The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Fifteen: Prom Night

After the whole disaster at lunch, Donna didn’t talk to me for a while. I presumed that she hated me, if only because I had played a part in her embarrassment. Not that she had heard me making fun of her or anything—I had been very careful to wait until she was out of earshot—but it was still at least half my fault, and more if you considered they were my friends.

I had a prom ticket, though, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I tried to sell it for half of face value, but no one took me up on it because everyone who was going already had a ticket of their own. Then, tickets went off sale, and I tried to scalp it for double the face value to some poor schmuck who had missed the deadline, but I didn’t have any luck there either. So I framed it and put it up on my wall, as a kind of memento of something. I figured it would pick up some kind of meaning for me someday.

The day before prom, I got a phone call. It was from Donna and she was asking me what time I was going to pick her up.

“What?”

“What time are you going to pick me up tomorrow? For prom?”

I felt sick. I should mention that I was more excited about missing prom than I had been about anything else in months. Years, even. The great seriousness and importance of the whole spectacle, as if it were some kind of milestone that signified adulthood or at least an abandonment of childhood or something like that—this I didn’t need. It was supposed to be so much more important than any other social thing I had ever done in my life, it was monstrous. It was a kind of social monster, like a social Godzilla stomping all what had so far constituted my entire psyche. I was a little afraid of it. All that and there was a really cool looking documentary on the History Channel that night and I really wanted to see it.

But I also thought that the social scarring that would accompany even the worst prom experience would still be better than whatever would be waiting for me if I said no to this girl right now. So I thought fast on my feet and said, “Well prom starts at 8, right? So how about 7:30?”

She laughed, and I was so annoyed I almost threw down the phone right then. I was going, wasn’t I? That wasn’t enough sacrifice? Now I had to be mocked for it too? “I was thinking more like two,” she said. And then I almost threw down the phone right then again.

“Why so early?” I was really keeping my cool. I hated myself.

“Well my family wants to take pictures.”

“Pictures?”

“A lot of pictures. And then I assume your family wants to take pictures, and then we’re going to go to Jenny’s house,” Jenny being a friend of Donna’s, “and take more pictures there, and then—”

I hung up the phone (when I picked her up the next afternoon, I would tell her it was a bad connection and she would believe me). The first thing I did is I freaked out and I hurled the first thing available (the phone) against the wall. I picked up the next thing available (the remote) and tried to throw it against the wall too, but I let go a little early and it went sailing out the window somewhere into the back yard, where no one ever found it. I kept my mouth shut and eventually, we had to buy a new TV, but my dad bought a worse one than the one we had, just to teach whomever had lost the remote a lesson.

But the point is, I was panicking because now I had to go to prom and I wasn’t prepared. I realized that I didn’t even have a tuxedo. I rushed upstairs and told my mom I was going to prom after all (she was thrilled, for some reason) and asked her if we had any formalwear in the house. She said only her wedding dress (always cracking jokes at my expense, my family), so I got in the car and drove to a payphone to call a tuxedo rental place. I could have called from the house, of course, but I don’t think I realized what I was doing until I was already in the car, flying down the driveway.

I tried three tux rental places, and all of them were all sold out in my size. I drove to a fourth because no one answered their phone, and they were also cleared out. No one was renting tuxes the day before prom, of course, and I was out of luck. I tried to think of something I could throw together at home—maybe just a nice shirt, a tie and some cargo pants. Then, across the street from the place I had just come out of was a costume shop. I figured it was worth a shot.

I went in and hit the little bell and asked the guy behind the counter if he had any kind of tuxedo I could rent.

“You want a tuxedo, or a tuxedo costume?”

“What’s the difference?”

“There are subtle differences. I don’t have tuxedos, but I do have tuxedo costumes.” I realized that I wasn’t in any position to make any kind of distinctions or be picky, so I just told him to show me what he had.

The suit I ended up wearing when I drove up to Donna’s house the next afternoon—how should I describe it? It was a tuxedo, but it was also a tuxedo costume, and you would have been able to see the differences right away, even if you weren’t able to articulate them. It looked like a tuxedo, but every bit of its tuxedoness was exaggerated to the point that it didn’t look like a tuxedo at all. The cummerbund was huge; the jacket had tails that trailed down past my knees; the shirt was frilly; the pants were so thick they were practically sweatpants; the shoes were at least three sizes too big for my feet. Technically, I was wearing a tuxedo, but for all the good it did me, I may as well have been wearing a chicken suit. Also, it came with a bow tie that spun when I pushed a button.

I knocked on the door of the address I had written down. A young housewife, probably in her early thirties at most, answered the door.

“Oh, hi, Donna,” she said.

“Is Donna home?” I asked, and then I thought, what?

“What? Oh, I’m sorry. You must be Donna’s little brother.”

“No, I’m her date to prom. Does Donna live here?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. You must be her cousin, then.”

“No. Just date. Donna home?”

The housewife was clearly confused, but she shook out the cobwebs and said, no, Donna doesn’t live here, she lives in that big blue house next door. The housewife lived in a big blue house too, two big blue houses right next to each other. I looked around and realized that a good 80% of the houses in the neighborhood were big and blue. It was surreal. I looked for Mr. Plumbean’s place with the big orange splot, but no such luck.

By the time I drove over to Donna’s house next door, she was waiting on the front steps for me. She looked radiant, but also a little impatient, like I was already fucking things up royally for her. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, which freaked the hell out of me because now she looked exactly like me in heavy makeup and a prom dress. I asked her to put them on, but she said she didn’t want to ruin the pictures.

“Did you bring my flowers?” she asked.

I looked back at the car, as if I were hoping a big rose bush was blooming in the passenger seat or something. “No flowers,” I said.

“What about a corsage and a,” and here she said the name of whatever flower thing I was supposed to wear to prom.

“No flowers,” I said again. She looked at me like she thought I was joking, and that I had them inside a pocket somewhere in my inappropriate tuxedo costume, but I didn’t, of course, so I just stared at her. Eventually, it dawned on her that there were no flowers and she looked like she was going to murder me.

“Get ready for these pictures,” she said. “Go inside.” And she didn’t drop the imperative tense for the rest of the night. Who knew a timid little thing like Donna even had it in her.

Her family was waiting inside. She had three brothers, all much older. Her mother and father were there, as was a grandmother who lived in the house with all of them. They crowded around me immediately, as if inspecting me.

When they were satisfied (none of them seemed to notice the resemblance, or if they did, they had been prepared for it), they all took a step back, making a kind of circle. I was a part of it now. It scared the hell out of me.

“Picture time,” said the mother. “Give Donna her corsage,” she told me.

“No flowers.”

“No flowers? What the hell kind of operation is this?”

“I’m not an operation,” I said timidly. No one heard me and I was shuffled over to the fireplace, which would become over the course of the next sixty seconds the site of at least 150 pictures on three different cameras.

After the fireplace, there was a lot more standing around and there were a lot more pictures. Just as we were headed out the door, one of the older brothers came up to me and pulled me aside.

“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are,” he told me, “but you had better not touch my sister. Got that?”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I would never even think of touching your sister.” He seemed less than satisfied.

We went to all the other places Donna had planned on visiting. And sure enough, we got to the prom only just in time—a little late, in fact, if I remember correctly. It’s amazing how time flew through all the pictures and silent car rides and awkward visits. That’s not right; time didn’t fly. In fact, it moved excruciatingly slow. But it moved, and I guess that was better than what I was expecting.

Prom was exactly as insufferable as I had anticipated. I felt a little smart, having predicted it so accurately and all. Personally, I wasn’t allowed to speak to any one of my friends, because Donna was too busy pulling me around, enjoying the moment and experiencing everything (we even sat under a gazebo, completely silent for about fifteen seconds, because there was a gazebo there and Donna would have felt that the night was incomplete if we hadn’t sat under the gazebo at least once). As old as that got, it was hard to care, because I just wanted to leave anyway. The atmosphere of the place made me sick. All around me, people acted like this was the most important night of their lives. I didn’t know which was more objectionable; that they might be right and this was the pinnacle of something, or that they might be wrong and incredibly foolish. Donna was among the sentimental, of course. She forced me to dance twice. That second dance she squeezed out of me, that’s when I almost started bawling. Everyone had pulled their partner close, body against body. Heads were resting against shoulders, people were kissing the tops of their partner’s hair and whispering into their ears. Donna looked around, like she was getting a feel for the room, and then followed the crowd and kind of snuggled up against me. Normally, I think I would have recoiled and felt (quite justifiably, I might add) like an asshole. But for whatever reason, I just couldn’t. I just wanted to die, right there on the dance floor, die in the middle of prom of an undetected heart condition, and feel everyone crowding around me in shock just before my brain clicked off. I wanted to die right there and it took every bit of strength to keep from bawling just then, with Donna in my arms. I have no idea why, but I just wanted to bawl forever. Thank God I didn’t, because I have no doubt that Donna would have gotten absolutely the wrong idea about it.

We left as the last song started. I think Donna took leaving "early" to be some kind of concession to me, since she could sense that I was having an awful time. People had been leaving for an hour, of course, and I had watched each and every one of them walk out the door in my own less-than-subtle way. But that we were walking out as the last sappy song played in the background, this was meant to be a compromise. It might have been a big one too, since it was the last big milestone of prom, and Donna was giving it up because she didn’t want to make me any more miserable. Maybe I should have been thankful for that.

I drove her to her friend’s house. There was a slumber party there or something that night, and Donna made a big deal about how she couldn’t invite me because it was girls only. I made no attempt to pretend that I was disappointed.

We pulled into the driveway, and I smiled for the first time that night because it was finally over. All night, I thought I had been smiling, but it turns out I couldn’t. Even in all the pictures, I have the deadest look on my face, just staring into the camera like it was responsible for everything wrong with the world. It’s positively eerie.

Donna opened her door and stood in the driveway. She left it open and leaned down and looked at me. My hand was on the clutch, ready to fly out of the driveway and speed home or into a ditch, depending on how I felt exactly.

“Did you have fun?” she asked. She was so hopeful.

“I went to prom,” I said. Who fucking knows what that means. I wish now I could have said yes. I could have lied and made her night, and that one good deed would have lasted me at least a decade.

She wouldn’t shut the door, and it occurred to me that she wanted me to walk her up to the house. The car was in park, so I pressed on the gas and revved the engine. She kind of flinched, but stayed in position, holding the door open like she wouldn’t leave until I did this one last thing for her. If there was some kind of button on the dashboard that would have blown up the car and killed us both, I wouldn’t have hesitated.

“I had fun,” she said. She looked a little panicked. She was clearly trying to stretch the conversation as long as possible, to give me every opportunity to figure out her blatantly obvious clue. I feigned ignorance—something I’ve been doing my entire life—and shifted the car into reverse. I took my foot off the brake and started crawling backwards, and she started crawling right along with me. I couldn’t believe it. The gall of this girl! I should have admired her a little bit. I didn’t, though.

I looked at her, and I think my veil of obliviousness dropped. It must have, I was so shocked by her stubborn determination. She noticed because all of a sudden she looked so sad and so disappointed and so crushed. In her face, for a number of different reasons, I saw me. All the suffering I had gone through at the hands of unrequited love, I was inflicting this on someone else now. And knowingly, which made it immeasurably worse. I hated myself so much at that moment that I could hardly stand it. I almost felt like jumping out of the car and kissing her uncontrollably, even if I didn't mean it, just out of some sick kind of moral rectitude, to set things right and win one for the other side, and I would have if I wasn’t so terrified, looking into her face like I was doing. Instead, I slammed on the gas and peeled out on the driveway, speeding away in reverse as fast as the car would go. As I reached over the seat and slammed the door she had been holding, I saw her screaming in pain and grabbing her shoulder. Turns out, since she was still holding onto the car when I drove off, I had dislocated it. All I could see was that she was hurt very badly in the driveway, but I was too busy escaping to do anything about it. It’s amazing I made it home safely without wrapping myself around a tree, the condition I was in.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Donna never spoke to me again. Add her to the list. I can say that about so many people, though, it’s a little amazing. She is in good company.