Like Mandarin

by Kirsten Hubbard

  Though I should have known, the realization startled me: for Mandarin, leaving is real.

  Because I didn’t want to meet her eyes, I watched over her shoulder as Earl selected a half-eaten burger from the trash can and despondently shuffled away.

  I slumped in a metal folding chair at the edge of the Little Miss Washokey crowd. In the years since my last pageant, the school administration had built a cement stage outside the elementary wing. It gave the pageants and school performances a little more credibility, though the tape deck and the curtain strung up between two poles appeared to be the same.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Mandarin. About how melancholy she’d sounded at the A&W when she’d talked about the ocean, the strawberry fields. I’d never met anybody with such changeable moods.

  Except maybe for Momma, who was sitting beside me, her restless hands folded over the purse in her lap.

  “I just don’t think Lindsey’s any good!” she hissed in a voice that wasn’t as quiet as she thought. “She’s off tune. Though you can’t say anything bad about that dress. Deborah’s sewing is exquisite. Ooh! Now that was a sour note. What a way to end her act! That’s all the judges will remember, the last impression, almost as important as the first. But she wasn’t as bad as the Shaw girl, Petra? No, the brother’s Peter, her name must be—Shhh!”

  I wiped a fleck of spit from my cheek.

  The MC, somebody’s grandpa in a rumpled tuxedo, had stepped back onstage. He tapped the microphone, even though it was obviously working just fine. “Next is the lovely little Miss Taffeta Carpenter, singing Andrea Bocelli’s ‘Con Te Partirò’ …”

  He hunched over the microphone and added, “In Italian.”

  That was exactly how Momma said that last part. Conspiratorially. Like if we spoke about my sister’s talent in loud voices, it might disappear.

  I hadn’t been able to carry a tune as a child. So Momma had me recite things like Shakespearean sonnets, “Jabberwocky,” and the Gettysburg Address. Once, I delivered that famous speech by Chief Joseph: From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. I wore an Indian princess costume, with lipstick circles drawn on my cheeks. But that performance didn’t go over well with the judges. Despite Chief Joseph’s having been part of Oregon’s Nez Perce tribe—not Wyoming’s Arapahoe or Crow or Cheyenne or Shoshone—the chief’s gloomy words probably reminded them of the parts of Native American history they’d rather forget. Like impoverished reservations, or the Trail of Tears. When it came to Indians, most white people in these parts believed that it was best to linger on the positives, like fry bread and dream catchers and turquoise jewelry.

  Taffeta stepped out from the shadows backstage. Her blue dress looked ultramarine under the makeshift spotlight, one of those clamp lamps used for pet reptiles. Her cheeks glowed with a fever flush. The MC lowered the microphone to her level. She leaned in so close I heard her lips rustle against it.

  Without any warning or any musical accompaniment, without so much as a drawing in of breath, my sister began to sing. Nonsense syllables, escalating into the first crescendo: “Con teee … partiró …”

  Although most opera music made me want to retch—mostly on account of my mother’s obsession with it—when Taffeta sang that song, it became my favorite song in the world.

  I forgot about Mandarin as the power of Taffeta’s voice coursed through the crowd. Taffeta felt it too. She tipped back her head and closed her eyes, like one of those child pop stars on the Disney Channel. She held out one hand plaintively while the other became a fist that pummeled the air. Her voice seemed to echo off the dim hills around us, transcending the whole town, all the people in it. For four minutes, we were cultured and worldly. Maybe even Italian.

  She deserved a shower of roses, a standing ovation.

  I wanted to climb onto my chair and call out, That’s my little sister!

  Then Momma whispered into my ear. “Oh, she’s like an angel! This is all I ever wanted! All I ever wanted!”

  And just like that, she ruined it.

  I brought my knees up into my chest, aiming myself away from my mother. I couldn’t even watch as my sister belted out the final piercing note to the song, holding it and holding it until I thought she would surely pass out or float away and vanish into the heavens, where we both agreed that she belonged.

  On our way home from the pageant, Momma drove with one hand on my sister’s trophy—the first-prize kind, not the stuffed kind. Taffeta sat in back, wearing a rhinestone tiara, her feet tucked beneath her blue dress. I sat in the passenger seat with the window open, breathing in the wind.

  It was during our epic pageant road trips that Momma used to tell me about the wildwinds.

  “They push all the ozone out of the air,” she would explain. “Ozone’s the electricity that keeps us sane. That’s why we’re all a little bit crazy.”

  I never really understood what she was talking about, although when I read about the hole in the ozone layer in second grade, I feared an onset of global insanity even more than global warming.

  “Did you see the looks on the judges’ faces when Taffeta finished singing?” Momma asked now, as we rolled through town.

  “Not really,” I muttered.

  “Like they were sucking for air? They’d all gone pale! I’ve never been so proud in my whole life.” She tap-tapped her fingernails against the trophy. Its chrome plating was networked with a billion hairline cracks. “This is it, my darlings! The beginning.”

  I glanced back at Taffeta, who was sucking on her fingers.

  “Next comes the tri-county pageant,” Momma continued. “All the best and brightest little girls in the three counties. And after that comes the state pageant.”

  “The whole state?” Taffeta asked.

  “The whole state! And I just know you’ll win that one, too, hands down. Can you imagine their reaction when a six-year-old beats all those seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds?”

  This time, my sister didn’t respond. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Momma’s joyful expression falter a bit.

  “Don’t you want to know what’s after that, honey?”

  “Okay.”

  “The national pageant! The whole entire United States of America. Fifty girls, one from every state. There’ll be music scouts and TV producers. All the important people in the entertainment industry. And it’ll be held in California.”

  I snapped my head around. “California?”

  Momma glanced at me, like she’d forgotten I was there.

  “Well, you can come too, Grace. But only if you’ll be supportive.”

  I turned back toward the window. My eyes trailed along the barbed wire fence outlining somebody’s front yard, as if it were a ranch or a pasture. Trespassers beware. Beyond the streets and houses, I could make out the dark haze of the horizon. As usual, it seemed unnervingly far away.

  When we arrived home, I shot up the stairs into my room and slammed the door. From the back of my closet, I withdrew my deepest, darkest secret.

  My pageant album.

  I’d stolen it from the junk drawer in Momma’s room. She hadn’t missed it. Taffeta’s album, crammed full from cover to cover, sat on the coffee table in our living room. Mine was only half filled. The other half would have been reserved for future accomplishments, except I hadn’t had any.

  The first pictures in my album didn’t bother me. It was the later ones, the ones I covered with scraps of notebook paper, that turned my stomach. Though sometimes I’d peel back the paper and peek at the tiny face underneath—pink cheeks, gleaming white baby teeth, a cloud of corkscrew curls.

  Looking at my former self, I wasn’t sure how much of the dread I felt was a real memory, and how much was a false one planted by the years between.

  Because with the exception of the pageants themselves, all my memories of those days were good ones. The photos proved it: me standing in the crispy roadside weeds with Momma’s hand on my head, the camera propped up on the car hoo
d. I was three, and four, and five, and six. Momma was in her early twenties. Both of us grinning, always.

  Momma entered me in every Wyoming pageant open to out-of-towners. There were plenty—especially in the towns too small to homegrow enough contestants. We visited the bigger towns too, except for Jackson Hole. Bad energy there, Momma said.

  The year I was six I remembered the best. We had the most photos from that year, from the summer before first grade and the spring at the end of it.

  I flipped through the pages, touching each picture. Rivers clogged with beaver dams. The sprawling flatness of Casper. The layered pink cliffs near Lander. Herds of bison at Yellowstone National Park and blurry pronghorn antelopes leaping through the Red Desert. A postcard from the art exhibit we’d seen of Bev Doolittle, a western artist who hid Indians and wildlife in her painted landscapes. I remembered pointing out pinto horses in the notches of aspen trees, the creased faces of Indian chiefs in boulders on the ride home.

  We’d visited the Devil’s Tower, like a wedding cake carved from ancient rock. The Tetons, jagged mountains whose name meant “breasts” in French. Hell’s Half Acre, which made our badlands look not so bad at all.

  No wonder I’d fallen in love with geology.

  We’d gotten lost plenty of times, but it had always felt like an adventure. We had to coax directions from the owners of ranches and diners and trading posts, the kind of folks who thought long and hard before speaking. The farther out in the hinterlands, the more eccentric the directions. Stuff like:

  When the dirt gets a sorta yellow color, you’ve gone too far.

  Go on past the Lutheran church and then, at Edwin’s house, make a right. (As if we had any idea who Edwin was.)

  You’ll see an old brown building that says Dairy Mart. Don’t turn there!

  In the following years, whenever Momma mentioned the things we’d seen—“Do you remember Indian Ridge?” or “Look, there’s a picture of the Elkhorn Arch in Afton. We drove under it. Grace, do you remember?”—I claimed that it had been too long, that I remembered nothing.

  But I did remember.

  Maybe not all the places Momma and I had seen. But I remembered the way we’d been. Together.

  I remembered how we’d always tried to stretch pageant season a little longer, to find just one more pageant for me to enter, to fill up the gas tank just one last time. Though like water swirling into a drain, everything eventually wound down to Washokey.

  When Momma acted like my Little Miss Washokey screwup was such a fiasco, it brought to light a fundamental difference between us. I lived for our road trips. But for Momma, the pageants were the important thing. Our journeys had just been the means to an end.

  There was only one photo of that last pageant. Momma must have taken others, but I didn’t know what had happened to them.

  This one showed all the girls dancing onstage, in the mayhem of our final act. I hadn’t covered my face with paper on this one, since Paige Shelmerdine and her flamingo pink dress had done the job for me. Now I wondered if when that image was snapped, I’d already made the impulsive decision that would knock my universe sideways.

  I tried to imagine Mandarin standing there, watching, somewhere just outside the frame. But through all my years of pondering, I never could guess what she’d been thinking when she saw Momma scold me backstage.

  I still couldn’t guess what Mandarin was thinking—like when she’d asked me to run away with her to California.

  I chased that thought out of my mind and closed the book.

  On Monday morning, we arrived at school a few minutes early. Taffeta danced away into the throng of kindergartners. I stood in the cottonwood grove and scanned the lawn for Mandarin, although I knew I wouldn’t find her. She usually arrived late in the mornings, since she considered attending homeroom a pointless waste of sleep.

  I adopted an insolent expression as I leaned back against a tree. Or tried to, because the trunk was a little too far away. I ended up practically diagonal. When I adjusted my pose, the bark made a crumpling sound.

  I turned and found a poster for the cowboy dance stapled to the tree trunk.

  I stared at it. In tempera paint, a hokey country couple danced in a swarm of musical notes. Every phrase was framed with exclamation points: Come one, come all!! Kick up your spurs at the cowboy dance!! The greatest event of the year!!

  The date: Saturday, May 19.

  My birthday.

  It was kind of like somebody sticking his fingers in his ears, wagging his tongue.

  Despite myself, I sighed. Then I hiked my jeans down another centimeter or two, shouldered my tote bag, and sauntered toward the school building. But I got stuck halfway up the stairs, because Mr. Beck was standing on the top step.

  Mr. Beck had a gray mustache and long ponytailed hair that was a timeline of his years: black at the tips, and fading to pure white at the roots. He wore jeans belted high on his gut, a suit jacket over a white shirt, and one of those wannabe cowboy bootlace ties, with plastic bear teeth instead of toggles at the ends. His high-heeled brown boots made him look forever on the verge of toppling forward.

  I tried to go around him. But to my surprise, he stuck out his hand to stop me.

  “Grace Carpenter?”

  The loudspeaker voice sounded strange coming from a real person. Discreetly, I tried to hike up my jeans. “Sir?”

  He grabbed both my hands. “I wanted to be the first to congratulate you!”

  I glanced at the students around me. Staring, as usual—but now for the wrong reasons. Hanging out with the principal on the top step wasn’t exactly enviable. Like when I got caught looking at pioneer postcards with Ms. Ingle. I wondered what would happen if I screamed at the top of my lungs. Then I realized what Mr. Beck had said.

  “On what?” I asked warily.

  “On your trip to Washington, D.C.”

  “Huh? Excuse me, sir, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I tugged one of my hands loose. But that was worse. Now it looked like the principal and I were holding hands.

  “There were some unfortunate discoveries about Peter Shaw. Specifically, we found out his essay was plagiarized. That means copied, Grace. He cheated.”

  Thanks for the vocabulary lesson. “Okay, sure.”

  Peter Shaw’s cheating wasn’t any big surprise. People claimed he’d won the junior-class presidency via devious tactics.

  “So in that case, first prize—the three-week All-American Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., plus a one-hundred-dollar savings bond—goes to our runner-up.”

  I stood there for one silent moment before yanking my other hand out of his and slapping it over my mouth. “What do you mean?” I asked through the gaps of my fingers.

  Mr. Beck withdrew a stack of pamphlets from his jacket pocket and offered them to me. “I’ve had a look at your itinerary. All kinds of field trips are included. The Pentagon. Arlington, and the cemetery. The monuments and museums. And of course, the White House. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to meet the president of the United States! Wouldn’t that beat all?”

  Alien places. Foreign words. Only a few of them made sense. I tried to wrap my brain around what he was saying.

  “So I’m really going?”

  “That’s right.” Mr. Beck beamed at me. One front tooth was the same shade of gray as his mustache. “And don’t forget the hundred-dollar savings bond. We’ll swap it for your fifty. I’ll call up 4-H and Kiwanis and let them know you’re in. All you need to do is fill out the paperwork and mail it in with your mother’s signature. Congratulations on your big win, Ms. Carpenter!”

  The bell rang. Mr. Beck held open the double doors, and I stumbled into the hall. The white noise of the kids surging around me sounded like the roar of applause. In that instant, I forgot to saunter. I forgot everything.

  I had won. For the first time in eight years, weeping was allowed.

  I studied the pamphlets in my classes. Pretty quickly, I discov
ered the problem with leadership conferences: they were all about leadership.

  My courses included:

  The Fundamentals of Leadership

  This course examines the philosophy of leadership, the difference between leadership and management, and the leader-follower relationship.

  Leadership in the Political Sector

  This course explores the nature of leadership in both traditional and contemporary politics. Guest speakers will include assistants to members of Congress and an associate Webmaster from a government website.

  Leadership: the Musical

  Once you have mastered the essentials of leadership, it’s time to perform! A requirement.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about that last course. Actually, I wasn’t sure how I felt about any of the courses. For now, I decided to concentrate on my victory. Everything that came with it could be put off until later—including telling Momma.

  Because although Momma loved a good win above anything else, I suspected her reaction might be a little underwhelming, considering how busy she was preparing for the tri-county pageant. An essay contest couldn’t compare. Momma didn’t even read books for fun, let alone my school papers.

  My brain fog lasted until lunchtime, when I almost went to sit by Alexis & Co. Fortunately, Mandarin intercepted me just in time. She held a paper cup filled with grapes so purple they looked black. Only then did I remember she hadn’t been in geometry that morning. Mandarin’s missing class wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but I had the troublesome sensation I’d forgotten something.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “It’s going great!”

  Before I could elaborate, Mandarin pointed at my tote bag. “What’s all that?”

  I glanced at my bag. The leadership pamphlets stuck out like a peacock tail. “They’re—”

  Now it doesn’t matter that you didn’t win that stupid trip, Mandarin had said in the cottonwood storm. We’ll be long gone by then.