4: Trista
1990
Click: Prom night in our senior year at John C. Calhoun High, Columbia, South Carolina. The three of us are posed in a latticed gazebo. Rick is standing between Martine and me, one arm around each. We’re wearing identical black dresses, strapless and slinky, with a wide white band circling the top of the bodice and identical chrysanthemum corsages on our wrists. I’m smiling up at Rick, whose expression is serious. There’s something spacey about the way Martine is grinning into the camera, though I didn’t notice it at the time.
The fact that I wouldn’t be at the University of South Carolina the following year made senior-prom night—our last big blast together—even more poignant and important. Rick insisted on squiring both Martine and me to the dance, declaring that he’d have the two prettiest dates there. We were more than agreeable, since Martine had broken up with her boyfriend a couple of months before, and I wasn’t dating anyone special.
It should have been perfect—the limo, our corsages, everything. Our class had chosen to hold the prom the Saturday night at the beginning of spring break at the biggest hotel in downtown Columbia. The theme was Summertime, like the song from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Martine and I shopped for two months, checking out boutiques and department stores in Greenville and Charleston before we found the perfect dresses, which were excruciatingly expensive. Dad sprang for them anyway, remarking that when you were a man blessed with two beautiful daughters, it was your responsibility to keep them looking good. Martine and I giggled at that; we were tall and blond and attracted more than our share of attention because there were two of us, but lots of other girls at our school were just as pretty and every bit as pampered by their fathers.
Trouble started to brew a couple of weeks before the big event when I casually mentioned at the dinner table one night that Rick and one of his friends were going to chip in to rent a room at the hotel on prom night. Adjourning to hotel rooms after the dance had become standard procedure at our school, and I was sure that our parents would fall into line. We’d heard lots of chatter about other kids’ parents paying for the rooms, the rationale being that they didn’t want the kids driving home drunk, and they were good kids, never any problems, so why tempt fate? Safe at the hotel, kids could hang with their friends, watch TV, and if they were going to sneak a few drinks, so what? I’d heard stories of people puking their guts out at last year’s prom, of a girl who’d called her parents at three in the morning begging them to come to the hotel and get her, but I’d discarded them as exaggerations. Besides, in every group of teenagers, you’d find guys who considered it cool to drink until they barfed and girls who got scared when their dates became too familiar.
After I innocently dropped the information over dinner one evening that Rick was planning to get a hotel room and that Martine and I intended to stay there overnight, my father slid his chair back from the table and drew his brows in the way that usually preceded a lecture. Martine darted a covert warning glance in my direction.
“And I suppose Rick will be bringing you home in the morning?”
“Sure,” I said, already sorry I’d floated the idea.
“How? I doubt that the limo driver is going to stick around waiting that long.” Renting a limousine for prom night was the norm, and Rick had already paid the deposit.
“Maybe Rick will leave his car at the hotel earlier and drive us home in the morning,” I said, definitely on shaky ground.
“Sometimes guys do that, leave their cars there the afternoon before the dance,” Martine chimed in.
“Hunh. So let me get this straight. After the prom, everyone sits around a hotel room in their prom finery? On the beds?” my father asked, a scowl spreading across his handsome face.
“Usually, kids dress for the prom at the hotel beforehand, and afterward they wear the same clothes they had on when they checked in. Then everyone watches TV and maybe orders room service,” Martine said. “And they have tables in the rooms. Sometimes a couch to sit on.”
“But there are beds,” Dad said ominously.
“It’s not a big deal, Dad,” I said. “Anyhow, you don’t have to have beds to do what you’re thinking.” This seemed like common sense to me, knowing as I did two or three girls who’d had babies, and not by stumbling across them in a collard patch, either.
He glowered across the table. “My daughters do not spend the night in a hotel room with a guy.” Have I mentioned that as a defense lawyer, our father excelled at the art of logical argument and enjoyed sparring with us?
“Dad—” I said, not too worried at this point. His resistance might be no more than part of his training program; Dad still cherished the possibility that Martine and I might join his law firm someday.
“Daddy—” Martine said at the same time.
“Roger,” Mom said hastily, “maybe we should talk this over later.”
“It’s only Rick, Dad,” I reminded him patiently. “He’s not just ‘a guy.’”
“Roger, there will be three of them,” Mom added. “It’s hard to imagine that anything, um, bad could happen. Rick’s parents gave him permission.”
Dad slapped his hands on the table, palms down. A vein throbbed in his neck. “Rick is a fine young man, but Trista and Martine are not spending the night at a hotel with him or any other boy. Stuff happens. Bad stuff. And don’t give me ‘Daddy, please,’ or ‘Dad, all the kids are doing it.’ Just because everyone else decides to jump off a cliff, does that mean I have to let my daughters do it?” This, of course, has a rhetorical question, and one that we’d heard often enough as we were growing up.
“But if you don’t let us stay at the hotel all night, we’ll have to come home after the prom is over,” Martine wailed.
“Nothing wrong with that,” my father stated firmly, tossing his napkin onto the table and stalking out of the room.
Okay, so Dad’s abandonment of the argument meant that his decision was final. The master of our fates had spoken. I was smart enough not to push it, at least not then.
I gazed down at my lap, my mother emitted sounds of distress and Martine burst into tears.
Martine and I spent the next few days commiserating with each other. Our friends added fuel to the fire by declaring that their parents were allowing them to stay at the hotel overnight, and how could our parents be so mean? To which we replied sorrowfully that it was beyond us, our father was hopelessly old-fashioned and just didn’t understand. Keep in mind that this was the year that Martine and I alternated between loving our parents to death and being sure they were out to ruin our lives.
A few days before the prom, our mother, her blue eyes sparkling with excitement, walked into our room and perched on the edge of my bed. She’d just had her hair trimmed, and it swung across her cheeks in a shiny arc as she told us she had a wonderfully exciting secret to reveal.
“It’s about prom night,” she said, barely able to contain her glee. “The Finnerans are having an all-night party at their house and you two are invited!”
I was folding socks to put in my drawer, and Martine sat at her desk producing a pen-and-ink cartoon for the school paper, where we both were on staff. My face fell, and Martine let out a groan. “Alec Finneran is the biggest dork in our school, and I wouldn’t spend prom night at his house for anything in the world, not even a
