By Terry Squire Stone
She opened the car door and got out as quickly as possible, slamming the door behind her. She didn't want her peers to see that her grandmother had driven her to the dance. A mother or a father wasn't so bad, but a grandmother, how embarrassing. Well, now what? She didn't want to be associated with this lime green Pontiac but neither did she want to enter the high school gym at the end of the parking lot. Freshman dances were bad enough in the first place, but for a new person, alone. . . So she just leaned against the car door and listened to her Grandmother's list of do's and don'ts and where to meets and at what times and. . . .
"Are you listening to me, Margaret?" her grandmother said leaning across the passenger seat, to talk through the open car window.
"Yeah, yeah, I hear ya." Margaret said pushing herself off the car door and plowing ahead toward a night of romance and adventure. Freshmen were coming in out of the dark from all directions. Some, who normally came to school by bus, were dodging the large family type cars driven by parents who were also yelling out pick up times and warnings. Some, who lived within walking distance, were tip-toeing across the grassy parkland, jumping over the low wet spots, trying to keep their dancing shoes dry. The girls looked alot like the seed puffs from Fantasia with their crinoline skirts and white shoes. The boys were either James Dean, Pat Boone, or Mr. Peepers.
She was wearing her old confirmation dress. It was the only thing in presentable condition after being packed in a suitcase for a week. She looked down at the plain yellow dress, no frills, no extras. She just barely filled it in where she thought it needed filling in the most. If height was an asset, she had plenty of that and she had no trouble filling a size 8 shoe. But filling a training bra was not as easy. She was a big girl, just not big in the right places. Big bones, they said.
"They" had defined her. Her mother and her grandmother, her only two relatives on earth. They said she would probably grow up to be a beauty, someday. They said ugly children made beautiful adults, but that's no help at 13. They also said she would be better off if she would just "act natural" as if that would compensate for some other flaw. But when she was natural they said her stride was too long, her freckles inappropriate and her hair just the wrong side of dishwater brown. They said she had a "new chance" in each new school. They said, "Enjoy yourself." 13 is a hellish age to be.
The gym was, well, a gym. The design of gyms is universal. Basketball hoops at both ends of a wooden floor, clocks in wire cages to protect them from errant highflying balls, bleachers up the sides to the very edge of the high ceiling and that strange smell, you remember.
"Are you a freshman here at Azusa?" demanded the adult behind the ticket table. The table had a metal money box on it along with a large roll of green perforated and numbered tickets and a hand lettered sign proclaiming,
"Mid Year Freshman Dance
Friday 7 to 10PM
25 cents Admission."
Another, smaller sign said,
"Basketball practice cancelled,
See Coach Davis."
The woman behind the table looked at Margaret suspiciously, her eyebrows coming together for a conference, dragging baby blue eyeshadow with them. Margaret felt her stomach doing an old familiar dance and hoped she looked enough like a freshman to fool them.
"I'm new this semester," she stammered. It was the truth, but years of experience had blurred the line between truth and lies. She wasn't sure how to make the truth believed. "I have a student body card. Does that count?" She rummaged in her red plastic wallet and produced the shiny card. The woman took the card, compared Margaret to the picture, handed it back and said, "25 cents." Margaret paid the 25 cents for the honor of walking into teenage hell.
The gym lights had been dimmed half way for the occasion, but dancers dancing too close during the "slow ones" could still be spotted and separated like weary prize fighters by the ever present chaperones.
On the boys' side of the dance floor was a long lunch table behind which stood the most powerful freshman in the room. On the table in front of him was the record player and next to that stacks of 45s. This one boy had complete control over the mood of the dance. Kids lined up to beg him to play "My favorite." If he liked you, he did, if not, "Hey, it's my record player, ya know." Margaret didn't have a favorite record anyway.
The facing edge of the gym was the girls' side. That's where the cookies and punch were on another long lunch table. And we wonder why so many girls grow up to have "Issues Around Food."
Margaret obviously (to her) didn't belong on either side, so she stood at the end of the room opposite the entrance, watching. Suddenly she realized she was still clutching her raincoat, umbrella, purse, book and notebook. She always carried a book with her. This one was Moss Hart's autobiography, ACT ONE. It was gay and literate, something she longed to be and made her dream of a life on the Broadway stage with gay and literate after theater parties filled with sharp and talented people. She was already making notes for her own autobiography, hence the notebook.
But now was the time for first love and romance in a high school gym. It might be hard to dance with all the stuff in your arms, so she climbed the bleachers to put her things along side the cozy pile of belongings from the other participants. Purses, jackets, scarves, hats, coats all came together to create one big sleeping patchwork teddy bear. She put her things next to it, as an offering, then balanced down the 5 bleacher steps to join the crowd and make her mark.
By now 50 or 60 freshmen had gathered and true to tradition, divided themselves by sex to the right or left side of the room. The ruler of the record player had been persuaded to play mostly slow ones, since hardly anyone could dance to the fast ones and the two sides were trying to size the other up without being seen looking.
In the dim light figures from the boys side could be seen swaggering across the abyss to ask figures from the female side to dance. Pairs started to form. Sometimes groups of 4 or 5 boys would start to edge towards a group of 4 or 5 girls. The groups would merge, and then pairs would break off from the larger group and they would find themselves together, a pair, and then, oh, what the heck, let's dance.
There was always the risk that the group of females would panic, before the boys could reach them though, and, as a group, bolt for the bathroom, squealing, with their hands over their mouths all the way. Sometimes they would walk; a few giving backward, awkward glances, and sometimes they'd run, knocking down anything in their path.
Margaret stood at the end of the gym watching, now without the protection of the coat, umbrella, etc. She stood her ground and waited. The pairings and unpairings continued, completely ignoring the new kid at the end of the gym. But she stood her ground. They weren't going to intimidate her that easily. The world was full of magic and someone would love her, want her, any minute now. All she had to do was look cool, act like she didn't care, like she was above it all, like a young Grace Kelly but with pimples.
She tried to push aside the fear that they probably all knew the truth about her. That was why they were ignoring her. They knew about all the other schools she'd been in and out of (though through no fault of hers. She had no control over her Mother's whims). They knew she had been laughed off the playground and teased out of the cafeteria. She had never learned the gentle art of friendship. She thought if you were a good person, you had friends. It was something you were born with: goodness and friends, like green eyes and freckles. She didn't know it took time to make friends and friendship needed continuity. Grammar school teachers had sometimes assigned a friend to her when she was new at a new school. "Now Linda, you show Margaret the ropes here at ______ School." These forced friendships never took and now in high school she was on her own and out of her depth. They could probably tell, just by looking at her and there was even a chance they were laughing. But she stood her ground and watched and waited.
She leaned against the cold brick wall and oozed coolness. Time oozed also. The wall felt colder and colder through the yellow fabric on her back. She shifted positions. She slipped out of her tight shoes but slipped them back on when her feet got too cold. She held her hands in front; she held them in back.
"That's o.k. I don't care," she said to herself as she looked up and down the gym. "I don't care." She wasn't going to be picked up till 10:15 PM, two hours to go. Her gaze went up the bleachers to the dark top row. Dark, remote places had always been a favorite of hers and now the call was getting too strong to resist. Her resolve to stick it out was weakening. Her belief in magic was dissolving. Reality was starting to set in. It was going to be the same old story. She slowly sidestepped off the wooden floor and started to climb the seats to the mountain of coats where she found her stuff.
Margaret repossessed her possessions and climbed up even further, into the darkness. No one would see or care about her up there. She made a place for herself on the highest seat, took out a pen from her white plastic purse and started to write in her notebook, "Act One". She would have to write by feel since she could barely see the page in the dim light of the gym. After a while she gave up even trying and felt the frustration pressing her into the darkness.
She was angry now, and disappointed and confused. On one hand she had known what to expect before she had even entered the gym. There were no Prince Charmings who would have asked her to dance and yet on the other hand she was mad at life for not producing him on cue. Why had she even bothered in the first place? Now she was stuck here for another couple of hours. Well at least she had her books, even if she couldn't see the words. She wrapped her arms around her legs and glared at the dancers way down on the dance floor. "Blue Hawaii" was blaring up from the tinny record player. She put her forehead on her knees and felt tears trickle down her legs. Large, warm tears that ran down to her white socks.
"Ah, hey, you wan dance?"
Her head snapped up and she saw a young man, standing two steps below her. He was dressed in jeans and a sweater and had a shy smile on his face. He was talking to her.
"What?"
"Wan dance, huh?" This was for real. He was a real person. He wasn't a product of her imagination. Flesh and blood, he held his hand out to her. "I sorta saw you and thought maybe, you'd kinda want ta dance, maybe. Do ya?"
Oh God, is this a joke? Some kind of a trick. Like when a kid came up to her in class and said, "You've won second place in our beauty contest -- Everyone else tied for first," and they'd laugh themselves silly over the expression on her face. Where was the catch in this one?
He had soft brown eyes and there was no malice in them. She didn't see anybody else around, no audience. Maybe, maybe this was real. O.k., what the heck. . .
"Ah, sure," she said and she took his hand, a real hand that steadied her all the way down the steps, past the table with the record player, to the edge of the dance floor. They were playing a slow one. Other couples were rocking from side to side in classic "slow one" form. She turned to face him; he held her waist with one hand and took her hand with his other, holding it in the down position.
"I'm David," he said, looking over her shoulder.
"Margaret," was her witty reply. After that not another word was spoken until the end of the dance. Margaret was too scared to make small talk and Prince Charmings are known for being strong and very silent.
"Wanna dance the next one?" he asked when the record came to its end. She bobbed her head up and down and they stood there looking at each other and the floor while the next record fell on the player and the needle found the right groove, with a little nudge from the boy in control.
They danced the next dance, also in complete silence. At its end, David smiled, said, "Er, thanks." and left her. She wasn't surprised when he left, that's the way it's done at freshman dances. But she was surprised when someone else came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder, "Ah, wanna?" Another boy was asking her to dance.
"Yeah, sure, sure." she tried not to look too surprised. The ice had been broken. She was in. There really was magic in the world and she had been touched by it. Something, some power, was on her side now and she knew she would never be the same again.
She never talked to David again. In fact, she never even saw him again. He wasn't to be seen at that dance or any other dance and she never saw him in school. He probably never knew the part he had played in her life he had disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared in the first place.
Many years later, Margaret sat on similar bleachers, in another gym, in another city, watching her own son play varsity basketball on the wood floor below. She let her eyes wander up the bleachers on the opposite side, up to the very top row and, holding her husband's hand in hers, she sent thanks to the brown eyed Prince Charming in jeans.
