Prettiest Doll

by Gina Willner-Pardo

  I felt myself blushing about girls liking taller boys.

  “I tell her there are different ways to be successful,” Danny said.

  “Girls don’t care so much about being tall. They care more about being thin,” I said.

  “Yeah, but they like tall boys. You never see couples where the girl is taller.” Now he was blushing. He had let me know that he’d checked.

  “Movie star couples, sometimes,” I said.

  He sighed. “That’s what everyone says.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “Okay, so male movie stars don’t have to worry about how tall they are.”

  We both stared out the window, which was streaky with rain. The trees that had been far away were closer now. On the other side of the wet glass, they looked smeared and fuzzy edged, like trees a kindergartner had drawn.

  “Especially if they’re handsome,” I said. “That’s what everyone is noticing.”

  We stopped in Springfield for fifteen minutes. Danny left the bus to use the bathroom in the station. I thought about going with him; I didn’t like the idea of using the toilet on the bus, walking past everyone’s knowing eyes. But I didn’t really have to go, and I thought that maybe he just needed some time to himself. While he was gone, I kept watch for him, willing him to come back before the bus driver revved the engine. I practiced saying, “Excuse me! We have to wait for that boy I was with,” in case I needed to. When I saw him heading back toward the bus, I thought Thank the sweet Lord, and thought of Mama.

  When he got back to our seats, he held out a Snickers bar and a Baby Ruth. “Take one,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s okay.” I didn’t want him to think I was hungry, which I was. I had forgotten about bringing food and had to be careful with my money. I had only fifteen dollars and sixty-three cents left after buying my ticket.

  “No, really. I wanted to get you one, but I didn’t know what you like.”

  Carefully, I reached for the Baby Ruth. “Thanks.”

  “I like them both,” he said, sliding into his seat.

  I wondered if it counted as a present if he would have eaten it anyway.

  The driver, whose nametag said ELROY, hopped back up the bus stairs and looked out over the passengers. “We all here?” he asked.

  “What should we say if we’re not?” Ed called out from his seat. A few people around him laughed.

  “You a comedian?” Elroy asked, sliding into the driver’s seat. “That’s all right. I’ve had my share of comedians.”

  Now lots of people were laughing, feeling chummy all of a sudden.

  “Keep ’em laughing, buddy,” Elroy said. Slowly, he steered us out of the parking lot.

  “How much money do you have?” I asked Danny when we were back on the highway. I knew it was rude to ask, but somehow the regular rules are easier to break when you’re on a bus and no one you know is around to lecture you. It was kind of thrilling.

  “A lot. It’s bar mitzvah money.”

  “Bar what?”

  “Bar mitzvah. It’s a Jewish ceremony. It marks a boy’s entry into manhood. You have to memorize a lot of Hebrew and make a speech. It’s a big deal.”

  “Manhood? Come on.”

  “Yeah, when you’re thirteen.”

  “Thirteen?”

  “It’s traditional.”

  “But you still have to go to school. You can’t drive. You can’t get a job.”

  “It doesn’t mean you’re a man like that. It means you’re responsible for following Jewish law.”

  Luthers Bridge doesn’t have any Jews. Some kids say mean things about them. Landon Terwilliger stole a Chunky from Turner’s once because he said Merle Turner was trying to jew him. That was after he kissed me during halftime at the Mountaineers’ football game at the high school. We were in sixth grade back then, and I hadn’t yet figured out what an asshole he was.

  “Do you go to church?” I asked. I felt shy in a way I hadn’t when I’d asked him how much money he had.

  “It’s called a synagogue.”

  “My mama says Jews are smart. She says if I was Jewish, I’d have to get good grades and work in a store after school and do pageants.”

  I was proud to be able to say that Mama admires Jews, but Danny shook his head and said, “That’s still being prejudiced. Even if you’re saying something nice.”

  I wanted to explain about Mama: that she means well, that in her mind, saying someone is smart is a huge compliment. But then I thought, Not as huge as saying someone is pretty. Pretty is bigger.

  “Not all Jews are smart,” Danny said.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. I was exhausted from saying the wrong thing, from not recognizing anything out the window. We were passing an exit for Sparkle Brook Road. I pictured a creek deep in the forest, a single shaft of sunlight, ferns and moss, that piney smell. There would be a flat, dry bank. You could spread out a blanket and the water splashing over flat stones would lull you to sleep.

  I woke up with a crick in my neck, my head against the window, my mouth open. I’d been drooling. I righted myself and licked my lips, praying that Jesus had been watching over me and hadn’t let me snore.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “A little after eleven. Boy, you were out. You missed a lot. Look,” Danny said, leaning across me and pointing. “The Mark Twain National Forest.”

  I looked, turning my head toward the window mainly so I could breathe into my cupped hand and check for bad breath. Outside, oaks, hickories, and shortleaf pine rose up and disappeared in the rainy mist. Usually I love trees, but now I resented the way they cast us in shadow, shutting out the thin, gray light.

  “My daddy used to shoot wild turkey in these parts,” I said, remembering Mama telling me.

  Danny was staring with wonder. “So much forest,” he said.

  “I wish it would stop raining,” I said.

  “I don’t mind it,” he said.

  We stayed on the interstate through the woods, emerging after a bit, and drove past exits to Waynes-ville, St. Robert, and Fort Leonard Wood. We passed a camouflage-colored Jeep driven by a soldier in a khaki uniform and hat. Danny and I both waved when he looked up.

  I thought we had left the forest behind for good, but more trees loomed in the near distance, and soon we were winding through them. I slept again.

  Hunger woke me up. I kept my eyes closed, trying not to think about fried chicken or Mama’s cakes. Trying not to think about Mama’s cakes made me think about Mama, how crazy worried she must be. I asked Jesus to fill her with the Holy Spirit, to let her know that everything would be all right, and while he was at it, to let me know it, too.

  We pulled into a Burger King in Rolla for a lunch break. “They got any restrooms in this joint?” Ed called out as Elroy put on the brake and pulled open the doors.

  All the older passengers laughed, knowing that Ed and Elroy had this thing going, this temporary friendship that was making the trip more fun.

  “Hey, why don’t you do a little investigating while you’re out there?” Elroy said. “Why don’t you give us a report?”

  “Will do!” Ed said, happy to be the center of attention as he waited for everyone ahead of him to file out of the bus.

  I was starving, but to save money I ordered fries and a small Diet Coke. The smell of the fries was like joy in my whole body. At home, we almost never had enough money to eat out.

  “Is that all you’re getting?” Danny asked when I squeezed into the plastic bench across the two-person table from him. He had ordered two cheeseburgers, onion rings, and a Mountain Dew.

  “It’s all I want,” I said.

  “Really? Or are you just always worried about getting fat?”

  I shook my head no. “I don’t even think about that.”

  Mama isn’t like some of the other pageant moms, making their girls eat salads and cottage cheese. She always says I’m naturally thin, the way she used to be, so I can pretty much eat what I want. />
  Danny took a bite of his cheeseburger and chewed. He had a pale streak of catsup on his lip. I kept waiting for him to lick it off.

  “You never told me why you’re doing this,” he said.

  “I have my reasons.”

  “I told you why I was doing it,” he said. “Fair’s fair.”

  You didn’t really tell, I thought about saying, but I just ate another fry. I didn’t want to make him tell. I wanted him to want to.

  I unzipped my purse and pulled out my wallet. I tugged the small picture out from behind my Dale Hickey Junior High School student ID, where I keep it hidden. It would be embarrassing for anyone to know I carry it around.

  I passed it across the table. “Don’t get grease on it,” I said.

  He studied it for a moment. “Your face. And your hair. It’s so big.”

  “That’s what you have to do. That’s the whole point. To look like that.”

  “How old were you in this picture?”

  “Six. It was the first time I won. I was so happy. I mean, I can’t even explain how happy I was. How it felt to be that happy. Like I couldn’t keep all the happiness in my body. Like I was splitting open with it.”

  And proud. “You did it!” Mama kept saying as we walked back to the car, and I kept wanting to ask, Did what? but she was so excited, she was laughing, maybe for the first time since Daddy died, and I was laughing, too, for the first time since Uncle Bread left. It had felt so good to think that maybe I had saved us both.

  “No offense,” Danny said, handing the picture back, “but you don’t look real. You look like a doll.”

  I took the picture from him and slipped it back into my wallet. Then, because it was driving me crazy, I reached over and wiped the catsup off his lip with the pad of my thumb. If it had been a movie, I would have licked it off my thumb, but it wasn’t. That would have been gross. I just wiped my thumb on my napkin.

  “Yep,” I said.

  nine

  THE afternoon was a blur of rain and traffic and highway signs: to Cuba and Owensville, Sullivan and Potosi, Stanton and St. Clair and Union. The interstate, I thought blearily, was like a copper wire, with little towns strung on it like glass beads.

  I thought about how each town had thirteen-year-olds living there, going to school, learning the same Missouri facts: how we are the Show-Me State, how Missouri is the eighth largest state in the country, how the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers join up near St. Louis, which is the fifty-eighth largest city. We all know about Mark Twain and George Washington Carver and Harry Truman. I thought of my teachers harping on the same stories, and it started to make a little bit of sense. They were trying to tie us together with knowing the same facts. They were trying to make Missouri our home. I looked out over the passing fields and felt a squeezing ache of goodbye in my chest.

  “What do you miss about Texas?” I asked.

  Danny was sitting by the window now; I gave up the window seat after lunch, my way of thanking him for buying me a Hershey’s sundae pie.

  “There’s a common room in our apartment building. Some old men play chess there. They don’t mind if I watch.”

  “Is that all?” I asked when he didn’t say anything else.

  “The beer-can house. Pecan trees.” He smiled. “My friend Benny Mittelman. We’re in the same confirmation class. We have exactly the same sense of humor.”

  “What’s the beer-can house?”

  “Some guy collects beer cans and hangs them from the trees around his house. It’s pretty cool.”

  “Did you tell Benny you were leaving?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t say where I was going. But I told him I had to get away. He understood. Well, he sort of understood. He doesn’t see why I don’t just get the shots.”

  “That’s what I told my best friend, Imogene. Because if I’d told her where, she would have told my mama. I know she would have.”

  He looked at me, impressed. “There’s a lot of stuff you have to figure out if you’re going to run away. I told you about not using your phone, right?”

  “I already knew that, from TV.” It wasn’t true, but I didn’t like him focusing on how I was so much younger than he was.

  “And you have to have a story, in case someone asks why you’re not in school. I tell people I’ve been staying with my grandmother while both my parents are in Iraq, and now my dad is home and wants me to be with him. Well, I would tell people that if they asked. So far, no one has.” He looked out the window again, where exit signs were announcing streets in St. Louis. “It’s always good to say your parents are fighting in the war. It distracts people. Plus it makes them admire you for being so brave, being strong while they’re gone, traveling alone.”

  “I don’t have a story.” I thought for a minute. “I’ll say I’m an orphan and I’m going to live with my Uncle Bread in Chicago. That my parents died in a car crash on the 475 in Georgia, and I was supposed to go into foster care, but Uncle Bread said he wouldn’t hear of any such thing, that I had to be with him.”

  “You can’t say you’re an orphan. People want to help orphans. That’s a pretty good story, though. How do you even know about foster care?”

  “There are some kids at my school.”

  “I think we should have the same story,” he said. “It’s too weird that two of us are traveling together and have different stories. You could be my sister.”

  I felt an electric charge all over, that he was lumping me in with him.

  “I don’t look like you, though,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll just tell people that you’re my little sister and I’m supposed to be taking care of you. And that you get carsick on buses. It’s good to throw in a few details.”

  I said okay and got up to use the bathroom, even though I didn’t really have to go. When I’d closed the door behind me, I just stood in the tiny, rocking space for a minute or two. I needed to be alone, where no one could see, to feel the happiness of Danny taking care of me.

  In St. Louis, we got a new driver, whose name was Len. We switched freeways and headed north. Now everyone was tired and cranky from sitting so long. Ed walked up and down the aisle a couple of times, explaining that his knees were seizing up. “You kids okay? You got someone meeting you in Chicago?” he asked on one of his strolls.

  “My uncle. Our uncle,” I said. “He just got back from Iraq. He won a lot of medals.”

  I was proud of myself, but Danny sneakily nudged his elbow into my side.

  “I was in the service. Army. Great bunch of guys. Great bunch.” Ed looked as though he was tearing up. “What branch of the service was your uncle in?”

  I started to panic, but Danny said, “Marines. Second Division,” as easily as if he was telling someone where he lived.

  “Good man,” Ed said, using the seatbacks on either side of the aisle to push himself forward. “You tell him I said so.” He leaned down and squinted out the window at the endless fields of brown, papery stalks. “Jeez. Enough already with the corn.”

  When he was out of earshot, I whispered, “What did you poke me for? You said people love it when someone’s been in Iraq.”

  “It’s easy to say too much,” Danny said. “Don’t say anything if you can get away with saying nothing.”

  I felt my face getting red from my stupid mistake. Suddenly it seemed as though there was too much to remember, too much I’d surely forget, and then I’d have to live with knowing that I’d blown it for both of us.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” he said, reaching under his seat for the brown paper bag. He sat back up and pulled out a hinged wooden box with alternating light and dark squares. “Come on. Let’s play.”

  “Chess?” He was opening the box. Inside, all the pieces lay in purple velvet indentations shaped like themselves. “I don’t know how.”

  “I’ll teach you. Come on. I’m bored.”

  I caught sight of my reflection in the window. I thought how pre
tty I looked, even though I’d been sitting on a bus for hours. I hadn’t thought about being pretty all day, and that wasn’t how it usually was for me. Usually, I thought about it all the time. Either Mama brought it up or kids at school looked at me in a way that I knew meant they were thinking about it, which made me think about it: a whole big circle I couldn’t get out of. I won’t lie: sometimes it was nice in a flattering kind of way. I mean, who doesn’t like it when other people like the way you look?

  But it meant I was always in the pretty-girl box, in a velvet hole shaped just like me.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We played for three hours. I had to work hard to hold the names of the pieces in my head. My favorite was the knight, because of the horse, and also because of the zigzaggy way it moves.

  I told Danny I didn’t want him letting me win. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said, and when I said, “Okay,” he added, “It only means something if you have to work for it,” which made me decide to get serious about memorizing the names of all the pieces and the directions you could move them. Which probably didn’t matter that much anyway: Danny said the main thing is strategy.

  I had no chance of winning, but I put Danny in check once. “Whoa,” he said, half-laughing. He saved his king easily and beat me in another three moves, but I could tell he was impressed. “You should do this for real. Join a club or something. Does your school have a chess club?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Dale Hickey is more about football and basketball and cheerleading.”

  “Not everybody’s into sports. What do the kids who don’t like sports do?”

  “I think there’s a Star Wars club,” I said. I didn’t tell Danny that I had never thought about asking.

  “Wait, let me guess. Star Wars—that’s the one you’re in,” Danny said. He was looking down, tucking each pawn into its purple softness. I couldn’t tell if he was joking in a mean way or just kidding.

  “I’m not in any clubs. I don’t have time,” I said.

  He nodded without looking up.

  I wished I could think of something more to say, to mask his disappointment, which was fogging up the silence.