The Miss America Family

by Julianna Baggott

  There’s one other thing about the dream and this you have to keep in mind. I knew that if I could get one key, just one key, I could unlock the bike lock, and my father could save me. He could fight off the man, and I could climb on my father’s back, like when I was little in the Bayonne Public Pool and my father would take me for rides, my arms hugging his neck. But I could never get a key, and the man never stopped coming.

  Ezra

  Rule #3: If you can’t play guitar, or if you do but don’t have a guitar handy, the next-best thing with women is to do what you’re told, to follow directions.

  Mr. and Mrs. Pinkering’s bedroom was enormous with a king-size bed. Evidently, Mrs. Pinkering had complete control over the decor, because there wasn’t the slightest trace of manliness, no dark colors, no stripes, only white and lace, pillows and perfume bottles. There was a giant fan in one corner as if at some time during the day Mrs. Pinkering lay in bed and had a servant fan her, maybe two servants, the second just to feed her grapes. I was feeling more relaxed—not relaxed enough to expect servants to come in with fans and grapes, but relaxed enough to sprawl out a little in the Pinkerings’ bed, almost like a king myself. Janie flipped off her tennis shoes and peeled off her socks. Her feet were pale and petite.

  She said, “Well, get naked.” And she opened a double closet door and stepped inside where I saw her rummaging again in a chest of drawers. She pulled a chain in the closet ceiling, and a bulb switched on. I could see her father’s suits on hangers, sweaters folded in cubby shelves.

  I took off my shirt. It smelled like grass and clay. I remembered Rudy telling me that you can’t come too quickly or the girls will be pissed. Rudy thinks he’s a real stud because he did it with his cousin’s friend’s sister in somebody’s basement remodeled to look like a billiards room, somebody’s dad’s smoking lounge. Rudy is a pervert and sometimes he goes too far. He told me to think of something else, something boring, like Mr. Quitter’s geometry class, but Arlene Mercer sat next to me at the round table in Mr. Quitter’s geometry class, so close I could hear her breathe. I could smell her bubble gum. We aren’t allowed to chew gum, which made her all the more rebellious and tantalizing.

  I thought instead of Dilworth Stocker. What could be more dull? My stepdad, the finicky fuck, with a towel around his waist, parting and combing his black shiny hair, shaving with his electric razor, clipping his toenails with one foot on the toilet seat.

  Janie unbuttoned and unzipped her tennis skirt, let it parachute to her feet. Her panties were indeed white, as glowingly white as I’d glimpsed them when she was sitting on the hood of the powder blue convertible earlier that day. She was still looking through her father’s socks. I unbuckled my belt and stepped out of my khaki shorts and my underwear in one swift motion so the underwear would be hidden in the shorts. I quickly pulled off my sneakers, my socks, and slipped under the Pinkerings’ flower-printed sheets before she could see my webbed toes. I realized that this might really be it, sex, the real thing. I thought about what I’d imagined it to be like, the way I’d first struggled to put pictures to the sounds from behind my mother’s bedroom door where she took the men from the green kitchen table, and Dilworth’s awkward, racy jokes, and Rudy’s stories from the basement/smoking lounge, plus Blue Lagoon—type movies and books by Henry Miller. I hoped that I’d figure it out, but I was nervous—despite the pot or maybe more aware because of it—rattled, especially in comparison to Janie, who was calm, self-assured. I wondered how many guys had been here before me, imagined them lined up, in order of ability. I wondered where she’d shuffle me in, if I’d get to scoot up past Kermit, and how I’d leer at him as I passed by. But of course I wasn’t so sure I’d get to pass Kermit at all. I decided that I’d be led to the end of the line, the usual spot I had on every team I’d ever been on.

  Janie Pinkering shimmied out of her shirt. She had something in her hand and flipped it at me while she unhooked her bra, tiptoed out of her panties. “It’s a French tickler. Like my dad couldn’t just have a normal condom.”

  I opened the package and saw a condom with a plastic flower on its tip. I looked at Janie, standing by the bed, naked, her breasts full and round, her stomach tan, little bikini lines running up her hips.

  “Scoot over,” she said. And I rolled to my back to wrestle the condom on. Janie kicked back the sheets, and I felt like a god, not a great god, but a small, lucky god, my dick a giant flower on the flower-printed sheets. She straddled me, bending down to kiss me. Her mouth warm on my mouth, her tongue soft and wet. She writhed around and then slipped me inside her, and my mind shot past Rudy, Mr. Quitter’s calculus, Arlene Mercer’s sweet bubble-gum breath. It flew past Dilworth Stocker flying naked with all the men in our neighborhood lifted up from their sod, their lawn chairs. It landed on my mother smiling at me from the stage, her hand cupped in that Miss New Jersey wave. She’s proud of me. I can tell by the way she kind of tucks her chin to her chest and then I look up at Janie Pinkering—the heave and sway of her breasts, her soft hair, the soft puffs of her breath, and, although I know it’s wrong and I hate it, I see my mother, too. And that’s the end of it.

  Janie wasn’t mad at how quickly I came, the way Rudy claimed all women would be, an opinion he probably formed on the basis of having once disappointed his cousin’s sister’s friend in that remodeled basement/smoking lounge where he probably remembers himself wearing a velvet smoking jacket. Janie didn’t seem to think anything of it at all. She just lay on her back a little breathless. Not smiling, intense, her eyebrows knitted as if she were thinking hard, and I figured that the line of guys who’d gotten this far—Kermit Willis plus whoever else—they had come quickly, too, and that there wasn’t so much a line ordered on ability but just a shaggy crowd, a gang of us all wondering what might happen next.

  She pulled the covers up under her chin and stared at the ceiling. “I hate my dad.”

  I’d really only just started recently to hate all the people around me—Mitzie was okay, in her own high-strung, sad little way, and my grandmother was weird with all the superstitious stuff but quiet and disinterested in me enough to be sincere, just fine with me. But I hated my stepdad for walking around all forearms and beefy shoulders, as if he were the quintessential man, and my real father for getting away with calling himself a father at all, and my mom, too, but for her it was the kind of sick hate that can only come from loving someone too much.

  I didn’t want to offer too much. “I hate my stepdad,” I said. “He likes to suck his teeth, little channels of cold air. He likes to sit in his leather chair, tugging at the crotch of his snug golf pants, flipping from one sports channel to the other. He’ll watch anything supposedly athletic, even those so-called sports shows where fat guys haul refrigerators around on their backs.” But I knew that this wasn’t what Janie was getting at.

  She looked over at me and smiled, a kind of “that’s sweet” type of smile. Then she got up and walked to her bedroom naked. A minute later she came back into her parents’ bedroom wrapped in a towel.

  “I’m taking a shower,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Will you?” I asked, because I wasn’t so sure she’d really be here. It sounded like a brush-off.

  “Yes, Stocker,” she said. “You’re the gardener, right? You’ve got a job to do.” She walked over to me and kissed me lightly on the mouth. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I got dressed to the sound of Janie’s shower. I imagined how the water was spraying her back, her chest, pouring down her yellow hair. I found my way out of the Pinkerings’ dark house by sliding my hand against the walls. I walked home, not on the sidewalk, but almost in the middle of the street, which was empty. It was late, nearly midnight, and I felt like I was seeing things new, for the first time, maybe not the way they actually were, particularly, but as they could be. The sky was jammed with stars, and I walked slowly, watching my shadow grow tall and shrink and grow tall again as I passed under each streetlight. It was quiet, b
ut everything seemed loud, each streetlight buzzing. The moon, a perfect bright circle, like a spotlight shining down on my life. I imagined it shining down on me and Janie, our bodies writhing on her parents’ wide bed.

  I didn’t go straight to the pool bungalow. I was starving. I walked around the house to the back door into the kitchen. That’s where my mother found me, staring into the fridge.

  “The turkey doesn’t jump into a sandwich and smear itself with mayonnaise.” She shoved me out of the way and pulled out the fixings for a sandwich, her hip holding open the fridge door. She was wearing a short, thin bathrobe, tied to a tight knot at the waist as if put on angry, and I knew she was angry. I thought maybe it was just that it was so late and I hadn’t called. But maybe she knew about Janie already, that one of the Pinkerings had come home early and had found out and called my mother, or that she could just tell, she just knew, because mothers can know these things. “So, you do a lot of gardening in the dark?”

  “No,” I said, laughing. I sat down at the breakfast table and looked out the window to the pool bungalow. I’d left a lamp on all day. There was light streaming out of the windows.

  “I hear the Pinkerings are out of town. Dilworth was worried if you’d know what to do without at least one of them there to help you through it.” I didn’t say anything. She paused. “Are you going to answer me?” she asked, her knife clinking around in the near-empty jar of mayo and then spreading the little white clumps on the bread, a little too hard, with her elbow cocked.

  “You didn’t ask a question,” I said.

  “I take it you met Janie.” But then she rephrased it, like a contestant on Jeopardy! who’s just remembered to phrase the answer in the form of a question. “I mean, did you meet Janie?”

  “Yes, I did, in fact,” I said, extra-politely, a reward for her having followed my rules.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  She cut the sandwich into four triangles, the way I’d always requested it as a little kid. “Why are you being so coy? All I’m asking is if that’s the reason you’re so late? Did you two hit it off?”

  I took a bite and talked with my mouth full. “Janie’s okay. Didn’t I meet her at somebody’s wedding? At the country club a couple years ago?”

  “I’m not so sure she’s right for you, Ezra. I know Janie Pinkering. I know how much trouble she can get into.” She was standing over me, the light at her back, her face was all shadows. I couldn’t tell if she was really angry now or if it was just the shadows. But she seemed to be pressing down on me, like she really knew everything, like she’d been in the audience for the spotlight performance.

  I panicked. “Didn’t you tell me just yesterday to get laid?”

  “Ezra! My god, did you sleep with her?”

  I repeated my question, “Didn’t you tell me just yesterday to get laid? To have sex while I was still young?”

  “What kind of a mother do you think I am?” she asked in all seriousness. “What kind of a mother would say something like that?” Suddenly, she looked a little wild to me, her hands thrown off her hips, palms open at her sides. Her eyes darted back and forth, searching mine.

  “A very strange mother,” I said. “Very, very strange.” And I picked up my plate and walked out the back door. I strode to the sunken spot in the yard where the pool once was and I sat there, ate my sandwich, and then lay back, looking up at the sky, knowing that my mother, from one of the dark windows of the house, was watching me.

  Pixie

  Practical Tips from Miss Bayonne, Runner-up

  Ezra believed that I only had him to concentrate on. He’d gotten it in his head that all of my thoughts swirled around him. And I was doing my best to keep him on a good, straight path. I was trying to keep our lives as close to normal as possible. I knew that things were teetering around me, the entire house precarious—Dilworth, Mitzie, Ezra, and me—the four of us like little glass figurines. I didn’t know it then, but looking back I know that there was a lot of static, that sometimes I could barely hear people above the noise in my head, like the loud hum of an air conditioner. And when I think of it, didn’t Mitzie’s voice get louder, more shrill, so loud, in fact, that someone could hear her across a great divide? Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I was talking too loudly as well, if I hadn’t started to sound like Mitzie with her adenoidally shrill voice. But it wasn’t Ezra that I was thinking about, although I should have been—he was becoming a man, wasn’t he, moment to moment, taking on some new shape. Sometimes I swore that I could see his bones stretching, his boy’s bones hardening, thickening until his jaw was really almost tough, his Adam’s apple sharp in his throat. And I wasn’t thinking about Mitzie, who needed to be allowed to be a little girl, not weighed down by the responsibilities of making her mother happy and contented with her life. I tried, I did, to look at the two of them, to focus on Ezra and Mitzie, to remain present. I could almost hear them calling to me from the other side of the loud hum. And the hum was the past, the train barreling down those tracks, the rushing air, and the quiet scraping of my mother’s spoon against the bottom of a pot. The hum reminded me of the time my first husband, Russell, took me and Ezra to a college buddy’s garage where he wheeled out a huge electric telescope so that we could see Saturn, what turned out not to be a fiery, burning planet but a disappointment: a ball, its simple hoop as ordinary as a fourth-grader’s paper cutout for the science fair. But I remembered the thick black cord, the instant rattle of the machinery when it was plugged in, how when I looked through the eyepiece, my cheek quivered, the buzzing was so loud. My tongue vibrated. That’s what it was like, the way I saw everything in those days, through the humming, buzzing electric past.

  Like the night Ezra told me he’d slept with Janie Pinkering, probably losing his virginity with her, I looked out my window to the pool bungalow and the indentation where the dirt-filled pool was. I could see Ezra sitting on the grass. I tried to imagine Ezra and Janie Pinkering; Ezra something of a delicate flower, just a boy, really, and I circled back to the image of Jimmy Vietree, words forever pouring out of his crooked teeth, nervously talking to fill up silence, and Janie, a teenage girl, headstrong, just learning that she’s powerful. I remembered how it felt, the new power of it, what it was like carrying that gun, and I imagined her firing the gun all around, not Ezra’s head but Jimmy Vietree’s. See how it’s all confused.

  The past, its hum swelled, and although I was standing there looking at my son in the middle of the night, one thought collided into the next, and suddenly I was thinking about Wanda Sorenski. You see, I gave up on reading everything in the Bayonne Library on the subject of manners after I met Wanda and she took me under her wing. To be Miss Bayonne, to pull it off successfully, I needed more practical tips than show cattle and dahlias. She lived in the neighborhood, and I knew her from when we’d been regular churchgoers. Wanda had been runner-up Miss Bayonne four years earlier. She’d since married and had two kids and a husband who was never at home. He was in the Coast Guard and stationed somewhere not too far away, but still he didn’t come home even when he could. She’d spread out a little since her pictures of the pageant. Her face was wider, her legs thicker. There was the beginning of a sag under her chin. And she was always a little tired, always sipping tea and eating only toast. She was almost always feeling just a little sick. But still when you came into her house, even though it was small and dark, all the furniture matched, the curtains and the rug, too, and it didn’t smell like cabbage and cigarette smoke like our dingy, mismatched apartment. Her kids rolled around on the floor, a girl and a boy, fighting most of the time, so you had to talk real loud, but she said that was good for me, to have to talk with confidence, loudly. She got me on a schedule. She wanted me to win. She really did. She said that the first time she saw me at a church-basement social she thought that I was special. She said that sometimes she wanted me to win so badly she could almost cry, and once she almost did. But then she shaped up and said that runner-up Miss Bay
onne didn’t ever cry. You could cry like crazy if you won, but you couldn’t even get glassy-eyed when you’d lost. She said, “You really should never cry. It’s never appropriate.”

  She gave me a list of tips. For shiny hair, I got some hair serum and put a quarter-cup of vodka in my shampoo. I set my hair with stale beer to help it hold, and put peroxide on strips of it and wrapped them in tinfoil to make it lighter here and there. Lemon helped with shine and blondness. I coated my hands and feet in Vaseline and slept in gloves and socks to make my skin softer. I put Ajax on my toothpaste after I’d brushed my teeth normally and then brushed them again. It sometimes made me gag a little, the sharp bite of it, but it made my teeth white, even whiter with some whore-red lipstick for contrast. That’s what she called it, whore-red. She taught me to dab a bit of clear nail polish on my cheekbones to paste my tendrils to my face so they would stay put and not grow slack. I got flip-proof adhesive for the soles of my shoes, and every day I practiced dancing with a short pencil sideways in my mouth that I bit down on, so I got used to smiling for long periods of time. Wanda had Super-Glued her ears back, but I didn’t have to because mine were flat enough to my head, and she used Preparation H to make her eyes less puffy, but mine, she said, were just fine. I was really and truly becoming someone else.

  She knew all about my family. And she said that she didn’t want to know anything about boys. She said, “Falling in love should be a secret. A woman should never reveal her secrets.” I thought Wanda Sorenski had fallen in love a time or two. And I knew that I wasn’t in love with Jimmy Vietree, that I didn’t want to be, even though it was plain that he loved me. If I had told him one thing, one true thing about me, I think I might have been able to fall in love with him. It would have been that easy, because I needed love so much and an outlet for it. But I wasn’t going to see him anymore by the tracks.