Almost Cinderella by Claudine Mussuto

In my mind, I walked in bare feet on a narrow, yellowed, dry-grass path, not stilettos or Merrell’s, Asic’s or glass slippers. Posturing and protection seemed incompatible with the advancing disclosures.

Left and right there were walls of water like the falls in certain hotel lobbies and shopping malls, but seemingly static, not flowing, like glacial ice, the same layered turquoise and white, and mirrored, warped, the way shame distorts what isn’t love into something recognizable and consequently accepted.  There was enough width for my shoulders plus an inch or two on either side.

This was not to be memory lane or cathartic therapy, not raw confession or past life recall.  My desire was to look plainly at one failure at being wanted by another, understand something about my inability to belong, to see if it mattered, if I cared, and not because death was imminent, though it might be, but because it had become more uncomfortable not to look than to pretend.

I wasn’t wearing much: a white V-neck men’s undershirt, large, maybe extra, probably Fruit of the Loom, what I wear to bed to overlay the heft of my breasts and solid roundness of my belly and hips, and ribbed black Hanes bikinis, which I don’t.  My toenails were painted Just Bitten red post pedicure.

I extended and plunged my left arm with the swipe of a windshield wiper and extracted Scott from the pellucid wet: a small surprise, a place to begin, a probable synthesis.

Forty years after our last encounter, he was no longer the chief of police in the town we grew up in (ostensibly the same; he had lived in a more affluent district with a superior elementary school) but staff in the reference department of the public library and wore a hearing aid.  I wondered if the reverberations of shot bullets had ruined his eardrums but didn’t ask.

He said he knew me.  I was scanning paintings onto a thumb drive in a short skirt and black wool Peter Pan boots threaded with glittery silver, my shapely calves and muscled thighs acknowledged if unimportant assets, to upload to my website and asked, feeling snarky, who the hell he was.

When he said his name, I recalled eighth grade walks to the original town library on the same cliffside plot.  There was a final, year-end project for AP English.  Scott carried my books and boys hooted from passing buses but not with vulgarities; Tom among them, the prince to my almost Cinderella in the fifth-grade musical who later, in high school, wore his thick dark hair well beyond his shoulders, excelled at Frisbee, and conversed easily and well with the languages of calculus and computer science.

There were two Cinderellas cast for the play, one black, one white, and a black music director who gave the black Cinderella the two parent performances and assigned me the two student shows.  I protested at the commencement of the civil rights movement about which I had no understanding then, or context in our neighborhood of the poor working class in black, brown, and white skins.  I was punished for my audacity, became ill and unable to perform, and forced by obsequious parents to apologize for the injustice perpetrated upon me.  I still recall the song sung by the fairies, who we were, black and white, when not Cinderella alone by the fire sitting and weeping, can still sing the lyrics in my clear and unfaltering second soprano.  There have been fairies since, some angels, and they have decidedly wrought gifts of wondrous magic.

I was the tenacious, usually welcome, curious sort, highly anxious, unaware of the source of my unrelenting fear that taking a misstep, being incorrect would lead to rejection and abandonment, and perplexed by deceit and meanness, always the unintended teachers’ favored; the perpetual naive good girl, closer to thoughtful and innocent.  A sense of unreality continually flitted at the edges of my being.

In that last year of junior high, there was the movie with Scott in a print polyester blouse, the rattling worry about underarm smells, and beige slacks, a date; his father picked up and dropped off and returned, my own would not have, and the early scene of smashed balls in the film Young Frankenstein that confused, then startled, then embarrassed me.  Scott’s arm was around my shoulders: me, not sure why, what it meant, whether it should lead to something.  I hadn’t been taught about what boys did with girls and was unconscious about what I was learning, had already learned from adult men.

In that same eighth-grade year, there was a sock hop at the girls’ Catholic high school, me in pigtails before I chopped them off, a poodle skirt, and white anklets along with two or three others, me acutely aware that everyone else wore street clothes, Scott unfazed by my outfit.  We danced on a crowded floor.  My bound hair bounced and flew.

There was a party, too, with Scott and his best friend in the den of my best friend’s house, her single math teacher mother of three a strict and stringent Baptist with a pronounced underbite she clamped down on with a sigh and pained eyes when she disapproved, often, me in too-loose, red- and white-checked seersucker pants I sewed.

I lost fifteen pounds that year as a project for Health.  I remember small red boxes of SunMaid raisins with a tallied number of saltines I ate for lunch; the raisins poised on the cracker edges for salty-sweet.  I remained baldly estranged from my physical form.

Adrienne was less successful with that same project, but her mother bought her training bras, which is how I learned about them.  Her older brother was damp and doughy with unwashed hair, had to be told when to bathe; someone to watch, track, and skirt. 

I was my father’s father’s sex toy then, had already been for a handful of years, though wouldn’t remember for twenty-five more.  I spent that summer before high school in Paris and Brittany with my mother’s family.  In the fall, Scott attended the boys’ Catholic high school in a different, somewhat removed town, and I never saw him again.

Until we were twenty-one, maybe twenty or two, soon after I rejected and relinquished Catholicism, and, in a peculiar simultaneity, had just heard from long-ago Adrienne that she was marrying a dubious prince she’d met in a traffic accident, and I was beneath Scott on his parents’ couch while they were away, his boozy mouth on my neck, my inquiry into his best-liked body part to distract him from possibly unwaxed or untweezed facial hair, and another encounter with foreign customs.

We’d gone to dinner.  I wore a fuchsia dress that I’d made at a time when I still wore bright colors with a cinched navy faux-leather belt and Mary Jane heels with a strap, appropriate for the restaurant he’d selected.  He suggested I change into jeans for our next stop, a bar, as if the switched costume would alter who I was, like an actor with more than one role in the same play.  He may have driven away from my parents’ house while I complied, then returned.  It was awkward and baffling.  I don’t recall his answer, but do recall that he didn’t call again, and still see his mocking stare through his rearview mirror some days later when I found myself behind him in my pea-green Vega.

I assumed that I’d been in some way inapt and therefore undesirable.  I understood later that everything post-dinner was for the purpose of eventual sex, which we did not have.  My mind had not traveled there.  I was, perversely, still interested in talking.  The conversation may have been interesting or just something I do well and enjoy.  I might have said yes if he’d asked, if I hadn’t been left to guess, which I avoid; I never initiate.

At the library, shortly after his name, Scott said he’d spent high school and college sporting, lacrosse I think it was, and drinking, conventions that don’t hold my attention.  By then, now sixty, I had evolved my own customs: simplicity, courage, and integrity.  I found the inner circle, where I always landed, duplicitous, and not a place to stay.  I peered in and around from the periphery and made my own decisions about conduct.

Scott had become bulky, not fat, but fuller than he probably wanted to be, no longer the lithe athlete who pranced across playing fields, but a settled, outwardly secure man.  He was long-time married to a woman who quilted, a crafter to my artist, and had two sons, one a teacher, the other, about whom Scott was obviously more charmed, in forestry service.  Parents always have favorites.

I didn’t tell him I’d pursued sexual submission with black men since my late teens, that I was about to embark on a live-in exploration of it, still not reconciled to my own agency and considerable power, though I would be by the ravishing end of that experiment.

I didn’t tell him that I was in town for the final affiliation with my cold and cruel mother, who adored him.  Scott had studied history and gave talks about fish and fishing, lighthouses, and the Hudson River.  When he was on the St. Augustine Roman Catholic Church Senior Group’s activity schedule, my mother made an extra urn of coffee and additional loaves of banana bread; he was that popular among the devote aged.

At our reencounter, I didn’t say that my life until I was forty-two had been a hallucination, that my naiveté, but not my innocence, had been ruthlessly destroyed then, or that from its debris my creativity blossomed and burgeoned.  I felt relief that our acquaintance had not continued, and an ugly superiority that I had not become entrenched in a standard life of marriage with children and religion, that I continued to venture, that I surrendered the past for the future and saw little point in history’s unthinking repetitions.

At a subsequent visit to the library, I offered Scott a small painted anglerfish with its modified dorsal fin ray like a quail’s topknot that acts as a lure for prey, an outward expression of who I became, a female person, an individual about whom I no longer make apologies or concessions, and choose not to share with others indiscriminately.

Claudine Mussuto

Artist page

Image: Gender symbols in black on a white background. From pixabay.com