All the Beautiful Girls

by Elizabeth J. Church

  Lily laughed. There couldn’t possibly be such a thing. The Aviator was funny.

  “I’m not kidding,” he said, touching the brim of his ball cap in a mock salute. “They dance, too, but not as well as you! Now, promise me you’ll have a good rest of the summer, all right?”

  “I will!” Lily skipped a few steps toward the bleachers and then turned to wave to him one more time. She watched him cross the parking lot, stand beside his tuxedo-black Corvette, and light a cigarette.

  A week later, Lily received a card in the mail that said she’d been given a Tah-Dah! Dance Studio scholarship, along with a stipend to pay for a leotard, tights, and appropriate dance shoes. It was signed “Your Secret Benefactor.” Aunt Tate said, “Someone has money to burn” but otherwise manifested no curiosity. And so after school Lily rode her faded red bicycle to the studio. It gave her two days a week when she was out of the house, free from chores and the lead-weight sensation of knowing Uncle Miles was due to come through the kitchen door, smelling of oil and diesel and sweat.

  * * *

  —

  UNCLE MILES SAID, “Tonight we experiment.”

  September’s full moon through the window made everything silvery bright, lit the edges of things, made silhouettes of her desk lamp and her bureau with her ballerina jewelry box. Lily jammed the ends of her fingers into her mouth, bit down to keep quiet. She squeezed her eyes shut, tight. Warm tears eased their way from the corners of her eyes, ran into her hair, and wet her pillowcase.

  Uncle Miles put his mouth to the center of her. He was moaning, which made a buzzing bee vibration that journeyed from his throat, his lips, to her core. And then she felt the growing heat of her own flesh in response. She fought against it but couldn’t help it. “Oh!” she cried, a surprised baby-bird voice. “Oh, oh, oh!” He held her pelvis as if it were a bowl.

  She thought that she might explode, that she was descending, plummeting, and it was release and good and hot and out of her control and sick and bad a disease and the worst thing ever that Uncle Miles had done but it felt good. It felt good. It felt good. Oh, no—it felt good. How could her body betray her?

  “You like it.” His whisper left a hot brand of accusation against the side of her neck.

  Once he was gone, she told herself that tonight was the exception to the rule. Tonight, it was okay to cry. With her face pressed into the wet pillow to muffle the sound of her confusion, Lily cried her shame. Her need. She cried a poisonous blend of gratification and disgust, of wonderment that Uncle Miles had given her pleasure, which was more frightening than any of the painful, awful things he’d done in the past. She cried her rupture, her irreparable breakage.

  The light from the gooseneck lamp on top of the church organ turned Mrs. Olson’s face cadaver white as she played “O God of Mercy, God of Might.” Seated next to Aunt Tate in the unforgiving wooden pew, twelve-year-old Lily wrapped her arms around her gut, which had harbored a deep, persistent ache since before the second hymn. Finally, Pastor Lester intoned the benediction and released the sanctified congregation.

  Lily immediately headed downstairs to the church bathroom, which wasn’t much more than a stingy coat closet. When she looked at the crotch of her panties, she saw blood. Oh no oh no oh no oh no. A string of dark, thick blood dripped from inside her, and there was more blood in the toilet bowl.

  Was this God’s doing? Was this one of the things that the all-powerful, vengeful God did to punish bad girls? She knew that what she did with Uncle Miles was evil, and God did seem so very fond of bloody atonement. Lily wadded toilet paper into her panties and then sat uncomfortably through her sixth-grade Sunday school lesson.

  Aunt Tate was waiting in the car when Lily finished class. “What did you learn today?” she asked, waving to some of her Bible-study friends like Margaret Steepleton, who kept a handkerchief tucked between her bulwark breasts and blew her nose loudly at least seventeen thousand times during the pastor’s tedious sermon.

  “The story of the prodigal son,” Lily dutifully reported. Then she took a deep breath, steeling herself to tell Aunt Tate about the blood and possible impending doom. “Aunt Tate? I’m bleeding.”

  Aunt Tate turned to look at Lily. “Where? Did you fall?”

  “No.” It was hard, but Lily knew she needed help, that something was horribly wrong. “Down there,” Lily whispered, looking out the windshield and across the street to the Texaco station, thinking about the smell of gasoline, the way oil puddles on the asphalt formed galaxies of rainbows. “It hurts,” she said, still avoiding her aunt’s stare and holding a hand to the ache in her belly.

  “Between your legs.”

  “Yes.”

  Aunt Tate closed her eyes and leaned forward until her forehead rested on the steering wheel.

  So, it was true. Lily was going to die. Or at least she was very sick, and there would be hospital bills. She’d bankrupt them. They would be roaming the streets, penniless.

  Margaret Steepleton knocked on Aunt Tate’s window. “Tate, honey? You all right?”

  Aunt Tate rolled down her window. “She’s got the curse,” she said, tipping her head in Lily’s direction. “First time.”

  Mrs. Steepleton leaned in the window and beamed across the seat at Lily, “Congratulations, sweetheart! Now you’re a woman!”

  The curse? Since the accident, Lily had always known she was cursed. But was it a curse simply to be a woman?

  “Lord, help me.” Aunt Tate sighed as Margaret Steepleton trundled off to join her husband and two boys. Her aunt’s voice was flat and unyielding, like the iron skillet that wouldn’t fit in the cupboard and so sat on the stove’s back burner, black, heavy, and inert.

  They stopped at the drugstore on the way home, and Aunt Tate bought Lily a sanitary belt and a big box of napkins with a picture of a dreamy woman strolling through meadows of flowers. She showed Lily how to wear the belt low on her hips and had Lily practice attaching the napkin tabs snugly to the belt’s metal fittings.

  “You’re growing up so fast. A young woman, nearly,” Aunt Tate said wistfully. “So much ahead of you,” she summed up.

  “Does the aching go away?” Lily asked, and for a moment she saw confusion on her aunt’s face.

  “Oh, the belly pain, you mean. Let’s get the hot water bottle.”

  Aunt Tate helped Lily lie down with the soothing heat of the pig-pink water bottle planted squarely over her belly, and they split a special Almond Joy candy bar Aunt Tate called “medicinal under the circumstances.”

  Lily fell asleep wondering about the connection between blood and womanhood. She hadn’t been able to make herself ask Aunt Tate why she was bleeding, if it had a purpose, other than inconvenience and ignominy. Was it something to do with God’s unending wrath toward Eve, the curse Aunt Tate talked about? Was that why only women harbored secret, open wounds?

  * * *

  —

  ON SATURDAYS LILY swept and dusted. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the kitchen’s green and white linoleum. In the bathroom, she held her breath and washed away the yellow splashes of urine Uncle Miles left on the porcelain toilet bowl.

  Alongside Aunt Tate, she learned how to make stew and soups, chipped beef on toast, casseroles, and hash from leftover pot roast. She mastered pastry, crimping a perfect blanket of crust over apples, cherries, or peaches. Aunt Tate taught her to fold laundry properly, how to iron simple things like sheets, pillowcases, and dresser scarves. When Lily conquered the straightforward items, she moved on to more difficult things like Uncle Miles’ work shirts and Aunt Tate’s cotton blouses.

  One afternoon, Lily opened the linen cupboard and shifted a pile of sheets to make room for her fresh ironing. Beneath the sheets, she found a cardboard folder that held a portrait of her parents. Her mother wore a light gray suit with a big chrysanthemum corsage, and her father had his arm about her m
other’s shoulders, an unmistakable flash of joy in his eyes that Lily thought she remembered, even if she could no longer hear his voice.

  There was a newspaper clipping folded inside, and Lily read the article from the Salina Journal dated June 10, 1957, four years ago. It featured a picture of her family’s car, mangled and topless. Another picture showed the Aviator’s brand-new, black 1957 Chrysler 300-C, which the caption said was a production-line muscle car with enough power to reach one hundred miles per hour in second gear. At the time of the accident, the Aviator was traveling an estimated 130 miles per hour.

  Lily saw decapitated and ten-year-old Dawn Marie Decker thrown from the car and the miracle of Lily Francine Decker’s survival. Sheriff Ingram was described as having hot tears in his eyes when he said that no one would ever know why the Buick had been traveling on the wrong side of the road. “Could be the Deckers swerved to avoid hitting a coyote,” he’d said. “Maybe a raccoon or a skunk. But it’ll be a mystery, always.” Ingram said the thirty-seven-year-old Aviator would not be cited, although he’d been cautioned to watch his speed. “No one to blame,” the sheriff concluded.

  Decapitated. Lily felt the word as a sharp, unexpected blow to her solar plexus. She hadn’t known. They’d kept it from her—the gruesome death of her parents. And the Aviator hadn’t told her the truth, not the whole truth. The Aviator had let her believe that the accident was his fault, but Lily’s father had been driving on the wrong side of the road.

  Lily tucked the clipping and portrait back beneath the sheets and closed the cupboard door. She put it all back where it was supposed to be, buried and hidden away.

  * * *

  —

  SHE LICKED HER fingers and touched herself the way Uncle Miles had taught her. She wet her fingers in her mouth once more and sent them back as quickly as possible, not wanting to lose the sensation she was building, a skyscraper of guilty pleasure and release. She needed to keep the pressure steady and so had the idea to wedge the satiny edge of her blanket between her legs. She squeezed with her thighs, tightened, released and tightened her muscles until it arrived—that sensation of heat and freedom.

  After Lily was done, she swore she would never do it again. She would stop. No one had told her it was a sin or bad or sick, but she knew it was. If it had to do with Uncle Miles, it was bad. The knowledge of her perversity was solid.

  Lily didn’t understand any of it—not the irresistible impulse to engage or any reason behind the pleasure. It was a disgusting need that Uncle Miles had ignited within her. Surely other girls didn’t feel this way, know these things, do these things. Her very core was diseased.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this all day,” he said one summer night when Lily felt a soft, cooling breeze coming through her open window. The Sorensons’ yippy little dog had just finished a protracted, panicked bout of barking. Uncle Miles pushed up her nightgown and ran his rough hand up her leg. “You’re getting such long legs,” he said. “Young filly.” Uncle Miles’ hand reached her crotch. “What’s this?” he said. “Off. Get them off of you.”

  “But—”

  “Then I’ll do it.” He slipped his hand into the waistband of her panties and yanked. The sanitary belt stayed with the panties, slid down with them as he tugged. He spotted the pad.

  “You’ve got your monthlies?” he said, pulling back.

  She was surprised that Aunt Tate hadn’t told him, but she was instantly grateful that her aunt had kept it to herself.

  “Since when?” Uncle Miles asked, and Lily realized that for some incomprehensible reason, Uncle Miles was suddenly worried.

  “A few months.”

  “Oh.” He reached for the bedcovers and threw them over her exposed body. “Shit.”

  With the exception of a sporadic “damnation” when the wrench slipped and cut him or when the lawn mower refused to start, Uncle Miles rarely swore.

  “Then that’s that,” he said, standing and looking down at her. He walked out of her room and actually closed the door completely, the click of the latch an unprecedented explosion of sound.

  Lily lay there, trying to comprehend. Some part of her knew Uncle Miles was gone forever, that he wouldn’t come back. But why not? What had she done? And why was even a fraction of her feeling sadly rejected, as if she’d failed? Why was she anything other than joyfully relieved? Now what had she done wrong?

  * * *

  —

  THROUGHOUT LILY’S EARLY teenage years, the Aviator continued to pay her dance school tuition. Lily studied tap and modern dance, which Aunt Tate pronounced “a good deal of meaningless thrashing.” Lily learned ballroom dancing and started to work on ballet positions (à la seconde, effacé), but Aunt Tate couldn’t afford the toe shoes, and because Lily would never presume to ask the Aviator for more, ballet remained a dream. Still, she could jitterbug and do the Charleston and shimmy and mimic Gene Kelly’s easy, athletic leaps and Cyd Charisse’s sexy, long-limbed elegance. An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain instantly became her favorite movies when she watched them as reruns on Dialing for Dollars after school.

  The Aviator faithfully attended all of Lily’s Tah-Dah! dance performances, and Lily knew he’d be at the upcoming recital of Enchanted Woodlands, too. Some of the younger girls chose to be squirrels. One was a big, clumsy bear, and several flitted across the stage as chattering birds. This time Lily was nervous—largely (and as usual) because of the pressure she’d put on herself. With hard work, she’d earned a solo, which meant she could choreograph the final piece of the evening for herself.

  Lily wanted to be different, to perform something that transcended childhood and matched the fact that she would soon be moving on to high school. In the library, she learned the word diaphanous and read the myth of Daphne, the beautiful nymph who spurned every suitor, even Apollo. When Daphne asked her father, a river god, to help her escape from Apollo, her father turned her into a laurel tree. It was an abominable, cruel solution. A daughter asked for help, and her father’s incomprehensible response was to sentence her to eternity as a tree, with roots bound to the earth.

  Lily wanted to free Daphne—at least for a while—and so Lily’s Daphne leapt onto the empty stage and danced as if escape were possible. She wore a green leotard, chestnut brown tights, and she’d sewn lengths of pink, rose, and fuchsia ribbons to the arms of her leotard. A diadem of leaves interspersed with ribbons crowned her loose, flowing hair. She felt free, transported. And beautiful.

  Lily covered every corner of the boards with her leaps, and she let her arms float in graceful, ever-moving arcs so that her ribbons wove patterns about her. She threw her head back, closed her eyes in rapture as if she were thrusting her defiant face into Apollo’s sun. Then, in keeping with the myth’s inevitably, Lily began to freeze. Mustering great dramatic authority, Lily stuck her feet to the floor of the stage. Inch by inch, with exquisite control and painful slowness, Lily stilled her body until only her fingertips quivered with musical breezes. The ribbons hung lifeless. She held her mouth to the audience in a silent, open O—an arrested scream.

  There was a long silence, and then they applauded. Someone even shouted “Bravo!” Lily bowed, letting her ribbons trail on the floor of the stage, and as she calmed her breath, she felt the audience’s energy lift her skyward. She kept her eyes closed as a beatific glow possessed her. When one of the younger dance students touched her arm, Lily opened her eyes to a bouquet of lilies and baby’s breath. She cradled the flowers in her arms and made a final bow, hoping the Aviator knew her thanks—her debt—was to him.

  In the hushed car on the way home, Aunt Tate said, “What do you call that?”

  “What?”

  “That kind of flailing.”

  “Interpretive dance. It was my interpretation of the character, through dance.”

  Aunt Tate sighed. “Well, I guess as long as we’re not pay
ing for it.”

  A voice inside Lily said, Don’t let her take this from you. Still, it hurt. Wasn’t there anything she could do that would make her aunt proud?

  Back at the house, Aunt Tate said that lilies smelled of funerals, and so Lily gladly set the vase on the nightstand next to her bed, where the scent of the Aviator’s tribute would perfume her sleep. Lying in the dark, still too fired up to sleep, Lily relived her performance, and she knew Aunt Tate and Uncle Miles had not succeeded. Lily had found a way; she’d done it. The audience had not only seen her, they’d loved her. Lily Decker was not invisible.

  * * *

  —

  A COUPLE DAYS after her dance recital, Aunt Tate left a gift on Lily’s bedside table, next to the vase of fading lilies. When Lily tore open the wrapping paper, she found a crystalline box with a butterfly suspended inside, its wings spread wide as if in optimistic flight. The creature’s wings were a stunning sapphire blue—vibrant, even in death. A card written in her aunt’s cursive read To match your beautiful eyes, and because you have more spirit than I ever did. And then, the most amazing, bewildering part of all—Aunt Tate had written, “Love, Aunt Tate.” LOVE.

  In high school, the bones of Lily’s face emerged like the visage of a goddess rising from a deep seabed. She was no longer merely pretty or interesting; her beauty arrested. When she walked the sidewalks of downtown Salina, men spun in their tracks to look at her. Women eyed her with a mixture of studied curiosity and envy. Once, when she was grocery shopping with Aunt Tate, a complete stranger stopped to say, “Now I understand what was meant by ‘the face that launched a thousand ships.’ ” To which Aunt Tate replied, “Well, we’re in Kansas, and I don’t see any ocean, do you?” At that, the woman walked on, but she turned briefly to shake her head and give Lily a secret, understanding smile.