Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Alix Kates Shulman

Author:Alix Kates Shulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2019-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

At home I cowered through Christmas, avoiding “Jingle Bells” and relatives. Only the books I had brought from school and baroque music could soothe me. I read deep into every night that vacation. In the daytime I slipped off to the quiet garden of the Cleveland Museum of Art where, thrilling to Bach on the organ, I could contemplate with Spinoza the vanity of all human wishes save one. I followed each idea to the next, finding one subsumed under another, itself subsumed under yet another, soaring after that single axiom or thought or word that would somehow sum up everything.

“Sasha, you’ve hardly eaten a bite the entire holiday. Don’t you think you’re studying too hard, darling?” asked my poor mother. But the only nourishment I took was for my mind; for my body I couldn’t care less. Like Descartes’s, my mind and my body led separate lives, but unlike Descartes, I found no satisfactory way to connect them.

I had always despised my body. Slowly my contempt spread to all things material. For the only time in my life, I didn’t care how I looked. Neither Leibniz, nor Spinoza, nor Newton, nor Locke, nor Berkeley, nor Descartes’s God Himself could bridge for me the growing gap between mind and matter.

My second day home I had gone to an engagement shower for an old high school friend. It turned out so unhappily that I didn’t want to see another Baybury soul.

“Sasha! We never thought you’d come,” said the hostess. “We thought you wouldn’t want to associate with us anymore since you got into that fancy college.”

Fancy college! Just because it wasn’t Ohio State! “Baxter’s not fancy at all,” I said. “It’s just far away.”

“Well,” said the hostess, “nobody ever hears from you.”

“Come on, admit it,” said another friend. “You have to be a Brain to get into those Eastern colleges. But then, Sasha always was a Brain.”

“That’s not true—” I began excitedly. It was the dream again. How should I begin to explain myself?

“Calm down, now. You’re probably both right.”

“You must be meeting a lot of interesting people there.”

“We were sure you’d be engaged by now. Things turn out so funny. The three girls from our group that are left are the ones we all thought would go first.”

“She always said she wasn’t going to get married right away.”

“Yeah, she said she was going to be a lady lawyer. Maybe she really will.”

Being spoken to in the third person didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. After the shower I decided to spend my evenings in the house.

“If it’s for me, say I’m not home,” I hollered whenever the phone rang, and retreated to my room. (Actually, it was now only nominally my room. Since I had gone away to school, it had been converted into an upstairs den. My bed was still there, and my things were still in the closet, but my pictures had been taken down, the room had been painted blue, and a large TV set had been installed on my desk in place of my phonograph and records.

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