The Miss America Family

by Julianna Baggott

  The door opened and Richard bounded down the stone steps. I would pick up soon enough that Richard was a bounder, that he nearly galloped wherever he went, like a boy with a new toy pony, a head on a stick. He was a little younger than my father with a mop of Miss Clairol red hair and a lavender shirt and thin tie, and he was agile and strong. I wondered if my father had ever done it with Richard, if he was an ex-lover. I figured he was. Why else would we have to be here? Why now?

  A blanched old couple stood in the doorway. Richard rounded the car, glanced at us and gave a quick smile, and held out his hands, showing us his parents. He was very gay, combustibly gay. And his parents looked like little expressionless parchment cutouts of people in contrast. I felt sorry for them. I felt like we were compatriots losing the same war. I wanted to tell them that there were normal kids in the world, like me, who could just sit in their den and learn the strategies of chess, popping the old lady’s homemade tarts.

  Richard leaned into the car, over my lap. “What took you so long?” he said. “I thought I’d asphyxiate on normalcy and all that plastic-covered-furniture tension. God, that lingering odor of mothballs and soup!” He sniffed his jacket. “I don’t know if it will ever come out!”

  Pixie

  How to Fake an Inkblot

  Another doctor escorted me into the same small wood-paneled office, a man this time, but he was also short with the same dark circles under the eyes and frizzy hair as my first therapist. He could have been the first doctor’s brother, and I wondered for a second about their mother—although they weren’t really siblings—and if she’d taught them anything about personal grooming. Above his white coat pocket there were a hundred pen marks, as if he couldn’t remember to cap his pens before tucking them away. There was mustard on his collar, a splotch now crusted over. I wondered if anyone was taking care of these people. And what about Ezra? Mitzie? (I admit I think of Ezra first, don’t I? Sometimes when I think of my family, I think of Ezra alone for just a split second, before Mitzie and Dilworth flood in. It’s like he’s purely mine, a part of me, that he’s always been with me, long before he was ever born.) I decided that maybe my kids were better off now without having me right there in front of them, but at the same time absent, lost. Wasn’t it better to have me really be absent? Wasn’t that at least less confusing?

  I’d gone through all the interviews by this point. I’d taken the long test, filled in the bubble sheet of true and false.

  The sky is blue. True.

  I’ve always loved auto-mechanic magazines. False.

  Animals talk to me. False. et cetera, et cetera.

  And now these inkblots. I laughed when the doctor pulled them out. “I thought the profession had given up on those old things! I thought they’d be antiques by now. I mean each one is a Jackson Pollock painting, and who would comment on a Jackson Pollock?”

  He was not amused. He held them up, one after the other. What good was an inkblot going to do me? Anyone can outwit a black splotch on paper. I said the sweetest things like, “Butterfly, two tilted irises, horses kissing.” But sometimes I saw bubbles rising in water, and I thought of the tub and my father dying. It made me feel sick. I tilted my head. I stared and stared until at last I could think of something nice . . . a seal, the kind with the big wet eyes. Finally, I told the doctor that I’d rather talk to a woman again. “No offense.”

  He said, “None taken.”

  And soon enough, the other psychologist shuffled in again, the young woman with the raised eyebrows and wire-rim glasses who thought she knew what I was talking about. She was wearing woolly slip-on clogs.

  I told her that I’d thought about it and had decided that I might have something worthwhile to share with others. “I’ve had a varied life,” I said. “I could really write a how-to. The chapters of my life would go something like: How to Survive Not Being Miss America, How to Survive Finding Your First Husband in Bed with Another Man, How to Be a Pimpless Whore, How to Marry a Dentist, How to Shoot Your Husband, things of this nature.” I was trying to keep things light. I was joking, but she took me seriously. It’s her job to take people seriously. With all the weirdos in this world, I’ve no idea how she can keep a straight face.

  She nodded solemnly.

  I told her that the first chapter would have to be about my childhood, planning my escape route. “But I don’t want to dwell on my childhood,” I said. “My childhood was spent trying desperately to get out of my childhood.” I didn’t tell that I hadn’t been able to shake it, that it had been there in my mind so much that I’d almost been living two lives, neither very successfully. I didn’t tell her that for years I kept Wanda Sorenski’s knitting needle, the one she used to break her water and induce a miscarriage, and that I remembered the small weight of the baby on my chest, barely alive, tiny, blue, how its little breaths finally stopped. After Wanda’s doctor left, after I got her kids to bed, I washed the needle in her kitchen sink and put it in my pocketbook. My life went on, but I kept it for a long time, because life is ugly, because I knew something, and I was going to hold on to knowing it. I think I knew that memories could leave you, if you wanted them to, if you’d let them. “I’m better at reinvention than I am at dragging around the past,” I said. “It did my father no good to try to relive the past, jumping into the Kill van Kull like he did when he was a kid. It killed him, didn’t it? I’m lucky I have a terrible memory. I’ve never wanted a good one.” But as it turns out, my memory is good and bad, spotty. I know this. It’s keen and then evaporates.

  I went on to explain that when I was Miss New Jersey, after having been Miss Bayonne, I didn’t know that I was already a whore. I hadn’t yet decided that there were only three types of people—whores, pimps, and johns. I didn’t think it was a groundbreaking realization. I knew it was an inkling, maybe, that all people have, the kind of thing that might come to you after finding your first husband in bed with another man. I told her that was how it happened for me, and I hauled Ezra back to a dump in Bayonne where I lay around for a week or more on a nappy sofa, thinking about large, philosophical things like that. Supposedly, this type of talk would make me a feminist. (It’s obvious the doctor is a feminist, complete with her woolly slip-on clogs. She’d have been one of the protestors on the boardwalk, burning her thick-strapped A-cup bra.) But I am not a feminist, because feminists, in my opinion, true feminists, won’t compromise their ideals. I believe that as a woman you must play dirty; you must take advantage of every so-called weakness. I think that feminists confuse equality with women becoming more male. And look where that’s gotten us: now women have to make $30,000 a year and still we’ve got to raise the children. “Feminists don’t deal with unalterable truths,” I said. “They’re optimists; to be a true feminist you have to be. I am not an optimist. I’m honest.”

  I was only vaguely aware that I hated men because they took my beauty personally, like I’d done something to please them, and I hated the fat, self-satisfied way they sat back and watched me like sultans. I remember a certain summer Saturday crowd of them in the chain-link fenced-in yard near the apartment my family lived in. They soaked their feet in metal tubs filled with water, ice slivers, and cans of beer, not to mention the Billy Trexler types, hanging out the windows of borrowed cars. I was used to being paraded. I was used to being expected to smile, to wave. If I wasn’t smiling, people would stop me and tell me to smile. “Smile!” they’d demand. “Hey, where’s your smile?” Sometimes I would turn to them and demand that they do something to entertain me, to earn the smile, but often I would simply show my teeth and get it over with. This is what the world wanted from me all the time, and I longed to have the distinction that the stage afforded me. So the world wasn’t just people wanting me, but an audience appreciating a star. I realized that it was a false distinction, but I needed it.

  And the wives from the Kiwanis Club, although they were envious of me, almost scornful, they promised me that I could go all the way to the top. If you are not going to b
e Miss America, I recommend spending time with wives of the Kiwanis Club. It’s another option and one that you can slip into without knowing. How else would someone become a wife of the Kiwanis Club but unwittingly? It’s something to be aware of.

  I remember when I confided in one of them, during a card game, that I didn’t really have a talent, she turned to me and said, “In 1949, Miss Montana rode her palomino into the orchestra pit. Darling, this is not about talent. It’s a tits-and-ass show.”

  I said, “I kind of play the accordion a little.”

  Another answered, “Miss America doesn’t kind of do anything a little bit. From now on you’re an aficionado!”

  And another added, “If my husband wants accordion music, he’ll play his polka records.”

  Wanda was there, too, nodding along, taking it all in. Wanda would have liked to have been a wife of the Kiwanis Club—I suppose it suits some people—but her husband was not around enough to be a member.

  I spent a lot of time in smoky parlors, listening to the Kiwanian wives discuss beauty contests, pathetic talents being their favorite topic—archery with balloon targets; fly-casting; reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Indian Sign Language; a speech on sewing, complete with a slide show; and an endless line of flaming baton twirlers. But they paid for everything—my dresses, hair fixings, makeup, swimwear, even the masking tape to cinch my waist and hoist and center my boobs. Meanwhile I learned to play the accordion in a way that didn’t block my cleavage, on an angle still showing off my ass.

  In 1970 there had been only one Miss New Jersey who became Miss America, Bette Cooper, 1937. She’d started out as Miss Bertrand Island—named after an amusement park at Lake Hopatcong. She’d been dared by friends to enter the pageant. At that time, there was no talent competition; that would come along the next year, with Miss Ohio winning, amid controversy, because of a tap dance routine to “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” In any case, Bette Cooper won and panicked. Some say it was her boyfriend who was the driving force, a local guy named Lou Off. She blamed her father, who wanted her to finish school. Her father claimed that it was just too strenuous for Bette to be Miss America. In any case, she disappeared.

  Like Bette Cooper, I didn’t want to be Miss America, really. I didn’t want to be shuttled around the country, cutting ribbons at car dealerships, posing next to prize-winning pigs at the New Jersey State Fair, signing “I love you” to deaf schoolchildren, not that I have anything against car dealerships or farm animals, and especially not the deaf. However, if I’d really wanted to help deaf schoolchildren, then I’d have taken the whole Miss America thing more seriously, like a supreme calling, or I’d have skipped it all together and taken sign language at Monmouth College instead of interior design, classes I eventually dropped out of. I wanted the crowning moment, the crown itself. I got myself so geared up for it that I expected it. I expected to win. But I didn’t win.

  During the talent competition, I was playing the accordion beautifully, smoothly, and it was almost like making something dead breathe. I thought of my father, because he’d drowned, and it was like I was trying to keep him alive, the bellows inflating and deflating like his lungs, my father, in my arms, singing, his sad voice carried throughout the large hall, the audience making him even more alive. I wanted to keep on playing forever, and when the end of the song came, I couldn’t recall it, and somehow I was back at the beginning. Everyone was staring at me. I knew that they’d heard the fumbled keys. I was going over my time limit, but I wanted to keep playing, pumping my father’s lungs. Finally I found a note, right in the middle, and I held that note for as long as I could. The crowd clapped politely, but I knew that it was over. My name wasn’t called for the final ten. All of the leftover girls were sent offstage to our dressing tables, where we sat in our evening gowns, watching the rest of the pageant on TV monitors, no different from everyone else in America in their living rooms. I convinced myself there, in that room of overwrought women, slumped in shimmering gowns, that I would have been a Bette Cooper. I’d have walked down the runway, Bert Parks singing his heart out, and I’d have looked out into the audience and seen my mother, in her unfashionable button-down dress, bewildered, suspicious, scared, wondering exactly how all of this good luck and happiness would turn ugly, and Wanda, jumping up and down, her heavy breasts bouncing, her small hands clapping wildly. There was also the clot of women from the Kiwanis Club, still scornful but applauding in white gloves. I’d think of Cliff, maybe hearing about it over some foggy Vietnamese radio station just for GIs, his buddies clapping him on the back, whistling at him as if he were the winner, not me. And then I’d have walked out of the building with the flowers, the crown, down the boardwalk, down the sandy beach, right next to that giant rolling ocean. I wasn’t always afraid of water. On that family vacation to the shore, I remember playing in the ocean, and I used to swim in a public pool with my father, but after he drowned, well, I’ve been afraid of water ever since, but this time I wouldn’t have been afraid. I’d have just walked and walked and walked. So, it didn’t really matter that I didn’t win.

  I’d always really wanted to be Miss America so that I could have the perfect family. Who else would eventually be the perfect American wife and mother other than Miss America? She’d eventually become Mrs. America, right? In being the perfect wife and mother, I could erase my mother, my father, my brother and me and start over, proving that there was higher ground, that I’d built it, and that I could reign over it. I could erase my childhood by perfecting someone else’s. This is a tragic flaw in thinking, I know now. But I wanted to have the Miss America family—that’s what I called it—with a husband named Steve, one son and one daughter, Troy and Wendy. I imagined we’d have a dog, too, a collie named something like Scout or Lucky. I reminded myself of this dream and the fact that Miss America’s crown was not necessary in making a family, not even the perfect family, and certainly not a prerequisite for doing a better job than my mother had. I was sure I could outdo my mother by picking a husband from a paper bag—not that I didn’t love my father, I truly loved him, but he was imperfect. And so I got married. It’s what people do.

  “But this isn’t what you want from me,” I whispered to the psychiatrist. “Is it? I’m very good at knowing what people want. You want to know the secret, you want to know why I did it. I’ve confided that I realized on that nappy sofa in Bayonne after leaving Russell that I believed we were all pimps or whores or johns. I boiled that down to two categories, then, the powerful and the powerless, and decided that we didn’t need to be divided into rich and poor, black and white, not even men and women. That there was no other division besides the powerful and the powerless. I believed this for a long time. But now I would say that there is a more accurate division: those who know and those who don’t, that the world is divided by secrets. And when a secret is revealed to you, you become a different person, sometimes more powerful, sometimes less.” And so, you see, I knew, but I didn’t know. My mother had told me something, but I was still trying to pull down those billowed sails, those wind-gusted sheets and shove them back into the closet. I was beginning to remember the moth smothered by the cottage sheet, too. I was starting to sense the breeding, the coming swarm. And why bed sheets? Why all of these particular linens? White, domestic, ordinary. Now, of course, I know why.

  “I’ll tell you this: the dream I had the night I shot Dilworth was an old one, my father coughing up keys. The man is always in the dream, swimming toward us, but this night there is no man and, for the first time, I actually catch a key. I held it so tight it was sharp in my fist, its little teeth almost biting alive. I unlocked my father’s arms and I climbed on his back with my arms around his neck, but instead of swimming with him to safety, I was choking him, my arms forever tightening around his neck. I killed my father and that’s when I woke up. Does that help?” I asked the therapist. “Does that tell you anything?”

  “What does it tell you?” she asked. “How does that help you?” />
  “Oh, please!” I said. “How did you get to be a psychiatrist anyway? Did you get someone else to do your homework for you? If you think I’m going to provide you with all of the answers, well then you’re crazier than I am.”

  She said that I sounded angry and she wanted to know what that anger was about. “Where is it coming from?”

  “The food here is atrocious. I wouldn’t feed it to a dog, and my roommate, by the way, pulls her hair out strand by strand. She sits on the edge of her bed, picking at scabs on her scalp, humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s irritating. Really and truly. And you, you look a mess. You need to defrizz that hair. Get out of the cardigan. It’s summer, for God’s sake. Wear some color other than gray. It only brings out your dark circles.”

  Ezra

  Rule #8: Make things clear right from the get-go.

  Richard was right; the house smelled like soup and mothballs. It was old and musty and the sofa and matching wing-back chairs were covered in plastic. There was a piano pushed up against a wall that was cluttered with old round-framed photos. Doilies were dripping off all the furniture, as if naked furniture were lewd, and there was tons of furniture, old polished dark-wood stuff. There were little crystal dishes filled with fossilized pink candies and sappy music playing on the radio, a giant ancient thing on a table in the living room. My father had to duck into the house. He was too big for the furniture, the small room. He hunched forward, looking miserable, with a weak smile.

  “Hester and John Pichard,” Richard introduced. “Ta da! Russell and his son, Ezra.” I thought Richard Pichard, and that his parents kind of deserved some sort of punishment for having named him a rhyme.