Miss Route 66

by Michael Lund

  So, after fretting and stewing to myself about the competition and Mr. Pierce for several days, I sought out my father. I'd hoped I could explain my general uncomfortableness in the presence of the assistant principal without narrating in detail the incident at Fanny's Dairy Delite.

  It seemed that I'd come up with a reasonable scheme. Of course, I was ignoring two key facts of the times: a father's reluctance to acknowledge sex in the life of his daughter; and a man's preoccupation with his own affairs.

  The next Sunday afternoon I found my Dad in, of all places, Tricia's favorite retreat, the old bomb shelter. I'd looked for him all over the house. Finally checking the back yard, I noted the door to the bomb shelter had been left open. He was standing in the main room with his hands on his hips, surveying.

  "Dad. What are you doing out here?"

  He chuckled. "Oh, hi. I'm not sure. Looking around, I guess." He turned slowly, observing the bunk beds (that would sleep four), the surplus World War II canned rations and the bottled water on shelves (supposed to last six weeks), the miniaturized recreational area (where we could have indulged in cards, Monopoly, books).

  "It's always the same," I noted, looking at the room myself. "Tricia's the only who comes out here."

  "Yes, it's been a few years since I've even stepped inside. Pretty elaborate, though, don't you think?"

  "Yeah." I hadn't ever really thought about it. Nuclear destruction had never been a powerful idea for me. All the world I knew kept humming along in its regular way. Even when I saw the movie On the Beach, I couldn't make myself connect its sequence of doomsday events to the life I saw continuing all around me.

  "Gosh, I worked a lot of weekends and evenings to get this set up!" exclaimed my father.

  He opened a deep drawer in a set of storage cabinets. Inside were a few small wooden barbells, a jump rope, and an exercise mat. The idea, I guessed, was that we'd need something to keep us in shape if we were trapped in here for weeks or even months.

  "Say, Dad, thanks for agreeing to pay for my dress. You know, the pageant."

  "Ah, yes. Well, we spent plenty on your sister, so it's only fair you have your day. Did you know I designed an air filtering system for this shelter and installed it?" He gazed up at a vent in the back wall.

  "Yes. Um, my having my day, it reminds me, the Pageant is, uh . . . well, there can be some stress, some little problems."

  "We have a chemical toilet back there," he gestured toward the smaller room carved into the bank in our side yard. Oak Street ran along the side of Piney Ridge, which created a northern border for the Circle. The bank in our side yard was part of the larger slope of Piney Ridge. When I was in college, development expanded up the ridge and down the other side.

  "A toilet. Yes. How long could we have stayed out here? A month?"

  "Several months, the time I figured radioactivity would be too high to venture out. But we could have lived here for longer, if things outside weren't safe."

  "Weren't safe?"

  He sighed. "Well, in those days we worried that society would come apart after the atomic bombs were dropped. There'd be anarchy outside. So we'd have to hide in here, venturing out only to replenish supplies."

  "We'd be fighting our neighbors?"

  "We might. We were thinking it would be the end of the world as we know it. And even good men might go bad in those circumstances."

  "It would be no holds barred? Every man for himself?"

  "That's right." He took the jump rope out of the storage drawer and absentmindedly inspected it.

  "Would girls, would women have been especially, um, in danger?"

  "We'd all be in danger, hon'. People who are starving or sick, they'll do what it takes to survive."

  "I mean, you know, women might be attacked. Men could, well, turn into attackers."

  I meant, of course, to use the term "rape" here, but that was a four-letter word in our day. Too shocking for me to say, too shocking for Dad to hear. I was having genuine trouble getting to the topic I had on my mind.

  "I would have protected you," he said simply.

  Dad now shook the jump rope out, draping it down at his feet as if he were actually going to jump.

  "Dad, what should a girl do . . . a girl who thinks someone, a man, is not really under control. He might try to . . . do something with her?"

  "You know, I used to get this out to unwind after working on the shelter. I'd get so keyed up, planning and revising and arranging, that I'd need to relax."

  "Um-hm."

  "And I used to jump rope regularly, back in high school."

  Unbelievably, my father had been a fairly talented boxer years ago. He'd competed as an amateur welterweight for a couple of years after high school. Looking at the overweight, aging man before me now made that part of his life hard to imagine.

  "But, Dad, I'm thinking about the Miss Route 66 thing, the judges and all. Do you think any of them ever get out of line with the girls? You know, flirting with them or something?"

  "What? Oh, no. You're talking about the mayor and Abe Pollman, that lawyer, Systrunk. They're all pillars of the community. And Bill Martin, he's blind, after all."

  "Yeah, well. . . . But suppose one did try to get one of the contestants off by herself, to ask her to . . . to do things."

  He stared at me. Either he didn't comprehend what I was saying in general, or he couldn't connect such imagined events to his daughter.

  "You know what I would have hated most about living in the bomb shelter?"

  "Huh?"

  "No telephones." He waved me back a few paces, making room to swing the jump rope.

  "No phones," I repeated.

  He began jumping half-speed, that is, with a little hop in between each time the rope passed beneath his feet. I could tell he'd done this a lot, as the rope whizzed around smoothly and slapped sharply beneath his feet. But his overweight body wasn't under control. The middle of his pear stretched out at the top and bottom of each jump.

  "The system would . . . be blown to . . . smithereens," he said, huffing after every third word. "And we'd all . . . be together . . . inside. No one . . . to call."

  10

  Well, so much for parental rescue. After my heart-to-heart with Dad in the bomb shelter, I decided I would pretty much have to figure this one out by myself. The first rule I adopted was never to let myself be alone with Mr. Pierce again, a rule I was able to follow on all but one unfortunate occasion.

  In general, it wasn't hard to stay in the company of the other girls, as the next events in pageant preparation, rehearsals, required attendance by all contestants. We each had to learn where we'd stand in the talent competition, how we'd process wearing evening gowns and swimsuits, and what was involved in the lineup of the three finalists. We had two run-throughs on successive Saturday afternoons leading up to the big Friday-night event.

  Although I remained nervous about the competition and apprehensive about Mr. Pierce, I was calmed each time I walked from the visitors' parking lot by the beauty of the college campus. Even as winter approached, the grounds were meticulously kept. Bushes and trees had been appropriately pruned, fallen leaves had been swept up and taken away, trash had been neatly deposited in the appropriate receptacles.

  And fall weather! The air is clear, the temperature moderate. It's not the dead of winter, with no life. You feel a year's end is coming, but the sure turn of the cycle reminds you that the sister season of spring will come in its time.

  It all made me look beyond the pageant and my last year of high school with considerable optimism. This was the kind of world I would eventually be moving into.

  The auditorium made up the north end of South Central Missouri State College's simple but attractive quadrangle and thus backed up on Business Route 66. Pageant sponsors made use of this fact in advertising the event, using slogans like "See Miss Route 66 crowned on Route 66" and calling it "America's Main Street Beauty Contest." A related idea, of course, was that winning this title prope
lled you on to our country's highest standing, as you were linked to the Mother Road as a kind of royalty.

  While one winner, Cathy Williams, did go on to a brief career in Hollywood (before giving up glamour for the traditional role of homemaker), most girls' lives faded back into the ordinary world after a brief comet's flash across the sky. The Miss Route 66 Pageant was, I now understand, a final event in a girl's life, not an initial one for a woman. There were few places a beauty contest winner could market her polished skills, except, of course, in catching a husband, who then might take her down Route 66 as an attractive prize along the way of his journey.

  Still, at the time, I tried to believe that I was destined for special glory. I even viewed my neighborhood's annual ripening of the pears as confirmation. I realized that the Circle's one fine day of harvest had arrived as I headed out the door toward the Rambler on the day of the final rehearsal.

  Wrapped in my winter jacket for the first time this year, I chanced to look up at tree and sky. When I focused for a second on a single fruit, I recognized the look of ripeness. I pulled down a low branch, felt a pear loosen easily at the stem. Rubbing it on my sleeve, I took a bite. Ah, its day had come. Wouldn't mine be arriving soon also?

  Later, on the walk from the parked Rambler toward the auditorium at the end of the quad, I wondered if, by chance, I'd run into Paul Thornton. There were no classes in session, but I did pass by the student union and the library. He could be at either of those places, or even sitting on a bench beside the very sidewalk I stood on!

  You might well be thinking I wouldn't have had to worry about a chance meeting with Paul if I'd just called him up and offered to meet. But these were the days when boys called girls, not the other way around. In fact, the whole sequence of courtship was determined by the guy's action and the girl's acquiescence. The rules held even more surely when the boy was significantly older--say, in college--than the girl--who might still be in high school.

  I suspect there was even more to my reluctance to break this social code: Sally Winchester.

  I assumed she and Paul were sort of a couple. That was the word around town, that he'd been snatched away from all other girls by the probable next Miss Route 66.

  True, he'd come to my concert. But he hadn't asked me if he should come or talked to me since. So I felt like I was standing in no man's land here.

  Sally, on the other hand, seemed very certain of where she was standing in those rehearsals. Mr. Pierce had her act the part of the winner in a mock run-through of the final announcement. And she was relentlessly helpful to us newbies who had to be told about each phase of the process:

  • "You'll want to avoid exertion as you prepare for the evening gown, Susan. Judges can see perspiration on your face--or, worse, on your arms--under the lights. And you don't want that."

  • "Now Susan, I don't put my suit on the night before, after it's been washed. You want your body to stretch it just so far as your body goes, but no more, so it's super tight when the judges see you."

  • "You keep playing, Susan, whether you miss a note or skip a measure. I've had some baton tosses that were not quite perfect, but I didn't hesitate with the routine. Finish, finish, finish!"

  Well, I knew that at least! And didn't her mentioning of exertion, stretching, mistakes make them more likely for someone trying this for the first time? Oooh, she was good at what she did, this smiling princess!

  These incidental comments were not nearly as unsettling, though, as what she said at the end of the last session. Well, she didn't so much say it as hiss it.

  We'd had our final walkthrough and were gathering our coats and purses from the auditorium seats before leaving. Mr. Pierce and the emcee were behind us, conferring up on the stage.

  Mr. Pierce had also seemed particularly attentive to me this time, putting a hand on my shoulder to move me into a different position, asking if I needed any help with my music stand, wanting to make sure I was happy with my swimsuit. (We had no real "dress" rehearsal, by the way, always wearing everyday clothes.)

  By chance Sally and I had put our things down next to each other, and I saw her glance toward the stage as she hiked her purse strap up over her shoulder. She had her baton in the other hand. She flashed a smile at the men on the stage, then turned to face me.

  "You have a ride?" She knew I did.

  "Oh, yes. The family car."

  "Mm-hm. Let me walk you out." She put the arm with the baton behind me, ushering me up the aisle.

  "Well, OK." I wondered if she might be going to give me, ever the neophyte in her view, some final words of advice about the competition. Or maybe, I thought, remembering what Sandy had said, she would explain how to handle Mr. Pierce. I could feel his eyes watching us, watching me. He had unnerved me a bit with his attention.

  "You've come a long way, Suzie-Q," she began as we walked up the aisle side by side.

  "Gee, thanks, Sally. You already know how to do all this stuff, though. You're sure to win." Suzie-Q?

  "Oh, don't be silly. This is an open competition. Every one of the girls has just as good a chance to get the crown."

  She looked around the entryway here, as if checking to see if anyone could overhear us. I think now she was being careful to follow the party line in public. Then we pushed through the double-doors together.

  She walked me to the Rambler. When I had unlocked the door and turned back to say goodbye, she stepped in close beside me. Putting her lips to my ear and crossing my stomach with her baton, she said these words in a furious whisper:

  "You win this pageant, bitch, and I'll carve my initials in that flat little tummy of yours with a kitchen knife."

  Interlude: The Throne

  I have a pretty darn good husband. He's considerate, faithful, dedicated to our children. But, like all men, he does have his blind spots. He was over the age of 40, for instance, before he came to understand completely one of the most basic elements of female lifestyle: the toilet seat.

  Now, I know the toilet is often called a throne. When someone's had too much to drink, he or she can be said to be worshipping at the "Porcelain Throne." But I never fully recognized how the toilet is a place of power for men and women until this blind spot in my husband's vast learning was revealed to me just before our twentieth anniversary.

  Fairfield's Miss Route 66 rarely sat on a throne, by the way. She stood on stage to receive the crown, and then her duties were to attend such events as the Phipps County Fair or the groundbreaking for a new municipal building. In some years the Christmas parade float did include a high seat for the town beauty. But none of those thrones was a toilet seat.

  For the men of Fairfield, interestingly, there was an annual king on a commode. South Central Missouri State College's patron saint was Patrick, the legendary figure of Ireland. And on or near St. Pat's Day, March 17, the college crowned one of their students as the year's honorary monarch.

  A vote was taken during the days leading up to the St. Pat's Day Weekend to select one student to represent the saint at an evening ball and in an afternoon parade. He was installed as regent at the beginning of a rowdy procession that went from the bottom of Main Street the length of town to the college campus.

  Because the student population at the college was nearly all male, and because they studied hard most weeks of the academic year, the celebration of St. Pat's was raucous, to say the least. Even though girlfriends came from across the state to spend the weekend, the Saturday afternoon celebration often got out of hand.

  Students sat St. Pat on an old commode propped up on a manure cart, "borrowed" years ago from a county farm, and pulled him by hand in front of local businesses. There was always beer at this event (sometimes dyed green), and more than once local liquor stores were raided for additional drink.

  The college's few coeds--and the town's wives, mothers, and daughters--knew to stay away on the afternoon of the celebration. Students lining the sidewalks of the route often were summoned by members of the unofficial co
urt to bow down before St. Pat and seek his (drunken) blessing. Even respected professors were in danger of being dragged out of the crowd of bystanders and taken to pay their respects to St. Pat.

  So, all this was definitely a male arena, a masculine rite with ironic trappings of empire. The symbolism of the event dismissed the feminine value of domestic order (the toilet, the bathroom) and asserted primitive rights of manhood (power, the outside world).

  I was slow to perceive some of the links between toilets and gender in growing up, probably because I began my thinking with the fact that the scrubbers of the world are generally women. The wife or daughter has always been the bathroom cleaner of the average family. In wealthier homes the maid, not the valet, kneels before the toilet with her sponge and cleanser.