A Glass Slipper Ball
In the photograph I am the one on the right.
The school is in the background.
Mary Lynn is laughing.
My mother is the one holding the camera.
Already my feet challenge unfamiliar leather,
small payment, I know, for what the gym will hold.
“Have fun, girls,” my mother finally lets go.
Mary Lynn and I enter golden oak doors...
Just as I imagined:
streamers and punch bowls,
gym mats and parallel bars dragged from sight,
a band.
Nobody dancing.
We hang in balance between crackers and nuts
and the girls’ room.
I study the patterns on my dress.
Me
ask a boy to dance?
Impossible.
We move from our hidden corner
to a new post where no one sees us,
saving our dances for the cavalier who is not here yet.
Half an hour passes and I don’t know about Mary Lynn but
my Cinderella shoes are no comfort to me.
Suddenly. Who walks out of the tobacco mist
but my mother.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I know
you’re having fun. But I don’t want you
around kids who are smoking.”
She blinks.
Do I explain that the haze was
what kept us buoyed and mysterious?
And that I am old enough
to decide what I want?
No.
She drags me out by an ear,
Mary Lynn in my wake
our mortification thicker than that hazy,
provocative, blue, blue smoke.
In photo: Mary Lynn Rouleau, Patty Mooney & Nancy Steemer;
photo taken at Nancy's house by her mom. This is a different photo from the one described in the poem.
