The Two Kinds of Decay

A Gift

Very late one night, in the fall of my eleventh-grade year, five years before the diagnosis, I unlocked the front door of my parents’ house and went inside and closed the door quietly and locked it behind me, and turned on the hall light and tiptoed up the thirteen steps, and turned off the hall light, and felt my way along the railing that surrounded the stairs, and walked through the dark doorway of my room, and felt in the dark above my shoulder, to the right of the doorway, for the antique light fixture that had been installed in the 1920s when the house was built, and turned the small switch that felt like the head of a small smooth screw.

And hanging from the gooseneck of the light fixture was a dress hanger, and on that hanger was a black velvet cocktail dress with a V-neck and black velvet straps. And on that dress, just below the point of the V, my mother had fastened her rhinestone turtle pin, and I would wear that dress to the Wellesley Cotillion.

I put it on and it fit.

I made an appointment to have my hair French-braided at the salon downtown. My mother bought me a pair of black pumps with a small heel.

The Wellesley Cotillion took place every December at Wellesley College, and all the eleventh and twelfth graders whose parents lived in Wellesley were invited.

I say “whose parents lived in Wellesley” because the cotillion was a mixer for private school students who attended New England’s various prestigious boarding schools. Most of the town’s high-school-age students attended those schools.

The dance was first held in the 1940s, and it was called the Christmas Cotillion, and the public was not invited. It was very exclusive. You had to attend a certain very proper dancing school, which had admission requirements of its own.

In the late 1950s, public school students were invited for the first time.

None of us from public school in 1990 had been to a cotillion or attended an event that required formal dress — the freshmen and sophomores had only an informal dance, and the junior prom wasn’t until spring. None of us had yet faced a receiving line.

In November the juniors at Wellesley High attended a special assembly where we were taught proper comportment at the cotillion. We were told to shake the hand of each man and woman on the receiving line, to make eye contact, and to state our names clearly.

There I am, about to face the receiving line, about to walk across the stage of my life in my town in my velvet dress. About to start learning why I don’t belong here, why I don’t want to belong here, yet do belong, whether I want to or not, in the torrent of people who walk through history in one direction.