chapter four
Stiff-arming the horn, Miranda slammed on the brakes of her 2002 Chrysler Town & Country and slid into her mother’s driveway, an unwelcoming patch of dirt and gravel that had spent the last twenty-five years winning a war of attrition against the backyard. It was seven forty-seven, and Miranda was already behind schedule. The boys had refused to share a bath again, so they didn’t get one, and the drive-thru line at McDonald’s was too long so they didn’t have breakfast, either.
“Why don’t you enter the boys in pageants?” Ray had once suggested. “They’d probably enjoy it, and it might help you connect with them a little more.”
But Miranda just sighed and shook her head. Yes, there were little boys who competed in pageants, but Miranda suspected that they all grew up to have sex with each other, and she was not about to raise a couple of gays. Not that she considered herself homophobic. Most of the best pageant coaches were homosexual, and she genuinely enjoyed their company, even considered them friends, but spending a few hours with one on the weekend was different from having one as a son.
“Is that what you want, Ray? A couple of gay boys?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” he replied, genuinely concerned.
But Miranda wouldn’t hear him. She knew her boys would be better off if she just let them be, so that’s exactly what she did.
The sign on the bank downtown said it was already eighty-six degrees, and Miranda’s pregnancy hemorrhoids felt like she was smuggling fried grapes. Bailey was slouched in the passenger seat scrolling through the pink iPod she’d won at the Miles of Smiles Perfect Face Invitational (Hendersonville, Tennessee). Pageant weekends were always stressful for Bailey, but something about this one felt heavy. Not only was she relinquishing her title of Junior Miss Beautiful, but her mother had decided to take a risk and enter her in the Most Beautiful Princess division, fudging her birthdate by three months to meet the age requirement.
“Isn’t that cheating?” Bailey asked when Miranda informed her of the scheme the day before.
“I like to think of it more like a gamble,” her mother said.
A gamble that if unsuccessful could get them both banished from the Southeastern Pageant Association for life, but Miranda believed it was worth the risk. The SPA sponsored only four pageants a year, and two of them weren’t much better than dog shows.
“And sometimes gambles pay off big time,” Miranda said with a wink.
“But why?”
“What do you mean?”
Bailey looked her mother in the eye, knowing the answer before she asked. “Why are we lying about my age?”
“Well,” Miranda tiptoed, “I was thinking about your diet, and how we could turn what has become a negative into a positive.”
Bailey crossed her arms. “Explain, please.”
Miranda looked at her daughter. Recently, she had started to think that Bailey was saying things just to mess with her, asking questions she already knew the answer to just to study Miranda’s reaction, as if Bailey was a scientist conducting an experiment and Miranda was a rat. She would never say it out loud, but it kind of creeped her out a little.
“Princess contestants are older, ten to fourteen.” Miranda explained. “In your regular category, you’ll be one of the oldest, so you’ll look big, bigger than you even are in real life. So next to the girls in the princess group, you’ll look normal size. Smaller even, which is better!”
Bailey stared at her. She was thinking about the five Cadbury Creme Eggs she’d eaten during that morning’s “elliptical workout.”
“So … it is cheating.”
“I’m trying to help you,” Miranda said, confounded by her daughter’s reluctance to endorse her deceitful, yet sensible plan. “Just … trust me. It’ll work.”
The warm purr of a lawn mower sputtered to life in the distance. Miranda laid on the horn again, inciting a dirty look from a portly neighbor on a Rascal using a grabber to jerk obscenely large underwear from a clothesline.
“Hey there, Emma.” Miranda waved, then honked again. “Mom, hurry up! We’re late!” She honked again. “I’m gonna leave these boys on the porch if you don’t get out here!”
Drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, Miranda saw her old, battered swing set slouching like an elderly nanny in the corner of the yard. Her father, Roger, had built it from found materials when Miranda was five. It quickly became Miranda’s second home and her only needed source of entertainment. There were two swings, a tube slide, a rope bridge, a pole to slide down, and a set of monkey bars. The design made it versatile enough to be whatever her imagination wanted it to be. When she wanted to be a princess, it was a castle. When she wanted to be a pirate princess, it was a pirate ship. When she wanted to be Princess Leia, it was the Millennium Falcon. Now, weather-beaten and rusted through, it was a monument to tetanus. Her boys loved it.
Finally, Miranda’s mother, Joan (pronounced “Jo-Ann”), unlatched the screen door and waved.
“Jesus, it’s about time,” Miranda said under her breath. The sliding door of the minivan moaned and sputtered open like a huge mouth deciding whether or not it wanted to vomit. It was the boys’ cue to get out.
“Listen to Grandma!” Miranda yelled at their backs as they ran toward the house. “I’ll see you Sunday!” And then added, “Wish your sister and me good luck!”
“Hang on!” Joan yelled as she laboriously inched her way down the worn wooden steps of the screened-in back patio. Miranda felt the increasingly frequent anxiety of a blown schedule and rubbed Brixton for comfort.
“Come on, dammit,” Miranda said quietly, cursing the woman who gave her life. “I don’t have time for this crap right now.” She turned to Bailey, “I love your grandmother very much.”
Joan’s knees were swollen from arthritis and stiff from the rain that would start in about four hours. Her left meniscus had ground to powder, leaving her bones to rub against one another like a mortar and pestle. Sometimes they would vibrate on contact, and Joan could feel her soul shudder, that nails-on-a-chalkboard feeling emanating from deep inside her being. Wearing her best smile, and third-best housecoat, Joan finally made her way to the minivan and leaned in the window.
“You off?”
“We’re late. Heading to Knoxville.”
“Okay.” Joan nodded knowingly several times. “In Tennessee?”
“Is there another one?”
“I don’t know. Probably.” She put her hand on Miranda’s belly. “Hello, sweetie.”
Miranda put the minivan in reverse, “We need to go, Mom.”
“What time should I put the boys to bed?”
“Just let ’em fall asleep in front of the TV. Ray should be by around ten or so to pick them up.”
“Okay, then.” Joan waved to Bailey and smiled. “Hey, hon. You gonna win this weekend?”
Bailey looked up from her iPod, smiled at her grandmother, and gestured toward her mother. “Mom thinks so.”
“Good. Good for you.” Joan smiled.
Miranda blushed and let her foot off the brake a little. The car creeped backward. “Mom, we really need to go.”
“Okay, well, y’all have a nice time. Be careful.” She called in to her granddaughter, “Bring back a crown, sweetheart! Or just have fun. Remember, you don’t have to win to have fun!”
Miranda slammed on the brakes and shot her mother a look of grave disappointment. “Dammit, Mom. We talked about this.”
That was exactly the kind of so-called encouragement that had forced Miranda to ban Joan from being a pageant chaperone. For some reason, Joan just could not get her mind around what was at stake, and trying to explain it to her was like trying to explain a card trick to a cat. She would never understand. Few did. Pageants were like wars: expensive, cruel, and necessary. Casualties were inevitable, and Bailey needed a warrior’s motivation to foster not only survival but victory. To Joan, it was all about having fun, looking pretty, and doing your best, which Miranda
thought was sentimental horseshit. Everyone knew the girls who had the most fun rarely took home a crown.
“Sorry,” Joan said, raising her hands in defeat. “I’ll let you go.”
“We’ll be back Sunday night,” Miranda said through her closing window.
“Okay, then. Bye. Y’all be careful now.”
The Town & Country kicked up a cloud of dust as Miranda tore out onto the road. Joan watched her daughter and granddaughter drive away and felt her smile turn sour. She knew how stupid Miranda thought she was, but Joan disagreed. She was a smart cookie. She watched the news. She knew things. Big things. Joan kept her eye on Miranda until she drove through a rarely observed stop sign at the end of the street next to the big, empty parking lot. Some people said it was the biggest parking lot in the state, but Joan thought that seemed unlikely.
Shaking her head, she erased the negative thoughts of her daughter like an Etch A
Sketch and pulled herself back up the steps of her porch. Stopping to rest, she asked Jesus if he had a few seconds to talk.
I always have time for you, Joan. How are your knees?
She grinned and shook her head in astonishment. “That is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Entering the kitchen from her back patio, Joan found J.J. and Junior sitting at the table shoving handfuls of homemade cherry pie into their laughing faces.
“Boys! That pie was for your supper,” she yelled. “I’ve got a good mind to send you outside and pull a switch off the tree.”
But she knew if she let them outside she’d never get them off Miranda’s old swing set. They looked up at her with big, worried eyes, cherry pie filling ringing their mouths like clown makeup. Joan shook her head. These boys need discipline, she thought, and Joan was not one to spare the rod.
No child ever turned out worse because he got his backside tanned every now and again.
The Bible was pretty clear on that. Then again, they looked so happy, full to bursting on something she’d lovingly made with her own hands. What was the harm, really? They were just being boys. Maybe instead she should be flattered that they loved her pie, the same recipe her mother made, and her mother before her. She couldn’t give the boys much, but she could give them pie. Besides, what’s a grandmother for if it’s not to spoil her grandchildren? The boys rarely ate something homemade. It was nice to be the person who provides them with something healthy for a change. When she thought about it, if she punished them for eating that pie, she would really be punishing them for loving her so much. And that didn’t make any sense at all.
“Okay.” She smiled. “When you finish up, go wash your faces, then it’s time for your lessons.”
For a little over a year, Joan had been homeschooling J.J. and Junior. Of all the roles she’d had in her life, teacher was probably the one that made her proudest.
“Only in America,” she once said to Jesus, “could someone who never finished high school be allowed to have the same educational influence as those so-called professionals.”
It really is a great country, said Jesus.
After seventh grade, Joan’s father made her drop out of school to work full-time on the family farm. “But that didn’t mean I stopped learning,” she told the boys in one of her many diversions. “I’ve read near seventy-five books in my life, and those were not books I would have read if I’d stayed in school. So do with that what you will.”
Joan believed that her life experiences and personal opinions had to be more relevant than anything the boys would learn in a classroom. Public schools had become nothing more than godless reeducation camps created for the sole purpose of indoctrinating children into accepting and perpetuating the liberal agenda. The 700 Club had alerted Joan to the nefarious plot of the public education system to brainwash an entire generation of young people, and she refused to stand idly by while her grandsons were exposed to dangerous subject matter like evolution, global warming, and the performing arts. She would rather the boys forgo education altogether than become hippie theater majors who believed their people came from apes.
With Jesus’s guidance, Joan worked up a tight eight-minute presentation for Miranda, who was skeptical at best.
“Homeschooled kids are ignorant and weird,” Miranda said. “I got enough problems with those boys. I don’t need them to be weird, too.”
“But,” Joan countered with the deftness of a TV lawyer, “think about how much more time you’ll have to focus on Bailey’s pageants.”
Miranda hadn’t thought of that. Smart cookie, indeed.
Joan adored the boys and wanted nothing but the best for them. They were pretty much her only human contact. Her knees prevented her from leaving the house very often, and when she did venture out it was usually only for Sunday service at the Pleasant Ridge Church of Christ or the occasional Mel Gibson movie. God knew she could use the company.
The boys finished their pie, and Joan shuffled over to the stove. Since 1975, an endless pot of pinto beans had warmed on the back burner. It was about all Roger would eat, and the smell reminded her of him. Plus, it was nice to have hot food to offer if anyone stopped by for a visit. She ate a spoonful and made her way to an open door on the other side of the room. Feeling her way across the wall, she flipped a switch and flooded a cramped utility room with light. Jars of canned peaches lined a wall in perfect, uniform rows like three-dimensional wallpaper. Generations of winter coats hung over each other in pregnant bulges above the washer and dryer, and half a dozen dusty fishing rods rested in the corner with Roger’s old squirrel rifle. Joan shook her head. She really did need to clean this room up.
It would make a wonderful study.
Carefully maneuvering the deliberate piles of clothes (some to be washed, some to be donated, some to be ignored), Joan made her way to the home computer nestled in the back corner. For her first semester as a teacher, Joan had relied primarily on Wikipedia for her lesson plans. It was easy, free, and allowed her to fix some of the more egregious errors made by the ignorant know-it-alls who posted the information in the first place. However, when she stumbled upon the simple brilliance of Conservapedia it was like getting an honorary doctorate in common sense. Joan felt as if she could have written those articles herself, which was high praise indeed. Pages spit from the Lexmark ink-jet printer Bailey won at the Rebel Belles Glamboree (Huntsville, Alabama), and Joan felt a blush of self-righteous pride. “This is what they should be teaching in schools.”
Classes began with an hour of Christian apologetics, followed by American history (real American history), Bible study, penmanship, recess, a healthy lunch, social studies (the evils of Hollywood values), and if there was time left over before Wheel, math.
Joan thumbed through her lesson plan and took her seat at the kitchen table. Through the open toe of her support hose, she felt a wide crack in the linoleum and ran her toe along the length of it. Installed in 1966, the dark brown wood-grain flooring had faded to the burnt yellow of a tobacco chewer’s teeth. A distinct path had been worn from the refrigerator to the sink to the stove to the table. In the corner by the window, a small rag rug covered the cigarette burns near the legs of Roger’s old secretary desk where, at the end of the day, he would read the evening edition as Joan hurried about making his dinner. Seventy percent of Joan’s adult life had been spent in this room, and she was grateful for every imperfection: the discolored flower basket wallpaper, the stove’s permanently grease-covered backsplash, the warped cabinet doors, the stained porcelain of the sink. It was warm, like wrapping herself in her father’s tattered cardigan.
The old stuff is the best stuff, Joan.
She laughed. “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” she agreed, and slid her big toe along the crack until her knee told her to stop.
The boys had started licking the pie pan clean, and a look of pity crossed her face.
“You boys need haircuts.” She sighed. “Why can’t your mother see how beautiful you are?”
Miranda’s indiff
erence to the boys didn’t make a lick of sense, but there wasn’t a lot about her daughter Joan understood. They rarely talked about anything other than schedules, and whenever Joan tried to question her daughter about the time (or lack thereof) she spent with her sons, Miranda would blow up and use terrible words that started with the letters f and s. Joan would just shake her head.
“Why a pretty girl like you would want to make yourself so ugly by using those words is beyond me. I don’t even know where you learned words like that. Certainly not from me.” Joan had never said those words, although after three or four beers, Roger would occasionally use profanity. But he worked hard, he deserved those beers.
Roger Sylvester Ford drowned in the shower while brushing his teeth. Time management had become an obsession for Roger. Insurance didn’t just sell itself, and if he was ever going to surpass that pompous ass Brad Souther as the insurance leader of Daviess County, then he needed every spare minute he could find. With his right hand, Roger would brush his teeth while his left used the removable showerhead to rinse the Pert Plus from his hair and mustache. It was so efficient that after a few weeks he had begun shaving and flossing in the shower as well. All told, the new system saved him nearly five and a half minutes a day, time that would later be spent around the Big Table at Gabe’s Restaurant bullshitting with other local businessmen who fancied themselves the town’s power brokers and brain trust.
Pretty Ugly: A Novel Page 4
