The Miss America Family

by Julianna Baggott

  When I got to Wanda’s house, I knocked and nobody answered. I walked in, because the door wasn’t locked and I found Wanda on the sofa, the middle cushion blood-soaked, her dress and blanket, too. I found her holding a small blue thing, wet and limp in her hands. It was the baby, half hidden in the blanket, but it didn’t look like a baby, it was so small and blue, its head smaller than a plum, a girl. Wanda was shaking, her whole body, and the baby’s chest was rising and falling, alive.

  She said, “Call this doctor. Only this one. Don’t talk to anybody but him.” She recited the number and I dialed it. I said I needed to talk to the doctor. It was an emergency. A man’s voice came on, Dr. Roberts. I told him that I was with Wanda Sorenski and there was something very wrong. He had to come over alone. I sat with Wanda and waited. Her hair was soaked, her body shaking hard. She told me to get a towel, and when I got back, she handed the baby to me. I held it in my hands and kind of propped it on my chest. Wanda closed her eyes, but I could see her chest still breathing. The baby, though, died. Finally, its little ragged breaths quit, and I thought of my daddy when his breathing quit—and how it must have been for the soldier, the stranger on the dock, rocking his dead body. I put the baby down and pushed on its tiny ribs, but they were so small, I stopped. I thought of putting my mouth over its mouth, but I didn’t. Its arms and legs were limp. I felt sick, stunned, breathless, and hot. I was shaking. There was nothing I could do. I picked the baby back up and held its sticky body to the front of my dress. It was puny and wrinkled, and I felt helpless and small. I patted its back like it was still alive, only asleep, maybe. I told myself that it wasn’t dead, and I hummed a lullaby.

  When the doctor came, he called from the open door and then walked in. I stood up. He could see what was in my arms. He didn’t look surprised, though, only matter-of-fact.

  He said, “Okay, let me have a look.”

  I handed him the baby although I didn’t want to. He checked it quickly and wrapped the baby in a towel, covering its face, the small hole of its mouth, and placed the baby wrapped in the towel on the kitchen counter. He was very professional, checking Wanda’s pulse, again and again. He barely spoke to me except orders, to get him things from his bag, to wipe down the blood on Wanda’s legs, to get her clean underwear and a pad, more towels. There was so much blood, the room smelled like metal, the rusted iron of an old gate. I did everything he said to do. Wanda’s eyes would flit open, but she was too weak to stay awake.

  “Should we get her upstairs in her bed?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Here on the sofa’s fine.”

  I looked up into his face; I saw there were tears inching down his cheeks. He said to me, “What did she do? I have to know.”

  I told him I’d found her there, the baby still breathing, but then not.

  “But she did something,” he said. “Did she put something inside of herself?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, tears coming down my face now too. But I thought I did know how she did it. I’d found something between the sofa cushions. A knitting needle, but I couldn’t say it.

  “Tell her that I couldn’t stay. I can’t, you know, stay with her. I have to keep going. When she wakes up, tell her that.”

  And I knew then that he was apologizing for something else, not just the way a doctor apologizes, but a man. I looked up at him sharply then, wide-eyed.

  He said, “You didn’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  “There’s nothing to know,” he said. He packed up his things, but it was clear to me he was the father and that the tiny body wrapped in the towel was his daughter. I thought of my mother’s giant scale of life, anything good always being balanced by something bad. I wondered if it had been good with him, if Wanda had been happy, and if this wasn’t the way she’d been made to suffer for that happiness. I was afraid my mother might be right. He held the bundle half under his arm, half against his chest. He said, “She’s lucky, actually, that she’s not dead.” And he walked out of the house.

  The kids came home from a neighbor, and I said that I was going to be their babysitter. I put them straight up to bed. They were exhausted anyway, tumbling out of their clothes and into their pajamas. The older one asked where her mommy was. I told her she went to a movie and that I didn’t know which one. I called my mother and told her the same story. She sounded surprised that I was calling, surprised by the sound of my voice. I wondered how long it took her to forget about me once I was out of the house. I wanted to tell her Wanda’s story and about the doctor, but I knew she’d have no sympathy. She’d say that a woman should know better, that I should know better.

  When Wanda woke up, she said, “Don’t tell me what happened. I don’t want to know. He came though, didn’t he? He took care of everything?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She told me to get an envelope out of the desk drawer with my name on it. She said she had written it to me in case she died. She didn’t let me read the note. She crumpled it up, but pulled a locket out of the envelope. It was inscribed to Wanda Sorenski, Runner-up Miss Bayonne 1963. She put it into my hand and pressed my hand shut. She said, “Look at me, Pix.” And her chest heaved a little, but she didn’t cry. She took a deep breath and told me about the Kiwanis Club, that she knew a member, a bricklayer down the street, who said he’d invite me to compete. She’d already explained that I’d need an invitation like this, how she’d been nominated to go to the Miss Bayonne pageant because her dad had been a member of the Kiwanis—a men’s club—way back. “I wanted to surprise you with the news. Anyway,” she said.

  “We shouldn’t talk about that now,” I said. “You should go to sleep. The doctor said that you’re lucky you’re not dead.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Go home, Pixie. Go on home.”

  I walked out of her house, locking the door behind me, but all the way home I was reciting the end of Cliff’s letter, that he could still hear the dog moan, no matter what, no matter that he shot that dog in the head, he could still hear it moan. I didn’t cry anymore. I decided not to cry ever again, not to think about my dead father, or the man, not to think about Cliff anymore or my sad mother or Wanda and that baby, not to give in to all of what the world seemed to want from me, that it was trying to wring out of me. And so I said to myself over and over, “That’s the end of it. That’s that.”

  Ezra

  Rule #6: Don’t keep guns in the house.

  I went from being the Pinkerings’ gardener to being my mother’s chauffeur. She hated going to visit her mother every afternoon. It made her pale and shaky, too nervous to drive although nobody said this out loud. Plus she said it was still a good idea for me to get to know my grandmother even though it wasn’t really her anymore at all. The idea, too, was that it was a good excuse for me to practice driving with my new permit. I was sixteen after all, and just as Janie had to start thinking like an almost-college girl, I had to start thinking like an almost-driver, even though I knew that once I got back to school there’d be no cars, no driving, nowhere to go.

  I liked driving to the hospital, because we had to take 1-95 and I loved to be behind the wheel, going 65, weaving in and out of traffic as much as my mother would allow. “Slow down. Please, Ezra! My God!” It was a giant step for my mother to let me drive. She hadn’t let me play with Legos for fear that I’d swallow one until I was much too old to actually enjoy Legos. But Dilworth had insisted I get my driver’s permit. “Like all the other young American boys in the nation, he may want to take someone out on a date one day, and use a backseat like everyone else.” He was still a little proud of my conquest of “the Pinkering girl.”

  But when I wasn’t behind the wheel, I was mostly miserable, sulking, sighing with my chin in my hand just staring out the window, alone in the bungalow. Helga would come out to clean, touching things with her dust rag, grunting each time she bent over to lift something off the floor. She’d say, “Oh, you are lof sick. Look at you. Anyvone could tell.” Sh
e tried to muscle the story out of me now and then. “Tell Helga, wass is wrong. I know every think about men unt women unt lof. I’ve had many lof affairs. Tell me.”

  But every time I looked at her, the butterfly Band-Aid keeping the loose skin of her eyelid from sagging over her eye, her red elbows, and dumpy apron, I knew it was all wrong, that she’d never understand someone like Janie. I’d shake my head and eventually she’d waddle away. I did, however, wonder what advice Helga would have and the idea that I could get a different perspective made me think that I could have been wrong about Janie. I began to imagine that she’d given me the polite brush-off because her mother had been in the room, that Janie was now a hostage of sorts. Maybe she’d tried to give me a message, maybe the water being perfectly warm was a kind of secret message that meant that things were really perfect between us, but that she couldn’t talk right then. I had these kinds of daydreams, worked on perfecting them, until they started to seem plausible.

  I hated the time that my mother and I spent actually inside the hospital. We usually visited during lunch hour so that my mother could feed my grandmother and feel useful. I hated the smell of that place with its stale recycled air-conditioning and plastic-wrapped meals of square meat, congealed vegetables, the little cups of juice and jiggling Jell-O. I wasn’t eating it, of course, but the idea that someone had to was disgusting. And there was always the Lysol and urine, a voice screaming down the tiled hall, the piped-in elevator music, playing an all-instrument version of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”

  My mother didn’t say much. Occasionally, she’d talk about the lack of rain. Since the end of my relationship with Janie Pinkering, it had stopped raining altogether even though it was still sticky and the sky seemed heavy, as if it wanted to rain. In the evenings, it would grow cloudy and windy, a high wind kicking up in the tops of trees, even far-off thunder, but as much as it seemed like the beginning of a storm, it never was a storm. I knew that it was the kind of symbolism that would not be lost on Miss Abernathy. I decided that in the fall I’d try to get into her creative writing class and write out the whole affair with Janie Pinkering in beautiful prose, chock-full of her much-loved symbolism.

  My grandmother hadn’t said my mother’s name since that first visit. Aside from the occasional stream of mixed-up words, she’d been very quiet for a couple of days in a row. My mother said that the words were a lifetime of all of the things she’d never said, but in random order, which seemed to frustrate my mother, who was blind to the fact that she, like her mother, never said much that was really on her mind. But my grandmother was improving. When she did talk, asking for something, usually more salt or a straw, she got the words right, for the most part. My mother fed my grandmother, wiping her chin, giving her sips of juice, while my grandmother eyed her suspiciously. My mother seemed to think this meant that my grandmother was in the process of becoming herself again.

  “She’s trying to place me,” she said. “Even though she knows that I’m her daughter, she hasn’t felt it yet. And now she’s beginning to feel that I’m her daughter.” My mother wasn’t doing much to jog her mother’s memory. Aside from my mother’s announcement that first day that we were her family, and the fact that she’d seemed, at least then, to know exactly who my mother was, and maybe the nurses asking about how her visit was with her daughter and grandson after we’d left, there was no mention as to who we were exactly. But still I didn’t think that my mother was wrong. I thought that something had changed and that my grandmother was gearing up for a breakthrough of some kind, and my mother certainly wanted something from her. “She needs me, Ezra. You can tell by the way she looks at me,” she’d say. “She needs me.”

  One Wednesday, my grandmother looked a little weak in her eyes, tired. My mother was feeding her, talking about how in past summers there’d been water restrictions and how she and most of the other neighbors had watered their lawns at night when they thought everyone else was sleeping—not the goody-two-shoes Worthingtons, of course, who’d never sin against the environment like that—but all the other sprinklers in our neighborhood, ticking and rotating all night, stealing precious city water for their plush green lawns.

  My grandmother pushed the tray away with her hand. “You make me tired,” she said. “All of this that I’ve swallowed. I’m tired of the boiling, the boil, boil.”

  “Oh, well, we’ll go then, so you can sleep,” my mother said. I was relieved to cut the visit short. I wanted to be out in the sun, back in the car, the warm air pushing in through the windows.

  My grandmother put her head down on her pillow, tugged the sheet up to her neck. I could see the outline of her long thick legs. She pulled them together, curled them up. She rubbed her hands over her face, dry skin on dry skin. Her body became hard in that position. She braced herself and said, “I’m going to die and all I can hear is the struggle of springs, the muffle of someone dying, the tub water filling. Do you remember the tub?”

  “You’re not going to die,” my mother said.

  “I remember it, you know, his feet in the hall, how he opened your bedroom door.”

  “You heard someone open my bedroom door? When was this?” My mother shook her head, bewildered.

  “It was my fault. It’s the way the world works. I’d had pleasure, Pixie, with the butcher. I’d been so alone for so long, and he loved me. Anyone could see it on his face, how much he loved me. I untied his blood-stiffened apron one night after the store was closed, the blinds drawn. Just once, that’s all it was and then I never went back. I never saw him again. But for that pleasure, there was suffering. I thought it would be my suffering, though, Pixie, not yours.”

  “Mr. Graziano? Are you saying you had an affair with Mr. Graziano, the butcher with the pug-faced wife and ugly daughters?”

  “You can’t deny how one thing follows another. Mr. Graziano, yes, and then just a month later, not even a month, I’m in bed and I hear it.”

  “What?”

  “I wanted the sound to become another sound, the neighbor’s restlessness, Mr. Gunsellman back from the plant, late shift. It became muffled, the sound of crying. Clifford hears it, too. He picked up the bat. He was just a boy, really. He couldn’t do anything. A mother should be able to go to war for her son. Only a good mother knows how to kill; the baby’s born and suddenly there are talons, claws, teeth you never knew were there. Mothers can kill. And Cliff can only scream like a kettle. Hear the kettle? It’s going off, the high-pitched whistle.” There was no whistling kettle, only the over-intercom music and an occasional patient shuffling down the hall with an IV on rollers.

  “What are you saying?” my mother said, no longer smiling. She put her hand on the sheet. She made a fist and the sheet twisted. Her face was pale and slack. “What did you say? Heard what?”

  “There was no other man. I made him up later,” and she looked up at my mother, “for you to have. Later, after it all, in the tub, the water filling up, all of the water tinged pink with blood, I made up the story of the man breaking into our house. But I was the one. I took the bat. It was in my hands, suddenly, like a miracle I couldn’t explain and I brought it down on his head.”

  “Whose head?”

  “Your father’s. See him? Is he dead? No, he’s not dead. I raise the bat again, but Clifford pulls it from my hands. Take him out, Cliff. Drag him out.” And my grandmother closed her eyes. “I didn’t kill your father, but I could have. Two weeks later he fell through the front door. Remember? That night he drowned himself. It might be the one thing, the only thing, that redeemed him.” She swallowed air, two or three gulps, and then breathed normally. “I gave you the stranger. It was a gift. And you accepted the gift.”

  “What?” my mother kept repeating it. “What gift?”

  But my grandmother was breathing deeply then.

  My mother stood up and let go of the sheet, a wrinkled star now slowly released from her fist. She turned around and stumbled into the chair where she’d been sitting, but caught her
self on the armrest. She stood, picking up her pocketbook. She unsnapped it and took out her sunglasses. Her eyes were round and soft, with fine wrinkles stitched between her thin eyebrows. She put the sunglasses on.

  “Let’s go,” she said, breathless. And, as usual, I followed her, and we left.

  That afternoon my mother set up the old reel-to-reel in the living room without saying a word. Mitzie was at one of her carpool-driven activities. Dilworth, having finished up work where I now imagined him mismeasuring bridges and mangling fillings, had gone for a round of golf with someone other than Bob Pinkering. He’d not only fired my stepdad as his dentist but also as his golfing buddy. I stood back for a while in the kitchen doorway, but slowly I moved into the living room with her and sat in a chair across from the sofa where she’d curled up. It was dark, the curtains drawn, lights out, the film’s shadowy light, the clicking reel. She was drinking from a bottle of scotch, straight, no glass even. I didn’t know what had happened that night in her house with her father and mother and Cliff. Someone had been hit over the head with a bat. There was bathwater, pink with blood. But that was all I understood. It went so quickly in a whisper. But I knew it wasn’t good. I knew that my mother looked smaller, shrunken into herself, with a pillow pressed to her chest. I could tell that what had begun to come undone in her the night I found her ironing in the kitchen had continued to lose its hold and now all of those small but essential hooks-and-eyes that kept her together were gone. She said, “I remember the parade, too, earlier in the week. A parade right down the Atlantic City boardwalk, all lit up at night. It was a misty night, just enough water in the air to make the streetlights look like shimmering globes. It didn’t ever really rain. There was a Planters’ Peanuts man, a giant peanut with his top hat and cane, and advertisements all over the place for a diving horse, but I never could figure out where that was or why anyone would want to see such a thing. We rode on the backseats of Oldsmobiles, each girl from each state, waving away. I remember people calling out. A bunch of boys on top of a phone booth, chanting, “New Jersey, New Jersey.” And the reigning Miss America on a parade float, the crown, the scepter, the robe. We were a family, you know. That’s what they called it: the Miss America Family. They’d tell all us girls, ‘Welcome to the Miss America Family.’ And even though I knew it wouldn’t really last, the words would echo in my head. It was like I’d been an orphan and was now suddenly adopted. In my interview, I talked about the terribleness of war, the hope of peace, but do you want to know what my true cause was? The one thing I really was hoping for as Miss America?”