Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen Read online

  Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

  Alix Kates Shulman

  with a new introduction by the author

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London

  WC1X 9HD

  www.serpentstail.com

  Copyright © 1969, 1971, 1972, 1985, 2019 by Alix Kates Shulman

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Alix Kates Shulman

  Originally published in 1972 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Acknowledgement is extended to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:

  Chappel & Co., Inc.: Lines from Where or When by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers. Copyright 1937 by Chappel & Co. Inc. Copyright renewed.

  Famous Music Publishing Companies: Lines from Lotus Blossom (Marahuana). Copyright 1934 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1961 by Famous Music Corporation.

  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: Excerpts from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot from Collected Poems 1909–1962.

  Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.: Excerpts from Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock, M.D. Copyright 1945, 1946, by Benjamin Spock, M.D. Copyright © 1957, © 1968 by Benjamin Spock, M.D.

  Portions of this novel have appeared in Aphra, Vol. 1, No. 2, Winter 1970, and Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter 1971; and in Works in Progress, Vol. 6, April 1972.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The right of Alix Kates Shulman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request.

  ISBN 9781788163408

  eISBN 9781782836087

  Alix Kates Shulman is the author of fourteen books, including her debut novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, which established her as a primary figure in feminism’s second wave. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Shulman studied philosophy at Columbia University and received an MA at New York University. She became a political activist, joining the Congress of Racial Equality in 1961 and the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1967. Shulman lives in Manhattan and continues to speak on issues such as feminism and reproductive choice.

  My gratitude to the Redstockings sisters,

  Aphra, and David Segal (1928–1970),

  who got me started.

  Introduction to the new edition

  Half a century ago, in the early, explosive days of women’s liberation, I wrote my darkly comic novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen to demonstrate why, given society’s treatment of girls and women, a feminist movement was necessary. A sardonic portrayal of one middle-class, white, Midwestern American girl’s coming-of-age, the novel takes a wry look at a range of experiences treated back then as either taboo or trivial—violence, rape, illegal abortion, the sexual double standard, daily humiliations, job discrimination, the frantic quest for beauty, the double binds of marriage, motherhood, and love—all business-as-usual between the sexes.

  Today, many of the predicaments in which the titular ex-prom queen Sasha Davis found herself have a powerful, emotionally charged name: “sexual harassment”—a term not coined until well after I wrote the novel.

  In the three years between my book proposal and the novel’s 1972 publication, enough people had been touched by feminist ideas to create a hunger for a new view of women’s experience that made my novel a bestseller. My proposal had earned a token advance, but well before publication the book began to take off. The galley proofs, which as a matter of course circulated among the paperback reprint houses, became hot items, passing quickly from hand to hand among the secretaries (a word that had not yet been replaced in publishing by “editorial assistant”); Publishers Weekly, the trade journal that reviews books six or more weeks before publication, announced that “this book already has a substantial underground reputation.” The publishing executives—all male in those days when newspapers’ Help Wanted columns were still unabashedly headed “Help Wanted, Male” and “Help Wanted, Female”—were mystified by the book’s pre-publication buzz and took me aside to ask what its secret appeal could be. Nevertheless, on the day reprint rights were auctioned, not only did every major reprint house enter the bidding, but the winning bid established a new record for paperback rights to a first novel. A pittance compared with today’s prices, but still enough to ensure that I could continue to write my books and to enable me to send checks of gratitude to every feminist journal that had taken the early risk of publishing me—audacious journals with names like Up from Under, Women: A Journal of Liberation, and Aphra, named to honor Aphra Behn (1640–1689), known as the first Western woman to earn her living by writing.

  While early reviewers found the novel “shocking,” “astonishing,” even “traumatic,” women readers responded with recognition. Feminists laughed out loud as they read it, potential feminists cried, others were puzzled or outraged—like the young man who wrote to me, soon after the novel was published, blaming me for his wife’s leaving him and taking their baby with her after reading Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. “Don’t you think,” I wrote back to the fellow, “you might have had something to do with it?”

  As the women’s movement continued to spread, turning its ideas from “shocking” to widely accepted, the novel, with its pre-feminist setting, was elevated to the category “feminist classic.” This kept it ever in print in the United States, even as the anti-movement backlash gained such force that young women spurned the label “feminist” while embracing the many benefits the movement had won for them. As the book enjoyed a 25th anniversary edition, a 35th anniversary edition, and a 40th anniversary ebook edition, Sasha and her author celebrated, but with mixed emotions, knowing that the social movement that had inspired the novel was moribund.

  Then I was as surprised as anyone by the grave political upheavals that recently rendered Sasha’s daily struggles baldly contemporary and the subject of fierce political action. #MeToo. #TimesUp. A revitalized women’s movement, diverse and determined, marching through the world in protest. The word “feminist,” so long disdained, is again respected, and media that formerly ignored women’s oppression or scorned women’s work now regularly cover them; at the same time, the revivified rightwing backlash against feminism hovers over the present like pollution smog. Along with other feminist “classics,” Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, which dramatizes and satirizes every sort of sexual harassment, is being read with new eyes. Sasha Davis, the pre-feminist prom queen, may be seen as a harbinger of today’s outrages, and her story a measure of both how far we have come and how far we still have to go.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  February 2019

  Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

  On the Sunday of my first lecture a sealed note was left at my hotel for me. The anonymous writer warned me of a plot against my life: I was going to be shot when about to enter the hall, he assured me. … I walked leisurely from the hotel to the meeting-place. When within half a block of it I instinctively raised to my face the large bag I always carried. I got safely into the hall and walked towards the platform still holding the bag in front of my face. All through the lecture the thought persisted in my brain: “If I could only protect my face!” … Surely no man would think of his face under such circumstances. Yet I, in the presence of probable death, had been afraid to have my
face disfigured! It was a shock to discover in myself such ordinary female vanity.

  —Emma Goldman in Living My Life

  The girl was ugly. I was bored during the whole journey.

  —Casanova in History of My Life

  I have learned to mistrust symmetry and the decimal system. There was once a time when I would do anything I chose for which I had ten good reasons, or again, anything for which I could find no reason not to, a time when I would not resist a dare.

  I am more cautious now. I have children and responsibilities. I am suspicious of reasons and hostile to dares. The evidence suggests that nature is probably unbalanced, that ten is no truer than four, that reason does not prevail.

  Accordingly, doubt is my motto. To share what I’ve learned (and to have something interesting to do now that I am past thirty and the children are in school) I shall compose a memoir. I shall begin my story neither at the beginning, moving forward as a reader expects, nor at the end, moving backward as a writer recalls, but rather somewhere in between, where the truth is said to lie.

  In a railroad station in Europe, then, about to cut free of my first husband, likely against all reason.

  One

  As the Orient Express lumbered into the subfreezing Munich Hauptbahnhof (and I fresh from Madrid!) to spew me onto the platform into the arms of my waiting husband, I was mistress of no grand schemes. I knew only that I had slightly under two minutes in which to bundle myself up, gather my dictionaries and belongings, fish out my ticket, and find the precise and perfect English words with which to shed my spouse. I knew he would be waiting, smiling, at the end of the platform, just one step beyond the ticket puncher, perhaps already holding out to me one of those sausages for which the Munich station was so famous and which—damn him—he knew I loved. There wouldn’t be a moment to experiment with attitude or wording. By then I knew that to wait and see would be to hesitate, and to hesitate would be to lose. I had already in my four long years of marriage to Frank wasted too many chances of getting free by taking aim at him. This time I had to get him square between the eyes on the first shot or he would get me.

  The letdown of getting settled into a pair of glum furnished rooms in that dreary northern European city that lacked even the distinction of being a capital had catapulted me south. Frank had his work; I had my nothing. Munich was certainly no place to spend a winter cooped up with a possessive husband in one of those postwar windowless houses six blocks beyond the last stop of the streetcar line; a house with endless locks and keys, a spying landlady, and no telephone. Only Fulbrights for friends in a foreign land. A waste of my youth!

  “All right, go on to Spain, then,” he had said when I pestered him for my ticket. “I’ll use the time you’re away to polish my piece on the German Question now that Intersection has shown some interest.”

  I had been careful not to show my delight. He was clearly ambivalent about my traveling.

  “I’ll try to bring some books for you from the library. Maybe you can pick up a little Spanish while you’re there. Enjoy yourself; get it out of your system.”

  But obviously if I had really enjoyed myself, how could I ever get it out of my system? I had enjoyed myself too much to answer the letters he sent me in care of every American Express office south of Munich. I would have had to answer them with lies, and I wanted to live open and clean.

  Well, my chance to prove my honesty was coming up fast. If he would only give me half the money I’d clear out of his life. He could keep the apartment and the furniture, no alimony, finish out the year here, and wait till New York for the lawyers. Simply reroute. I would go to … Rome. Let him decide what to tell our friends; let him think of a story for the family. Let him save his face any way he could. Mine would take care of itself.

  As the train screeched slowly to a stop, I took a final look in my mirror. Not bad, not good. I was losing my power to judge, now that I was twenty-four. I smoothed the bangs above my eyes, fluffed up my hair at the crown, flexed my smile. Looking good made everything easier. But I felt old—twenty-four and married and old; a has-been like last year’s Miss America. Please God, I prayed, let me be beautiful at least until after my money runs out.

  The rosy-cheeked clergyman with whom I had shared the compartment was saying “Auf wiedersehen, Fräulein” and extending his pudgy hand. Those handshaking Germans.

  “Bye-bye,” I said. They loved to hear you say bye-bye. His chattering away at me in German since just past Nancy had chased the Spanish rhythms from my ears and made me postpone my preparations until the last possible moment. And now he was insisting that I leave the compartment first, when I needed every extra second.

  “Bitte,” he said, holding the door for me and waiting.

  “Danke,” I said. And abandoning the last possibility of flight, I walked onto the platform into the lion’s lair.

  There was the lion himself, just as I had expected him, a step beyond the ticket puncher, grinning once he spotted me, and carrying an armful of anemones. As though I were returning from a short trip exactly on schedule.

  Get him! But my words were not ready.

  Achtung! Achtung! blasted the loudspeaker, as Frank glided up to me and gained the advantage by speaking first. Well, let him, I thought. I’ll have the last word: bye-bye.

  “Hi, baby. Welcome back. Did you have a good time?” All smiles, he held out the flowers to me. Flowers! They were the first flowers he had ever bought me; he was pulling something. Once when we were both students he had gathered a fistful of buttercups to turn our chins yellow. But that was different. These flowers were premeditated. How hateful of him to bring anemones that I loved, that open and close and grow taller so gaudily right before your eyes, like a time-lapse film. It was as though he knew … But suddenly it struck me that of course he didn’t know. At that moment I knew everything and Professor knew nothing. It was I who intended to act, I who had the advantage. I was ready to exert all my power—the only kind of power a woman has. Until the night before when I had wired him about my imminent arrival on the Orient Express, he had surely considered me one of the missing or departed; but now he thought me his wife come home from a little trip. He didn’t even suspect that I intended to leave him forever. He thought I would let him correct my spelling and teach me German, that I would cook him weisswurst and entertain his friends and explore Bavarian churches while he did his work, and be flattered to belong to him. He didn’t even suspect the truth. I avoided his kiss by thrusting my suitcase at him. He put it down. With one arm around my back he squeezed my shoulders and placed a husbandly kiss on my cheek. “Welcome home,” he said tenderly with the joy of possession, each syllable visible as a puff of steam in the freezing air of the station.

  His words were visible objects in the air. And where were my words?

  It was all I could do to keep my knees from trembling. Could he not have noticed how rotten I looked? It should have been so easy for me simply to blurt out the truth. Then why did it seem to be such a dirty business instead? Maybe because I knew Frank believed exactly what he wanted to believe, no more, no less. His cup of tea did not include the dregs, though the dregs are the tea. His brew was nothing but vapor.

  “God, I missed you. Why didn’t you write?” he asked. But of course he couldn’t allow me to answer such a dangerous question. Quickly he asked instead, “What happened to you?” switching me over from active to passive.

  How I wished I could tell him that nothing happens to me, that it is I who happen to them, true or not. How I wished I could tell him … “A lot happened,” I said. Now. Tell him now. But the loudspeaker interrupted with its Achtungs and I lost my nerve.

  “I was worried about you. Didn’t you get my letters? I wrote you everywhere I could think of. Well. Now you’ve traveled. I hope that’s finished! I hope it’s all out of your system. Now that you’re back, I’ll never let you out of my sight again. God, I missed you.” A train starting up drowned him out. He squeezed my arm and yelled, “Come on. L
et’s get some sausages and you can tell me about your adventure. Here, take these.” He succeeded finally in handing me the flowers; then he picked up my suitcase.

  Why was everything nice he did for me a bribe or a favor, while my kindnesses to him were my duty? Now he was going to try to stall off my revelations with sausages, buy my silence with anemones. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him bouncing too jovially along through the station carrying my bag, his long legs rushing ahead of him as though they had some place important to take him, and I knew it was only a matter of moments until the right words would come to me, the words with which to tell him the truth. I would use his words, his vaporous vocabulary.

  “Frank. Wait. Before we go for sausages there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What?” he asked smiling at me. Always smiling. He didn’t even put down my suitcase or slow his walking to hear what I had to say. He didn’t seem to remember that all the while I was away I hadn’t written him a single letter.

  “I was unfaithful to you, Frank.” Casually I brushed the bangs out of my eyes. “In Madrid.”

  He didn’t move a muscle, not even to drop the smile. But I knew I had struck him. I could proceed, knowing the words would come easily. How much better to tell the truth than to try to hide it. After that I was sure only the formalities could keep me here and for only a little while, like waiting around after a funeral, and then I would be free to go.

  But I took no chances. Solemnly, officially, I said, “I know how you feel about it. I know that’s the end of us.” His turn now.

  Yes, he heard me. He began slowing down. Finally he stopped walking entirely. He stood looking at me, picking up my suitcase and putting it down again, like a twitch. His mouth hung open a little, letting the truth seep in. He wiped a hand on his overcoat. Then out he came with it, his simple, automatic response: “No!” Softly at first, then increasing in volume in minute increments of decibels. “No! No! No!” I knew him well enough to recognize each one of them. What a variety of no’s, relieved now and then by a synonym or a paraphrase: “You didn’t,” “I don’t believe you,” “It isn’t true,” “You couldn’t have.” A barrage of negatives. The no’s allowed me for another instant to hate him. Listen to him! I said to myself triumphantly, justifying. But there was really no time for that, and besides, justifying would be a trap. No, I needed simply to press my advantage and be gone.