The Miss America Family

by Julianna Baggott

  The bartender brought two more gin-and-tonics. “This one’s a little weaker for your guest. He should go easy, right?”

  Mr. Pichard nodded, and once the bartender was down at the other end of the bar, Mr. Pichard turned to me and said, “You know, you and I have got something in common.”

  “We do?”

  “What Richard said last night about your mother shooting your father. My mother shot mine, too,” he said. “I never told anybody about it, but, well, it’s not something you forget easily.”

  “My step-father,” I corrected. “He’s my step-father.”

  “I know, I know. Not the fella with the big opportunities, who doesn’t eat my wife’s dessert, someone else. I can follow these things.”

  I wasn’t interested in talking about it, really. It hadn’t come up since the first few minutes with my dad in the car, and that was fine with me. But this explained why the old man had invited me out with him for the day and the look he’d shot me across the dinner table. He had his own secret to get off his chest. “I didn’t see it, you know,” I said. “I think she was just cleaning out the gun. I don’t think she meant to.”

  “A woman always does what she means to do,” he said. “Mrs. Pichard, even after all these years.” His eyes were bloodshot. He looked into his drink. “You know she’s the reason he’s that way. Richard, you know. I’ve read up on it in books. They say it can be the fault of a strong mother.”

  “Do you think that’s all true, Mr. Pichard?” I said. “I think you can just be born that way.”

  “I don’t want to love him, you know that,” he said. “But sometimes your heart doesn’t let you choose. People think you can predict who your heart will and will not love. But they can’t.” He paused. “I’m not that way, you know. If he was born like that, it wasn’t from me.”

  “I’m not that way either,” I said, thinking of Janie Pinkering, her long legs under her swishing tennis skirt. I was a little woozy drunk on gin-and-tonics, but I couldn’t help but be a little nervous about homosexuality too. I mean, I’d just found out that my father was, in fact, that way. I couldn’t be sure about much.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Did your father die?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “She was an excellent shot. It was a warning. He was leaving her, and she shot him in the leg.”

  “Oh,” I said, in a tone that seemed to say, Well, that’s only fair.

  “It was a mess. You see,” he lowered his voice, “she was a strong woman, my mother, and I loved her. But I’m not that way.”

  “The books are wrong, Mr. Pichard. Dead wrong. About you and me and maybe Richard, too.” I left my father out of it. Mr. Pichard was confused enough as it was.

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. What do some college guys writing those fancy books know anyway? Nothing. Nothing.”

  And then I said, “I don’t really think my mother was just cleaning out the gun.”

  “No,” he said, “Of course you don’t. Who would?”

  I felt close to Mr. Pichard just then. I wanted to say something else but was suddenly heavy, a little drunkenly sentimental. I thought of him singing while floating on his back in the pool. I said, “Man, you can really sing.” But as soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a macho thing to say.

  His face cast over, stern again. “When I was your age, I wanted to be an opera singer. But it’s better that I went into shoes. It’s better now to think I could have done it, better than having become a failure.” He drained his gin-and-tonic, mostly ice water now. “You didn’t hear anything. You got me?”

  Pixie

  How to Marry a Dentist

  I wasn’t receiving visitors, but I got a call from Dilworth. He told me that he forgave me, that he wanted me to get better. He was seeing a therapist himself, at the behest of my psychiatrist, the older man who’d given me my sleeping pill prescription for years without asking a single question, not even if I was chatting with animals, if, for example, the neighbor’s cats occasionally struck up a conversation. I told Dilworth that I agreed that it was a good idea for him to talk to a therapist, and that I’d been faring well, although I wasn’t so sure, having cried so much in the last session. My therapist had been proud of me, though. She handed me tissue after tissue and rubbed my back gently in a small circle. I wondered if she’d learned the small circular motion in school. I couldn’t imagine what they taught. Wasn’t it a Ph.D. in listening? In any case, she said the crying was good for me and that there might be more to come.

  Dilworth informed me that he’d told our friends and family that I was on a vacation visiting an old friend in Massachusetts who had cancer and might not see the fall. He added, “Of course, I haven’t told your mother anything. She wouldn’t realize it if you were on the moon.”

  I might have said, “Actually, she’d prefer it,” but I didn’t have the energy.

  He said, “Mitzie is living with the Worthingtons.”

  “Why can’t you take care of her?”

  “Not with only one arm. Maybe if my good arm was the one that still worked, but it’s not, Pixie.” He took a deep breath. “Look, the Worthingtons are wonderful! Natural-born parents.”

  Except that they weren’t natural parents, I wanted to remind Dilworth, and they weren’t related to Mitzie at all. But I didn’t feel like getting into it any more than necessary. “Is she okay? What did you tell her?” I asked.

  “She knows it was an accident, that you were just cleaning the gun, you know. And I’ve told her about your friend with cancer,” he said. “She eats with me on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Helga’s cooked earlier that day. She says she thinks you’re great for taking care of your friend. As usual, I’ve got everything squared away.”

  “I know Mitzie,” I said. “I made Mitzie. She’s lying to you, to make you feel better. She knows exactly what’s going on. You should tell her the truth, Dilworth. It’s not good to lie to kids. One day, she’ll be with Ezra in a restaurant when they’re both grown and he’ll say, ‘Remember when Mom went crazy and shot Dilworth.’ And everything will come crashing down and she’ll remember that she was really there, and what it was like when I left the house that night. See? Do you see what I mean? How could she not know? She just wants to make you happy.” I wanted to go on to say that I’d failed Mitzie, that I’d been raising her in preparation for my life, all that I know, and I didn’t even know my own life.

  “You’re not well,” Dilworth said. “It’s hard for you to be away from home, from us. I shouldn’t have called. It only makes things worse. I can see that. But you need help and help is what I’m getting for you! Look, Pix, you’re a fragile person, but we’ll get you all back together. You know, Mitzie likes your friend with cancer. She prays for her.”

  “You realize, Dilworth, that I don’t have a friend with cancer. I’ve never even been to Massachusetts. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You’re still not yourself yet,” Dilworth said. “You’ll bounce back though, soon, I can feel it. You’ll be your old self.”

  And I knew why he wanted the old me back, the one who couldn’t do anything right, who was a mess, who took her sleeping pills and went to bed, and didn’t shoot him. “Where’s Ezra?” I asked. “I want to talk to Ezra.”

  “He’s with Russell in Baltimore.”

  “I need to talk to him. Tell him that. Okay? Don’t lie to him.”

  Dilworth agreed, but a halfhearted agreement that made it clear that Ezra wouldn’t get the message, and then he hung up.

  When I married Dilworth, I threw away Wanda Sorenski’s knitting needle. I decided that I was a dentist’s wife, that I had no need for it anymore. Who wants to dwell on the ugly things in life? When we were standing in the empty living room of the house he’d bought for me, a nice house in the heart of the suburbs, Dilworth told me about his mother running off and his father beating him in the back room of the furnace shop. The real estate agent was out in the yard�
�a perky woman in a lime green suit, tacking a SOLD emblem over the FOR SALE sign. And Dilworth said that we didn’t ever need to talk about it again, because he’d survived it and, “Look,” he said, sweeping his arms around the room, “look at what I have now!” You can see how I understood Dilworth and, although I didn’t dwell on my past, he knew things about me, too. We understood each other in that way. Dilworth wasn’t all bad, you know. He gave me the yellow kitchen, the one I’d always wanted, sparkling S.O.S. clean, a whole house of matching mahogany furniture. He gave me the daughter I wanted to complete my set, at a time when I was still trying to picture my family as the perfect family, a symmetrical family photo, mother and daughter in matching dresses, father and son wearing identical ties. Marrying Dilworth was an insurance policy for my sickly Ezra and a way to rise up into the predictable, uncomplicated, happy, pastless world of Dilworth Stocker.

  I’d say that there’s only one trick to marrying a dentist: be attentive to your teeth, that dentists admire well-structured, sturdy, clean, white teeth. They notice these things. These things are important to them. But that wouldn’t be fair. There’s more to it than that. On my part, I was tired of all of the men. The government I’d created was crumbling, its constitution had never really been written anyway, and the natives were exhausted, desperate, sickly. And the conqueror had been bit by something and had no built-up immunities and was fevered, deluded. I was the native, the conqueror, the entire wild vast landscape, see? And, in the real world, Ezra was in and out of the hospital. There was Dilworth with his shiny teeth-cleaning tools, his little spit cup and sink. To marry a dentist you have to need the dentist.

  But really Dilworth couldn’t help me, not the way I needed. I was alone again, married, once again, to another lonely person. Loneliness doesn’t really have anything to do with the person you’re with, although we were no company for each other, not really. Loneliness is personal. It happens inside of you. Self-insulation. It can be its own religion. For me, I guess it was. I was good at it, faithful, a devoted parishioner. If I saw my attempt at being a whore as governmental, as self-colonization, then my marriages turned out to be religious excursions, a religion of loneliness, and I was evangelical, my husbands converted.

  Ezra

  Rule #12: Trust no one.

  My father didn’t come home that night. He called from Philly. I could hear some sort of party going on in the background, or a bar, maybe a gay bar, I thought. I was trying to get a picture of what his life was like, anything at all.

  He said he was at a banquet. “I’m caught up here. I’ll be there tomorrow.” But he didn’t come the next day or the next, despite his calls, which always included an excuse and a promise. Richard would talk to him, too. I could hear Richard saying, “Don’t pull this old trick.” And I knew that my father was who he was, like my mother always said, you couldn’t change somebody, and that maybe it wasn’t my father’s gayness my mother had been warning me about, but this. The way he was there and then not there. But I was used to it. I felt as though I could have predicted it, and, at that time, predictability was good, any predictability, and so my father’s consistency, at least, was almost a relief, a strange comfort.

  The days went by in a blur of dark greasy gravies and canned fruit and television. Richard and I played gin rummy and canasta. Usually once a day, he would leave the room in a huff over something his parents said, but I wasn’t paying much attention. He was right; you got used to the aimlessness of the conversation and stopped trying to piece everything together. I moped about Janie Pinkering. Once, I said out loud that I was in love with her. But no one responded. Once I said that I hoped my mother wasn’t going any more crazy, cooped up like that. Again, nothing. The three blank faces stared at the TV, dipped cookies in tea, and the next comment was always something else altogether about the neighbor’s asthmatic dog or the detergent not really being as lemony as the announcer claimed. That’s how it was.

  I’d given up on trying to find a Rule to Live By, but something kept coming to me over and over, something about always being in control and never counting on someone else, especially not someone you wanted to rely on, someone you wanted to pull through for you and who, for whatever reasons, just couldn’t ever pull through. The idea of it came from my father’s having left me stranded at the Pichards’, but every time I really thought about it, I came back to hating my mother. At least, I’d figured out that I couldn’t rely on my father, but good old Pixie could give you the impression that she was there for you, and then suddenly she wasn’t.

  One night I went to bed early but then got up and walked toward the kitchen to get a drink of water. Richard and his parents were all in the kitchen. I heard Mrs. Pichard say, “Why did you give him your car?”

  Mr. Pichard added, “I don’t trust him. Where do you suppose he is? All that business of opportunities. I don’t buy it.”

  Richard was defensive. “He’ll be back. He hasn’t stolen the car.”

  Mr. Pichard said, “My son has always given in to people. Weak. Remember the boys who stole his Halloween candy when he tripped over his dishwasher costume? Those boys who were supposed to have been his friends.”

  “I was a robot!” Richard hissed. “Not a dishwasher.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Pichard said. “I remember the shiny buttons.”

  “He’ll come back,” Richard said, emphatically. “He has to come back.” I imagined him motioning through the wall, back toward my bedroom, mouthing, “His son? Remember?”

  Mrs. Pichard said, “Yes, the boy.”

  Maybe they were nodding or maybe shaking their heads, sorry for me. I couldn’t be sure. Would he come back? I’d heard of an Indian princess traded for a gun. Would he trade me in for a convertible? Would he consider it an upgrade? I wondered what Mitzie would say to me. I remembered how she told me everything was going to be all right, and I’d believed her. I wanted her to start talking in that screechy voice about handlebar pom-poms and shit like that. I wanted to hear about stupid things, the stupid little things that can make a kid happy.

  I went back to my room and came out a few minutes later, coughing loudly. Richard was now the only one left downstairs. He was alone in the kitchen drinking coffee at the counter.

  “Can I use the phone?” I asked.

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  I dialed the number and kind of stared at him to let him know I meant privately. But he didn’t pay any attention. I got the machine. It was Dilworth’s voice. “We can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message. If this is a call for Mitzie, she can be reached at the Worthingtons, temporarily.” He gave their number, but he sounded weird, out of touch, like a stewardess giving crash instructions in that smiley, chipper way.

  “I need to use it again,” I said.

  “No problem.”

  Mrs. Worthington answered.

  “Hi, it’s Ezra Stocker. Is my sister there?”

  “Yes, but she’s sleeping.”

  “I need to talk to her.

  “Yes, but I’d hate to disturb her.”

  “She’s my sister and I need to talk to her.”

  “Hold on,” Mrs. Worthington said. “Hold on.”

  I wasn’t feeling polite anymore. “Do you mind?” I said to Richard, my hand over the mouthpiece.

  “Oh!” He picked up his coffee and swished out of the room.

  “Hello? Ezra?” Mitzie sounded a little groggy.

  “Mitz,” I said. “What are you doing at the Worthingtons?”

  “Mrs. Worthington doesn’t have any kids, Ezra. She can’t. Did you know that? Isn’t that sad?”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So, you’re going to be her kid now?”

  “No, not really, but it’s nice for her, you know? They take pictures of me and send them to friends.”

  “The Worthingtons are weirdos, Mitz. They’re not right. They’re too good.” It was their goodness that made me suspicious of them. I don’t b
elieve that people can really be like the Worthingtons. I believe they can only pretend to be that good, but that really there’s a whole lot going on, just under the surface.

  “Mr. Worthington tends a garden and we get our own vegetables from it. And Mrs. Worthington had a tea party for me and my friends. She doesn’t like crowds so she orders stuff from catalogues. And she only lets me watch PBS and Waltons reruns.”

  “I’m not comfortable with this,” I said. I imagined Mitzie cut off and swirling away from the family, but there was no family left. I remembered how I’d wanted to be a Pinkering with unattached toes and how that didn’t seem the least bit possible now even though I still hoped it was. I was jealous that the Worthingtons had her and, too, that she had them, a shot at something good.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m not even really sure.”

  “You know what, Ezra? It can be good if you want to look at it that way. You just have to decide to see it that way.”

  I wanted to say, Yeah, and our mother’s in a loony bin. She shot your father. But I wasn’t sure what happy face Mitzie had put on that one and I didn’t want to disturb her.

  “Ezra, it’s late.” And then she whispered, “Mrs. Worthington looks worried. She wants me to get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Wait, Mitz, you haven’t told me anything yet about anything. How was the tea party?”

  “I’ve got to go. I’m very important here, Ezra. It’s hard to explain. It was nice talking to you.”

  “You too,” I said and then Mitzie hung up.

  I walked to my bedroom, passing Richard lying on the couch, his hands behind his head. “Are you mad at him?” he asked.

  “Who?” But I knew who he meant, and I said, “Are you mad at him?” I guess I figured that he’d been such a staunch defender of my father in front of his parents that he’d convince me that my father was coming back, but away from his suspicious parents he had a different tone.