Our embarrassment was becoming replete. I should say my embarrassment. Judy’s mother hadn’t made her a gown for the senior prom, as my mother had for me, on the impregnable theory that wishing (or more precisely, willing, praying, pleading privately with all the saints, lighting candles) could make it so. Maybe I have suppressed my own fixation on this prom-date, but I look back in wonder: who actually wanted it more, she or I?
Perhaps it would finally prove, among other mother-flattering things, that I could be the girl my father would approve her for creating. For though he routinely missed mass himself, he loved our churchgoing, smooth Sunday-morning look in gloves and heels almost as much as he despised this cheap, “teen-age” prom culture. And yet he knew the prom to be a rite of female passage, and rites of female passage he understood. I can imagine a curious mixture of dread and longing in his mental anticipation of my first symbolic moment as another man’s woman.
The dress my mother made me was a checked taffeta affair in navy and gray, strangely subdued elegance for a fashion climate that favored pastel chiffons. It had a long full skirt, drop sleeves over a fitted bodice, and her hallmark featherstitching around the neckline. Pretty as it was, I could not actually see myself wearing it, which, right there, as any visualization expert will tell you, was deadly. It held itself erect on a hanger over the sewing machine like a proud beauty, straight through the prom season.
In a kind of giddy desperation, I even asked several Jewish boys to take me, moving on to another and another as each said no. Judy couldn’t believe me. I couldn’t believe myself. I remember something wistful and long-coming in their rejections that seemed to make them painless. And yet it was if I had been inviting them as a favor to somebody else.
Judy said we should go out anyway, the two of us, though neither of our special prom budgets had included the contingency of an unprom, and I knew it was not a category of expense my father recognized. My mother must have persuaded him that it was the only possible balm for my grievous disappointment. Only whatever we did, she said, was going to have to get me back to the New Haven RR in time for the train.
It was a perfect prom night. Hitting the darkening street after a movie at the Carnegie, I know we both felt that same stab, like two Alices forced to keep this side of the looking-glass. There was something as ripe as strawberries in the air. Across 57th Street the Automat was still bustling—we’d been there before the show, gloriously nickel-and-diming our dinner, popping up and down from the marbleized table as each new food fancy struck us, aesthetically overdosed on bright brass and the magic of pie wedges and radiant meringues behind shimmering convex shields of glass.
“We’re kinduva couple, aren’t we,” I observed, rather dolefully, as we made for the subway. Judy giggled agreement. We were: short and tall, wearing our rhyming blue cottons with the waistlines we pronounced “awhmpeer,” the simple dresses we’d cut from the same pattern and then stitched independently, mine under my mother’s expert eye. We had matching shawls to keep off the night air.
We took the A train down to the Battery, stood up all the way, frantic with laughter as the updraft on the subway car ballooned our skirts. We took a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, still just a nickel each way in 1952, across the bay and back.
We let the wind on the deck fling our hair into tangled streamers and whip our dangling copper earrings till we almost lost them. Judy took hers off and I screwed mine in tighter, as tight as I could bear. We still had the deck to ourselves—no other prom-nighters yet, making their own romance of the cheap sea ride. The salt spray the flywheel kicked up flicked into our eyes and mouths. We faced the wind gasping, hugging our flapping shawls tight about us. We laughed about how much better this was than going to the prom. We have never changed our minds.
Judy’s grandfather was already gone. Her grandmother died that summer. This was sad, but an enormous relief too, and Judy and Muriel slowly unraveled themselves from their Christian Science cocoons and shook their damp bright wings in the sunshine like a pair of butterflies. After so intense a confrontation with her parents’ too implacable faith, the Mature Parent was now exploring other religions. Once, she asked me to unravel the long tale of my multiple namings, how I had been christened Flavia Maria Immacolata and then added two more names, Anna and Rosa, at my confirmation, and what this all meant. Poor simply Judith Ann Lawrence felt severely disadvantaged. In retaliation, she dubbed me “Fluffy Mary the Immaculate.” I winced.
“Your Catholicism,” Muriel would say. “It’s about the bleeding Jesus Christ, if I may say so, isn’t it. Death, death, death.” I had rather thought it was about the Virgin Mary, St. Ann, etc., etc., but she had a point. There was that crucifix too, and all those bloody Stations of the Cross.
I had been about to leave for the railway station and she held me, growing thoughtful again. It was as if I were a wise child who could deal with profound questions—nothing in her of that secret intent to outwit me I sensed in so many well-intentioned adults. She seemed to enjoy what I was, where I was, without the need to impose higher standards, greater expectations. Enough of these in our lives—in hers no less than mine, maybe more. She smiled. She said, as if to assure me I was not entirely responsible for the murky history of Catholicism, “Much to be said for confession.”
I kissed her good-bye, thankful for the gracious exit line. Judy had me by the hook. “Oh, Fluffy Mary,” she pronounced, “do be careful going home.”
That fall, Judy decided to continue studying art, part-time, in New York. I actually envied her, though I was the one entering Barnard on scholarship. There had been remarkably little fuss about what I would actually do with my life, when it finally came down to it, because I didn’t make the fuss I might have over where I would go to college to learn how to do it.
For, all credit to the power of my mother’s immovable certainty that gifts like mine and my sister’s shouldn’t be wasted, it had been understood that I would go to college, always, and when I graduated M&A with honors, it had been understood that I would attend a very good school. My own researches into what this meant for me (Syracuse, Bard, other colleges with strong arts programs) became ultimately irrelevant. I could see this the moment my brother Lou, new Columbia College graduate, dispatched the wisdom that Barnard College, across the street from Columbia, would be quite acceptable. This reassured my uneasy father, who could feel me slipping away, and who could easily paint the dangers to my bewildered, conflicted mother of any school I could not commute to from home exactly as I had to high school—same train to the 125th Street station on the New Haven line, same bus to the West Side, different transfer, to the Broadway bus going downtown instead of up.
My mother hated to see me disappointed at not continuing my art, but there seemed to be no right answer to the question, “What will you do?” For I saw myself with long hair, alone, in a loft some day, painting, sculpting, writing poetry. Unfortunately, so did they. So did he. It was decidedly not a pretty picture.
My mother felt she had lost her fight if she hadn’t made us both happy. “Wouldn’t you rather be a teacher?” It was her idea of bliss.
My poor father had his hands full, between the two of us. I said, OK, OK. I will become a chemical engineer. I meant it. And yet he might have known he was in danger. Who but a perverse and wayward daughter, out to break your heart, would go straight from a high school sculpture award to a college degree in chemical engineering?
Ah, but at least there would be no more lies! Other Barnard women got on the train in Larchmont, in Pelham and Mount Vernon. They looked so beautiful to me. So fine. How could Columbia boys write “Cattle Crossing” on West 119th Street, where Milbank Hall looked out over the tennis courts?
I almost instantly lost my faith. No, that’s wrong. I almost instantly let myself see it, that last sweet shred of it, in another, more ironic perspective. When I wrote my first essay for Miss Tilton’s freshman English class, it had been supposed to be a paragraph, two at most: “Describe something. Anything,” she had said. “Let it be carefully observed.” I had described