The Radical Element by Jessica Spotswood (9)

Mr. Pendergrass didn’t stand a chance.

As soon as we walked in and Sandra glimpsed the substitute teacher’s precisely trimmed mustache, she turned to me with a mischievous grin. She’d had it in for him ever since two weeks ago, when it had become abundantly clear that he wasn’t going to call on a girl for an answer, even if that girl was confidently punching the air, indicating that she knew every single one.

I snuck a second glance at the teacher’s rigid back as he wrote his name in neat block letters on the chalkboard. Judging by the handful of times he’d subbed for our class, he wasn’t the type to take a joke.

But I could see Sandra was ready and waiting for her lines.

He was doing the roll call now, looking stern any time he said one of the boys’ names, like he maybe expected them to try something. He seemed to have no such expectation for any of the girls. All we got was a smile dripping with condescension and, occasionally, a “Nice to see you again, dear.”

That sealed the deal for me.

What could I say? I got an inexplicable thrill from defying expectations. I actually, physically felt it on the back of my neck, a tingle that bubbled its way to the tips of my fingers and toes, like soda pop fizzing over.

If my mother knew about it, she would call it “unbecoming.”

But I lived for it.

I scribbled out the scene on a piece of paper and casually dropped it on the floor next to me. I heard the scrape of Sandra’s chair right as Mr. Pendergrass got to my name.

“Rosemary Sweeney,” the teacher droned.

“Present,” I said in a calm, clear voice, belying my nervous anticipation for “Sandra Tanner” and “Bobby Weaver” — which would signal the end of roll call and the start of our scene.

Bobby had just announced he was present when I saw Sandra’s hand waving in the air. I leaned back just a smidge, ready to enjoy the show.

At first, Mr. Pendergrass simply pretended he didn’t see Sandra at all. “Mrs. Morris has written a note that you were to have started act 5 in Macbeth by today,” he said. But my best friend would not be deterred by something as trivial as being blatantly ignored. She waved her hand, slowly at first, and then as emphatically as a Dodgers pennant on game day, until it was obvious that every single person in the class — except for Mr. Pendergrass — was staring at her. I could even see some of them smiling in anticipation of whatever antics “Sandra” had come up with this time.

Finally, in the middle of tonelessly recapping some of the statistics of Shakespeare’s play (first performed in 1606, often called “the Scottish play”), Mr. Pendergrass addressed Sandra without looking up from his book. “You, miss, can go to the powder room after class.”

“And leave my nose unpowdered all that time? How barbaric,” Sandra quipped. “But, no, that’s not why I’m raising my hand, Mr. Pendergrass.”

He looked up at her, irritated. “Well, what it is, then? The lecture hasn’t started yet, so I can’t imagine you have some pressing academic question.”

“Oh, but I do. It has to do with Lady Macbeth,” Sandra said with a polite smile.

“Lady Macbeth?” Mr. Pendergrass asked, clearly still suspicious.

“Yes. Act 5, scene 1 is her big scene, isn’t it? Some would say her most famous scene.”

Mr. Pendergrass frowned but looked down at his book, skimming over the pages in front of him.

“Yes, I suppose that is likely true.” He said it like it was costing him something to admit she was right.

“‘Yet here’s a spot.’” I recognized Sandra’s Ethel Barrymore voice immediately as she quoted the text.

“Ye-e-e-s,” Mr. Pendergrass said slowly. “Now, class, let’s talk about . . .”

But Sandra was now out of her seat, staring off at a space in the distance and moving slowly toward the front of the class like a guilt-ridden sleepwalker. “‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say!’” she whispered furiously.

Mr. Pendergrass practically jumped back in alarm. “Excuse me, Miss . . .” He looked frantically down at his roll call, clearly trying to remember Sandra’s name.

“‘One: two; why, then, ’tis time to do it.’” Sandra continued to walk slowly and regally to the front of the class. I saw more than one classmate fighting back a smile, including Tomás Chavez, whose reactions I noticed more than most. “‘Hell is murky!’” Sandra suddenly screamed as she turned around and stared at a point above everyone’s heads, before making her voice soft once more. “‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’” At this point, she turned her head slowly and gave what could only be described as a chilling stare at Mr. Pendergrass.

“That’s why I always rely on the cleaning power of Tide!” With a snap of her head, she was facing the class again and had suddenly adopted a cheerful midwestern drawl along with a Pepsodent smile. “Tide gets clothes cleaner than any soap! And we are so lucky to have this wonderful product as sponsors of the Macbeth family. It’s on your shelves at the grocer’s. And if it’s not there, ask him to put it there!” She placed her hand on the hip of her belted skirt and froze in place.

Most of my classmates had already burst out laughing, instantly recognizing the riff on the laundry detergent commercials that Red Skelton did almost every week as part of his shows. I laughed along with everyone else and allowed myself another covert glance at Tomás, whose lips were parted in a grin that made me feel things.

Like, for one of the first times that I could remember, disappointment that nobody besides Sandra knew I had anything to do with the class disruption.

I watched Mr. Pendergrass’s mustache wiggle up and down in anger, looking incongruously like Groucho Marx’s eyebrows, as he told Sandra to immediately pack up her things and take herself to the principal’s office. I didn’t want to get in trouble, wasn’t brave enough like she was, and yet . . .

And yet, maybe I wanted the credit for coming up with the bit in the first place. Maybe I wanted one of those laughs to be directed at me. Maybe, most of all, I wanted to finally have the discussion with my mother. The “Why, Rosemary?” and the “How ill-mannered, Rosemary!” and, most hopeful of all, the “You are clearly not cut out to be presented as a deb, Rosemary, and will obviously be an embarrassment to me and our family, so we can just forget that whole thing.”

But a much more realistic part of me knew that, barring some sort of tragic bus accident, my mother would not let me out of this stupid debutante ball even if she had to drag me there in chains. It was too important to her. In fact, I’m sure she’d pictured my coming-out party as soon as the doctor had informed her that she’d just had a baby girl.

After school, as I waited for the light at the crosswalk to change, I eyed the bus driving past me. Then I remembered that it was Monday. I Love Lucy was on. Maiming myself could wait.

Mrs. Lucy Ricardo’s impending shenanigans were the only thing that propelled me to our block of crowded brownstones, through our front gate, up our stoop, and through our apartment’s door.

Because Mondays also meant something else.

“Hurry up now, Rosemary,” Mother said as she came out of our parlor to greet me, nearly bumping into the seventeenth-century baroque side table that was one of the only pieces of her inheritance that she’d managed to salvage. It was huge and ungainly, especially for the small sitting room, and I’d never quite figured out why she had chosen to keep that piece out of all of them. But maybe nobody had wanted to buy it. “Didn’t Mrs. Fenton insist she would drop you from the class if you were late one more time?”

If only that were more than an empty threat, I’d figure out a way to inspire a massive subway strike.

I hated cotillion classes with Mrs. Fenton, a woman who glided like a swan, chirped like a sparrow, and seemed determined to live her life like she was some sort of a decorative bird instead of a grown person. Worst of all, my mother paid her to try to teach me to do the same. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I didn’t tap into my inner hummingbird during the waltz or peck elegantly at my salad with the correct fork, but judging by the severity of Mrs. Fenton’s reaction, I’d guess something on the scale of Pompeii.

“Would that be such a bad —” I started.

“Not today, Rosemary. You’ve made your views on this dance quite clear, and so have I. Let’s spare both of us the irritation, and, please, just get to your class. We both know you are going to anyway.” Mother pointed a finger out the door.

Frankly, she was right. I did always do what she asked eventually, no matter how I felt about it. The sense of familial duty that was hammered into me from an early age, coupled with my mother’s formidable personality, were too intimidating to overcome — especially in combination.

I turned around and marched back out onto the street, taking my frustration out on a stray baseball that one of the Powell boys next door must’ve forgotten. I kicked it all the way to the entrance of the subway that would lead me from Brooklyn into Manhattan, where all the other debutantes naturally lived and, so, where Mrs. Fenton could make a living waxing poetic about cutlery.

The cotillion classes took place in the basement of a church downtown. There were eight of us “lucky” eighteen-year-olds, forced to partner up to learn the waltz and fox-trot and some other dance, which, honestly, felt exactly the same as the other ones. Either way, I danced it just as clumsily, as pointed out to me frequently by Mrs. Fenton in a “ladylike” voice, which apparently meant speaking in whispering singsong. After all, far be it for a lady to speak in any tone in which she might actually be heard.

As always, I left the church in a foul mood, my breath visibly indignant in the brisk early-March air. I made the trek back home, reclaimed the baseball that was still by the subway station, and kicked it right back to the Powells’ front yard. As I was depositing it back under their azalea bush, I heard Mr. Powell’s voice wafting from his kitchen window.

“Women just aren’t funny.” The words rammed into me like a freight train. “Bob Hope is funny. Jerry Lewis is funny. Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers. You know why there isn’t a Marx sister? No one wants to see a woman make a fool of herself like that.”

He said it like he was announcing the weather or reading a newspaper headline — like it was a foregone conclusion, a boring but irrefutable fact.

It was his matter-of-fact tone, more than anything, that made me stop in my tracks. Because Mr. Powell was a professional and had actually written for some of the very people he’d just mentioned. Sure, it was hard to reconcile some of those famous, raucous bits with the serious man next door, but they had indeed bloomed from his mind.

So how could he say that? How could he believe it? Women weren’t funny? Of course they were. What about Rosalind Russell?

What about Lucy? I wanted to yell right through the window.

“Lucy who?”

I blinked. Had I said that out loud?

I turned around slowly, and there was Tomás, looking at me from the stoop. The Powells lived below his family. Lucky them. My family lived underneath the Midnight Bowling and Shotput League of America, Brooklyn Chapter.

Ever since Tomás had moved here back in October, I’d been trying to get this kid with his beautiful, lilting accent to speak to me, and this was how he finally did it: calling me out for talking to myself in the middle of his front yard.

“Ball,” I responded. “Lucille Ball.” Well, I was going with it. I’d waited all this time to have a conversation with him, and I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity.

“Oh,” he said. Then, after an interminable pause: “Like on television?”

I broke out into a big grin. For a second, I thought he might not have known who Lucy was and that definitely would have tarnished his appeal. But now, standing in front of me with his slightly too-long dark hair and that tiny smile that was more in his eyes than his lips, he remained a perfectly suitable leading man. “She’s sort of my hero.”

“You want to be Lucille Ball?” he asked.

“No,” I responded. “I want to be Madelyn Pugh.”

Tomás looked at me blankly. Obviously, he wouldn’t know who that was. Come on, Rosemary. The boy is dreamy, but he isn’t perfect!

“She’s one of the writers for I Love Lucy,” I explained.

Pugh’s name had gleamed out at me from the very first time I saw the show’s credits roll, like an oracle predicting my future. If someone named Madelyn could write for the funniest show to ever exist, then why couldn’t someone named Rosemary?

A full smile spread across Tomás’s face. “Like how you write for Sandra?”

My mouth gaped. “You know about that?” Sandra had long worn the crown for class clown, but all this time, I’d thought my role in it had been the best-kept secret at school.

“I’ve been watching you,” Tomás responded with a sheepish grin. “I saw what you wrote. And then a few minutes later, Sandra said it . . .” He tapered off. “Why aren’t you the one to say it?”

It was my turn to shrug. “I’m more of a behind-the-scenes kind of girl. I love Lucy but . . .”

“You want to be a Madelyn?”

I gave a small laugh. “Exactly. So do you watch the show?”

He started to play with one of the early-blooming azaleas on Mrs. Powell’s bush, looking a little embarrassed. “I’ve seen an episode at a friend’s house. But we don’t have a television.”

“We only got ours last year,” I said quickly, hoping he wouldn’t feel ashamed. Honestly, most people on our block had only gotten a set recently. “Did you like it? The episode you saw?”

“I did. It was very funny.” He paused. “You don’t usually see a guy who looks like me on television.”

It took me a moment to realize he meant Desi Arnaz. And another to realize that he was completely right. I couldn’t think of another Latin man on TV.

“I like Desi, too. He’s a great straight man to Lucy.”

“She is very funny,” he agreed. “So is the woman who writes her lines.”

“I think so.” I lowered my voice. “Apparently, he doesn’t.” I gestured toward the ground floor of his building.

“Mr. Powell?”

I nodded as his voice came through the window again. “I’ll just have to convince George that the show doesn’t need ‘a female touch,’” he said. His son Gary had been boasting all over school about the great gig Mr. Powell had finally landed — a new NBC television show. Rumor had it that the Powells had fallen on some hard times due to the Hollywood blacklist — hence their move to our working-class neighborhood.

“It can get on just fine with me, Eli, and Peter. Fifteen years of being a powerhouse team . . . all our credits . . .” Mr. Powell grumbled. “Auditioning female writers. Ridiculous!”

I rolled my eyes at Tomás, who seemed frustrated on my behalf. “He’s the one being ridiculous,” Tomás exclaimed. “He should read some of your bits from school!”

I snorted. “If only.”

Tomás let go of the flower he was pinching, and the delicate stem snapped right off the bush. We both watched it flutter and land amid the frost-covered grass. Then he looked up at me again, brushing his dark hair off his forehead, before shoving his hands deep in his pockets. “I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’m supposed to watch my brothers for Mama.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay.” It looked like he might say something more, but then he turned around and walked into the house.

Drat. If I could’ve scripted that, maybe it wouldn’t have been so anticlimactic. Or maybe, at least, I could have said something funnier for him to remember me by. Like something about how Mr. Powell tuning out women’s voices was self-preservation after having to hear his wife sing “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” every time she did the washing up. Assuming the Powells’ ceiling was just as thin as the walls between our two buildings, surely Tomás would’ve gotten the reference. I could’ve gotten a laugh.

Instead, I absentmindedly picked up the purple flower from the otherwise spotless lawn and took it with me inside my own building.

All night, Tomás’s words stuck with me. What if Mr. Powell could read my work? He had said something about auditioning female writers, hadn’t he? How did that work?

I mulled it over during my walk to school, which was prime daydreaming time anyway: thinking up jokes or stunts to file away for possible future use. I wasn’t used to being interrupted, so it took a while for me to realize someone was calling my name.

When I finally turned around, Tomás quickened his pace to catch up to me. “Mind if I walk with you to school?”

“Of course not.” For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I was still in daydream mode after all.

He fell into step beside me. “So what did you think, then? Of last night’s episode?”

I glanced curiously at him. “Of Lucy?”

He nodded.

I grinned. “It was spectacular, of course,” I gushed. Strangely enough, on last night’s episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy had accidentally eavesdropped on her neighbors’ conversation, too, only in her case she thought she heard them plotting her own murder. “There was a scene with Lucy on the phone to a police officer . . .”

“Where she said she pretended to be a chair?” he finished.

“Yes!” I replied. “Hey! I thought you didn’t have a television.”

“I don’t. I asked Gary if I could watch theirs last night.” Tomás grinned, and I could tell whatever he was about to say was why he had flagged me down this morning. “You will be happy to know I caught Mr. Powell laughing at least twice.”

My heart soared. Good ol’ Lucy. Still . . . “Only twice?”

“I know. For a man who writes comedies, his sense of humor seems . . .” He gestured with his hands, obviously looking for the right word.

“Nonexistent?” I attempted. “Six feet under? The size of a peapod . . . from a dollhouse kitchen set?”

Tomás laughed. “Yes. Definitely one of those.”

“So tragically true,” I said as I hoisted my bag higher on my shoulder. Tomás made like he was about to offer to carry my books, but I immediately thought of something much more important. “Did he say anything more about auditioning female writers for his show?”

Tomás shook his head, moving his hand away from my bag. “I could maybe find out? Are you thinking you might audition?”

It would sound silly to say yes. After all, I didn’t know how to write a real script. Or how to get Mr. Powell to read one from an eighteen-year-old girl he knew best from snooping in his front yard and, one time, accidentally crashing a tricycle into his wife’s prized azaleas. (All right, so maybe it wasn’t quite an accident. Maybe it was an attempt — a successful attempt, I might add — to get my younger brother Jacob to laugh at the sight of me on his bike after some older boys had chased him away from their baseball game.)

But I smiled. And said yes anyway. I’d already told Tomás more about who I really was and what I really wanted than practically anybody, except Sandra. Why stop now?

“Let me see what I can find out,” he promised as we neared the school. And I suddenly felt much lighter than if he really had carried my books.

Did you hear about . . . what? A carnival? A circus? A discount at the beauty parlor?

I had been agonizing about that line for an hour. It was also the only line I had written.

Tomás had come back with the intelligence that the scripts — the ones by other female writers — were being sent through the mail for Mr. Powell to evaluate. I’d seized my opportunity and borrowed one of the many manila envelopes I’d seen the postman drop off at Mr. Powell’s mailbox. It was the only way I could think of to see an example of a real, live script. After I hastily copied it out and returned the original, I pored over it. It was fascinating. I watched and listened to all of the comedy that I could, but I’d never seen the jokes laid out like this before. This one was a sample sketch for The Red Skelton Show, which made me think I should write a sample episode of the show that I knew and loved best.

But I needed further research. So on Monday, when Lucy came on, I decided I’d try my hand at being a scribe.

When the show first started airing last year, it was only Jacob and me who really watched, with Father reading his newspaper and Mother flitting in and out as she cleaned up. But as the season progressed, I noticed that the living-room mantel seemed to suddenly need extra dustings on Monday and that, more often than not, my father would only think to turn the page of his newspaper during a commercial. Though I was elated by this revelation, I knew better than to bring attention to it. It wouldn’t take much for Mother to denounce the show as vulgar or low class, especially if she knew that I saw it as more than a weekly diversion and more like a potential career path.

But I certainly wasn’t able to go unnoticed that night when the four of us were gathered around our television set. Mother, Father, and Jacob all watched me agape as I wore out two and a half pencils trying to transcribe Lucy’s and Ethel’s every word.

“Rosemary, may I ask what on earth you think you’re doing?” Mother finally asked as a piece of paper flew from under my graphite-covered hands and nearly hit the ceiling before fluttering slowly and dramatically to the ground.

I didn’t want to answer her, afraid that I would miss the next line if I did.

“Rose . . .”

But better a few lines than the whole thing, so I thought quickly. “Oh, it’s an assignment. A transcription assignment. For my journalism class.”

“I see,” Mother said after a pause. “I didn’t know you were taking a journalism class.”

But then, thankfully, she left well enough alone. By the end of the episode, my fingers had the posture of Quasimodo and the living room looked like it had been feted by a ticker-tape parade, but I thought I might have a good idea of how the show was constructed.

Although now, staring at the blank page in front of me, it dawned on me that it was quite hard to come up with a whole new scenario and then . . . make it funny.

I stared up at the piece of paper I had pinned above my small desk.

“Women aren’t funny.”
— James Powell

That lit the appropriate fire.

I placed my pencil emphatically back to the end of Ethel’s line, closed my eyes, and plucked the first word that came to my mind.

Carousel. “Did you hear about the new carousel in the park?”

I wrote it out slowly, realization dawning that a walk in the park might help me air out my ideas. Or, better yet, maybe I could go over to Sandra’s. I’d already told her all about my harebrained scheme to submit a script to Mr. Powell, and she’d loved the idea. She’d always been my collaborator anyway, bringing my work and ideas to life with her perfect delivery. Maybe that was what I needed: a sounding board.

I got up from my desk like a woman possessed, marched out of my room, and went to grab my coat from the hall closet.

“Rosemary,” my mother called from the dining room. I quickly pulled on my coat and had my hand on the doorknob when she appeared, the click of her heels alerting me too late to her presence.

“I need to get back to the tailor about your fitting.”

Drat. Sometimes, I could swear that woman was a hawk in a previous life: swift, silent, attuned to when its prey, aka her daughter, was at her most vulnerable. Though to be fair, my head was in the clouds often enough that I usually wasn’t in any position to fend her off.

“We should go tomorrow . . . Rosemary, what on earth?” she exclaimed as she looked me over, her beautiful face pursing into that look I knew all too well and her hand now on the hip of her immaculate yellow-and-white-striped dress. “What is this about now? Please don’t tell me you’re thinking of setting up another . . . play.” She said the word play the way she would say the word rodent. I already knew how she felt about my attempt at staging an impromptu show with Sandra in Prospect Park last summer. Though, honestly, that lake was just begging for an Ophelia by way of Mae West routine.

But I had no idea what she was so upset about now. There was really nothing wrong with my shoes, or skirt, or . . . oh.

Apparently, in my haste, I’d grabbed the first bit of greenish fabric that I saw in the hall closet. Which was not my woolen peacoat, but my father’s jacket. My father’s army jacket, with gold, red, and blue emblems on the pocket, brass buttons on the lapels, and sleeves that came down about a foot past my fingertips.

Well, now, that was . . . funny, actually. I wondered how Sandra would have reacted if she saw me in it — it might have led to a good bit. Perhaps some other time, I thought, as I took the coat off and hung it back in the closet before turning to face Mother.

“I made the dinner reservation at the St. Regis. Would you ring up Julian to let him know?” she asked.

I sighed. Of course she would want to talk about the ball, something I hadn’t given a thought to in hours because I’d been preoccupied with more pressing matters, like what sort of trouble a redheaded housewife could get up to.

“Yes, but . . . what if we skip dinner?” It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to spend extra hours with Mother and Father and Julian, my escort and the dull son of one of my mother’s childhood friends, whom I’d only met a handful of times and spoken even fewer words to. The restaurant at the St. Regis Hotel was also far too pricey. I took a closer look at my mom’s dress and realized the white was slightly dingy from too many washings. The last thing we needed was to spend more money we didn’t have. Especially on something as trivial as a pre-dance dinner.

“Rosemary!” Mother exclaimed. “Dinner before a cotillion is tradition.”

“But what if . . . I don’t know. We could have dinner at home. Two of the girls from cotillion class are doing that.”

It was true. Annie’s and Josie’s families were each throwing a small dinner party in their honor at their respective homes. But I saw my mother looking uncomfortably at our narrow entryway and that lone fancy end table, and I knew she wouldn’t want anyone coming here.

“We could just pretend we did,” I said quickly, putting my hand on her arm and looking her in the eye. “No one would have to know we didn’t have a real dinner party.”

For a moment, when she looked back, I knew we understood each other perfectly, the unspoken dialogue between us a current that was pinging back messages in the same language. But then she looked away, and the cable line snapped.

“Don’t be silly, Rosemary. It’ll be a lovely dinner. Mrs. Chambers has simply raved about the salmon, and your father has been looking forward to it for weeks. Would you please just ring up Julian to let him know?” The bright smile was back on her face, now that she was assured of my compliance.

I nodded, watching her swish back into our tiny parlor. I didn’t know how accurate Mrs. Chambers’s feelings about the fish were, but I knew for a fact that my father hadn’t looked forward to much since he had worn that army jacket himself.

For all her poise, sometimes my mother seemed to me a woman huddled over the tatters of things that had long disappeared: a stately childhood home; a maiden name that vaguely stirred up ideas of grandeur for people of a certain age; a boy she loved who, for all intents and purposes, never came back from the war at all.

It was like she couldn’t bring herself to accept that she lived in this apartment building in Brooklyn with the Powells, and the Chavezes, and everyone else on this block — not the slightest bit of difference between us.

But me, I had always lived here. And I’d never once wanted the Park Avenue address.

At least not by marrying into it.

It was one tedious phone conversation and half an hour later that I made it out of the house. By then, any flits of writing inspiration seemed to have left me completely. I was going to go over to Sandra’s anyway; I needed a pep talk.

As soon as I walked down my stoop, I was met by a wave and a big smile from someone else — someone who had apparently been waiting for me to appear. Tomás jogged up to me. I could feel my cheeks lifting to match his.

“How has it been going? The writing?” he asked, and my face fell. “Oh. Not good?”

I shook my head. “I seem to be stuck. I just can’t think of a good setup. I had Ethel ask Lucy if she’s heard about the new carousel in the park and then . . . I have no idea what happens next.”

“Oh,” Tomás said, his eyebrows furrowed.

“Can you think of anything?” I asked hopefully. Sometimes Sandra would throw out random ideas, and one of them would catch, blooming joyously into something unexpected as it filtered its way through my mind.

“Umm,” Tomás stammered. “So they go to the carousel. And they ride it. And they get dizzy . . . and maybe one of them gets sick?”

Clearly this was not one of those times. I smiled politely. “Maybe.”

“Oooh, or how about they go to the carousel. And then they argue because they both want to ride the same animal. Maybe the . . . giraffe!” he exclaimed, laughing, as if that were clearly a punch line.

I had to laugh, too, at his enthusiasm. “A giraffe, huh?”

He nodded.

“It’s an idea,” I said noncommittally, not wanting to hurt his feelings.

He looked at me shrewdly. “I’m not helping, am I?”

“Not really, but you’re making me smile. And that’s more than has happened all day.”

“I will take that.” His dark-brown eyes looked into mine and, in the quiet that ensued, I knew what was supposed to happen next. Every movie I’d ever seen and daydream I’d ever had about this very moment told me.

But he hesitated; I could tell he was wondering if he should.

I thought of my mother, who was inside the house, only a few feet away. She might look out the parlor window. What she would think if she saw me kissing the boy next door — who didn’t have a name or a fortune? Who didn’t even have the right color skin?

And then I thought about what I wanted.

I closed the gap between us and let my lips meet his.

My mother didn’t see us. I could tell because she didn’t come running out in a fit and proclaim her plan to ship me off to a Swiss finishing school.

Sandra seemed a little disappointed that the Alps weren’t in my immediate future. “Just how great would it have been if she had seen you, Rosemary? It could’ve been your chance. Your big moment to give her a piece of your mind.” Sandra had just put the needle on the Doris Day record when I’d told her what happened. She hadn’t harped on the fact that I’d kissed an extremely handsome boy, but, rather, that I had done it where Mother might have seen.

Sandra had wanted me to stand up to Mother for years. She’d even offered to act as my stand-in. Playing the role of Rosemary and reciting the lines I’d write, she would tell Mother to “put a sock in it,” as she so gleefully put it. I admit, I was twistedly curious to see what Mother’s reaction to that might be . . . though in a fly-on-the-wall, purely scientific sense. The actual thought of being on the receiving end of Mother’s reaction made me repeatedly swallow like a nervous contestant in an amateur fire-eating contest.

“I just need to get through this dance,” I told Sandra. “And then, maybe, Mother . . .”

Sandra raised her eyebrows at me.

“Okay. Definitely. I will tell her.”

My plan after high school was not to marry some Rockefeller and settle down on the Upper East Side like Mother wanted. It was to move to Los Angeles with Sandra and try to make it as a writer in Hollywood while she got her acting career going. I’d even looked up some screen-writing programs there, particularly at the University of Southern California.

“And besides,” I continued, “today wasn’t about defying Mother. I just . . . wanted to kiss him.”

Sandra smiled at that. “Well, all right, then. Good for you. And how was the kiss? Did it live up to expectations?” She came over and flopped down on her bed next to me.

I grinned. “I wouldn’t mind going back for seconds.”

Objectively speaking, the girl in the mirror looked pretty good. It was the dress, mainly. The silvery white taffeta did something to my pale skin, made it glow and even look a bit tanned as opposed to the tinge of gray that tended to settle in after a long New York winter. The appliqué beaded flowers on the full skirt, in a smoky shade of blue, caught the light and glinted at unexpected moments. And the corset kept everything in its proper place as long as I was supposed to resemble a certain antiquated timepiece made of glass and sand (which Mrs. Fenton had assured me I was). But I couldn’t breathe, the scratchy fabric made my skin feel like it was being stung by a thousand tiny bees, and keeping my balance in the strappy silver high heels meant scrunching my toes in a way that made them turn purple.

Mother did not care one jot about any of these complaints. “You look lovely, Rosie,” she whispered when she saw me. “You know, the night I came back from my deb ball, I didn’t sleep a wink.” Her voice was far away. “I couldn’t stop thinking about dancing with your father. I was doing all the steps in my bed the whole night.”

The night hadn’t even happened yet, but I knew I wouldn’t feel any of those things. I couldn’t dance very well as it was, never mind in those shoes. I was going to spend the whole time trying to keep the curtsies and salad forks straight in my head. And the only boy I’d want to dance with certainly wouldn’t be there.

I felt a pang when Mother grazed my shoulder and breathed out the word “lovely” one more time. It was easy to feel frustrated with her, angry at her, for not understanding me at all. For not looking at me, the person I was instead of who she wanted me to be. But at the same time, I was the one who kept my true self hidden, who followed her every instruction with meek protests, who let Sandra say the lines I wrote, who kissed the boy I wanted to kiss but hoped Mother hadn’t seen.

In that moment, looking at her face in the mirror, the glass was showing me a side of us I wouldn’t have been able to reach on my own. Maybe she really thought becoming a society wife was what would make me happy because I had let this fantasy of the girl in the mirror go on for too long. Maybe if I was the one writing the lines, it was time for me to speak them, too.

The girl in the mirror placed her hand over her mother’s and made a silent vow to herself.

I would go to this ball for her. I would do my best to be the polite well-bred girl she had taught me to be. But then I would leave that girl at the dance, shedding the snakeskin that had never fit my coils. And I would breathe . . . in every sense of the word, I thought, as I envisioned breaking the boning in my corset with Jacob’s baseball bat first thing tomorrow.

My mother had the cab drop us off in front of Tiffany’s. Ostensibly, it was because she wanted to start off the evening by gazing at the famed window displays. She’d always said they put her in the right frame of mind: peaceful, elegant, and just a little bit detached from the vulgarities of real life. But I knew that she didn’t want anyone to see us pulling up in a regular old yellow taxicab instead of an elegant town car. And even that taxi had required careful saving up.

Mother sighed in contentment as soon as we glimpsed Julian Dupont waiting for us in front of the St. Regis. A bland smile was already punctuating his classically handsome face. His sandy-blond hair was parted neatly, with just the right amount of pomade to keep it in place. His tails grazed below the knees just as they were supposed to, and his white bow tie was perfectly centered. It was hard to imagine that anyone in Julian’s carefully curated life had ever looked at him and felt the inexplicable revulsion that was oozing out of my pores. But I was surprised it didn’t stain my dress.

He said and did nothing that veered one iota from that rehearsed exterior. He was a perfect gentleman at dinner, steering the conversation from the weather to the meal and back to the weather again. He made two feeble jokes, which received raucous laughter from Mother, polite chortles from Father, and very strained smiles from me, after Mother kicked me under the table. It was undoubtedly the most painful when he was trying to be funny.

For just a moment, the conversation steered toward baseball, and I thought I saw a hint of something that might resemble passion, or a personality, or simply a sign that he wasn’t a Macy’s mannequin brought to life. But a minute later, we were back to what a chilly March it had been, and I was left wondering whether I had willed that spark out of sheer boredom.

I winced when the bill came and I glimpsed the twenty-five-dollar tab. It seemed a ridiculous price to pay just to be seen.

After we left, Mother and Father let us walk ahead of them over to the Park Lane Hotel, obviously hoping for some sparkling conversation to take place between Julian and me. A couple I had seen at dinner was walking ahead of us, clearly headed to the cotillion, too. She was radiant in white, a matching fur shrug contrasting with her sleek black hair. He was tall and wearing a tuxedo, and they were walking arm in arm. Together, they looked like they might have stepped out of a black-and-white Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie.

“So what do you think?” I turned to Julian conspiratorially as the pair floated down Fifth Avenue. “Are they Russian spies? Or automatons?” I nodded toward the couple, whom I had decided to christen Natasha and Bot Wonder.

“Sorry?” Julian looked at me blankly.

I pointed to them. “They’re too perfect, right? So either they were sent here by the Ruskies,” I said in a bad Eastern European accent, “to infiltrate New York City as American teenagers, but their only frame of reference was the movies, so they look like they just stepped out of one. Or they are, in fact, robots and we have a lot more to worry about than a silly little war with Russia.”

Julian’s expression did not change, except for maybe a slight tinge of confusion that snuck onto his perfect mask of a face. I waited a beat before I felt I had to explain. “It’s just a game, a joke,” I said, which of course ruined the very nature of either.

“Oh,” Julian replied, and, after a moment, bestowed a small smile upon me.

The rest of the night was almost too boring to mention. We arrived at the ball; I was announced; I curtsied; I danced (poorly). Then we were entertained by a pair of professional dancers who glided across the floor, further driving home just how badly I had failed in my attempt to do the same.

But just then, the most glorious, wonderful thing happened.

The girl dancer wore a dainty little mask over her face, pale pink rhinestones framing her large blue eyes. I suppose in the story of their dance, they were supposed to be at a masquerade ball. And that’s when I was struck with an idea. A funny idea. An idea I thought I could easily turn into an I Love Lucy episode.

What if Lucy went to a masquerade ball because she heard there was going to be a television talent scout there, and she wanted to get Ricky booked on a TV show? Only, of course, there would be a case of mistaken identity, and the person Lucy was trying to woo would actually be a masked thief, there to steal from all the finely bejeweled ladies at the ball. Lucy would inadvertently spend the entire ball thwarting him. She would be a masked hero! I could almost imagine the orchestra playing a version of The Lone Ranger theme song, a wink to the audience.

My mind churned. I wished I had a pen and paper. I looked ruefully at all the tiny and dainty purses my fellow debs had brought and knew I’d be hard-pressed to find one here. I took to staring off into space instead, trying to commit to memory all the one-liners and sight gags that were suddenly whizzing around in my brain. Julian had to ask me to dance three times before I heard him. I only said yes because saying no would’ve required extra conversation that my brain simply had no room for, and also because I caught my mother’s frown and remembered my unspoken promise to her. I owed her one last glimpse at the daughter she wished she had.

Finally, finally, the clock was ticking midnight and the cotillion was over. I felt like a reverse Cinderella, itching to get back to my own clothes and — most important — my own desk, where beautiful white sheets of paper and a glorious ballpoint pen were awaiting me.

Mother and Father had left a little earlier, Mother no doubt hoping for a spontaneous — though, of course, appropriate — romantic moment to erupt between Julian and me if only we were left alone for a bit.

But I hardly remembered how I said a final good-bye to him — certain and entirely unconcerned that I would never see him again — or how he hailed me a cab. All I knew was that, finally, I was sitting in the back of a warm taxi and furiously thinking by the lights of the Manhattan skyline.

I was dropped off at the end of my block, where I promptly took off my shoes; even though I only had a few yards left to walk, I wasn’t going to spend one more minute in them. Then I started to actually skip toward my brownstone.

“You look happy,” a soft voice said.

I smiled before I even saw him. “I am, Tomás.”

He stood up from his stoop, where he was rolling around an old baseball. Now I knew the reason for all those stray ones under Mrs. Powell’s shrubbery.

“Have a good time at the dance?” he asked.

“Yes, actually,” I said, pausing for dramatic effect. “Because I figured out what I’m going to write for Mr. Powell.”

He smiled and walked down his steps toward me. “That’s wonderful. Can I read it?”

“When it’s finished,” I agreed.

“Thank you. You look . . . beautiful,” he added after a small hesitation.

I looked up at him, my eyes questioning.

“It’s just . . .” He paused again. “I just like the way you normally look even better.” He looked away, clearly uncertain whether he had said the right thing.

I smiled. “Me too.”

There was probably more to be said on a beautiful moonlit spring night, standing in front of a boy I liked in a ball gown and bare feet. But there was something more important that I simply had to do right then, before the jumbled words in my head had a chance to escape into the abyss.

“I have to go. To write,” I told Tomás.

He nodded and stepped out of my way, and that one gesture was probably the most romantic thing he could’ve done. I let my arm graze his as I walked past.

I was in luck. Though my mother had obviously intended to wait up for me, she had succumbed to sleep on the couch. I tiptoed past and went to my room. Without even taking off the gown or the corset, I sat down and I wrote.

The next afternoon, I sat on our sofa in the parlor, a manila envelope in my lap, my legs crossed at the knees, waiting quietly.

“What on earth are you doing sitting around in the dark, Rosemary?” Mother asked as she walked in and drew up the blinds. She was humming a little, obviously in a good mood.

It was too bad I was about to spoil that.

“Waiting for you.” I stood up and faced her. We were squared off, our wide skirts touching.

“Oh?” She looked surprised but kind of pleased. I again felt a pang — regret mixed with a dollop of fear — at having to yank her out of this haze of security. It wouldn’t be easy to disappoint her, even if I knew that it was my fundamental self that she wished she could change, the part of me that was set in stone. But after eighteen years, it was time for me to tell her the truth. It was past time.

“I want you to read something.” I stuck out the envelope so that it was only inches from her face.

She looked down at it, puzzled. “Mail for Mr. Powell?” she asked, reading the address I had carefully written on the envelope.

“It was intended to be,” I said. “But now it’s for you. Or, at least, I want you to read it first. Before I give it to Mr. Powell.”

She looked up at me, and I could see the crease already starting to form between her brows. “Rosemary, what . . . ?”

“It’s a script.” I interrupted her in a calm, measured voice, just the way I had rehearsed it. “I wrote it. Mr. Powell is auditioning female writers for his show, and I wrote a sample script of I Love Lucy.”

Mother stared at me doubtfully and then broke into a small laugh. “You’re pretending to be a writer now? That’s a pretty silly trick to play on our neighbor.”

“I’m not pretending. I am a writer. Look.” I shook the envelope in front of her again. “I wrote this.”

She laughed again but made no move to take the envelope. “Rosemary, I appreciate that you’re a bit of a daydreamer, but Mr. Powell is a professional and I’m sure he doesn’t have time for —”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, interrupting her again. “He’ll read it. And maybe he’ll think it’s funny. Maybe he won’t. But the thing is, I know I’m funny. And I know I’m a writer. I know it because I’ve been doing it for years in school and in my head.” Just a hint of emotion got into my voice, but I stifled it. My mother respected poise over all, and she was going to get it this time, when what I had to say mattered most. “I may be a daydreamer. But if I am, it’s in the best way. It’s in the way that lets me imagine better things than what’s placed in front of me. It’s in the way that makes me go after those things, no matter what or who stands in my way.”

We were the same height now, my mother and I, and I looked evenly into her pale-blue eyes. It was like she was frozen in place. Even the breeze from the window didn’t deign to ruffle her skirt.

I knew my cue to exit. I’d always had excellent dramatic timing.

“I would appreciate it if you read this,” I said to her, then, quieter: “I think it’s good. I’m going to drop it off at Mr. Powell’s tomorrow.”

I placed the envelope on her oversized side table, and then I turned on my heels and walked out.

In my mind’s eye, my mother was picking up the envelope and looking at it. Maybe in a few minutes, she would open it and start poring through the pages inside.

But I didn’t look back to check.

Instead, I thought about how it was perhaps a little too chilly to be outside without a coat, but I didn’t care. The brisk air felt good against that spot on the back of my neck that had just started to tingle.