What I Saw and How I Lied

  Then, just when I was sure he’d have to give up, he turned down a side street and we saw it. A hotel with a light on. And it was pink. Pink as cotton candy.

  “Le Mirage,” I said, reading the sign.

  “Well, it does feel like we crossed a burning desert,” Mom said.

  Joe drove down a circular driveway that ended under a porch. “Look at this fancy drive, just made for a Cadillac.”

  “Too bad we’re driving a Ford,” Mom said. But she said it in a funny way, and we all laughed again.

  A skinny boy in a red jacket and black pants suddenly came running out to open our doors before we could. “Welcome to the Le Mirage Hotel,” he said as Joe got out of the car and stretched his back. The boy held out his hand. “Your keys, sir. I’ll get your bags.”

  Mom and I linked arms and caught our breath when we walked into the lobby. It was almost cool inside the tiled space. It looked like a castle, only smaller. There was carved wood everywhere, and whenever they could add gilt, there was gilt.

  “It’s like Radio City,” Mom said, hugging my arm.

  “There’s a painting on the ceiling,” I said, tilting my head back.

  A tall man and woman strolled across the lobby toward the dining room. The man touched the small of the woman’s back as she walked. She wore a pink dress with a deep neckline and a black sequined cardigan draped over her tanned shoulders, fastened with a brooch. Her black hair was long, past her shoulders, and straight. It was pinned to one side with a clip that looked like a spray of diamonds but were probably rhinestones. She wasn’t beautiful—Mom had her beat by a mile—but she was the kind of woman who made heads turn.

  “Now there’s an attractive couple,” Mom said in the voice she used when she approved of something, like Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun or Butter Rum Life Savers. “I wonder where they’re from.”

  “Jersey City by way of Kalamazoo,” Joe said, which is a joke he makes if he means “nowhere and everywhere.” But you could tell he was happy that a little shot of glamour had turned everything around.

  We wanted the whole hotel to be as good as the lobby, and it almost was. We liked the white tablecloths and the clean towels, as many as we wanted. I had my first grapefruit, smothered in sugar. We learned that the bright flowers were bougainvillea and how to plan around a thunderstorm every day at four. We had never seen rain like that, pounding so hard it seemed to jump off the sidewalks straight back into the sky. We liked the breeze off the ocean at night, and the tiny green lizards, and the smell of night-blooming jasmine. We all got the giggles just hearing Joe say “I’ll charge it to our suite.”

  It didn’t take Mom long to realize that we were too dumb to know what everybody else knew—nobody came to Palm Beach in the fall. There were so few guests in the hotel that Mom and I were able to nickname them all, like Nice Fat Man and Mean Fat Man, Honeymoon Wife and Honeymoon Husband, Crabby Couple. We called the glamorous couple we’d seen when we checked in The Swanks.

  The rest of the hotels didn’t even open until December. All of the stores on Worth Avenue, Palm Beach’s main drag, were closed. The Paramount Theatre was closed. We had landed in a ghost town.

  The desk clerk told us about things to do—tennis lessons, boats we could rent—but we never got to them. We started to notice the worn upholstery on the sofas and the stains on the carpets. The hotel had been closed during the war, and nobody had bothered to fix it up.

  Mom finally met the swanky couple by asking for a light. Their names were Tom and Arlene Grayson. She’d once worked for Hattie Carnegie, the dress designer. He owned a “small hotel” in New York. That did it for Mom. The Swanks became The Graysons, and Mom and Joe started staying up late to play bridge with them.

  I started eating dinner early in my room, sandwiches and potato chips. I’d eat in my damp bathing suit to stay cool, sitting on the carpet. Then I roamed around. I got to know how a hotel worked. I saw the closets that the maids disappeared into to fill carts top-heavy with towels and stinky with soaps. I saw the bored clerk at the desk sneaking looks at a girlie magazine. I saw the valets sitting on the white stone wall, smoking cigarettes. I peeked into the lounge with the stuffed sailfish where Mean Fat Man sat drinking alone every night. I walked the halls and played hopscotch with a penny for a potsy, hopping from rose to rose on the carpet. I didn’t have to worry about being childish. There was nobody around to get embarrassed in front of.

  It’s crazy how you can go from not being bored to being bored out of your mind in about the time it takes to tie your shoes. I started to wonder about school and Margie and Jeff and when we’d be going home. I missed lying on my bed, listening to Sinatra on the record player. I was tired of being hot.

  And then one night everything changed.

  Chapter 6

  I heard the laughter first.

  I crept to the window and looked out, still chewing on my chicken sandwich. The usually empty drive was filled with girls getting out of their daddy’s cars, squealing and running to catch up with other girls who were posing on the steps while boys in white jackets stood close by, looking at them but not talking, not yet. Girls, peering into compacts, lying to each other about how pretty the other one looked. Girls in petticoats and stockings, hair brushed one hundred strokes, perfume from the bottle they got for Christmas. Girls laughing at nothing. Girls going to a dance.

  They wore corsages and were dressed in foamy dresses with skirts that fanned all the way down to their ankles. During the war, skirts were shorter because we had to save material for Our Men in Uniform, but now that the war was over everything was bigger. Cars, buildings, skirts.

  The perfume! I could almost smell it from the window. Jungle Gardenia and Evening in Paris. I hummed with all the wanting I had inside. I wanted to be those girls. I wanted to be blond like my mother. I wanted to have a dress with a full skirt.

  I looked at them and I wondered: What would it be like to come as a stranger to a dance like that? At home, I would be one of the wallflowers, one of the ones a teacher would muscle a boy to ask to dance. Here, I could be anybody. Here, I didn’t have to be me.

  I opened my closet door.

  Gloom. What I needed was tulle and net and petticoats and shoes dyed to match my dress. I had cotton dresses and white anklets and saddle shoes.

  What I needed, of course, was a fairy godmother. But I wasn’t Cinderella.

  I didn’t even have to touch my hair to know what a mess it was. I hadn’t washed it after swimming in the ocean that day. It was thick and wiry with salt, not glossy and groomed the way it should have been, like the bouncing pageboys out the window.

  I wandered into Mom and Joe’s room through the connecting door. Mom had gotten dressed in a hurry and had left her compact behind, open on the mirrored vanity. A dress was flung on the bed, something she’d rejected. High-heeled sandals were kicked off underneath it. A towel stained with powder was draped over a chair; bobby pins were flung like jacks on the dresser.

  I opened the closet. Shoes kicked off and left on the floor all crazy, nylons in a little silky ball. A woman’s closet. Not like mine, which smelled of salt water and perspiration.

  Her perfume rose from the dresses and the beachwear. I passed my hand along the dresses. Lots of them were new; Joe had followed through on his promise to buy her clothes. I pretended to hesitate, but there was only one dress I really wanted.

  It was spring-green silk with violet flowers scattered on it, and if that combination sounded ugly, it wasn’t. The funny thing was, I didn’t think it looked so swell on Mom. The pale green color didn’t suit her. I liked the deep V of the bodice and the pleated sash. It would fit me, I knew it. But I needed one of her bras, and tissues to stuff inside. Plenty of tissues.

  I flung the dress on the bed alongside the other one. I felt greedy as I pulled out a lace brassiere that stood up at attention in the drawer. I didn’t look in the mirror while I slipped my arms through the straps and stuffed it until there was no gap between the mat
erial and my skin. Then I slipped into the crinoline petticoat, all stiff and crackling with purpose.

  I was just adjusting the tissue in the bra when the door opened and my mother and Mrs. Grayson walked in. I had my hand right in the cup.

  Mrs. Grayson’s eyebrows arched over her dark eyes like blackbird wings. My mother had a cigarette in her hand with a long ash. I watched as it dropped to the carpet.

  We all froze, like we’d been flung into our poses like a game of statues.

  Then they laughed.

  Mrs. Grayson put a fist to her mouth, but her laugh came out like a little yelp. They leaned against each other and giggled like girls.

  I looked in the mirror. My hair was frizzy. My arms were skinny and I was too tall. I looked like a dog on its hind legs. I felt tears spurt into my eyes, and my humiliation was complete.

  “No, no,” Arlene Grayson said. “We’re not laughing at you, petal. We were just surprised, that’s all.” She clicked over to me on her high heels. “You look pretty. You just need a few…touches.”

  I smelled their cocktails and their hair spray and their confidence in their own allure. “She’s in such a hurry,” Mom murmured to Mrs. Grayson.

  “Weren’t you?” Mrs. Grayson asked. “I was. We need to fix her hair, Bev.” She was all cool and soft, like iced sweet butter. She tucked my hair behind my ears. “We should wet it down.”

  My mother looked at the green dress I’d flung on the bed. “I know one thing. She doesn’t need a girdle like I do for that dress.”

  “Look at that waist,” Mrs. Grayson said. She placed her hands around my waist. “Those were the days. Come on, Bev, let’s fix her up.”

  Mom hesitated, but I knew she wouldn’t refuse Mrs. Grayson. They pulled me forward, digging for lipsticks and combs. I felt part of a conspiracy, a conspiracy I’d always watched from the sidelines, girls pulling their friends into powder rooms, or pinning broken bra straps.

  They dragged me to the sink and mercilessly ran a wet comb through my tangles, laughing at the faces I made. They put setting lotion on it and pushed it one way, then the other. Mom fussed over me with lipstick and powder while I felt my hair being tugged into a French twist. My back was to the mirror so I couldn’t see what she was doing, only the line between her eyebrows as she concentrated.

  “Don’t look yet,” Mrs. Grayson warned me. The amusement in her voice was gone now. She was taking the job seriously. Hope made bubbles in my chest. If anyone could make me pretty, I thought, it was Mrs. Grayson. Mom had always put the kibosh on my attempts to be pretty. She said I had plenty of time. Mrs. Grayson seemed to understand that I didn’t.

  Mom cradled the dress in her arms like a newborn and carefully pulled it over my hair. She did the hooks in back. Then she pulled down the skirt in a professional way. Mrs. Grayson brought over a pair of high-heeled white sandals. I slipped into them and wobbled.

  “Keep your head up,” Mrs. Grayson ordered. “Don’t look at your feet. Straighten your spine!”

  I straightened my back and lifted my chin.

  “Good,” they said together.

  “Now look,” my mother instructed.

  I looked in the mirror. I expected to see a version of my mom. Somehow I’d hoped that the dress would look better on me than on her. It didn’t.

  “Smile,” Mrs. Grayson said, and I smiled. “There. You’re beautiful.”

  She said it seriously. Not like Joe did—and I realized at that moment that when Joe said I was beautiful, he always lumped me in with Mom, as though I was the giveaway and she was the real prize. Sure you’re beautiful, kid—look where you came from!

  In the mirror, I exchanged a glance with Mrs. Grayson. I was surprised to see sadness there.

  She leaned over to speak in my ear. “This is your time, Evelyn. Grab it.”

  Just one dance. Just one. That’s all I wanted.

  I know now how you can take one step and you can’t stop yourself from taking another. I know now what it means to want. I know it can get you to a place where there’s no way out. I know now that there’s no such thing as just one. But I didn’t know it then.

  “Come on,” Mrs. Grayson said. “Before you turn into a pumpkin.”

  They spun me around and pushed me out the door, wobbling like a top winding down. Now I had no choice. I went.

  Chapter 7

  Luckily the band was playing, and mostly everyone was dancing. I walked straight to the punch bowl and poured myself something red in a crystal cup. I did it slowly, hoping that some boy would come over and offer to pour for me. No one did.

  I stood with my back to the gold brocade curtains and watched, sipping the sweet warm punch, afraid to spill on Mom’s dress.

  I figured out pretty quick that everyone in the ballroom knew each other. I overheard conversations and realized that they were all seniors in the local high school across the water, in West Palm Beach. This was the first dance of the year.

  If I were pretty, a doll, a dish, maybe some of the boys would have gotten up the nerve to come and introduce themselves. But I saw their glances slide off me, like ugly was Vaseline, and I was coated with it.

  I felt like I was disappearing. I clutched the punch glass, empty now. I couldn’t seem to move to put it back on the table. If I moved a muscle, someone would notice me. The best I could do now was hope to stay invisible and then sneak out.

  Then the worst thing happened. A boy noticed me.

  He was the most unattractive boy in the room, a dogface, a Poindexter, the one who hadn’t asked any girl to dance, because he knew that no girl wanted him to. But I was a stranger, so he figured, why not?

  I realized that there was something worse than not being asked to dance. It was being asked to dance by the wrong boy.

  He pushed himself off the wall as the band swung into “In the Mood” and the swirl of dresses took over the dance floor. I was trapped, caught between the dancers and the punch bowl.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he said. “Which makes us even. Because it took me until now to recognize you. Swell dress.” He waited another second, then said, “I’m a bellhop here. And I park the cars.”

  “Did you sneak in, too?”

  “I go to the high school,” he said. “You’re the sneaker. Maybe I should call the manager.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious. But a Florida kid wasn’t going to get away with that with me. “Go ahead,” I said. “Let’s see what happens. Maybe it will liven up this lousy party.”

  He grinned at me. “I’m Wally.”

  “Evie.”

  “Yeah, I know. We know all the names of the guests. Not hard, since there’s hardly any. You should see this place in December.”

  “So I hear.”

  “So what do you say? Do you want to dance?”

  He was so far away from my dream of what this night could be. I saw three pimples on his chin, and how the comb marks were still in his hair. One of the prettier girls looked over and whispered to the boy she was dancing with. She giggled.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I…don’t want to dance. I have to go, anyway. See you around!”

  I had to get out, and fast. I turned and put down my punch glass and then pushed at the French doors behind me. I felt the breeze on my face. The air was like water I could dive into and swim away in.

  The pool looked so impossibly blue with the lights on—a blue I had never seen before in my life, not in the sky or the ocean or a dress. It was the cleanest blue I could imagine. I felt calmer just looking at it, and at the way the lights under the water made the shadows of the palms waver.

  I felt a chair at the back of my knees, and I sat, petticoat crackling. I wanted to rip the whole dress off and tear my hair out of the hundreds of bobby pins Mrs. Grayson had stuck in my head (my scalp, I’m sure, was dotted with red pricks from each individual pin). Suddenly I was furious at them, at Mom and Mrs. Grayson, for dressing me up, knowing how stupid I looked, and launching me at that party lik
e a battleship.

  I took off one of the high-heeled sandals, the white sandals my mother prized, and threw it into the pool.

  That’s when I noticed him. He was on the other side of the pool, dressed in a white shirt and khaki pants. He had lowered the chair until it was flat, and he was lying back on it, face to the night sky, smoking a cigarette. He raised himself on his elbows and looked into the pool like he owned it.

  “Well?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. Was he going to report me to the manager, a man who smelled like Vitalis and only smiled at the rich guests?

  “Aren’t you going to let the other shoe drop?”

  I took off the other one and threw it in.

  “My kind of woman,” he said.

  Woman. From across the pool, in this dress, did I look like a woman? If I could just manage to beat it out of here, victory would be mine.

  But then there were the shoes. I could maybe think of a reason they were soaked. (What? A waiter spilling a pitcher of ice water? A toilet overflow?) But I couldn’t come up with a reason for them to be lost.

  He stood up and started toward me. It took him a while to get to me because he had to walk around all the chairs and the deep end of the pool. I had plenty of chances to run, but I didn’t. There was something that made me stay. I was afraid to be rude, I guess.

  I’d always been such a good girl.

  He sat on the end of the chaise next to me. He didn’t look at me, but looked at the pool. “I’m more used to taking orders than giving them, but you do know, don’t you, that it’s a crime to be sad under a full moon.”

  But you do know, don’t you…You could hear the commas in his sentences. Nobody in Queens talked like that.

  My feet dangled off the side of the chair. It was the only part of me he could see. I was embarrassed by my sunburned toes.

  “I assume that you’re a refugee from the dance inside.”

  “I escaped the enemy, captain,” I said.

  I could see the side of his face, and his smile. “Ah,” he said. “At long last, a promotion.”