Fifteen

Black statues moving around the room,
the Brothers were up against it:
screening the practice school dance for
groin-crushers.
My partner was Joe. What a letdown I was—
as naive as the day is long
while resisting unto death that conscious thrust,
insistent stare.
I never dreamt of screaming, or walking out,
did not presume to feel anger,
the room guttering inside my head as I swallowed
humiliation.
I even suffered because I bored him — nerveless,
determined Joe,
good-looking, with curly yellow hair. In the breaks,
he made off
with his pal, both close, tight-lipped, somehow
in it together.
(What, for god's sake, were they whispering about
out there?)
On the night of the real dance, he dumped me.
Who could blame him?
Sue stole the evening, blancmange breasts aquiver
above crimson.
Angry as blackbirds, the Brothers confabulated
in corners,
mindful, no doubt, of the moral theology of it all—
how a strapless dress is, ipso facto, an occasion
of sin: fantasies
of gowns falling to the floor, bare bodies, the whole
damned thing.
And, to add insult to injury, there was Claudia's
cleavage,
olive-toned and wonderful, rising from cobalt silk…
Generous as flesh, or mean as sin, there is no
gainsaying sex —
spied on, it becomes invisible, can hide in the cells
for a lifetime.
After the dance, I set out to walk from Northcote
to South Melbourne —
that's how I felt. "Oh, Joe will bring me back,'
I'd said,
waving a taxi fare away at the kitchen table.
It was Philip
who brought me home. Nice-looking and quiet,
he knew me
from a distance. "Come out on Sunday,' he said,
"for a drive.'
I don't know how many times I got up to put fresh
lipstick on.
He never came. That was my first real date.
The one with Joe
doesn't count, arranged, as it was, between
the schools—
lists of partners drawn up by the Sisters and
the Brothers.