The Miss America Family

by Julianna Baggott

  Ezra

  Rule #2: Always agree with women, no matter what they’re saying, even if you don’t understand them.

  When I got to the Pinkerings’, Janie was sitting on the hood of a powder blue convertible in the long graveled driveway next to a broad lawn arched with maples and their green leaves. She was wearing a tennis skirt, and her legs were spread just wide enough to reveal the white glow of her underwear, the heels of her sneakers parked on the shiny chrome fender. I was surprised to see she’d changed. Her teeth were big and straight, her nose a little too perky, but she was tan and lean and stacked. Her white polo shirt was so tight that it made a taut ripple from one nipple to the other, and her long legs extended from her little white skirt. She was a good two inches taller than me. She made me nervous.

  I was wearing sneakers and beat-up khaki shorts. I felt suddenly very sloppy, poor, like a servant boy. Just because I go to a boarding school doesn’t mean we’re rich. I’m on almost a full scholarship because of those little bubble tests. Plus, I round out demographics. I’m a way for rich kids to be exposed to the middle class. Dilworth is a dentist with an okay practice, but our house is the smallest on our block, and run-down, the roof streaked with washed-out tar, the gutters rusting through their white paint, the linoleum curling up in the corners of the kitchen. I felt like Janie knew all of this. Just by the way she looked up at me walking across the yard, I decided that her parents had told her that they were doing my folks a favor. I was the hired help, but I even failed at that. I looked nothing like a gardener and felt even less like one. I’d figured little Janie’d have some sort of camp to attend and Mrs. Pinkering would be at that hair appointment that women always seem to have to rush off to, that I’d be alone and that there’d be little to do. The old gardener having just gotten fired, how quick could weeds take over? But now I felt anxious. I walked up to her and said, “I’m Ezra Stocker. The new gardener, I guess.” (Yes, I had to take Dilworth’s last name, an act of goodwill, my mother the ambassador negotiating between two not-warring but not altogether happy countries: Dilworth and me. I didn’t have any choice, really. I was just a snot-nosed kid at the time.)

  Janie said, “My Dad fired the last gardener for planting marijuana in the greenhouse,” and then she paused to see if I had a reaction. I tried not to. She went on, “He was a hippy freak, with one of those long, gross ZZ Top ponytails and sweaty-pitted tie-dyes, and when you looked at him up close, he was ancient, way over forty years old, like an authentic relic. But I got a bag of weed just by telling him I thought his sandals were cool.” That’s the way Janie talked, in big gushes of information. I thought of sandals, how I didn’t wear them because of my webbed toes and how I was maybe missing out on something. I wanted to know if he wore the sandals with thick wool socks like some of the kids at my school, but I didn’t ask. Just then, a small blue butterfly landed on Janie’s knee, a peach of a knee with fine golden hairs that she’d missed shaving. We both looked at the butterfly for a moment and then it lifted. Janie slid off the hood of the car to her feet and the butterfly flapped around her head. She closed her eyes and tilted back her head and opened her mouth. The butterfly skittered off on its bumpy path up over the car, up into the trees. Then Janie opened her eyes, put her hand on her throat. “Did I swallow it?” she asked. “Did it go in?”

  “No,” I said, but immediately I wished I’d said yes. Obviously she hadn’t swallowed it and knew she hadn’t swallowed it. She was asking me some other question, more personal. I changed my answer. “But maybe,” I said, and I thought if only I’d been more diligent in making up my Rules to Live By that there’d have been one to have kept me from making a mistake like that.

  “Sure,” Janie said matter-of-factly. “It’s not a big deal.” And she led me across the well-trimmed lawn.

  It was about two o’clock. I walked in the front door, the hallway lit up with bright sun. “Nobody’s home but me, for like a week, probably more. My parents left for vacation this morning, not together, separate vacations.” She gave the impression that she thought “separate vacations” were as gross as the hippy gardener’s ponytail. She rolled her eyes.

  My parents’ being divorced and my dad’s being absent except for his annual swoops in from California once a summer in somebody else’s convertible, I was thinking that she was lucky to know where her father was at all. When I was a kid, my dad drifted in and out of our apartment. I remember hearing a door shut down the hall, thinking that each of our neighbors’ shoes on the stairs could be him, waiting for the pause, the jingle of keys or the turn of the corner, feet up another flight. I remember my mother always with me, the nights she spent rocking me on the edge of the tub making me breathe shower steam to cure a croupy cough, but he was always out. Since my mother married Dilworth, I’d ask questions about my real dad every now and then. When I’d ask what he did for a living, people would just kind of shrug. Dilworth, who usually clammed up on the subject of my father, would snort, “He’s a dreamer.” But my mom would defend him, because, I think, she never stopped loving him. “He was always interested in politics. Maybe he’s an activist. I think he wants to have enough money to buy the life he’s always wanted to live. He’s actually quite shy,” as if any of that were a job. To me, he was still a ghost, a growling motor in the driveway. And I said to Janie, “My dad’s a ghost.” Meaning that my parents divorced when I was five, and I almost never see him, but all that came out was this disconnected statement.

  She looked at me, tilted her head, as if what I’d said interested her, made her reconsider me somehow. But she didn’t respond to it, and I was too flustered to explain the comment. She said, “I think I’ve seen your house. I think my dad dropped your dad off once when I was in the backseat.”

  I wanted to correct her, to make it clear that Dilworth was not my father, but I didn’t want to make a stink about it, like people do when their name’s mispronounced. “Oh, I don’t live at home really. I’ve got my own place out back. My mother had wanted my grandmother to live there, but my grandmother didn’t want to and the nursing home won’t take pets. My grandmother has about twenty caged birds, swinging on their little perch swings. So she moved to a condo nearby instead.” This was all true, but I wished I hadn’t brought up my grandmother at all. I was suddenly imagining her living room, a dark room of old furniture, chirping, feathers, and dust. The mention of my grandmother at all killed the bachelor lure of the place. Sometimes I get nervous and tend to run on. My mother tried to get my grandmother to live in the pool bungalow, which would have meant changing its name to “the mother-in-law’s suite,” but my grandmother refused. Publicly, she refused on the grounds that she wanted her independence. But privately, she confessed to me that my mother had always been edgy, a fragile child, and my grandmother had learned early enough to lie to her about anything the least bit unhappy. She said, “Not to mention that Mitzie. Your sister’s voice reminds me of your mother’s god-awful accordion. And that husband of hers.” She rolled her eyes. My grandmother hates Dilworth Stocker, which is one of the reasons I like my grandmother even though I don’t really understand her. “We might come from fish, Ezra, but he’s a sheep, I tell you. He’s a descendant of some kind of herd. He’s a herded animal, if you know what I mean.” I only sort of ever understand her. She’s a strange superstitious woman with a lot of theories.

  Janie had lost interest. “You can weed the beds out back and at dusk water down the clay tennis court. Oh, and keep the leaves out of the pool. Help yourself to any food.” She paused and looked at me, and I guess I was just staring at her. “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said, glancing around the room. “I’m just taking it all in.” There was a lot to take in—a huge shiny kitchen with French doors that opened to a porch banked by windows that overlooked a blue hourglass-shaped pool and a fence-enclosed tennis court. “Is the convertible yours?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “A gift for my sweet sixteen.”

  “It’s nice.”r />
  “Start in the flower beds,” she said. “Kermit’s coming over to play tennis with Elsie and me. Kermit Willis? Elsie Finner?”

  It was kind of a compliment that she thought it remotely possible that I’d know them. But I didn’t. I shrugged and she seemed a little relieved. In most places, there’d be more social separation because of wealth, and I was used to picking up on the distinctions of old and new money. I’d studied it in boarding school, had become a pro. But because Greenville is so small, there’s some overlapping—tight circles that by social necessity have to overlap, for example, to fill a wedding reception at the country club where Janie and I had met a couple years before.

  I just stood there for a minute, hoping the tour wasn’t over, hoping she’d tell me which thing was a weed and which was about to bloom into a prize-winning rose.

  Janie was pouring juice. She was all business now, no longer the girl with the butterfly in her throat. She turned around. “The tools are out in the garage, hung up.” She smiled, but not with her mouth, just squinting her eyes.

  Kermit pulled his Saab right up to the court’s fence, turfing about ten feet of lawn, which I was pretty indignant about, considering I was the gardener and would probably have to reseed or sod or do whatever gardeners would do in a situation like that and knowing, too, that I’d never do anything about it at all.

  But, really, the day would turn out pretty good for me. A few things went my way. Kermit, a real prick actually, had started going with a college girl he’d brought with him to round out the foursome, and Elsie Finner showed up, too, with her mother’s cook’s son, Manuel. I walked around the yard, watering the grass with my thumb pressed over the opening of a green hose. There was probably an elaborate sprinkler system somewhere, but I had dug up only the hose and only watered as far away from the spigot as it would reach. I watched them from the little row of windows in the garage door, then from the kitchen where I ate a couple bowls of their low-fat cereal. It was obvious that Janie hadn’t been expecting the college girl, dressed in ratty jeans and a cut-off shirt. She was beautiful, fresh-faced, like a camp counselor. She seemed to think everything was hilarious and had this loud, kind of throaty laugh. It was obvious, too, that there’d been some sort of relationship between Janie and Kermit that maybe had been a kind of touchy-feely thing but unspoken, just my guess, and that it had abruptly dissolved, because of this college girl, which was the first news flash that Janie had gotten about it.

  He and the college girl swapped a flask back and forth and played doubles drunk. Elsie was there with Manuel, who wasn’t wearing a shirt. She kissed him open-mouthed in front of everyone. She was being bold, breaking boundaries. She was slumming, and Manuel didn’t seem the least bit unhappy about it. I don’t know if Manuel spoke English. I never heard him say anything, and he smiled like a foreigner all the time, especially if anyone gestured his way or said his name. He didn’t play but sat along the fence and became, as a matter of course, the ball boy, which he seemed okay about. Janie was the only one playing to win and she did win, each match, each point, a little grunt with her backhand. And then everyone went home. Elsie let Manuel drive her Volvo, and they spun out of the driveway, Manuel waving happily out the sunroof, followed by Kermit and his college girl, who beeped twice.

  I think it was the following combination of things that made Janie interested in me: 1) Elsie Finner introducing the concept of slumming. I was, after all, the help, the gardener, a servant, really, just like Manuel’s mother and Manuel, the ball boy; 2) Kermit Willis being out of the picture, all caught up in his newfound interest in older women. I’m not stupid. I don’t think Janie Pinkering was ever really in love with me, but somehow the idea of me wasn’t so bad or was suddenly convenient. In any case, she came up to me while I was struggling to get the hose to the clay courts to water them down for the night. It was dusk, and bats had begun to circle high above us.

  She said, “You seem like a tireless virgin. Are you like fanatical about it? Or just by chance and sticking with it, doggedly.”

  I froze, bent over the hose like something not fully evolved. “What?” I understood what each word meant; they were the kinds of words she’d probably recently picked up studying SAT vocabulary. But I thought maybe I’d misunderstood her completely. It had happened to me before. My grandmother said she’d bought my stepdad rubbers for Christmas and I kind of freaked, staring at her like she was crazy, and then she said, “Galoshes, to wear over his shoes and keep them dry in the rain.” Or I thought maybe she’d said something wrong. I once told Rudy that one of the senior guys had gotten an IUD over Christmas and I’d meant to say DUI. So I’ve learned to just be calm, like everything’s normal, and to make people repeat themselves.

  But Janie didn’t repeat herself. She said, “You heard me.” She touched my arm, first the part covered by my shirtsleeve and then the bare arm itself. “C’mon. I’ll show you how to lure a bat.”

  “I’ve got to water the courts,” I said, as if I suddenly cared.

  “Bring the hose.”

  She stepped to the middle of the court and swung her racket back and then hit a ball up into the sky, her skirt swishing around her taut thighs. The bats dipped and swooped, diving for what they thought were fat juicy moths. I stood there spraying water as evenly as I could across the court. I had no idea what I was doing, how much water courts needed to be healthy. I watched Janie in the dim light, her white skirt swishing, the swing of her arm, her hair, too, swaying on her back, and all the time the smell of wet clay rising up around me. Each time she shot the ball just a bit lower until the bats were flapping around our heads. One came so close that she screamed and grabbed me around the chest, laughing, breathless. She jerked my arm in a way that made the water shoot up over our heads for a second, like a quick rain. I took my thumb off the hose and let the water pour out around our feet.

  Janie giggled, holding her hand to her throat, as if the butterfly were there tickling her. And then she looked at me. “We’ve got to do something about you, Ezra Stocker. You need serious work.”

  I agreed.

  By now it was dark, and I followed Janie through the house blindly. She held my hand but walked quickly, almost jogging up the turned staircase to her bedroom. Her hand was smallish and a bit damp. I thought about Pete Duvet and I felt lucky that I didn’t have his sweaty palms, dry cough, and that lingering scent of peanut butter. I said to myself, Well, if nothing else, you’ve got that going for you.

  In her bedroom, she turned on one lamp in the corner and closed the curtains. She rummaged through a little top drawer of her dresser, underwear, I imagined, little flimsy things by the way she flicked through them. She pulled out a plastic baggy of pot, a box of wrappers, and, from the side of a fat candle on her dresser, a matchbox. Her room was big with a high ceiling and a window seat. She kneeled on her bed and began rolling a joint. I’d smoked once before on Rudy’s dad’s boat the previous summer. It was actually Rudy’s dad’s weed that we’d stolen from some little almost-hidden hatch belowdecks. It was just the two of us. We smoked just one joint while his dad was onshore. Rudy got so hysterical that he said he thought his ribs were going to puncture some major organ. I didn’t think that I felt much of anything at first, a little scratch in my throat, but that’s about it. I was a little freaked out by how much Rudy looked like a donkey, his horsey teeth, all that braying, a donkey with braces and miniature rubber bands. Then, out in these high weeds where Rudy took me to spy on some girls who were supposedly naked, he kind of lost his mind. Smoking pot makes me a little nervous. I’ve seen it affect people, you see.

  Janie said, “Sit down, Stocker. You’re so, you know, stiff.”

  I sat down, but gently, like an alarm might go off if I applied too much weight to the bedsprings.

  “Can you believe that girl Kermit brought? Did you see her? What an idiot. She can’t return a serve to save her ass. Did you see her ass? College girls gain fifteen pounds, I hear, as soon as they unpack. I won’t b
ecause I’m aware of it.” She was spreading the dry green leaves, trying to work out a few clumps. She licked the rolling paper with the tip of her tongue, just the tip, just wet enough. “I’m going to go to Brown. It’s the only school that’s laid back, but still respectable.”

  I was thinking about my dad, that he’d have had a guitar with him. He’d have been barefoot, showing off his webless toes. He’d have started strumming and singing with his eyes closed. I worried suddenly about the scissor cuts that my mother had made in my underwear. I wondered if we’d get that far. I thought, too, of my stepdad. He’d scored my mom, so he must have done something right. I tried to puff up my chest a little to give the appearance of being bigger, broader, but Janie picked up the matches and looked over at me.

  “Are you holding your breath?”

  “No,” I said, letting the air slide out of me.

  She lit the joint and took a drag, her lips a little loose around its tip. I could hear a small crackle. She held it all in, swallowing now and then, and passed it to me. I did my best, took a drag, my throat burning.

  Janie said, “My mom’s in Santa Cruz and my dad’s speaking about feet at some convention in New Orleans, but how many conventions about feet can you have in New Orleans in one year? My mom knows, of course, that there’s someone in New Orleans, but she looks the other way. It’s such bullshit. Adults are cowards.”