisper. “Did you see her face? That girl is about to barf.” Everyone fell silent, and a round of giggles followed.

I took advantage of their laughter to rip open the Velcro strap that held my leg in place. I’d been drinking, though I wasn’t feeling sick. The stall was dark and my vision blurry from alcohol. I turned the leg upside down and shook it, but nothing came out. Then I found that one side of the wire had pierced the cushioned lining, where it lodged, and the other end was poking up. “What have I done?” I kept saying. In fact, this was nothing a very long pencil and a steady hand might not have corrected, but being a teenager with a few gin and tonics mixed with my reckless drive toward the crest of despair, I couldn’t conceive of such an invention. Or maybe the relationship itself was the looming threat: it was hurling too quickly toward love on my part, or worse, uncontainable lust. We were just fifteen and seventeen.

I was literally knocking my forehead against the stall when I heard Claire’s voice, distinct and deeper than the others. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said to someone on her way to the stalls. “Claire!” I called before I stood on one unsteady leg to open the door. “Claire, get in here! Help!”

“Eileen?” she said, jamming into the stall with me. I explained what had happened, and she said only, “That’s bad.”

“Claire!”

“We’ll fix it.”

We peeled off the white slipper on my foot, then my pantyhose. “These are full of runs,” she said, “Wanna just ditch ’em? Your dress is long. No one will notice.” I was probably still beating my head when she tossed them into the Tampax trash bin.

“What’s going on in there?” said someone from the sitting room. That was followed by whispers and titters.

Claire tried shaking, then batting, the leg, but we were too crammed in. She shoved the shoe back on the foot and helped me out to the sitting area while carrying my leg in her hand. A swarm of girls descended on us, some to our aid, while those who didn’t know me stood at a distance, their chins tucked to their chests, their eyes astonished. A redheaded girl with a boyish haircut and a strapless gown commented, “Well it’s a cute shoe on that foot.”

Someone offered a chair. Claire helped me into it, before kicking off her own shoes and climbing onto an upholstered chair. She wedged my foot against the ceiling to look inside. She tried to jar the wire loose. Nothing came out. “I see it, but the wire is pinned into that small part. My hand won’t fit,” she said.

“Oh, god,” I said, “He’ll never forgive me.”

The redhead handed me a lit cigarette. She pulled a small flask from a white clutch with Kelly green piping that matched her dress and shoes, and even the upholstery of her settee. “Just in case it doesn’t come out,” she said, handing me the flask.

The warm bourbon tasted awful then wonderfully hot on my throat, before I passed along the flask. Now I was sweating out my fate under an air-conditioning vent in a powder room, which was turning out to be more fun than one might imagine. And my heart was breaking. The flask made its way back to me, and I said, “What the hell.” I took another mouthful of bourbon.

Finally Claire, who never did fail to ground me, asked me what I planned to do about the leg situation. She could go to such insane depths then jerk back to reality, an enviable trait, but one I probably hadn’t even registered because I was still climbing the arc of despair. “Well?”

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “Just get drunk enough to go back out there, I guess.”

“Eileen?”

“You got a better idea?”

She shook her head before handing me the leg. At least now the wire was only stabbing from the side of my leg, so I could walk, sort of. I found James in a knot of people dancing. He gripped me by the shoulders and saw the pain in my face. “You couldn’t fix it, right?”

I shook my head. “Come on,” he said, his jaw tightening as he led me out of the room. “I’ll take you home.” Nothing was said until he lifted me into the van. “You don’t have to take me home,” I said. “Let’s go to the party. I don’t want to ruin your night.”

He rolled his eyes as he climbed in on his side and took the wheel. “It’s kind of late for that.”

“Oh.” I felt my lip quiver. “Oh.”

He paused to collect his thoughts. I was pretty sure he was going to tell me this was the end of us. Instead he reached for me. “Come on.” He got up and carried me into the back seat. “At least we have an excuse for missing the party,” he said. His anger gave way to a hard, open-mouthed kiss. It began almost bitterly and mellowed as if he’d forgotten himself entirely.

So far, in all of our kissing, James had only touched me under my sweater. I tended to gasp at the touch of his palm on my stomach and by the time it worked its way under my bra, I would have to hold my breath because I was afraid he’d hear my excitement. He dedicated hours to exploring under my meager brassieres. I would be gasping for air as if coming up from a thirty-foot pool:
Will I make it? Will I make it?
The rush of excitement and breathlessness made me even giddier. It’s a wonder I never passed out.

Most of what I knew about sex came from columns in either
Vogue
or
Glamour.
I had no explanation for why I was literally gushing at times. Did men find it appalling when a woman’s body reacted so enthusiastically? Then one of Liz’s friends gave her a copy of
The Happy Hooker
. I stole it from her underwear drawer, and when I finished I stuffed it under my mattress. Then I remembered that Candy changed the sheets every Tuesday. Oh, the stories Candy might have told every evening to her sister! This book gave me far more than I needed, but that was the whole point of reading it. James had only put his hand under my sweater. Clothing had not come off. He hadn’t ventured anywhere near my legs. And this was due to the fact that invariably, just before things got too hot, we’d squabble. Usually it was me who started it. “Why did you say that at the party?” I’d say.

He’d lift his face from inside my blouse, which seemed most unlikely, but James was all about honor and reputation. “What did I say?”

“You know!”

“That joke about your family?” he’d say, barely concealing his grin.

“Well?”

He would squint. “
You
joke about your family.” Then his wet lips were on my breast again, and panic coursed through my veins. Often I would fire into the dark: golf, or the fact that he was Cuban—those were frequent targets, but both I found intolerably sexy, and therefore I could hardly rouse his ire on either. James had almost no visible weak spots, from my perspective. About the only thing that made him vulnerable was the fact that he was grounded for about fifty percent of his adolescent life. These house arrests were a sign of the very short fuse tethering him to his father.

Alone in the back of James’s van, with hours ahead of us before either of us was expected home, James kissed me until we had to stop and remember how to breathe separately. We dropped back against the seat. He reached over to my neck and pointed right where that pearl-drop necklace rested. I watched him slide a finger from my clavicle across my chest to lower a strap of my dress. He liked that. And I didn’t stop him. So he sat up enthusiastically and lowered the other strap, checking my face for a reaction. I lowered my eyes. He took that as a sign, and peeled my dress down over my strapless brassiere. He stopped to give an approving nod before shimmying it down to my waist. Then he buried his face in my flesh. I cradled his neck and squeezed his curls between my fingers, so lost now that I said nothing when he lifted my skirt.

If I’d wanted to argue, he’d take care of that. He plunged his tongue deep into my mouth. My shoulders rose in alarm as his fingers traveled to my bare thigh. Now his palm, warm and tender, was planted on my skin. We stayed in that place for what seemed hours.

Finally, he took my hand and placed it on his pants, where I felt what I’d been brushing up against for months. I started to pull my hand away. This had always seemed to me the part of the body that men had to bear, and women dealt with—what was I supposed to do with it?

An argument—I needed one, something, anything to break this up. Of course I could have simply said no, but where was the fun in that? Besides, I didn’t want to stop. Nothing but anger, raw, in-your-face rage, could distract us at this point.

Even beyond my fear about having sex, I didn’t want him to touch the wood of my right leg. If he did, I felt certain the world would close in on us. So I did the only thing I could think of at the time: I shifted the right leg away from where he stroked my left thigh. He stopped kissing me again to look questioningly into my eyes. Once more I could only look down, so he kissed me again before his hand moved to the spot where my eyes had apparently directed him. I jerked as it landed, and jerked again when he slid it under my panties.

Now we were Russia and the United States, both of us only a finger’s stroke from detonation.

I pulled back from the kiss and froze. He had discovered my secret. What did he think of me now? Was he going to leap over the front seat and drive me home? Wasn’t it true that boys were “turned off by girls with a sex drive”? The Girl Scout den mother said as much in the birds and bees talk that Mom had signed me up for in grade school.

I took my hand from his pants and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t do this.” He lifted my straps up and smoothed them over my shoulders, and lowered my skirt. He bit his lip and looked out the window. We sat there a while, just our heads touching, staring off in different directions. It seemed that eventually we would drive home. I wondered if he’d go to the parties by himself after he dropped me off.

In time we both stared ahead. Eventually we found our foreheads touching, as if our thoughts were being transmitted physically through our brains. Then our noses touched. He kissed me. And before long we fell back into the throes of foreplay.

CHAPTER 14

Changer of Hearts

T
he women in my family were stingy with compliments. When Rosa, who was majoring in art history, elbowed me on the sofa and said, “Eileen, you have a Botticelli face,” I braced myself for the punch line. What species was a Botticelli? She pointed to a reproduction of
The Birth of Venus
in her massive textbook.

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

Flattery or anything that smelled of success intoxicated me; it also caused me to panic. I’d come to believe that if I were naïve enough to see myself as attractive or smart, I would pay in humiliation. The payment might not hurt as much as being thrown down a staircase, or it might hurt worse. Maybe I’d be broken from the inside. In this sense, James seemed a safe boyfriend. Upon threat of death he would not hand over a compliment. On the rare occasions when one escaped from his lips, I could bank on its sincerity. My favorite compliment from James came in the form of a reconfiguration of my nickname. Instead of Looney Tunes, he called me Tunes. Since he cared almost as much about music as he cared about golf, this was as good as being called Her Majesty. And better still, everyone followed him.

In general I was mistrustful of people, and yet for a girl of fifteen I trusted in myself to an unrealistic degree. Within my family I trusted Frankie, except that we were clashing over our choices of friends; Kevin, but he was away at Notre Dame; and sometimes Ted, but he was only in the eighth grade. Nina, who was about seven years old and shared a bedroom with me, wasn’t old enough to confide in; however, she and I lavished affection on each other. On Sunday mornings she climbed into my bed to give me butterfly kisses with her abundant black eyelashes, while I tickled her until she begged me to stop. We’d had only one argument. I don’t remember what it was over, but that same day she left a note on my pillow and, because apologies were rarer than compliments in our family, I kept it. The paper is full of angry scribbles and finally the words: