A Spectator Event

Kristine Langley Mahler

The true theater of a girl is to glitter with excitement, a shimmering display of technical skill: the point is the performance. You don’t want to be restless and bored. You want to be a success. So you don’t suggest the evening you’d like to see; you don’t tell him the truth.

You’re ready when your date calls, your excitement bursts operatic (your first number is concluded). To spare embarrassment, you stand at the window until he collects you. You will be good, you will be satisfactory even if he’s grumpy. You prevent a scowl and grumble if you know the right system: your date goes first, and you follow.

You sit closer—you’d love to shrug off your program, but how? This unreasonable tradition that “a lady should not be unkindly” is your fate. You won’t endanger that stiffening across a table, the veiling cage. If there’s a question that will disturb him, you quickly check it, shed it grace- fully. Your mission: to thread your way back by making yourself as small as possible (the aisle is narrow).

You deliver a particularly good line; you’re the only one who appreciates it.

You take your cue when he turns—selection is concluded— pauses like paragraph breaks, not the ends of chapters. He rises, rigid. A certain amount of foot-stamping and an outcry is expected; you finish, downbeat, quietly, sadly, forgivable. It is a performance.

You reflect upon your heart—tempting to smudge, spoil, break the exhibition. You will make the job easier. You do a little research for a preview of what is to come; you know the game. It’s wise to appear unknowing so he can instruct you, to turn to him and say, “What’s a sport?,” to cuddle, nuzzle, wrestle—you know where the action is. He is breathing heavily past your ear, in your lap, your territory, beyond the boundaries, the wrong time, a serious moment to taunt the player.

If anyone had wanted to take it, he could have (he should). See: you, a full-blast radio, a country road, deserted, unforgivable.

Source: Haupt, Enid A. Chapter 11: “You’re a Spectator: Attending Theatres, Movies, Museums and Sports Events.” The seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining, David McKay Company, 1963.