Miss Route 66

by Michael Lund

  That's what I thought when I got into the car to leave Larry Thornton's house because, walking up the sidewalk big as life, was a man--Larry's brother, Paul. And, my goodness, what a good looking man he was! Several inches taller than his brother, slender and athletic, possessing all the glamour of college.

  Remember, in those days many young men finished their education with high school, going to work on the family farm, joining the military, taking up a trade. And choosing to go to South Central Missouri State College in Fairfield, where rigorous math and science departments weeded out the less able in a torturous first year, was a strong statement. Only a handful of women had ever attended, most daughters of faculty members, so it was very much a man's world.

  That local campus had a significant place in the Cold War era, the time when America was designing and building the explosives and delivery systems that gave substance to a foreign policy of deterrence. At such institutions across the country budding scientists and engineers were getting the training necessary to protect our way of life.

  There was, I now realize, a very phallic symbol of these American men preparing to build (or destroy, if necessary) the future: the slide rule. Before computers, even before hand-held calculators, these amplified wooden rulers were holstered at the hip of nearly every SCMSC student, including Paul Thornton.

  The slide rule generated approximate calculations when its thin central rod was moved left or right between two calibrated side bars and a glass frame with a hairline marker was positioned at the appropriate spot. The whole was kept in a leather case, twelve or sixteen inches long, and hooked to the owner's belt.

  So this product of Fairfield High, Paul Thornton, wearing the symbol of collegiate masculinity and striding toward his front porch, existed several levels of awe above the worm farmer I'd just been talking with. And it occurred to me that I might like to have him explain rocket propulsion, target range, and product yield at some length for me.

  Such an exchange wasn't going to happen today, however. For at the male hip without the slide rule came none other than my world's reigning female, Sally Winchester. No slide rule hung by her side, of course, but her two hips swung back and forth, close and far, up and down as she walked with Paul.

  "Oh, hi, Susan," she sang out cheerfully. "Were you taking part in Larry's experiment?"

  "I was, um, answering some of his questions." Sally lived one block over and two blocks east.

  "Paul, you know Susan, don't you? Susan Bell, Tricia's little sister."

  Well, thanks, Sally! Just how I want to be thought of, as an inferior, younger version.

  "Sure, hi, Susan." Then he turned to Sally. "We're set for tonight? The movies?"

  "I'll be ready. That will be after my workout, of course."

  I assumed this meant her baton twirling workout. Sally had no summer job, no baby-sitting, no waitressing. Her life was conditioning, contests, competition.

  Sally smiled her famous smile, blessing us all, and bounced on her toes. Her ample bosom bounced too, I noted, within the tight embrace of her bra and blouse. Then she spun on her heel and walked on down the sidewalk. I, baby-sitter and newly recruited worm enthusiast, had to get home.

  I was driving, by the way, our family's second car, a cute little l960 Rambler American. This automobile, my husband has informed me, was among the first well designed compact cars of the postwar years, but it came somewhat ahead of its true time. There was no gas crisis in this decade, no oil cartel, no sense of environmental danger in burning fossil fuel.

  As prosperity continued through the 1960s (according to my resident automobile authority), so did the size of the middle class's second family car, leaving this reliable, functional model to expire with its parent company, American Motors (derived from Nash/Hudson). The Rambler American idea would be reborn at a later time, of course, mostly in the form of Japanese and European imports, as, in the 1970s, economy became more important than size and power.

  The roads on which the efficient Rambler traveled were also changing over time, especially Route 66, the highway that inspired our annual beauty pageant. What John Steinbeck had called America's "Mother Road" was being replaced by Interstate 44, taking a new route as a four-lane divided highway north of town. (Information about this famous highway was something I had to learn in connection with the pageant, so my husband doesn't need to lecture me on this topic.) As I think about what the "Mother" Road meant from the perspective of several decades later, it occurs to me that one can't see it as particularly feminine.

  The original road had come from Chicago and St. Louis into town from the northeast, run south on Fairfield's Main Street for about a mile, then turned west to head out of town toward Springfield, Joplin, Tulsa, and the great West. In driving home after seeing both of the Thornton boys, I would cross Main and travel down Kingshighway (the first, in-town rerouting of Route 66) before turning off into the area of the former pear orchard, my neighborhood, the Circle. The high school cruising route that we'd all driven hundreds of times also incorporated some of this path: the section along Main Street out to Business Route 66 past Fanny's Dairy Delite.

  In some sense, then, we were all traveling within the paths of history. I couldn't see where they all led, of course, nor truly recognize how many people had been guided by the same directions in the past. Perhaps I understood the grid organizing traffic, but I certainly couldn't grasp the forces that had shaped that grid in the first place.

  If the highway was a man's way, the pageant was a girl's way. We didn't aspire to build cars or race them, to survey for roads or construct them. Instead, we aspired to be things of beauty, objects of desire, the cars that are driven.

  The Miss Route 66 Pageant resembled beauty contests in other communities throughout the country, calling for evening gown and swimsuit beauty; musical, artistic, or dramatic talent; qualities of congeniality, sensitivity, poise. These were the same things that determined a girl's success in other arenas, though the categories of achievement were hardly so openly admitted.

  All of this encoding of values went on unrecognized by me at the time, just as Sally Winchester's one sign of vulnerability eluded notice by her peers, competition judges, and the men who hoped to be her escorts. All I knew was that I wasn't the model of choice that year, and that I didn't like it.

  That night I went back to the Sears' catalog and the swimsuit and underwear models, comparing what I saw in the mirror to what was pictured on the page and what I imagined under Sally's drum majorette outfit. At first I was mightily discouraged. I certainly didn't have breasts like Sally's. But then, I realized, neither did the Sears girls.

  It wasn't that bad, I concluded. All of me came together in a way that resembled the finished look of those catalog icons. I began to see it most clearly when, alone in front of the full-length mirror in my sister's room, I took off all of my clothes. Without clothes that fit imperfectly or that showed signs of wear and use, my nude body had the basic contours I saw in the models. And I had the flattest tummy!

  It was something I would have to learn to use, I realized, the way Sally used her body. My stride, my stance, the motion of my hips all needed to be adjusted to draw eyes to the center that held it all together. I had to be the conductor of my own orchestra. I would do a belly dance!

  Now, decades later, I know that the attempt to make my belly announce who I was represented one more step on the road to the Miss Route 66 Pageant, to my decision to become a contestant, to the fulfillment of a destiny that had been mine all along.

  Here once again the flute carried me on.

  9

  "I think you need to schedule a performance," my mother said not long after my worm class with Larry. "It will make you perfect a few pieces. And, hey, I could play one with you!"

  "Why do we need to do that?"

  "Well, you should set a goal for yourself, something to work for."

  "But if I just enjoy playing, here with you, why do I need to perform in front of other people?"
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  "You don't, of course. It's just an idea. But I think you'd be pleased to see how well you can do with someone listening. Now, I mean just friends and family. We're not going to Carnegie Hall!"

  Of course, I had trouble resisting this argument: it meant once again carrying something through to completion, an idea I almost always endorsed. (I could not, of course, accept it in what Randy Alexander wanted from me.) And, as I've said, I was coming to love my instrument, what it could do, the nature of music itself.

  Each time I set up the stand in our dining room, took the flute out of its case and assembled head, body and foot, then went through those routine warming-up exercises my mother insisted on, I continued to feel a new self coming into being. The "sweet" Susan Bell still existed, but latent aspects of her personality or being were also emerging as well.

  I understood at some level that, in playing, I was borrowing ideas or feelings from the composers, both famous and forgotten, who had conceived the pieces I would play. Too, when I put the mouthpiece to my lips, I joined a coterie of flutists past and present, amateur and professional, who studied and performed in the same manner. They all added to the original me, or to the me who'd existed when I first saw the flute in the display window of Martin's Jewelry Store.

  As my story will confirm, I think, another side of Susan Bell did exist then, unnoticed or unrecognized thus far in life. And it was emerging in those warm summer days between my junior and senior years of high school.

  "OK, Mom," I told her at one point. "Let's have a recital."

  "We can have it right here, put our stand in the dining room and face the living room." The wide, arched passageway between the two rooms gave people seated in the living room an open view.

  "How about in September, when Tricia's home, before she goes back to Drury?" My sister was waiting tables in Springfield that summer and taking private lessons from her drama coach. It occurred to me that I'd like her to see her younger sister in a new or at least different light.

  "Sure. Your father will be here, of course. Invite Sandy, Randy, a few of your friends."

  Hmm, I needed to work on this. Randy and I were much less of an item, as he stayed busy at work and I evaded him at other times. Could I find a way to invite Paul Thornton? Or would that put too much pressure on me, romantic as well as musical?

  I didn't play the flute all day everyday that June, July, and August, of course. It was, after all, summer, and I was a teenager. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day intense times of practice and regular baby-sitting jobs alternated with periods of idle dreaminess. During these summer downtimes, the hammock behind our house in the Circle, an old-fashioned canvas one that we'd left out in too many rainstorms, served as a favorite place of retreat for me.

  To a lesser extent, my sister before me, too, had loved the hammock. Young slips of things, of course, either of us would disappear into the fold of the canvas, becoming invisible to others--say, inquiring parents--looking out from the house or across another Circle back yard.

  Tricia had a second, better place where she escaped, by the way--our family bomb shelter. In the early 1950s, days of worry about possible all-out nuclear war, my father had exceeded most of his neighbors in developing a safe place for his family.

  Half a century earlier, when this whole area had been a farm, there was a root cellar for the house now owned by Dr. Masters, three doors down and around the curve from us. The root cellar was in our side yard, its entrance midway in a bank that sloped up to the street. My father had done such a thorough job of enlarging and fortifying it as a bomb shelter that I wouldn't be surprised if it's still there today, intact and functional.

  My parents retired to Arizona about the time I finished college, and I've not been back to the old house for over a decade now. My memories of the shelter, however, remain vivid: a large main area and a smaller storage room behind it dug into the earth and soft limestone of Piney Ridge. Dad had installed battery-powered lighting, bottled water, and a circulating, filtered ventilation system.

  I was too young, I guess, to pay much attention to this project while it was in progress, but I recognize it now as one of the significant things my father completed outside his job at the phone company. After long days in the field, he must have worked hard during evenings and weekends to complete the shelter. I'm not aware of any other such project taking up his attention until my last year of high school, and his putting on weight occurred during those interim periods of inactivity.

  Tricia used to hide out in our bomb shelter when her popularity threatened to overwhelm her. She'd disappear after school and on weekends for hours at a time, but we knew always where she was.

  Every boy in the neighborhood wanted to be in there with her, of course, and the phrase, "going to the Bells' bomb shelter," was, for half the adolescent males in Fairfield, synonymous with making passionate love.

  A neighborhood myth circulated that one of the Landon boys had actually met Tricia in the shelter, probably Charles the older one. I kind of liked Mark, the younger brother who went to Vietnam, but he was taken by Marcia Terrell in those days. Tricia has told me unequivocally that this was not a make-out site for her, but a place for quiet self-examination and recovery.

  I didn't use the bomb shelter for retreat myself because it was so powerfully associated with Tricia, with the effect she had on boys. The hammock provided a comforting invisibility for me.

  The hammock hung from a large pear tree near our back fence. I liked to lie in it dozing or spinning out some fantasy. The breeze might move the limbs above, imparting an occasional gentle swing, just enough to stir me from sleep. Rarely, a pear might fall to the ground with a decided thump.

  In midsummer those pears were the size of tennis balls and as hard as golf balls. While some already had that familiar pear shape, others were more rounded, spherical. The elongation and broadening of the base that made the final fruit would come in the late weeks of summer.

  Not many days after my Mom had set a tentative date for our concert, I was lying in our backyard hammock contemplating the nature of the universe, the shapes and forms of my world. My own body, stretched out long, lean, and comfortable under the leafy branches, gave me more satisfaction than it had at the beginning of summer. I was proud of my flat tummy.

  I thought of the tire around my father's middle, his sagging belly and broadening hips. Too tired after work and dinner to take much interest in anything except the TV, he was for me background to other more exciting figures.

  My mother's slender build contained much more animation, especially now that she had returned music to an important place in her life. Not only was she practicing with me, but I'd caught her playing on her own. She had dug out of cellar boxes music far too advanced for me.

  My sister Tricia was also moving ahead in her life's work down in Springfield. She was gaining acting experience and skills that would, her coaches were telling her, take her far away from her small-town Midwestern beginnings. All seemed well and interesting in my gently stirring, canvas-enclosed world.

  "Sure," I heard a voice say. "Sure, Sally has great boobs, but something makes me want to put my hands around Susan's waist."

  10

  To explain how I overheard these remarks, a brief description of the geography of the Circle is in order.

  Limestone and Oak Streets branched off from a common beginning, the end of Black Street. (Black Street crossed Highway 00 on the western edge of Fairfield.) Both ran more or less east-west along the side of Piney Ridge, though not exactly in straight lines as they took parallel swings to the north halfway along their route.

  After about a quarter of a mile, Limestone curved south and rejoined Oak, creating, in the minds of us kids at least, a circle of neighborhood streets. The houses on one side of Oak (ours, for instance) looked back to the houses on the south side of Limestone. And each of those back yards touched on their five neighboring backyards within the circle of homes.

  Thus, I knew at once that the voices
I overheard from my hammock belonged to boys who were in some back yard contiguous to the Bells'. There were low fences, shrubs, and small trees marking property lines in the middle of the Circle, but town gossip, sports scores, and information about the newest model Chevy and Ford traveled regularly from family to family over those boundaries, especially in summer months.

  Who these boys were, where exactly they were, and what I should conclude from this expression of one boy's interest in my middle remained, however, to be learned. I realized immediately I wanted to know.

  "Awagh!" I said loudly, giving the most voice I could to a giant yawn. I reached out one arm in an exaggerated stretch, then sat up and swung my legs out of the hammock on the side that faced our house.

  Whoever had been speaking was now quiet, and I concluded that they'd been looking in my direction. I decided that a casual glance over my shoulder would not appear too staged. (I realize now that I was imitating my sister, the actress, in this little game.) And I saw movement in the bushes of Old Man Simpson's yard.