The Decoy
Pretty white, sweetly scented, suspended bells on the Lily of the Valley along the park path dripped their poison deceptively as sixteen year old Kevin spoke the words I was waiting to hear, "Do you think your parents will let you go to the junior prom with me?"
"Ashes, ashes, they all fall down!" The nearby cackling happy toddlers hadn't heard him, but I did and yelled above them a premature hopeful answer, spilling my "YES" as deep and as wide as the adjacent Allegheny River. Two long months of waiting would ensue, a busy two months for both of us, littered with teenage exploits; sports practices, competitions, homework and mind numbing chores. At fourteen, my mother said, "You are too young to date," but she made an exception and said I could go to the prom with Kevin because it was chaperoned and "Anyway," she shook the salt shaker longer than she should staring me down, "I like his parents." Leading up to my dream night there were tantalizing phone calls, toothsome hall peeks and subsequent slinky occasional walks in the park together, where I clutched at his every word as if he were Shakespere, intoxicated by my own personal interpretation of his seductive soliloquy.
My dress was not hard to find, pink, light pink, almost white, with a matching chiffon shawl that caressed the skin on my back as a temporary prop. Before the long mirror in the dressing room, anticipating his touch, I imagined slipping the shawl off and draping it carefully onto the back of my seat, replaced by his strong caressing arm followed by a tender benign kiss from his lips to my bare shoulder. He would then ask, "Would you like to dance?" Nice and slow, slower than the soft spring breeze, we would dance the night away stealing soft kisses and glances from the others, all of them only wishing they could be us. Love had bitten me so hard, everything I once knew slipped behind the couch and I didn't care to look for my family or my friends; even my favorite books laid dry in collected dust, as I habitually fantasized over my lionized paramour.
When the coveted night arrived he entered my family hallway as royalty, my dashing prince, and I stepped forward like a virgin bride ready to commit in pink. He did say, "You look nice," but seemed to look beyond me as he said so. I assumed he was embarrassed in front of my parents, and with the help of my mother, he successfully pinned the coordinated pink carnation corsage upon my heaving chest, close to my left breast atop my marshmallow heart. It was on the ride over to the prom with him in the back seat of my father's Cadillac that I first noticed it seemed I had lost my place in the book I was writing. Boldly, I reached for his arm and he quickly raised it cupping his hand to his mouth simulating a cough, pulling his body as far away as he could without leaving the vehicle. "Perhaps he's nervous in front of Dad," I thought, while following his lead by staring off towards pedestrians and vegetation, anything other than each other.
After we arrived, he led me to our table, and there I sat, shawled, alone, in my seat, other than when I would get up to look for him, only to see what my eyes pleaded to deny. Patty Paulson. Pretty Patty Paulson, also 16, the girl every 11th grade guy wanted to be with and Kevin, talking, dancing and even slipping away outside, together, I saw them, and when the door closed behind them, a tsunami tore the door off its hinges and flung it across the room crushing me. Had she come alone? Unlikely. Perhaps her date became a bore to her too and she found her next shiny object. When it was time for the meal, Kevin finally came to our table and talked to me and the rest of the sitting students jovially, while my tongue wanted to ask, "How dare you," but couldn't, as if my tongue was a duck stuck in a row bound and tucked in for the night. Was I just his decoy used in the hunt? Dead ducks and cracked egg shells littered the floor.
He didn't sit next to me on the ride home. His friend's father drove us and he jumped into the front seat before he was invited to do so. He said goodnight to me without even turning his head and didn't have to say it was over between us before it began. The why was simple and it started with a "P." I couldn't say her name and couldn't get the vision of them slipping away out of the gymnasium door off of my mind. That scene would haunt me, an open grave on a Halloween night long into my adulthood.
My parents were waiting at the front door when I pushed by them as if they were unwanted stray dogs, "What's wrong," they both asked recognizing the obvious signs of turmoil. "Nothing!" I protested and they would never know, although they must have surmised and decided to let me work through the pain of unrequited love.
It was Elton John I became acquainted with in the days and weeks following the prom. Tumbleweed Connection. 1971. I crawled inside his mind, like a worm down its hole searching for safety, but the darkness Elton must have been feeling when he wrote his words infected me and I drowned with him, zombie-like, somewhere on top of my cold twin bed for too many excruciating minutes multiplying into hours, day after day, losing count and my way, so close and so far away from Elton, farther from Kevin, alone.
"Some leave you counting the stars in the night."