The Miss America Family

by Julianna Baggott

  There was a long pause. Janie put her head on my chest. “I don’t know, Ezra,” she said, “your mom might be smart. I mean, she might understand, you know, things about being a woman.”

  “Well, she is one. She’s got a lifetime of experience,” I said, which suddenly seemed like an unfair advantage.

  “I want to meet her,” she said.

  “I don’t know.” The thought made me feel a little queasy. “I’m not so sure.”

  “Yes,” she said, sitting up in bed. “Definitely. I want to meet her. Tomorrow morning.” And now suddenly I saw how it would be if Janie Pinkering were my wife, how she would decorate our bedroom so that there wasn’t one single trace of me and how I’d want to have a little chickie down in New Orleans who thought I was smart, who followed all of my advice, who might have a little crying jag about my wife back home from time to time, but who’d be easily sedated if I told her I loved her best and patted her hair and started arranging my calendar for my next so-called foot conference.

  “Call her up!” she said. “Call her to make sure she doesn’t have plans.”

  “I’ll tell her tonight. Later on,” I said, knowing that my mother would be prowling the house until I came home, knowing that she’d be waiting for me to saunter in the back door or for the light to flick on in the pool bungalow, waiting, too, for it to eventually flick off.

  “Just call her,” Janie said. “Just call her now!”

  But just then Janie and I heard the sound of tires in the driveway. I pulled the sheets up to cover my chest like a granny. “Are you expecting somebody?”

  “What’s today?”

  “Friday.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, getting out of bed and walking to the front window. “My dad’s supposed to be coming home.” She paused, squinted. “But, actually, it’s my mom.”

  I jumped out of the bed and picked up my elastic-snipped underwear, stuffed them into my pocket, and started pulling on my shorts.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “She won’t even notice.”

  I found that hard to believe. I pulled on a T-shirt. The front door was opening.

  “Seriously, Ezra, I thought you were making progress.” Janie was casually stepping, toes-pointed in such a way that made me think she’d taken her share of ballet lessons, into her panties, front-hooking her bra. She stood there with both hands on her hips. “But this is a major step backward. Your reaction is totally wrong.”

  I was thinking how being with Janie was like taking a giant social exam. I’d thought I’d been hanging on to a modest C-, what with all the personal stuff, but now I wasn’t so sure that I was passing at all, and at the moment, didn’t care. I whispered sharply, “She’ll kill me! I think I’m being very calm, considering!”

  Mrs. Pinkering must have sensed something right away. We hadn’t cleaned up after ourselves all week. The house was pretty disastrous, wet towels hanging everywhere, the empty bar glasses. I could only imagine what it looked like to her. She was calling nervously for Janie as she scurried up the stairs. “Janie! Janie!” There was already a sharp edge to her voice.

  “Just stand there, Stocker. Everything’ll be fine,” Janie said. She called to her mother, “In here.” Janie was still only wearing her bra and panties.

  I tried to look casual, my hands on my hips, then crossing my chest. I smiled for a second, pretty generously and then quit, stuffing my hands in my pockets.

  Her mother opened the door and held on to the knob unsteadily. “What in God’s name,” she said, breathless. She was, in fact, much the way I’d pictured her before I’d ever stepped foot in the Pinkerings’ home, except not hopping out for a hair appointment, obviously.

  “You remember Ezra Stocker. The gardener.”

  “What in God’s name!”

  And then Janie snapped. “Oh, don’t be so surprised. Where have you been for the last week! What have you been doing! You make me sick.”

  Her mother was pale, looked like she might throw up. In fact, she lurched forward and I thought she might throw up on me. I pressed my back up against the bureau. She glared at me. “Your father can’t even fill a filling,” she said. “He can’t even fit a bridge.”

  “That’s my stepdad, actually. My real father’s a politician.”

  “Get out! Get out!” she screamed.

  And Janie was screaming, too, at her mother. “You never change. You’ve always been selfish. You’ve lost your mind completely! Listen to you!”

  I slipped past Mrs. Pinkering and ran down the hallway, the stairs, out the door. I left it wide open behind me, the hall light bleeding out onto the overgrown lawn. I jumped on my bike, forgetting the jar with my grandmother’s dead bird, and pedaled home as fast as I could, the breeze kicking my sweaty hair off my forehead. I was saying to myself again and again that it would blow over, that Janie would win, that we’d be back at it soon enough because Janie needed me for whatever reasons. I’d become indispensable, plus the way she’d pegged my mother as so wise, a source of knowledge she’d be needing. By the time I got home, I’d convinced myself that not only would it blow over, but that Janie could very well show up sometime to meet my mother the next morning. I decided that we didn’t need the Pinkerings’ house and its amenities at all. We had the pool bungalow, no actual pool, but the bungalow, a love nest, until the Pinkerings cooled off and took me in as one of their own, and Dr. Pinkering would zap the webs from my toes. And what could anyone say about it? I decided that no one would say anything.

  I knew that my mother would be up. The kitchen light was on. I stood there catching my breath. I didn’t want to talk to her, wouldn’t tell her anything about Mrs. Pinkering walking in on her daughter and me—realistically I knew she’d find out soon enough—but I decided to just stick with the plan, to tell her that Janie wanted to meet her the next morning. I wanted to prove how normal everything was.

  When I walked in the kitchen door, my mother was standing there, hunched over an ironing board. She hadn’t turned the lights on and so there was only a little light seeping in from a lamp still on in the living room. She never ironed, not the type to starch the collars of her hubby’s work shirts. She has all of her clothes dry-cleaned or pressed by Helga in the basement. And although she didn’t look authentic, bedraggled, eyes dark-circled, the way a wife who irons in the dark should look in a cloud of spray starch and steam, the iron’s red light zipping back and forth in the dim kitchen, she was sweating, a thin sheen to her bare arms, and I’d only seen my mother sweat when she was riding the exercise bike in her changing room. She looked up and nodded at me. She was still dressed for the day, in her pink outfit. I was nervous that she really knew this time, that Mrs. Pinkering had, in fact, already gotten word to her. I was almost certain of it.

  I sat down on a cushioned kitchen chair. “What are you doing?”

  “Ironing,” she said. “A few of your things. Just a woman ironing her son’s clothes. If you’re to be a man, you need to look a little sharper, don’t you think?” She was chipper. “This is the beginning.”

  “Of what?”

  “This is the reason I saved you, I guess.”

  “Saved me from what?”

  “Your lungs filling up like water through a wicker basket. I dressed you in doll diapers you were so small.”

  And I could see now that she was spray-starching a T-shirt of mine, just a ratty one that I only used for sleeping in. My mother is always having some other conversation with me, one that I’m supposed to understand even better than if she were actually saying what was on her mind.

  “Janie wants to meet you tomorrow.”

  “Oh! Your girlfriend. Bringing her home to meet the folks. Isn’t that a big step for a young bachelor? Well, you should invite her out to your place,” she said.

  “The bungalow?”

  “Of course! It would be strange if we met here. And I’ll pop by, announced, of course. I wouldn’t want to cramp your style.” She tilted her head and smiled, a fake s
mile.

  “Lovely,” I said. And I knew that my mother was losing it. I thought that it had to do with me primarily, with me and Janie Pinkering. She wasn’t freaking out really. She still looked almost perfect, but she’d come just a little undone, just a little. In someone else, you might not even really notice the change. But in my mother, who always appeared, at least, completely put together, this one hook-and-eye unclasped was glaring. I’ve seen my mom really lose it. Once when I was just a little kid, she lay on the sofa for weeks, wearing the same old white slip until it looked oily. That was when I was five, just after she left my dad, heartbroken. And we moved back to Bayonne, a little apartment where I rubbed lotion into her legs, combed tangles from her hair, made peanut butter sandwiches that she barely picked at. I remember once brushing her teeth, one cup for rinsing, one cup for spitting. This is before she bought the gun, passing it back and forth in her hands like it was a small wounded animal, something she’d found on the sidewalk, almost dead, until the pawn shop owner said, “It’s a gun, you know. Not a Hummel for your mantelpiece.” This wasn’t like that time, but still there was something familiar about it.

  I was about to stand up and walk out the back door. I must have sighed and half-hoisted myself up with my hands on the kitchen table, but then she said, “Your grandmother had a stroke while you were out.” Like it was my fault for having been out of the house, like if I’d been in the pool bungalow tucked in, it wouldn’t have happened. And although it didn’t make sense and wasn’t fair, I felt guilty, and disoriented. I remembered what she’d said about feeling different, about the walls in her head crumbling. I guessed that I should have known there was something wrong, that at least I should have stayed with her a bit longer and done what I’d promised to do for her dead bird. I could feel the bulge of my underwear balled up in my pocket. I could still smell Janie on me, the sweet pot smoke mixed with her mint lotion.

  I’d heard my mother, but I said, “What?” It was dark; the red light on the iron was still streaking back and forth. My mother’s arms were slick, shiny in the dull light, like chrome, something you could look into and maybe see your own reflection but warped, too long or too wide.

  “A mild stroke. A neighbor found her. She’d struggled to the front door and collapsed in the hall. There was a bird, the neighbor told me, eating peanuts from her pocket, nesting in the middle of her chest. The nurse at the hospital told me not to come out, that she’s sleeping, to come in the morning. But it may be the beginning, they told me.”

  “The beginning of what?”

  “The end,” she said, finally looking up at me. “The beginning of the end. Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  Pixie

  Remember: Miss America Never Cries

  Mothers get old and sick. Husbands are difficult; marriages complicated. And your children can look at you sometimes like they are pleading for something, but you don’t know what to give them. They grow up. They leave you. The picture of me last summer should be pretty clear: my eyebrows were neatly plucked. My toilets were freshly scrubbed. The potpourri was apricot-scented. And I was consumed by the past, caught up in a cloud of it. I spent any number of days, for example, trying to remember what it was like to be with Jimmy Vietree and what it was like to break his heart. I don’t know why I was thinking about this, but my mind was fixated. There were more pressing issues, of course, and I was painfully, but also only remotely, aware of them, because I was remote myself, distant. I was walking on the edge of it all, in an apricot-scented, freshly scrubbed, eyebrow-plucked kind of way, and there was Jimmy Vietree out by the tracks, just a normal cold day, his hands already warming under my coat and sweater, on my stomach. I tried to remember his hands, small and hot. Wanda had told me about falling in love being a secret, and at sixteen I already had too many secrets. I decided to get rid of Jimmy. Honestly, if Wanda hadn’t fallen in love with her husband, who was never around anyway, then maybe she’d have tried again for Miss Bayonne, maybe she’d have gone all the way.

  I said, “Jimmy, I can’t be with you anymore.”

  He pulled his hands off me and balled them up in his pants pockets. “What? Why?”

  “Because I have to decide between you and my future. And my future is very important to me. I am going to become someone.”

  “But you are someone,” he said. “You’re my girl, first of all.”

  I thought for a minute how it might be to be his girl forever and ever. I thought of my mother and father as kids, him jumping into the Kill van Kull, and what that river was like now, freezing over, the cold stiffening around my father’s body, even though my father had been pulled out by the soldier; what it would be like if he was still there locked in a new skin of ice; how my mother looked like she’d frozen too. “I can’t be your girl,” I said, but I thought I might love him and how much I’d miss him loving me; that’s what I’d miss most of all.

  His face crumpled up, and I thought he was going to cry, which I thought might have made me cry. But he didn’t. He said, “It doesn’t matter. No one thinks you’re normal, you know. Not at all.”

  And I was relieved that he was mean, so that I could leave him behind easier. I said, “That’s not news to me.” And it wasn’t.

  Wanda had been sick. She could barely keep anything down. She was pregnant with her third, but she made me swear not to tell anybody. She was worn out. She looked like a rag. She kept all the dishes out of the sink so she could throw up there and just wash it down the drain. She said she couldn’t go through labor again. With her last one they’d given her Twilight sleep, a form of truth serum, a drug to dull her memory but not the pain. But she did remember the dark ward of moaning women, how the nurse told her to quiet down because the girl one room over was having her first and scared enough already, and that the nurse rolled her to her side and handcuffed her to her hospital bed rails, standard procedure. Her last memory was of trying to fold the bones of her hands and slip free. She didn’t remember the baby coming out of her, nothing, until later, a tight girdle of pain and bleeding. My mother had told me that when she was in labor with me, they’d closed her legs when she started to push, because the doctor wasn’t there yet. It made me sick to think of it. I told her that I planned to have a boy and a girl, but not until they got labor down a little bit better. (Of course, they didn’t get labor to be any easier. It won’t ever be easy to have a baby come out of your body. It would be misleading if it were.)

  One day when I stopped by, Wanda was lying down on the sofa, and the kids were tearing around the yard. It was cold and they were underdressed in unzipped coats, sneakers without socks, no hats, scarves, mittens. One of the neighbors had already strung Christmas lights; her husband was on the roof wrestling a plastic reindeer.

  Wanda had eaten a green apple earlier and had to go to the bathroom. I could hear her moaning, and when she called to me for a cool washrag, I found her on the bathroom floor, just lying there, and she said, “It’s not his.”

  And I didn’t know what she meant. “His what?” I asked.

  “Baby,” she said. “He’s on Governor’s Island, putting out barge fires. How could it be his?”

  “Who then?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Nobody you know.” She looked up at me, and I sat down on the floor next to her. “Will you help me?”

  “How could I help you?”

  And then she said, “Of course not. I must be crazy sick. No. No. Forget that I told you anything. Forget all of this.” She coughed a little and the cough made her gag. “Just watch the kids fifteen minutes, will you? Just ten. So I can rest my eyes.”

  I watched the kids for an hour or so, but it was getting dark. The kids’ cheeks were bright red. I had to wake her up to tell her that I had to go home and sort out my homework. She propped herself up on the sofa and said, “Forget what I told you. Okay? I’ll be fine.”

  But I thought about it all the way home. I wondered who the father could be and thought how awful it was to be a w
oman. I remembered the first time I bled and I didn’t know much of anything. I told my mother that I was really sick, that there was blood down there. She took me to the bathroom and fixed me up with a thin elastic belt and a pad. She said, “You’ll get used to it.” But it turned such a bright red on the white, white pad, sometimes still it shocks me, the red, and I’m amazed that no one knows that there’s blood coming out of me, and not just me, but all of us women, at some time or the other, and how it is that we keep all of this red blood a secret, and not just that but there are so many secrets, each woman a storehouse of them.

  When I got home, Billy Trexler and his cousin were sitting in a car, waiting for me in front of my building. I walked up in the glare of their headlights, and they each hung out an open window, their breaths like ghosts above their heads. They said, “Pixie, come on for a ride, won’t you?”

  I said, “No, thanks. I’ve got things to do. Don’t you boys have to study?”

  And Billy said that he’d rather study me.

  I said, “No,” again.

  His cousin said, “She’s ice cold, man. I told you Vietree was a liar. Let’s go.”

  And I knew that Jimmy had started talking since I told him that I couldn’t see him anymore. Then Billy asked me again to go for a ride. He said it was his uncle’s car and he wouldn’t have it for long.

  Finally, I said, “Jesus! No. Haven’t I said it enough?” I stepped inside the door to the long hall of doors and started to cry. My chest was suddenly heavy, welling up. I shut the door and I couldn’t stop it. I walked down the hall and behind the stairs, hid there, sobbing, because I didn’t know why those boys always had to think I was going to go off with them. It was proof to me that everybody knew, they could tell that I wasn’t really pure, and then they hated me when I refused them. I was thinking about Wanda, too. I was scared for her, because I knew what she was asking me to do, how I was going to help her get rid of it somehow, the way I’d heard about. And once I started crying, I couldn’t stop. I was crying about my dead daddy and Cliff, and my mother, too, how I was going to have to go into that apartment and find her smoking by the window, how we were going to have to eat across from each other at the dinner table, and we wouldn’t even say a word. Most of all, I cried because I didn’t want to cry. How was I ever going to be Miss America if I went around crying?