Her mother walked into the bedroom and said, “Oh, honey, your hair looks awful. What are we going to do about it?”
Beth turned away quickly before the tears showed. Her mirror was not full length. It was a cheap rectangle from the discount store, sitting on top of her bureau, and the bottom was blocked anyway by all her rows of makeup and perfume. Bottles to make her beautiful. Bottles that had not lived up to their promise. And yet Beth Rose loved them all. She loved scents and colors. She made herself look at the mirror and knew that her mother was right. Her hair, which she had tried to fix the way Aunt Madge had, merely looked ridiculous. The braids were fat spikes that stuck out and the shining dark red cap of hair on top was frizzled and askew.
Her mother finished buttoning. “Let’s leave,” she said. “Now do you want me to wait outside the high school for you for fifteen minutes? I think that’s the best thing, Bethie. If you get in there and you simply can’t handle it, and nobody talks to you, you can just slip right out again and get in the car and we’ll drive away and say no more about it. How does that sound?”
It sounded like a nightmare.
But it also sounded possible.
I’ll walk in, thought Beth, and the gym will be perfect, because Kip was in charge. There will be beautiful corners and aisles of plants and clusters of seating arrangements and sparkling things hanging from the ceiling. I’ll move like a stick figure from spot to spot, until I see and touch everything Kip designed and then I’ll be back where I started from. And a few people will look at me pityingly, thinking, Does Beth Rose really think she can pull this off?
Oh, Aunt Madge, how could you do this to me! I really believed you were my fairy godmother, and you could wave your wand and make me beautiful and popular, but of course you aren’t and you can’t.
She didn’t weep, but only because she was used to things going wrong and her mother being negative.
Her father’s voice came bellowing up the stairs. He disliked anything that interrupted his television. “Beth!”
“Yes, Daddy?”
“Your Aunt Madge is here. Come on down.”
Aunt Madge? But she lived a hundred miles away!
Beth ran to the stairs, and the funny thing was, she instinctively knew to lift her skirt from the sides, ever so little, so that she didn’t trip on the hem, and she held it gracefully, because the dress was so lovely it demanded grace. Aunt Madge was standing at the bottom with a heavy-set, middle-aged woman and they were both beaming. “Beth Rose!” cried Aunt Madge, clapping her hands. “I just had to come see how you looked. Didn’t I tell you, Jeannette? Didn’t I tell you she would be beautiful in my old prom dress?”
“You certainly did,” said Jeannette, whoever she was. “And you were right. We got here just in time to fix her hair.”
There were introductions. Jeannette was Aunt Madge’s next door neighbor. This was a lark, they explained—an adventure in their quiet lives. They wanted to see the dress go out the door. “And how often do I get involved in a dance anymore?” added Aunt Madge.
She had Beth’s messy braids out in an instant, and brush and comb flew through the hair so quickly it really felt like a magic wand.
Beth Rose kept laughing.
It was too wonderful. “I wish I’d known you were coming, Aunt Madge,” she said happily.
“I didn’t know myself. A hundred miles is a long way to come. But I’ve been thinking about your dance all day long and I couldn’t bear it. It’s my dress, you know. I went to my prom with Virgil Hopkinson. I worshipped Virgil Hopkinson. So did every girl in town. They were all jealous of me, Beth. I tell you, there’s nothing so wonderful as a dance where every other girl in the ballroom is looking at you.”
“But you didn’t marry Virgil Hopkinson,” said Beth.
“Oh, my, no. He wasn’t worth marrying, darling. He just made a perfect escort. Tall, dark, handsome, and rich.”
“I wonder what your life would be now if you had married him,” said Beth Rose. Her hair was finished. She looked in the hall mirror, and the magical girl was back. The lovely fragile creature with the gleaming hair in her soft, old-fashioned dress, as if her edges had faded like an old photograph album, and she was drifting in from another world.
“Boring,” said Aunt Madge. “Virgil was boring. People who travel on their looks often are. My dear, you are beautiful.”
“And boring?” teased Beth.
“Never! Nobody could be bored with you around. Oooooh, I can’t wait. I know you’re going to have the best time of all,” Madge said.
Her mother said nothing, but her eyebrows said it all. Mrs. Chapman was saying, “The best time? No. She’ll arrive, she’ll sit, and then she’ll leave. That’s the kind of time Bethie will have. That’s the kind of time Bethie always has.”
“Will you be staying for the night, Madge?” said Mrs. Chapman stiffly, giving the unknown Jeannette a false smile of welcome.
“No, no. We’re driving right back. But it wouldn’t be out of our way to drive Beth Rose to the high school,” Aunt Madge said. “Why don’t we do that for you, honey, and that will spare you having to go out alone in this dreadful weather.”
“I’ll still have to wait up for her,” Mrs. Chapman complained.
Aunt Madge said, “A dance like this is worth a few hours of inconvenience.” She looked in disgust at the light jacket Beth Rose was putting on. “A jeans jacket? With a zipper?”
“You make it sound obscene,” said Beth.
“Next to my prom dress, it is.” Aunt Madge frowned. “Don’t you have a wrap? Some lovely wool stole? A felt blazer, even?”
Beth Rose shook her head.
Her mother said, “I do. I have that lace jacket that goes with one of my Sunday dresses.”
Beth Rose almost fell over at the idea of her mother helping out, but Mrs. Chapman ran eagerly to her own closet and came back with a three-quarter-sleeve jacket. It was much too white for the dress; too stark, too obviously modern.
“But better than denim,” said Aunt Madge, and Beth Rose put it on. “Just take it off the moment you’re inside, dear,” said Aunt Madge. “It’ll give you something to do those first few moments, draping the jacket over your arm.”
They went out the basement side door, slipping into the car without getting very wet because of the carport. The wind was fierce enough to throw the rain inside the carport anyhow, but Beth’s dress stayed dry. Her Aunt Madge got into the front passenger seat and Beth slipped in back. Jeannette drove.
The rain came down in sheets, and the wind ripped into it like shears into fabric, slashing through the wetness, hurling it across the car violently. The car shuddered beneath the force of the wind. Trees on the sides of the road bent dangerously close to utility wires and Jeannette’s fingers tightened into white knuckles on the steering wheel.
Beth Rose had no steering wheel to hang onto, but her knuckles were equally white.
They arrived at the high school. Huge overhead parking lot lights penetrated the dark and gloom in overlapping circles. Two cars ahead of them pulled slowly up to the front steps of the old portion of the school, whose pillars and granite towered like monuments to another age. A uniformed doorman materialized from the front doors, and dashed down the wet stairs, holding an enormous umbrella to hold over the couple getting out of some parent’s car.
“How impressive,” Aunt Madge said. “We never had a doorman when I was a girl.”
“We never had a doorman when I was a girl, either,” said Beth Rose. “He must be one of Kip’s brainstorms. Hired for the occasion.”
The first car pulled away. A beautiful couple hunched beneath the umbrella scurried into the building. The doorman returned for the next couple.
Couples, thought Beth Rose. I’m alone. Nobody else will be alone. I can’t do this! I can’t go alone to a formal dance. This is crazy. “I can’t go in, Aunt Madge,” she whispered. Her chin began to tremble. If I cry, she thought, my eyes will turn red and my whole face will get al
l blotchy. I can’t cry.
I’m going to cry.
Aunt Madge turned in her seat. “I love you, Bethie,” she said in a soft voice. Beth Rose kissed the warm cheek. I love you, too, she thought, but she said nothing because she was afraid her voice would break.
I’m going to my execution, Beth Rose thought. A four-hour-long execution. True medieval torture. Witnessed by a paying crowd.
“Remember your dress,” said Aunt Madge. “Remember you’re an A-plus, not a C. Remember that I love you.”
“I’ll remember,” Beth Rose croaked.
The doorman flung her door open and beamed at her. Water glistened on his gold braid decorations. “You look like Cinderella,” said the doorman, smiling like a father or an uncle.
The aunts and uncles love me, thought Beth Rose, but that’s what I have enough of. I need a boy age seventeen to love me!
She wanted to get back into the car, and turned to look once more at Aunt Madge, but her aunt was slumped against the seatbelt, tired by a long trip and a repeat drive ahead.
The doorman waited for a moment, frowning, expecting a boy to get out of the far side and join them. He looked oddly at Beth Rose who fibbed, “I’m meeting him here.”
He believed her. His face cleared, he smiled, he took her arm and led her up seventeen steps to the door. It was like going to a guillotine. He opened the door for her, and went back down the stairs for the next couple. She was alone.
She stood very still.
A parent was standing in the foyer, smiling. Beth Rose gave her a stiff-lipped smile back. “Did your boyfriend go to park the car?” said the mother pleasantly. “Why don’t you just wait here with me and then you can go in together. The photographer is taking pictures at the cafeteria door by the rose arbor, and you don’t want to go in without him,” she explained.
Beth shivered in the thin white inappropriate jacket.
“I came alone,” she said.
The mother stared at her. The astonishment turned to pity. “Oh,” said the mother awkwardly. “Oh, well then.”
Beth Rose thought, I could just go stand in the bathroom for an hour before I call my mother.
Behind her the door opened again.
Anne and Con, the classic couple, walked in laughing.
Roddy MacDonald told his parents nothing, told his friends nothing, and most definitely told his sister nothing. Inside, his stomach churned and his head ached, but outwardly he did the required homework to bring his grades back up, and wrote a thank you and an apology to his grandmother, and washed his father’s car in the hope this would soften his parents’ stand a little. It didn’t. He was still without wheels for six long weeks. Thursday and Friday in school were torture.
People talked about the dance. Mostly the girls talked about it, but the guys mentioned it a little. You knew who was going, who was not. They assumed Roddy was taking Molly.
What was he supposed to say? “No. She had a better offer.”
“No. She dumped me and asked somebody better.”
He just said nothing.
Nobody actually questioned him. A lot of the boys routinely said nothing about their girls, or lack of girls. It was his business. Or it would be till Saturday night, when people would begin arriving at the dance. They’d see Molly with Christopher Vann. And he, Roddy, wouldn’t be there. He’d be home, moping. Feeling sick and inadequate and thin and stupid and. …
Roddy tried not to think how worthless he was.
Saturday, all day long, his thoughts were on the dance. He’d gone with his mother to rent the tux. It was in his closet. Flowers had been ordered the week before that. He was going to have to pay for them, anyway. He worked Monday and Tuesday afternoons and evenings at the gas station. He thought of last week, when it rained and was cold, like tonight. He’d dashed in and out, checking oil, filling gas tanks, scrubbing filthy windshields, earning money for the evening with Molly.
Aaaaaahh. Christopher was going to have some forum in which to show off. All the kids who had been little freshmen and sophomores when he was a big splashy important Number One Senior were juniors and seniors themselves now. Christopher would be swaggering, impressive Ivy League, Molly on his arm. He’d be big man on two campuses that night.
For once, Anne and Con wouldn’t be Couple Number One. Molly and Christopher would give them a run for their money.
His mother called down the hall, “Roddy, dear, shouldn’t you be getting ready for the dance?”
“Okay, Mom,” he said. He went into the bathroom to take a shower as if he really intended to go to the dance.
Outside the sky groaned, thunder splitting his thoughts like the sounds of war. Lightning whipped across the black sky. Roddy pulled the shade down.
Kip isn’t going, he thought. I’ve always liked Kip. It’s her dance and she didn’t get invited to go. I wonder if. …
No.
Impossible.
He turned on the water and held his finger under it to test the temperature. He thought, Right now. Quick. Before I lose the courage. I’ll call Kip.
He wrapped a towel around his waist, went into his room, looked up her phone number, and dialed, all in thirty seconds. His stomach began to hurt as if lightning had struck him and burned through. Acid. He swallowed. He thought, I can’t believe I’m doing this. One hour until the dance and I’m calling a girl up? I’m worse than Molly.
He said, “Hi, Kip? It’s Roddy.”
There was a blank pause.
“Roddy MacDonald,” he said helplessly, knowing that his first name alone had meant nothing to her. Now he really felt sick. He was calling up some girl who didn’t even know him. Didn’t want to know him. If he hadn’t given her his last name he would have hung up. Now he clung to the telephone and struggled to think of an intelligible sentence. None came to mind.
Maybe I should just throw myself down the cellar stairs and be done with it, Roddy thought. He said, “Would you like to go to the dance with me tonight, Kip?”
Kip Elliott lived on the seventh floor of a luxury apartment building high on the city’s only hill, overlooking the entire town. On clear days you could see past the newest housing developments, with their neatly spaced yards and tiny new trees, and on beyond to the last lingering farms and woods. At night from the dining room table they looked out on dancing streetlights and the soft trajectories of headlights.
Tonight the darkening sky throbbed with the fire of an electrical storm.
Fits my mood perfectly, Kip thought. She pushed her pot roast around in the gravy, making little dams with her mashed potatoes. The rest of the family watched her unhappily. Kip was the oldest of five and was supposed to set good examples. Tonight she was a failure. They were all witnesses to it. She could fake things in front of the kids at school, and she would be absent from the scene of her failure tonight whether she liked it or not—but her family Kip could not avoid.
“Now the important thing,” said her thirteen-year-old brother, “is not to think of yourself as a complete zero. I mean, so nobody wanted to ask you to the dance. It’s only a dance. It’s not that big a thing.”
“Thank you, George,” said Kip. “I feel a hundred times better now.”
“How come you just don’t go, anyway?” piped her ten-year-old brother. “Don’t you want to see the dance with everybody there dancing?”
All her brothers had helped with the decorations. They’d built the rose arbor under which the couples’ photographs would be taken; they’d hauled in the barrels, and the bales of hay, and the bushels of apples, and the piles of pumpkins that were some of the props for her Autumn Leaves Dance.
“Why would I want to see that?” snapped Kip.
“Well, you did chair the whole dance,” said the ten-year-old, as if she might have forgotten. “You did work for a whole month getting the cafeteria ready to be a ballroom. And we worked on it, too.” His whole face lit up. He looked angelic when he was excited. “I know, Kippie!” he cried. “You and I will go! Then
we both get to see how it looks in the dark with people there!”
“Get lost,” said Kip.
“Really, Katharine,” said her mother sternly. “Don’t yell at your brothers just because you are having a difficult time. They have done their very best for you.”
Kip said nothing. She cleared her place and took temporary refuge in the kitchen, where there were no brothers lurking. At least she could be sure nobody would come in the kitchen without being forced; they were a family that loved cooking and hated cleaning up.
She scraped her plate into the garbage disposal. Every other girl in Westerly is getting ready for my dance, she thought. They’re not doing dishes. They’re putting on new eye shadow. Fixing their hair. Getting ready for the best night of their lives.
So I chaired the dance. Big deal. I can decorate. I can locate a good band. I can hire the off-duty policemen and round up chaperones and sell tickets and get door prizes donated and rent a spiffy uniform for a hired doorman.
I can’t attract a boy.
What’s the matter with me?
How can I have so many friends in school and be so happy all day long and never have a boy really like me?
Her life had fallen into a pattern that made her want to scream or weep. When the sun was out, her life was filled with laughter and talk and school and friends and activities. At home she had four brothers and ate supper and did her homework, and she didn’t mind any of that.
But about eight-thirty, every single night, she finished her homework. And wondered if maybe tonight the phone would ring.
Monday. Good time for a boy to call just to talk.
Tuesday. Perfect night to call to ask her out for Saturday.
Wednesday. Still time.
And of course by Thursday night, as she lay awake, long, long after eight-thirty, she had to acknowledge that yet another week had passed, and she, Kip Elliott, was still not good enough to enter a boy’s mind when he wanted a girl to go out with him.
Every single girl she knew well had a date for the dance. Sure, some of the dates were duds—but at least somebody wanted to be with them. Not even the duds wanted to be with Kip.