Chapter Five #2
“I wore off-white tea-length chiffon,” Maisie sighed dreamily.
“Me too!” I said. It must have been in, like Lola’s slips. Which also meant we must have been about the same age. Was it impolite to ask what year Maisie graduated and where? Was it strange or heartening that even here, even now, where you’d lived and when still seemed to matter?
“I forget the dress,” Dot said, “but I seem to recall gloves to my elbows.”
I remembered my mother advocating for elbow-length gloves, first for my prom, then for my wedding, but they’d seemed so old-fashioned to me, not least because they were my mother’s.
Dot was maybe a little bit older than Maisie and me, but she wasn’t old enough to be my mother, so maybe I’d been wrong about the gloves.
The song ended, and Moth bowed to his partner.
His next was so small he seemed not to notice she kept stepping on his toes.
When that song ended, he walked her to the snack table, then escorted her back to her seat on his arm, two mini cupcakes and a glass of punch impressively balanced on his other hand.
He made sure she was settled, then mamboed back to us.
“We were just comparing hairdos and outfits from our proms,” Maisie said, folding him back into the conversation like whipped egg whites.
“We don’t have prom in England,” Moth reported. “At least we didn’t when I was a lad. Our proms are walkways along the seashore.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” Maisie said.
“A ball, maybe?” I asked. “In someone’s drawing room?”
He bit his lower lip to keep from smiling, which didn’t work. “Do you imagine I graduated from secondary school with Jane Austen?”
“Vividly,” I sighed.
A new song came on, and Dot said to Maisie, “We better dance. While we still can.”
I wondered whether she meant while the night was young or while they were, relatively speaking.
Maisie got up at once and brushed cupcake crumbs from her hands. “We’re dancing. You”—she nodded at me, then Moth—“take him.”
Who was I to argue? We followed them out to the dance floor, where Maisie leaned into Dot, and I tried not to feel silly.
The verb we used to use for what happened next was “gather.” He gathered me into his arms, held my right hand in his against his chest, pressed his other into the small of my back.
It felt just like I remembered but as if from another life, more déjà vu than memory.
The lights spun in the darkness like stars, which I supposed was the point only I’d never noticed before, and the song was slow and sweet and old.
Like us. We danced closer together than strictly necessary, closer than seemed polite even.
From this vantage, the spots on his bow tie clarified into tiny beakers and test tubes.
So I wouldn’t see Roger seeing me, I pressed my face next to our clasped hands against Moth’s chest and closed my eyes.
But then he was talking, so I drew back to look up at him.
“I feel like the belle of the ball,” he said.
“Do you?”
“Everyone’s watching us.”
I surveyed the room and found this was true. “They think you’re easy because you’ll dance with anyone.”
“I will! Life is short. Dance with whomever you can, I say.”
“You cad.”
“It took me some time after I came to this country to understand proms. The first one I chaperoned, I broke up a fight between two lads, one of whom had apparently danced suggestively with the other’s date.
So I explained that from an evolutionary standpoint it made sense for young people to mate widely, and perhaps they could share.
They laughed so hard they forgot about punching each other. ”
“Who got the girl?”
“I’m guessing neither, because later that evening I found them snogging each other under the bleachers.”
“What happens under the bleachers is always more momentous than what happens on the dance floor.” I too had chaperoned my fair share of proms over the years.
“Just like the after-party is always better than the event itself. Someone lives near enough to school that everyone can walk over, even in heels. Someone’s parents aren’t home. No rules. No supervision.”
“Speaking of,” Moth said, but didn’t finish. I waited. He cocked his head, slightly sheepish but only slightly. He put on an impeccable accent, American and young. “I live, like, really nearby. And my parents definitely aren’t home.”
“Rules or chaperones?” I asked.
He returned to the Queen’s English. “Not a one.”
So we left the prom.
His apartment looked just like mine but more lived-in because I wasn’t quite unpacked yet.
The first thing he said was “So Sarge, where were we?”
Where, however, seemed a less pertinent question than when.
I was starkly in the present in the way yoga teachers are always advising, but I’d also spent much of this evening in 1964.
Where was odd too, though, at once familiar—my exact same floor plan—and also not at all.
I was home alone with a strange boy for the first time in decades. Half a dozen decades.
He held up his arms so we could resume dancing without all the eyes on us.
There was no music, but, to my surprise, music turned out not to be requisite.
We were slow dancing silently for a little while, and then, slowly, we weren’t anymore, and then, unbelievably—really, frankly, gobsmackingly—he tilted my chin up and my mouth toward his and held both sides of my face in his hands. And kissed me.
I felt like it had been a long time since anyone had, but that’s true of a lot of things these days.
I felt like I did not remember how, but then I did after all.
I felt like I did not remember it could feel like this.
We kissed for a long time, but that’s as far as it went. We were the wrong sort of seniors, after all.