Like Mandarin

by Kirsten Hubbard

  But I knew it was time. Time to tell her that I knew the truth, about the envelope and arrowheads, and that her lie didn’t matter to me—because after all, when it came to bastard parentage, I wasn’t any better.

  I cleared my throat. “Mandarin …”

  When she didn’t answer, I squatted beside her and took a deep breath. “Mandarin, I know about your mother. I know she’s sending you arrowheads.”

  Her shoulders stilled. Slowly, she lifted her face. “What?”

  “I saw an envelope.”

  “Why the fuck didn’t you say so?”

  “I don’t know.” I rushed to explain. “It was after our fight. And … I guess I figured you had your reasons for keeping it a secret.”

  Mandarin stared at me a moment longer, her frightening eyes spearing mine.

  Then she unclenched the tank top from her first. It was so crumpled it looked like crushed velvet. “She claimed she didn’t have the money to take care of me proper,” she said, yanking on her shirt. “And she wasn’t in the right mental state. I didn’t give a damn about that as a kid or now, but she insisted. I haven’t seen her since.”

  “But the letters …”

  “I don’t even read her damn letters. They just remind me how much I hate her for leaving me here in this horseshit town.”

  She didn’t even read them?

  It seemed so immature. Like Taffeta’s plugging her ears when I ordered her from my bedroom. It was as if Mandarin felt validated by their rift. As long as she ignored her mother’s efforts, Mandarin could continue believing she was the one who’d been wronged.

  Just when I was about to voice my frustration, she pressed her face into her arms and began to sob.

  “Why do I let them get to me? Why do I let them? I just can’t understand how anybody could hate me so much without even knowing me.”

  My heart felt stuck in my throat. “Gary Householder’s an asshole.” Tentatively, I touched her shoulder. “Remember? What he says means nothing, okay? He’s just a stupid asshole hick with sheep shit for brains, who gets off on making people feel as small as he is.”

  Mandarin looked up at me again. Eyeliner streamed from her red eyes. She was an entirely different creature, spoiled by tears. “Get a clue, Grace. They’re all like that.”

  “Who are all like that?”

  “People,” she said. “People in Washokey. They take, take, take, with no mind for anybody else. If you get in the way of their fun, they’ll run you down and squash you.”

  “Come on. No they’re not! That’s impossible. They can’t all be.”

  “You have no fucking idea.”

  The words came out in a snarl. I jerked my hand away as she turned and stared across the water, her mouth a tense gash. And then she turned to me, suddenly inspired. “I know,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I know what to do.”

  “To do? What do you mean, Mandarin?”

  “I’ve figured it out. How to show you. To prove to you how they really are. All of them, in this town. To show you why we’ve got to escape before we’re eaten alive.”

  I fought to breathe normally.

  “I keep forgetting how young you are, and how much you haven’t seen. No wonder you act like leaving’s a joke. You got no idea about the real Washokey. About what places like this turn people into. If I don’t prepare you, when it finally hits you, you won’t be getting back up.”

  “Mandarin, you don’t need to prove anything to me.… I already believe you!”

  “No you don’t,” she said. “But trust me. You will.”

  My dress was an old white one of Momma’s, with spaghetti straps that tied over the shoulders and a sash abuzz with embroidered bees. The cups were so thickly padded it looked like I’d stuffed two rolled-up socks into my top. I complained until Momma let me wear a white cardigan to hide them. She’d somehow found the time to french-braid my hair, same as hers.

  We had to look immaculate, like a family unit. When Taffeta won first place in the tri-county pageant, Momma said, we’d all be invited onstage.

  I sat in the backseat of the car with a pair of secondhand high heels on my lap. My sister’s feathery pageant dress—white, with familiar-looking puffy lilac sleeves—dangled from a hanger beside me.

  Taffeta sat in the passenger’s seat, dressed in a terry cloth tracksuit. Momma had spun her hair into Shirley Temple corkscrew curls, with a white orchid pinned above her ear. Her makeup looked airbrushed on. Momma had ordered her to keep her face as expressionless as possible so she wouldn’t crack her artificial splendor.

  Momma wore the shimmery gold junk shop gown she’d saved for years. She drove with white-knuckled tension. All day she’d been in her worst form, rocketing around the house, hollering at my sister and me, drinking mug after mug of burnt-smelling black coffee. The caffeine only fueled her nervous prattling, which increased until her brain seemed to rupture and she could hardly articulate a complete sentence.

  “Road’s shit,” she said at one point. “Taxes wasted.”

  And later, “What to do about butt glue?”

  Butt glue? Clearly, she’d gone insane.

  We arrived in Benton, the county seat, a little after six. Benton—named for the mines, of course—wasn’t much larger than Washokey, but it had the courthouse and a tiny Wild West museum. Momma swung Taffeta out of the car and set her down. She opened my door and leaned over me.

  “Dress,” she ordered. “Duffel.”

  After a short pause, I handed her Taffeta’s dress and the wheelie duffel bag overstuffed with pageant gear. Before I could climb out myself, Momma slammed the door. I watched her speed off with the dress slung over her shoulder, her bag bumbling over the asphalt, and Taffeta hurrying to catch up.

  I buckled my feet into the stupid strappy heels and slid out of the car. My dress was too short. Paired with my skinny legs, it made me feel like a stork. Plus the heels chafed me in sixteen places. They made a clopping sound as I crossed the parking lot.

  I stared at the piece of paper taped to the back door of the Benton High School cafeteria: Authorized Personnel Only. Then I pushed inside.

  Backstage, dozens of little girls and their mothers churned through a fun house of mirrors and lights. Dressing tables were littered with makeup, blow dryers, spangled fragments of costumes. Mothers screeched to be heard over the commotion. Several little girls were wailing, their mouths shaped like figure eights. The space stank like a putrid fruit salad, coconut-pineapple mousse and strawberry-champagne lotion. I almost preferred the smoky beery reek of Solomon’s. All the sights and sounds and smells whooshed to the bottom of my stomach, giving me an ominous sense of déjà vu.

  It couldn’t have been this bad. I would have remembered.

  I risked a few steps into the hot-packed space. Immediately, a red-haired woman towing a little girl shoved past me. Her doughy breasts blobbed from her emerald dress. She held them in with one red-taloned hand as she stopped and leaned over the little girl.

  “Hold still,” she ordered.

  The girl stuck out her lips in an exaggerated pout and the woman smeared them with scarlet. When I blinked, the color seemed to linger behind my closed eyelids.

  As I searched for my mother and sister, I overheard snatches of conversation:

  “Mommy, it’s too tight! It squeezes my ribs.”

  “I wanted to put Vaseline on her teeth, but it makes her sick to her stomach. Or at least, that’s what she says. Some kids’ll say anything. I read on the net …”

  “Lovely, Erica, lovely! Just like that!”

  “Remember to smile like you adore them—even if you have to pretend.”

  I passed a tiny blond girl kneeling on a chair, in a dress so puffy and stiff with netting it seemed to exhale around her. With her elbows on a dressing table, she made faces in the mirror, batting her eyelashes, while one woman teased her hair and another sprayed it with a purple can of hair spray.

  I passed a girl a few years y
ounger than me balancing a baby on her hip while her mother practiced dance moves with small identical-twin brunettes.

  I nearly crashed into a woman scolding a sobbing little girl, who kept pleading, “No, Mommy. Please, Mommy, not that song,” while her mother repeated, “It’s been printed in the program, DeeDee! We can’t change it now.”

  As I navigated the confusion, I tried to shake each spectacle out of my brain. Mothers and daughters. Daughters and mothers.

  Mandarin and her mother had no relationship, other than the mysterious letters and a jar of arrowheads. Momma and I didn’t have much more than that. Or so I told myself. Ever since I’d screwed up Little Miss Washokey and Momma and I had grown apart, I’d felt cheated. But what was worse—our distance or the syrupy overflow of mothering slathered on these tiny girls?

  And who was it really all about, anyway—the children or their mothers?

  At last I spied my sister. Dressed in nothing but pink lace underwear, she was practicing her wave. Momma stood behind her, fastening her corkscrew curls into a Marie Antoinette updo. Bobby pins protruded from her lips like fangs.

  I cleared my throat. “Momma?”

  “That wasn’t bad!” she said to Taffeta, spraying pins from her mouth. “Not bad at all. But you’re not sucking in your stomach, baby doll. I can tell.”

  “Yes I am.” Taffeta glanced at me.

  “Potbellies are for four-year-olds. Did you see the figure on that redhead? You’ve got to remember: suck in, suck in, suck in. Think it in your head at all times. Like a drumbeat, playing behind your song.”

  “Momma, she—”

  “We don’t have much time left,” she said, ignoring me. She slid the pageant dress from its hanger. “Ups-a-daisy.”

  Obediently, Taffeta raised her arms. The dress settled around her like a fallen flower. Momma knelt to tuck her feet into tiny gold pumps. Then she stood and surveyed Taffeta appreciatively.

  “I’ve done the best I can. The rest is up to you. All you’ve got to do is remember to suck in. And don’t stumble on your Italian accent, not even for a second. Give me a note.”

  Taffeta glanced at me again.

  “Momma, lay off,” I said. “There are too many people around.”

  “I need to check her pitch,” Momma said. “Sing, Taffeta. Sing.”

  Taffeta blinked hard, like Davey Miller. I imagined her bawling, mashing her fists into her eyes, all her perfect makeup gushing black and wet down her rouge-tinted cheeks. There wouldn’t be enough time to repair the mess she’d make. Mentally, I cheered her on: Cry, Taffeta! Cry your eyes out.

  As if she could read my mind, she shook her head. She lifted her chest, sucked in her tummy, and belted out a tune.

  The cafeteria sweltered with other people’s breath. I longed to remove my cardigan, but I didn’t want anyone to stare at my unnaturally inflated chest.

  We stood elbow to elbow in the front row of cafeteria benches, listening to the pageant contestants shout the national anthem. My hand drooped from its position over my heart. Momma mouthed the words along with the girls, her cheeks flushed with patriotic passion. Thank goodness she didn’t try to sing. I tried and failed to find my sister’s voice in the dissonance.

  The song ended, and the crowd rustled into their seats. All the people in our row sat with their backs to the cafeteria tables, facing forward. I sat backward with my elbows on the table. I would be a silent protestor, I decided, like Gandhi.

  Momma jabbed me in the side. “Turn around! Don’t you want to support your sister?”

  Grudgingly, I turned.

  Onstage, the little girls had lined up against a blue velvet curtain. Taffeta was third from the end. So these were all the small-town pageant winners. I wasn’t surprised to see that every girl was white. The announcer, whom I’d seen backstage, was a lumpy-looking man with shifty eyes and a black mustache. Why did these creeps get involved with kids’ pageants, anyway?

  On second thought, I didn’t want to know.

  The man strolled to the front of the stage and took the microphone. “Good evening!” he exclaimed. Several members of the audience lamely shouted back. Still, it was a better response than Mr. Beck had ever received. “Welcome to the tri-county pageant! My name is Mr. Ferber. I’m overjoyed to be here, and I’m sure you all feel the same way.”

  “Notice he’s not speaking to the contestants,” I said.

  Momma glanced at me. “What did you say?”

  “And now I’ll introduce our little princesses one by one: the superstars of the tri-county area.” Mr. Ferber motioned with one fat hand. “First, we have Miss DeeDee Kemble!”

  DeeDee, a blonde with enormous eyes and a wreath of flowers in her hair, marched across the stage, grinning and blowing kisses. No trace of her backstage tears.

  “Miss Rosemary Birmingham!”

  Rosemary, a pigtailed brunette, crossed with her thumb in her mouth.

  “Miss Kayla-Ann Green!”

  The tiny girl with the poofy dress, who I’d observed making faces in the mirror. I glanced at Momma. She looked concerned. I didn’t know what she was so worried about. The other girls were adorable, a tribe of glittering pixies, but none had my sister’s voice. And I’d bet my entire rock collection not a single girl could sing in Italian.

  “Miss Frederica Jones!” Mr. Ferber continued. “Miss Madison Matthews!”

  And then I heard my name.

  “Grace Carpenter!”

  I jolted around in my seat and searched the room. A multitude of unfriendly faces stared back. I turned to the front again, admonishing my imagination.

  “Miss Lily Morehouse!”

  The red-lipsticked redhead flounced across the stage. She did have a figure. Possibly better than mine.

  “Gracey, come on! Let’s go!”

  This time, the voice was unmistakable.

  I stood, frantically scanning the crowd. A gray-haired woman across the cafeteria table complained that I was blocking her view, but I didn’t care. At last I spied Mandarin tucked into the nook of a closet doorway. She waved her hands wildly.

  My heart soared. Mandarin had come for me! All the way to the tri-county pageant at the Benton High School cafeteria. Of course, I didn’t know why she’d come, but it had to be for something exciting.

  “Grace!” It was Momma this time. “Grace, sit down! What are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry, Momma … I have to go.”

  “You have to go where? What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll be home later tonight, okay?”

  “You will not! You—”

  “Miss Serena Bond!” the announcer called.

  Momma, distraught, glanced at the stage, and then back at me, and then back at the stage again. The grumbles around us amplified into quiet curses as I hovered there, half in and half out of my seat. Finally, Momma gestured me away.

  “Fine! Just go, go! Get on out of here!”

  I clambered over the tangled legs of the angry crowd, to the aisle where Mandarin waited. “Took you long enough,” she said, grabbing my hand. Together, we rushed along the dim corridor toward freedom.

  “Miss Taffeta Carpenter!”

  My hand slipped from Mandarin’s. I caught the door before it shut between us, and turned to look.

  Taffeta stepped out of the row of little girls. Her grin seemed to catch the light and send it back at me, like sunshine zinging off a car windshield. I couldn’t tell if she was sucking in, but it didn’t matter. She was beautiful. I watched the tilt of her head as she gazed out at the audience, scanning, searching.

  And suddenly, she was looking straight at me.

  I doubted she could see me all the way in the back of the room, where I hunkered like a fugitive. But then her grin faltered. Her eyes widened.

  My fingers slid a few inches down the door.

  “Come on, Gracey! Let’s go!”

  Ducking my head, I followed Mandarin into the evening outside.

  “Look,” Mandarin said. “He
at lightning.”

  We stood in the parking lot of Benton High, on either side of her father’s truck. Far across the badlands, the evening sky faded into a gradient of flashing light. The whole earth seemed to rumble faintly, as if something were awakening.

  “What causes it, anyway?” I asked as Mandarin stuck her key into the driver’s-side door.

  “Dragons,” she said.

  There was a shudder of wind right as she said it. Wildwinds. Or maybe not. I pulled the cuffs of my cardigan over my hands and shivered. Mandarin reached across and unlocked my door. I hopped in and slammed the door behind me.

  “So … I see your dad let you use his truck again.”

  “It’s my truck now.” Mandarin patted the steering wheel.

  “Really?”

  “I still got to pay him back. But how’d you think we were going to leave town in the first place?”

  The wind quaked against the sides of the truck, and the heat lightning seemed to crackle into the cavity of my chest. I suddenly became aware of the tiniest details: the flimsy fabric between my hands and my thighs, the expansion of my lungs, the way my dry tongue seemed to fill my whole mouth.

  Is this it?

  This very night? Without any warning at all. Would she? Of course she would—it was just like her. I commanded my heart: Careful, now.

  “Leave town? You mean … Now? Like, this is it?”

  Mandarin stared at me. Her face was dangerous. “What if it was?”

  I tried as hard as I could to hold her stare. But fear won. I dropped my eyes. Just for a second, but it was enough.

  Knowingly, Mandarin nodded.

  But she didn’t look angry. Only resolute—maybe even self-satisfied. Probably because I’d proved her right. Silently, she thrust the key into the ignition. The engine vibrated but didn’t start. She tried again. Nothing.

  “So where are we really going?” I asked when I found my voice.

  “You’ll see.”