Miss Route 66

by Michael Lund

  "I found this down at Ben Franklin's," he said, turning back. "It wasn't expensive, so. . . ." He kind of shrugged. "Here."

  He pitched whatever he'd been holding over the fence. The silver mass spread as it came toward me, making a ring or loop perhaps three or four inches across in the air. It wasn't a perfect circle but changed shape as it floated with bends and bumps here and there.

  He'd thrown accurately, and I held a hand out and caught the silver ring neatly.

  "It has flutes on it," he added, and then turned away.

  It was a charm bracelet with little musical instruments attached, including, as he said, some beautiful miniature flutes.

  7

  Omigosh! I shouldn't be getting presents from Larry. This would give him a standing in my life I didn't want him to have. But I had been taken completely by surprise.

  I called out, "Larry! No, wait. I can't . . . you shouldn't. . . ."

  However, he had slipped through some bushes and kept moving, pretending, I believed, not to hear me. And I wasn't prepared to climb the fence and chase him down. This was so unfair!

  Well, I'd find a way to return the bracelet, maybe just put it in the mail to him. Or I could ask Sandy to take it for me. No, I'd better not do that. I needed to handle this myself, discreetly.

  Meanwhile I really should be practicing the flute and making other preparations for the upcoming competition. In fact, I had that organizational meeting to attend the following evening. I decided to put Larry and the bracelet on hold for the time being rather than take some rash action that I might later regret.

  The introductory session for Miss Route 66 contestants, by the way, conducted by Mr. Pierce, impressed me quite a bit at the time. Over the years of his association with the pageant, Fairfield High's assistant principal had put together a succinct one-hour presentation, carefully polished from start to finish. It had beginning, middle, and end; and the whole did what it was supposed to. (From where I stand now, of course, I can see all sorts of red flags in that artful composition, signals of ulterior motives I didn't have the experience then to interpret.)

  "Remember, girls," said Mr. Pierce early in the session. "You have to play to the judges on pageant night, not just put yourself out there on the stage and hope for the best. Every judge is a potential admirer, and you have to figure out what appeals to him."

  All the judges were male, by the way: Mr. Rodd, town mayor; the president of Thompson and Pollman Insurance, Mr. Pollman; and Mr. Systrunk, head of Fairfield's most prestigious law firm. The pageant emcee was a local celebrity, country-and-western singer, Blind Bill Martin.

  Mr. Pierce went on. "This one, hgrph, for instance." He was sketching a hypothetical judge for us, inserting a little cough into his delivery to elevate his lecture style. "This one, hgrph, is only interested in the bows you take, the sweep of your arm, the bend of your neck. Another wants you to walk in a certain way, hgrph, with a bounce and an assertiveness. Yet a third watches how your strapless evening gown rides below your shoulders. It shouldn't slip or sag. Hgrph."

  We were in a small basement auditorium of Norwood Hall. Mr. Pierce, whose main function was to marshall the contestants through the three kinds of competition, stood at a lectern before our semicircular rings of tiered seats. There were three blackboard panels behind him.

  "Also, there are more titles than the Miss Route 66 to be won here. So judges aren't your only audience."

  As he continued, Mr. Pierce tapped his palm with the side of a wooden pointer. It telescoped from about ten inches in length to over three feet.

  "There are, of course, first and second runner-up, very important positions." He tapped his pointer beside these terms on the board to his left. "If, for any reason, the winner, hgrph, cannot serve during the next year, why, one of these girls will have to take her place."

  Was it my imagination, or did he look at Sally Winchester and smile when he said the word "winner"? She certainly flashed her famous smile at him as he spoke.

  "Mr. Pierce?" asked Elizabeth Rogers, who stood a good chance of winning the talent competition. She'd been playing piano since the age of five and had a flair for performance. She was younger than most of the girls, but this was her third year in the contest. "What about shoes? Are we required to wear heels?"

  Liz was tall, nearly five feet ten. And she knew standing out in a row of shorter girls was sometimes to her disadvantage.

  "There are no restrictions on shoes this year," Mr. Pierce said. "But I should say, Liz, that the right shoes can do a lot in the swimsuit. They give, hgrph, your legs the right shape."

  I knew I wasn't going to win with my legs, but I was getting tips in general that would help me. I needed to build the whole package here, the complete contestant: talent, beauty, poise.

  While Liz and I were not in the same class at school, we'd taken two years of Latin together and I liked her. If I hadn't had my Mom to help me with the flute, I probably would have asked her help with my playing, since she had such musical know-how.

  But music wasn't her only talent: she was Fairfield's first really gifted cross country runner among the girls. Now, I don't mean she was going to be best in the state, as we were a small school. But she'd won district and regionals two years in a row and competed in the state championships.

  She had the look of a distance runner, all arms and lanky legs. Her stride seemed awkward, like a colt's, but she covered the ground. And she never tired. There had been, however, one embarrassing moment in her racing career. At the finish of a race, Liz's left boob flopped out of her outfit.

  Fortunately, this occurred at a small event, conference competition with a team from Licking. So no one in Fairfield, except members of the track and field team, saw it.

  These were the days before tight-fitting running clothes came along, those form-hugging special fabrics and elaborately engineered support structures. And girls, who were not taken very seriously as athletes, just wore what we called "gym clothes" to their meets rather than racing gear. So, when, in an extra effort to extend her winning margin at that memorable race, Liz threw forward an arm in crossing the finish line, out came a breast.

  Of course, she poked it back in her bra immediately, and refused to acknowledge that this awkward event had ever happened. If it had happened to me, I would have been so mortified I could never even have dressed out for gym again! But Liz was tough. For the pageant, she would look her best in the long evening gown.

  Mr. Pierce went on. "There are also prizes for three additional contestants: Most Congenial, Most Dedicated, and the Roadside Attraction." Again he tapped with his pointer, this time the board to his right. "And these three titles are chosen by you, by all the competitors."

  Oh, don't make me Miss Congenial, I thought. Too much like being sweet.

  I shifted in my seat. My candidacy, my new self, was now completely out in the open, something I couldn't take back even if I dropped out of the pageant. I had joined a coterie of girls who saw themselves as beauties, as women men wanted to see.

  Except for the Roadside Attraction, there was nothing that made this beauty pageant different from others across the country. Route 66 figured in the title, but there was no overall theme of transportation or the American Dream or new frontiers. I suspect the original organizers just threw in this particular feature to justify connecting the pageant to the Mother Road.

  The Roadside Attraction was supposed to be the candidate who didn't win the title or a runner-up spot, someone who wasn't the most congenial or most dedicated, but a girl who consistently made the event interesting along the way.

  "She's funny," said Mr. Pierce. "She makes us laugh and keeps the right tone throughout. She's clever, saying the right thing to cheer up a disappointed competitor or encourage a girl who has lost her enthusiasm. She's the spirit of the pageant."

  And with that he moved into his finish. "So, not all of you can be first or second runner-up. Only one girl can be Miss Route 66." He tapped the board behind him, where
the title appeared in an elegant script. "But everyone should come away from this contest a winner. Hgrph. And that's what I'm here to help you with, to be a winner."

  Mr. Pierce smiled as his gaze swept across our attentive young faces. It gives me a shudder now to remember that gaze and how I learned what it really meant less than a week later at Fanny's Dairy Delite.

  8

  Well, you already know what Mr. Pierce said at Fanny's, about my doing the belly dance under his direction. And how I ran out of there in a panic, not exactly sure what he was talking about, but pretty darn sure I wanted no part of it.

  Up until he'd starting making his glass sing, he'd done nothing but give me reasonable advice: about what to wear when playing the flute; about how to do my hair with the evening gown; about making sure I turned this way and that in the swimsuit competition. (Hmm. Now that I think about it, some of this was clearly leading up to glass playing.)

  Then all of a sudden, it seemed to me, he was leaning across the booth and extra saliva was forming in the corner of his mouth. And I was heading for the door.

  Outside I kept moving, intent on jumping into the Rambler and putting significant distance between me and Mr. Pierce. Stuffing my hands into my jacket pockets with a kind of shudder, I felt the charm bracelet Larry had given me, with its tiny musical instruments. I had been carrying it with me in hopes that the perfect opportunity to return it would arrive by chance.

  Memory of Larry the worm farmer didn't drive the picture of Mr. Pierce out of my mind immediately, but it did give me my first words to express how I felt about the assistant principal: "Worm waste!"

  I know, I should have said "castings." Still, you get the idea.

  Returning the charm bracelet, I realized, was now the lesser of my current challenges. Yes, I didn't want Larry believing he and I were close enough to exchange presents. But the relationship of the new me to the whole rest of the world was threatened if I couldn't go through with the Miss Route 66 Pageant. So Mr. Pierce was the more serious obstacle in the path of my true destiny.

  Away from Fanny's Dairy Delite down our favorite in-town cruising route, I came back home to the Circle. There I asked myself what I should do about the assistant principal and his odd talk. Of course, it's easy now to see what I should have done: reported him to my parents, to the School Board, to the authorities.

  But these were different days, remember, when so much was left unspoken, unseen, under wraps. A policy that told us "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at tall" made it easy for un-nice things to stay concealed. And that made it hard for young people to know what to look out for, what to suspect, what to recognize as a threat.

  I hadn't, it turns out, been the only one to be approached by Mr. Pierce. At the end of the organizational meeting, he had made an appointment with each of the four girls new to the pageant. And I eventually learned--too late to spare myself, or any of us--that he made similar magic fingers proposals to every one of them.

  Still, Mr. Pierce had really only suggested doing something odd together, not literally proposed having sex. He talked about generating notes ("Oooo!") while doing a belly dance. And innocent me, I wasn't completely sure what he meant. (That was the advantage of good old Randy and his mouth organ: you knew what he wanted!) What could I tell my parents?

  In the privacy of Tricia's bedroom, I did seek advice from a world traveler, Juliet the parrot. "Hello there," she said.

  "I have a problem," I offered. "Mr. Pierce acted really weird at the Dairy Delite today. I'm not sure I like being around him."

  "Come here," she said. So I came over to her cage, and she hooked her beak over my little finger.

  "Thanks for the handshake--or beakshake."

  "Pretty bird."

  "Yes," I mused. "Pretty bird. I think Mr. Pierce thinks I'm pretty. Or something."

  "Hello there."

  Apparently this wasn't going to be where I found the answer to life's many problems. I gave Juliet a dry piece of melon. Let's face it, I thought, the easiest person to talk with about this was going to be my best friend. I called up Sandy.

  "Sandy," I said, "what do you know about Mr. Pierce?"

  "Not much," she replied. "I don't particularly like him, but, then, I've never met a principal I like." She laughed.

  "Yeah? Is there something specific about him? Is he married?"

  "Sure, married, got two kids, boys I think. No, there's nothing specific, though. . . ."

  "What?"

  "Oh, I don't know. He seems, sometimes, to look at girls in a funny way. And Mary said something about him once."

  "Mary Dunkin? What?"

  "Yeah. She said only Sally Winchester could handle him."

  "What did she mean by that?"

  "I don't know. Just that most girls are a bit afraid of him. I know he intimidates me!"

  Well, I was intimidated now. So, after more general girl talk with Sandy, I decided to go back to the lesser problem, return of the charm bracelet. Since Sandy and Larry were old friends, I didn't share my thoughts about this with her.

  Yes, I was uneasy putting the incident at Fanny's on the back burner, but I guess I wasn't really ready to confront everything it was telling me--about Mr. Pierce, and even about myself.

  That's, of course, the way it is with adolescence: one crisis blends into another. You worry and struggle and agonize--about your looks, your behavior, your relationship to your peers--and never feel you're making progress with anything.

  In the end, it turns out you have gradually come to terms with many areas of concern. Or at least this is so for most of us. For those who finally find themselves in adulthood, the journey they've traveled seems magical. Where exactly was the victory? When did we crest the mountain and start on the downhill path? How did each of those old problems get resolved anyway?

  I can say this, of course, in the kitchen of my suburban home some twenty years after the events in question. I consider myself fortunate to have survived childhood's dilemmas with as little damage to my sense of self as I have endured. And I know full well that others, many others, have not been as lucky as I. Despite the casualties in the eternal drama of growing up, however, there are a great number of survivors. And I take heart in that general pattern of resolution.

  So anyway, I felt I had to tackle at least one of my problems in this early stage of the Miss Route 66 Pageant, in this period of my emergence as someone more than "sweet." How could I relieve myself of a charm bracelet?

  First of all, I didn't want to pursue Larry in order to return his gift. That would make it look like I was interested in him. I needed to just bump into him somewhere and then casually say, oh, I don't know--say maybe that I couldn't wear this bracelet because I was having some sort of allergic reaction.

  Hmm, could I possibly get in touch with Paul, the older brother, and have him give the bracelet to Larry? Paul had been at my concert, after all, and I still hadn't thanked him properly. What I needed was the appropriate occasion when we might get together briefly--for a chat, for a chance for me to say again how nice it was that he'd come to the recital (I wouldn't even call it "mine" as both my Mom and I had played), for a moment when I might ask him a slight favor.

  This was, of course, so thoughtless an idea where Larry was concerned that I'm ashamed to admit now I ever entertained it.

  As I contemplated my emerging solution then, I found myself once again in front of the full-length mirror in Tricia's room. And now you may also see another reason I was so upset by what Mr. Pierce said. He'd put a wet finger on his Coke glass, remember, and pulled it along the edge to create a sound--"Ooooo." He was playing the glass like a musical instrument, proposing to play me in the same way. But I'd already been playing myself more than I wanted to admit. "Pet me," Juliet had said. And I did. Guiltily.

  9

  I worried that my sins of self-abuse might be discovered. And I fretted that every day Larry's charm bracelet remained in my possession would give him reason to think a relat
ionship was developing. The two concerns overlapped each other and intermingled, of course, and I found myself sliding away from talking to Larry (via Paul) to confronting once again the difficulty posed by Mr. Pierce.

  I had begun to admit that, if I wanted to be more than sweet, I was going to have to take the initiative, to do something. But I thought I might need some help. Whenever a young person like me considers questioning the authority of an established social figure, she will generally seek the support of another authority. In this case, it had to be my father.

  Now, I know my mother was an authority in my life. And I'd gotten closer to her over the last six months as we practiced and then performed together. But, despite her domestic competence and musical ability, Mom was still a woman. And wives and mothers simply did not have the status in the larger world I felt I needed in such a case. Besides, I didn't think I could explain what had occurred in terms of birds and bees and pears.