Miss Route 66

by Michael Lund

  Our beige brick, two-story building was architecturally consistent with nearly every other high school built in Middle America in the mid-1950s: entrance with principal's office and library at one end; classrooms across the main section; a combination gymnasium/auditorium with cafeteria behind at the other end.

  While the population rose steadily in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, F.H.S. survived in its basic shape. Newer elementary and middle schools provided extra space, and grades eight and nine were eventually shifted out of the high school. So when any of us returned, our past remained visible in this unchanging structure.

  There was also a graduation of buildings that went along with graduating students: from the small elementary schools to larger junior high to even bigger high school and to college. I liked this sense of progression, of a process that moved from beginning to end, from small to large, from childhood to adulthood.

  I hoped that I, too, like the butterfly emerging after larva and cocoon phases, was leaving behind not just buildings but states of being in my movement through these structures.

  My sex life had certainly evolved, as I've said, to a new stage, though I wasn't sure I should call it progress. I had reached this latest plateau almost before I knew what I was up to.

  It emerged in part from my modeling swimsuits in front of the full-length mirror in Tricia's room. I had two standard one-piece suits, one of which I (and later my mother) assumed I would wear at the pageant. But I also used bra and panties to imagine what a two-piece might do.

  I practiced my walk, of course, concentrating on the side-to-side slide of my hips, measuring the ride of my flat belly. I considered my middle exposed, my middle covered.

  I was watched in such displays by Tricia's parrot, who occupied a cage probably five feet high and thirty inches in diameter that hung from its own stand in the middle of the room. We'd spread an old sheet under the cage, though our new resident was not particularly messy. Juliet was, however, a large and a loud bird. She would eat any fruit, vegetable, or nut I gave her. Always ready for games or challenges, she was a demanding pet.

  Tricia had showed me how to hide treats in her cage, tucking them into forks of tree branches or behind rocks in her miniaturized landscape. Juliet devised games of her own, climbing up the side of the cage, riding her swing, ringing a little bell with her thick, crooked beak.

  And talk! That bird was a quick learner who had been trained, Tricia said, by her first owner, an eccentric theater manager in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "Come here," she would cry. "Pretty bird. Hello there. Pet me."

  At one point, idly modeling swimsuit variations, I wondered if parrot training could be my talent. While I was progressing rapidly on the flute, I didn't know how I'd do in public. Would I panic, my hands refuse to cooperate, my breath, shallow, fail to make a tone? I looked over my shoulder to inspect my rear end. Not as full as Sandy's.

  But I doubted if Juliet would do what I asked on stage, eat a biscuit, rock the swing, speak.

  Perhaps I could borrow some of Larry's worms, give a talk on worm sex: "a mucous ring slides forward over the worm's body, gathering several eggs and sperm along with it, and fertilization takes place inside that gunk." No, that wouldn't work.

  I stood sideways in front of the mirror. Cupping a breast in each hand, I admitted they were average at best.

  Maybe a demonstration on a slide rule, if Paul would agree to instruct me. Oooh, yes, doing the numbers with the college guy!

  But he was dating the pageant favorite, Sally, the baton-twirling phenomenon. I imagined her strong hands gripping the rod. (Did she, by the way, set the ends aflame?) She turns it this way and that skillfully. It travels over her head, around her waist, between her legs.

  "Come here," Juliet cried. "Pretty bird. Hello there. Pet me."

  It was this last injunction that led me down temptation's path. "Pet me," commanded Juliet, and I echoed her. "Pet me," I told myself. "Pet me."

  And, in my underwear, I did.

  3

  "Are you ready to practice?" my mother called up the stairs.

  I jumped (if one can jump from a prone position).

  "Oh, um, yeah. (Whoo!) Just a minute. Be right down."

  Well, now, there was an interruption, my mother breaking in on a pretty intense fantasy! She was getting ready for me to play the flute, but I had been playing myself.

  Such sessions were proving that I was an instrument whom no boys had yet studied, an intricate organism capable of sweet melody. But I had to be both the player and the played.

  My private pleasure would have been frowned on, of course, had anyone, including my mother, known about it. These acts were not condemned directly in those days, as no one openly used words like "masturbation." But from our earliest days we heard parents say, "Don't touch yourself there, sweetie," "Keep your hands off now," "We don't do that, honey." By the time of puberty, girls simply understood that their erogenous zones were off limits, paths to damnation.

  We Bells were, I think, not more or less religious than most others in our town. A regular participant at church, Sunday school, and vacation Bible school, I absorbed the general moral code from that world. Any deeper understanding of why such a code might have value would take many years to develop.

  I don't remember my mother preaching at me. And my father was generally distant in my high school years. Still, I connected the prevailing morality with them, assuming their endorsement.

  Once the flute lessons began, I did have more chances to interact with my Mom and to hear her individual opinions. But on such difficult subjects as birds and bees and pears she was, as you know, sometimes indirect, if not evasive.

  My Mom obviously enjoyed our flute sessions together, though, and I was pleased that we now shared this common interest. I hadn't resented Tricia all those years when she was home, but maybe now I realized I had often been in the background of her world. In my music lessons I got my mother's full attention.

  "Those are sixteenth notes there, Susan," she would say, pointing to the measure just played. "That's one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four."

  During our months of practice I did learn some things about my mother I hadn't known, how her musical talent had been obvious at an early age, how she'd progressed steadily through her teenage years performing in church, at school, for small gatherings. But she was reaching adulthood at the end of the Great Depression, the beginning of the Second World War. There were far more jobs for bank tellers than for female musicians, especially in small towns.

  I tried to imagine the romance between her and my father that would put any thoughts of a career further out of her mind. The pear-bellied father I saw every day now was not, I'm afraid, compelling as a knight in shining armor, a man on a white horse, a brilliant musical conductor.

  In addition to the image of their twice-daily kiss--when he departed for work and when he returned--I have a permanent picture of him in the easy chair in front of the television. It's how I saw him many, many nights after dinner during the years of my growing up. Thank goodness he is not drinking a beer in this picture! But he is slouched before the television, his body getting broader and sagging as the chair's cushions are being compressed with the years.

  I see the back of his head, the thinning hair, as I pass from the kitchen (just having finished the dishes) to do homework or practice the flute or talk on the phone with friends. I doubt if it ever occurs to me to wonder what's going on in that head as I pass through the dining room and into the hall on the way to my room.

  Later events have taught me that things were going on in the mind of this middle-aged man, of course. He was engaged in a genuine confrontation with questions about where his life had gone, what his youthful dreams had been. In fact, a change was occurring in my father at the same time I was preparing myself for the Miss Route 66 Pageant. Absorbed with myself like any teenager, I just didn't see it.

  A germ of the hidden man might have been visible in one anecdote of their courtship my m
other had related to me more than once. It reveals the kind of enthusiasm, intensity, and appreciation of process I've always admired myself.

  Even though Dad was only a telephone lineman when he met my mother, he had an interest in the engineering behind the whole industry that would help him rise in the company. And he courted the slender bank teller he had come to know with the material of his profession. She had moved here from the nearby, smaller town of St. James; he was a Fairfield native.

  According to Mom, he explained telephones on one of their dates. "It's all energy," he said. "Energy throughout the whole system. The force of your breath pushes a diaphragm inside the handset." He was holding one at the time. "Here, say something."

  "Oh, I hate it when someone says that. 'Say something.' I never know what to say!"

  However, she does take the handset. It is connected by a long cord to another handset, not to a receiver. This young man and his date are sitting, by the way, in his car parked on the street in front of the house where she has a room. He has pulled this telephone equipment up from the back seat.

  "The outside of a little box in here," he points to the speaking end of the handset. "The outside of a box full of carbon granules is compressed by the force of your breath, your energy. The closer together the granules, the better they conduct sound. The looser, the more resistance. Thus, variations in sound produced by your speech are passed down the metal wire in the middle of this cable. New kinds of energy."

  "I still don't know what to say," objects my Mom. She holds the handset out at arm's length, inspecting it. "You do it."

  "You're doing just fine. Go ahead and complain."

  "I wasn't complaining, just offering a suggestion. Give me a script; say what to say."

  He picks up the other handset. He has previously connected the two handsets by a stretch of regular telephone cable as a demonstration device. It is not patched into the larger telephone system but rather is a sophisticated version of a child's string and tin can walkie-talkie.

  "Think of how anyone with a telephone can put his energy into the system, just by talking."

  "Hey, where are you going?"

  My father has stepped out of the car on the driver's side, carrying one handset with him. He leans back in the window.

  "There's an electromagnet in the earpiece of a regular telephone--you know what an electromagnet is, don't you?"

  "Yes. Wire wound around a core. More current in the wire, more magnetism."

  "Yes. A regular phone is hooked to a central system. Electric current at your end, the handset--controlled by the carbon granules compressed by your speech--activates the electromagnet in the other end, pulling a metal diaphragm to mimic your speech."

  "OK. It's all a complete circuit."

  "Yes. Electricity is the unifying force throughout the national system. And it connects everyone who has a phone. They all can speak into it but also receive the energy or speech of anyone else who talks."

  "We used to have to crank the phone. Was that generating new energy?"

  "Yes, to ring the operator in the old days. Now, keep talking and we'll see how this simpler system works."

  He backs away from the car and walks down the street behind the car, still holding his handset. The cable is several dozen yards long. He crosses the sidewalk and disappears behind a tree.

  Mom is puzzled. She hears his voice coming from the handset and puts it to her ear. There's a crackling sound. She thinks she can hear him walking.

  "Say you'll marry me," says the voice, his face appearing suddenly at the window beside her. "Say you'll marry me."

  And she does.

  4

  When I showed up at Simpson's Clothing Store to find out about evening gowns, I knew I would have only a brief time before I'd need to tell my parents about me and the Miss Route 66 Pageant. Fairfield was a typical small town, and word would travel as quickly from Main Street to my Dad's office or out to the Circle as my Dad's proposal had come around the car to my Mom.

  Still, I figured the farther along I'd gotten with my candidacy, the harder it would be for anyone to object to it. By the end of my visit, unfortunately, I realized I would need my parents' help as well as their approval for this project.

  On the day I inquired, Mary Dunkin, another contestant, was already in the store trying on a gown.

  "Hi, Susan. You're entering this year?"

  "I'm thinking about it. I'm pretty sure."

  "That's great. You'll like it."

  Simpson's, by the way, is the best clothing store in Fairfield, a favorite for those attending formal events and those to whom social standing is important. My Dad gets his business suits here, but my Mom has always shopped elsewhere for bargains.

  A clerk asks if she can help me, and I explain that I am inquiring about gowns for the pageant.

  "Well, you see what Mary is wearing. It's this year's required dress."

  "Required?"

  "Oh, yes. All the girls wear the same dress, for fairness."

  "But the swimsuits are different," I note.

  "Swimsuits, yes. Gowns, no."

  "She's right," adds Mary. But then she raises an eyebrow to me, suggesting she might have more to say about this.

  Mary Dunkin is probably the smartest girl in the competition, certainly one of Fairfield High's best students. A National Merit semifinalist, she hopes to get a scholarship to the state university in Columbia.

  "So you're doing a dramatic presentation?" I ask, willing to be polite.

  "Yes, Viola's speech to Olivia about the Duke's love for her."

  When I look puzzled, she explains, "In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night."

  I say "Ahh!" as if that means something to me, but it doesn't. I wasn't a big reader then and am not much better now.

  Mary returns to the changing room. Seeing how the required dress fits Mary, I recognize that it will help large-busted girls. It's strapless, tight through the middle, spreading out from the waist rather than fitting trim down the legs.

  Legs are Mary's best feature, something anyone who has seen her at the Fairfield Town Swimming Pool in the summer would know. Although not especially tall, she is short-waisted, and so a large portion of her sleek look is thigh and calf and ankle.

  Visiting a cousin in Philadelphia several years ago, she had been introduced to synchronized swimming. She learned to float on her back, lift one leg, toes pointed, straight up to the sky. Floating face down, she could also bend suddenly at the waist and dive to the bottom. Because she was using her arms to slow her descent, her shapely legs disappeared an inch at a time.

  Of course, this athletic sport was hardly known in our small Midwestern town, so, whenever Mary practiced some of these maneuvers in the town pool, she was a solo artist, not part of that team of coordinated swimmers you would see in swimming competitions back East. And here people tended to gawk at her underwater and surface acrobatics.

  I remembered seeing a number of boys snickering at Mary one day last summer as she went through a series of traditional synchronized swimming moves. The guys were hanging on the splash trough at the edge of the pool as she rotated her body from face down to face up. Robbie Wann, one of the least pleasant boys I knew, reached out and did something that caused Mary to jump (if one can jump in water!) and then break off her exercise.

  I assumed that he had pinched her bottom. I couldn't tell if she'd reacted to the pain of a pinch or the fact that a boy had touched her rear end.

  Robbie turned around right after he pinched Mary, so his back was to her as she looked angrily around to find the perpetrator. He grinned at his comrades, winked, and then reached down into the water to the front of his own suit.

  I could not see what he was doing but figured he was grabbing his crotch, making a hip thrust to underscore his boldness. His behavior disgusted me, not just because of its meanness toward Mary (and girls in general), but also because he was touching himself, an act, as I've said, my culture believed was inappropriate or worse. "What a
low-class jerk!" I thought.

  As this memory surfaces months later, in Simpson's Clothing Store, I blush. There's anger at Robbie in my heart still, but there's also a gnawing worry in my own mind that, with all my "swimsuit modeling" in my sister's room, I've become a low-class jerk myself.

  Well, I conclude--changing the subject of my musing--this off-the-shoulder evening gown will add one more piece to Sally's standing as favorite. I'm going to need a lot from my belly and the swimsuit competition!

  Mary comes out of the changing room in her own clothes, and the Simpson's clerk produces a dress for me to try on.

  The Simpsons' daughter, Patti, by the way, was a cheerleader at school last year, an energetic, lively person. At least she was until the accident, what wags in town called "Cross Rhodes."