The Miss America Family

by Julianna Baggott

  I told Wanda that I got letters from Cliff and I tried not to read them. I did read them, but only once, and then I stuffed them away, to be pored over nearly twenty years later, each one spread out, arranged, and refolded back inside its envelope. In one he said he’d become good friends with this black guy, Jamison, and that he’d never really been friends with a black guy before, not really, even though he’d worked with them and gone to school with them. Now they sat together on patrol. Jamison wasn’t letting him know him all at once, the way another white guy would. He kept some things to himself. He did tell him one story, though, about when Jamison was a kid getting money out of the bank for a summer camp, and he ran back to the car where his daddy was waiting for him. When he got there, his daddy slapped his face and told him that a black man never runs down the street with money in his hands. Cliff said that Jamison thought that his daddy was right, and that he’d do the same to his boy if he had one, “because some shit never changes.” Jamison had a kid brother who was autistic. He told Cliff that he missed hearing the boy sing, not word-songs, just all of these long beautiful sounds, pure and whole. Jamison said it was the closest thing to hearing God talk right to you.

  Cliff said that he’d told Jamison everything about me and our mother and father, and how our father died. He said, “And, Pixie, you won’t believe it because you don’t understand everything, you don’t know what all was going on, but I told Jamison I was glad he was dead. I told Jamison that I’d have killed him if I’d gotten the chance.” Cliff said that maybe I’d understand him one day. Maybe not. And that he hoped that I never understood him, and I didn’t think I would, not really. Even though we never spoke of it in my family, I knew that he knew about the man, the one who came into my room that night, maybe, I thought, looking for Cliff or looking to steal something, and that my father came in and took care of him. It was dark, but I knew that I’d felt the man on top of me, and I’d seen my father, back-lit by the hall light, his arms over his head, bringing a bat down hard on the man’s head. I didn’t remember anything else, only the taste of blood because I’d bitten my tongue, warm blood and nothing else. I’d been over it and over it in my head so many times that there was nothing I didn’t understand, there was nothing I couldn’t see in all of its details. Nothing. Cliff was my big brother and I figured he was being like my mother, who pretended there was some knowledge out in the world that only she could give me, and that when she did I’d suddenly be a grown woman. But I was becoming a woman without them. (The same way, I guess, Ezra was becoming a man without me, and certainly without his own father, who’d never really played much of a role. Dilworth was there, of course, but I wasn’t so sure that I wanted Dilworth to be passing on too much to Ezra anyway. He believed in raising boys with a certain amount of roughness and so I never encouraged him to think of himself as Ezra’s father.) I wondered how Cliff could hate my father; even with all the lousy things he did—that he was weak for drink and he spent all of our money until there was nothing—he was still our father. I decided that there was something almost evil in Cliff. Really, sometimes I thought that about Cliff, and I hated him. Once I wrote Cliff a letter and told him not to write me and that I hated him, but I couldn’t send it.

  Wanda told me that she could see another person just under my skin, coming out. And it was like she was my new mother, like my old mother was fading each time I came home, fading into the upholstery of the chair by the window. One day, I figured she wouldn’t be there at all. Wanda told me to look in the mirror, and I did, the wood mirror painted to look like gold in her hallway, and I stared and stared. She said, “Do you see her?” And I stared until I saw a pure girl, glowing almost. “I do,” I told Wanda. “I really do.”

  But last summer when I looked into the mirror, I saw only what was behind me: the living room, a floral sofa, big windows with white sheers, the furniture polished to a wet shine. I looked at myself. I tried to make out my face, but there was nothing that I could really latch onto, nothing that seemed like it was really me at all. And if I looked hard enough, I saw the fake-gold-framed mirror, Wanda over my shoulder, her nose and cheeks pink with rouge, and my clean young face, me as the girl I once was, wanting to be pure.

  Ezra

  Rule #4: Eventually, things come undone.

  All that week, Janie and I lay out in deck chairs by the pool. I never took a dip. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, having to hold my nose when I jumped in. I’d tell her it was too cold or I was too tired. But I watched her do laps, strokes that she made look exotic, backstroke and butterfly. We ate like grown-ups on an airplane—honey-roasted peanuts and convoluted mixed drinks that Janie invented at her dad’s bar. We played tennis, and she taught me how to serve, relieving me of my broad, arching backswing that she said reminded her of her mother on their vacation to St. John last spring, teetering on a footstool trying to kill mosquitoes. Sometimes we’d take the powder blue convertible out on back roads, where Janie hugged curves and gunned it on straight-aways. We had sex in the afternoons in her parents’ bed. We rinsed off in her parents’ shower, together, lathering up with her mom’s sweet foaming lotions, apricot extracts, and stuff like that. We dried off with her parents’ monogrammed towels. It was all perfect. I never weeded or watered the clay courts or cut the grass. Each time Janie jumped into the greenish pool, leaves stirred up and swirled and floated like in a lake you’d find just off a nature trail. I never did actually set foot in the Pinkerings’ greenhouse. Every night, it rained, a quick, sometimes thundering rain that had built up all day in the thick humidity causing tight ringlets of the hair not swooped up in Janie’s ponytail. The grass grew so heavy and full that it curled over on top of itself. The flower beds were thick and green with weeds that choked the prissier blooms, flowers I couldn’t name if my life depended on it. And I dreamed of living there, even when the Pinkerings returned from their separate vacations, and that Dr. Pinkering would see my webbed toes, by accident, one day poolside, and he’d take me into his office and zap the webs right off. I dreamed of becoming part of the family, Ezra Pinkering, although that didn’t really make much sense since I supposed I’d have to marry into the family through Janie, but that’s what I wanted, not only the steady sex life, although I marveled at that, but to be a Pinkering, from my head to my toes.

  I filled out time sheets, ones that Dr. Pinkering had left for me that were normally used by the part-time help at his podiatry office, ones you’d usually punch into a clock. But I filled mine out by hand. I was afraid of getting caught, and suggested every once in a while that I take a crack at mowing the lawn. But Janie would say, “Don’t be ridiculous!” Once I took the mower out while I thought she was sleeping, but after the first two or three ragged pulls on the mower’s cord, she appeared at an open upstairs window, topless, calling me inside. She encouraged me to count every minute on the time sheet that I was on the premises. But, in good conscience, I couldn’t include the hours I spent having sex with their daughter and lounging in their bed. I did, however, put down time spent in their pool, on their clay tennis court, whenever I was outdoors and generally getting sun or developing muscle. Those were Dilworth’s chief goals, in any case. But Janie was always at me to put down more hours. “Look,” she said, “my parents wouldn’t notice if I shaved my head bald and burned the house to the ground. It doesn’t matter!”

  My mother, on the other hand, had decided to create a diversion. After our late-night conversation about me and Janie having had sex, my mother hovered around me whenever she got the chance, dusting under my elbows, sweeping up under my feet, all of it already cleaned and polished by Helga. She would say things like, “This really is a nice thing we’ve got here.” And “You know, your stepfather works very hard. He provides for us.” I was pretty sure that she felt like our life had a hairline fracture because of my lost virginity, that she felt like she was losing control and was trying to convince me, and herself, that our suburban life was like Eden and that I was eyeing the apple tree, or
maybe I’d already taken a bite, but a small bite that could maybe get Super-Glued back. In any case, one day she caught me walking out the front door, heading for Janie’s. I walked down the stone steps into the yard and she followed me. She was wearing pink Bermuda shorts and a pink short-sleeved sweater, her toenails painted to match. She said, “Ezra, I’ve made a decision.”

  “About what?”

  “About you. I think that you should spend as much of this summer as possible getting to know your grandmother. She’s finally living so very close and she’s old, Ezra. An old woman.”

  “Why don’t you get to know her?” I asked.

  “She’s a link to your past, Ezra.”

  “She’s a link to your past,” I said.

  “The past is overrated,” my mother said. “Just do what I tell you, okay?”

  My grandmother had been over a few times for quick dinners with the family, ones she cut short by saying things like, “The bird cages need to be covered,” or “I’m missing my program.” She was a regular Columbo devotee. She never seemed to care in the least that I’d only stopped by once to drop off a stick of butter. She was a no-nonsense type.

  My mother said, “She’s expecting you to come by today. Before the Pinkerings.”

  I imagined my mother presenting the idea to my grandmother and the old woman saying, “What are we going to talk about, for God’s sake? What do I have in common with a sixteen-year-old boy?”

  “I don’t have much time, you know. I’ll go, but I can’t stay forever.” I walked back up the driveway to get my bike from the garage.

  “Apartment 2B,” my mother called out.

  The hallway of my grandmother’s apartment building smelled like dog piss and Chinese food refrying in a wok. It was dark, especially after I’d been outside in the bright sun, and I felt almost blind.

  “Who’s there?” my grandmother said.

  “Ezra.”

  My grandmother unlocked bolt after bolt to let me in. She never spoke much, but when she did, it was something that you could tell she’d edited down to some essential point. She never wore makeup, never filed her nails, but cut them bluntly across. Her hair was always pulled back in a low clip at the base of her neck, tightly, no tendrils. She was not the type for tendrils. Maybe she’d been beautiful once. There wasn’t any technical flaw in her face. In fact, you could trace some of my mother’s fine features back to her, but she was missing beauty. She was a big-boned woman, and I’m not trying to say nicely that she was fat. She wasn’t ever fat. Her bones were actually big. She was sturdy and had that look that some people have of not just being people but having been put together. She was well constructed. “Cheep-Cheep died in the night,” she said. “You’ll bury him for me in your parents’ yard. I’d do it myself, but I don’t have a yard.”

  All the curtains were drawn, and there were just a few slices of light that fell on the floor through the curtain’s edges. Every once in a while, you could hear a feathery rustle from the cages hung on hooks around the living room, wings brushing the cage bars.

  She walked into the kitchen, a catch in one hip making her limp, but not really slowing her down. The kitchen light overhead was a weak fluorescent tube that flickered. There was a dead green bird on the counter, limp, its head tilted back, beak shut, eyes open. Its claws were sharp and splayed, rigid. My grandmother pulled a Nescafé jar from the cupboard, twisted its lid, and dumped the grounds into a bowl. Then she stuffed the bird into the jar. It was a tight squeeze, and I could see the bird’s one eye pressed to the glass. Its claws folded up under its body. She screwed on the lid.

  “Take it,” she said.

  But I couldn’t.

  “Here,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “It looks so dead,” I said.

  “Think of it as sleeping,” she said. “It looks like it’s sleeping.”

  “No,” I said. “It looks really dead. Technically, it’s dead.”

  She lifted my hand for me and put the jar in it. “It’s just a bird,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  And then we fell quiet. “You want juice? I’ve got juice for you, if you want it.”

  “No, thanks.”

  She walked into the living room and cooed with a roll of her tongue. She pulled peanuts from her apron pockets and fed them to the birds. “Are you doing good in school?”

  I nodded.

  “Your mother wants us to get to know each other. I don’t believe in that kind of thing.”

  “Me neither.”

  “But lately I haven’t been myself. When you get old, I suppose you can sometimes feel the breaking, like the walls of my mind had once been so strong, but now they’re cracking here and there. I think of things that I haven’t thought of in years! Imagine, suddenly, they’re here and each memory real.” She smiled. “I remember a kindly butcher,” she said. “A sweetheart of mine.” And then she straightened. “It’s not the kind of thing you can explain, Ezra.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You should go. You’re a busy man. I can tell. You probably have a sweetheart of your own.”

  My cheeks felt hot. I nodded.

  “I don’t believe in falling in love, either. It seems like a bad investment. I don’t recommend it.” My mother had mentioned my grandmother’s mistrust of marriage and love. I’d heard vague stories about my grandparents’ fights. My mother said that they had brawls, really, like two kids. I didn’t know much about my grandfather except that he drowned trying to show off, that it was late at night and he was drunk. She walked me to the door. “Poor Cheep-Cheep,” she said. “But it’s just death, Ezra. It’s the way we are punished, the ones taken, but even more, the ones left behind. You ought to get used to it.”

  I didn’t know what to say, although I guess I kind of agreed. I mean I’d never really known anyone who’d died, but my father had gone on to a different life, and I always felt that I was the one who’d been left behind, my same old life minus him. “I’ll try,” I offered and this seemed to please her.

  She nodded. “And say a prayer, too.”

  “What?”

  “Over the bird when you bury it. I would, but I’m not a believer.”

  “Okay,” I said and I walked out the door. I carried the dead bird under one arm, riding my bike one-handed straight to Janie’s. I wasn’t going to bury the bird and I had no intentions of saying any kind of prayer on behalf of my grandmother for her Cheep-Cheep. I didn’t know any prayers anyway. My mother had never taught me to pray. By the time I’d pedaled to Janie’s, I decided that I’d toss the jar in the garbage out back, but when I rode up, I saw Janie first thing. I quickly parked my bike by a tree surrounded by pachysandra and I hid the jar behind the tree in the short dark leaves around it.

  Janie stepped out on the porch with its white wood furniture and floral cushions. “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “My grandmother’s place,” I said. “I’m supposed to get to know her.”

  “Oh, I thought maybe you weren’t going to show, but here you are.”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Let’s forget the swim,” she said. “I don’t feel like tennis.”

  She walked upstairs to the bedroom and I followed, trying to shake the images of my grandmother, her dead bird, and all of the strange things she’d said about death. I could still feel the dust in my nose.

  Janie and I talked a lot. Not usually during the day, really. Not outside during my tennis lesson or lying out by the pool, but after we’d gotten stoned and had sex, mostly while we ate chocolate chip cookies and her dad’s Slim Jims in her parents’ bed. Every night when I got home, I went over all the bits of conversation that I could remember, writing some of it down in my pocket-size notepad, things Janie had confided and things that I’d said, and I rated the things I’d said on a five-star point system as to how well they’d gone over. As far as I could tell, Janie liked personal stuff. I was thinking of making it one of my Rules to Live
By, to be personal to get women to like you. But it wasn’t a rule really. It didn’t have that tone. It was more like good advice. She liked when I revealed how much I hated my life. It spurred her on to tell me more, and mostly Janie liked to talk. Janie liked to entertain me, which was fine by me. She didn’t want to hear long monologues about my life. She wanted me to be amazed by her and yet a little mysterious myself. Most of the time I wasn’t pulling it off. But that afternoon, after sex, lazing in her parents’ bed, right toward the end of the week, I thought she might have been falling for me.

  We were talking about my mother, that she was Miss New Jersey a long time ago, 1970. I told her it was only the second-ever Miss America pageant to be protested, women walking up and down the Atlantic City boardwalk, chanting, “Ain’t she sweet? Makin’ profit off her meat.” I told her how my mom remembers the marching crowd, the signs like WELCOME TO THE MISS AMERICA CATTLE AUCTION. She remembers the sheep they hauled out in a crown and sash.

  Janie said, “I think the Miss America pageant is gross. It’s demoralizing to women.”

  “This is what my mother would say to that: that she’s been judged her whole life by everybody, hateful women and sick men. That’s the world. The Miss America Pageant is just a civilized version of our disgusting world. At least it’s honest about it.” I’d heard it a million times. My mother has spent much of her life arguing with the protesting women, people she doesn’t know, never met, people she’s never spoken a word to in reality, but still she seems to collide with them everywhere all the time: on the news, on talk shows, on NPR, which she hates. She sees them as they step into VW wagons from the co-op health-food store next to her hair salon, women in wool sweaters with no makeup and bumper stickers about animal rights. And since she’s never gotten out of the car and argued with them through their nonautomatic windows, she’s presented her argument to me, over and over. I’ve got the speech memorized.