Not a thing, Joan. Not one single thing.
Opening the door, Joan let Ray into her house, then looked up at the heavens and gave Jesus a quick wink. Try as she might, it was impossible not to blush when He winked back.
chapter eight
The corridors of the Knoxville Crowne Plaza were teeming with little girls wearing enough makeup to offend a South Beach prostitute. Mothers, grandmothers, coaches, and a few bored fathers herded half-naked contestants in and out of hotel rooms while highly paid teams of consultants gave their final opinions on hair, clothes, poise, makeup, and coquettish expressions. “You go, girl!” was heard from every room, often sounding more like a command than an encouragement.
With her hair set in massive three-inch curlers, Bailey weaved through the mayhem, licking peanut butter off a plastic spoon. She was allowed to have peanut butter on pageant days because it was a good source of protein, and Miranda had heard an Olympic swimmer say that protein was good for a body in training.
“Pageanting takes just as much energy as swimming,” Miranda said. “More, probably, if you count the mental part.”
Cradling a bucket under her arm, Bailey searched for the ice machine. If memory served, it was at the end of the hall near the housekeeping station. Most hotels, the decent ones, anyway, did that now, put their ice and vending machines out of earshot of their guests. Bailey had become very familiar with hotels. Most of them were exactly the same: bright patterned carpeting, drab textured wallpaper, Art Deco wall sconces, flowers by the elevators. Bailey liked it, the similarity. At least if she had to spend every weekend in a new place, she could count on a few things being the same.
Miranda had been up all night crying about someone stealing her TV show, and Bailey had been sent to get ice for the swelling under her mother’s eyes. Any excuse to get out of the room was a welcome one, so Bailey grabbed the bucket and—when Miranda wasn’t looking—slipped a dollar from her purse.
Bailey’s interest in pageanting had dwindled to the point of nonexistence. Aside from the fact that all the pageants felt exactly the same, Bailey had grown increasingly tired of being judged by people who had probably never read a book that didn’t have beach chairs on the cover. There wasn’t a specific incident that soured her on competing, but standing backstage at the Dixie Dolls Spectacular (Jackson, Mississippi), she realized she didn’t really like any of the other girls, or their mothers. Especially their mothers.
“Everyone’s so two-faced and mean,” she told Miranda. “All they do is smile and wish me good luck, then go off and pray for me to make a mistake. Why do we spend so much time with them?”
“Because you love pageants, Bailey. You have since you were a baby.”
“Fine, but…” Bailey chose her words carefully. “I think I might like to try something else.”
Miranda inhaled deeply. “Like what?”
The true answer was “nothing.” Bailey wanted to do nothing. For as long as she could remember, every spare moment of her life had been scheduled: after-school dance classes or vocal lessons, gymnastics, dress fittings, yoga classes, photography sittings, nutrition classes, spin classes, kickboxing. Then every weekend they would pack up the minivan and drive to some random town where Bailey would make herself unrecognizable and perform like a trained chimp. She was tired of it.
“I think maybe I’d be happier spending weekends at home with my friends. I never get to see them because we’re always running around doing pageants. And I think it would be fun to just, you know, hang out. Play games, ride my bike, read books…”
Miranda looked at her daughter like she’d farted a curse word in church. “Wait. Where is this coming from? Did something happen?” Her tone turned dark. “Did Theresa do something to you?”
“No, Mom. No one did anything to me. It’s just…” Bailey shrugged, “It’s just something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. I think it might be time to retire.”
Miranda shook her head. “Nine-year-olds don’t retire, Bailey. And you’ve worked too hard to just quit. Besides, a lot of famous and successful women owe their careers to pageants. Diane Sawyer was America’s Junior Miss; Sarah Palin was Second Runner-up in Miss Alaska; Halle Berry was Miss Teen All American; Oprah Winfrey was Miss Fire Prevention; Sandra Bullock was Miss Congeniality—”
“That was a movie, Mom.”
“Yes, but I think they based that on a true story, so…” Miranda gave a knowing smile. “Besides, you name me one attractive, famous woman who sat around all day reading books.”
Bailey nodded. “Yeah, that’s a really good point, but I just thought it might be nice to go out on top, you know? People love that.”
“No one loves a quitter, baby. They love winners. And you’re a winner, not a quitter.”
Bailey wasn’t surprised by her mother’s response. Miranda was defined by Bailey’s success as much as, if not more than, she was. If Bailey quit, then Miranda’s life would no longer have purpose. For Bailey to stop competing there would need to be a good reason, and since there was no good reason—at least not one Miranda would accept—Bailey devised a plan: She would compete for one more season, never complaining and never giving her mother reason to suspect she was unhappy. Meanwhile, she would try to gain so much weight that in the end Miranda would be begging her to retire. Bailey knew her mother couldn’t stand fat girls in pageants, and she was more than happy to sabotage her own body as long as it took her career down with it. It had been a difficult year, especially after Miranda started monitoring her food and making her work out like Madonna. But if pageants had taught her anything, it was patience and determination.
After twelve months of surreptitious binge eating, it looked as if Bailey’s plan was going to work. She was getting too big to win her age division, and Miranda would either have to let her quit or live with the shame of having a fat pageant daughter. But desperation breeds creativity, and what was more creative (or desperate) than cheating?
“Mom, I think this is a bad idea,” Bailey said again, protesting her mother’s birthdate scheme. “Everyone knows how old I am. These moms know more about their competition than they do their own husbands.”
“You’re just being dramatic,” Miranda said dismissively.
“886-98-0093.”
“What is that?”
“Starr’s Social Security number. Please don’t do this.”
But Miranda would not listen. So Bailey dropped it. She’d once spent six months dancing to Tom Jones’ “What’s New, Pussycat?” while dressed as a cat princess. At this point she was immune to embarrassment. It was just one more part of her life that was out of her control.
The ice machine was tucked away in a dimly lit alcove by the emergency exit. When her bucket was full, Bailey fed the stolen dollar into the adjacent vending machine and freed a Baby Ruth from its corkscrew restraint. It landed with a satisfying thud. Tearing off the wrapper, Bailey devoured the candy in three quick bites. Retrieving her change, she found a small treasure in the form of an extra seventy-five cents forgotten by a traveling businessman.
“Sweet,” Bailey said, her tongue thick with chocolate and caramel.
Staring at the drink machine, she considered her options, then selected a Mountain Dew, something she’d never tried but had heard good things about. She popped open the can and drained it in one stretch. The belch was deep and resonant, and Bailey smiled for the first time all weekend. In the last two minutes she had consumed more calories than Miranda allowed her in a day. It felt like Christmas. Stashing the candy wrapper and soda can in a nearby housekeeping cart, she skipped happily back to her room, ice bucket in tow, feeling more alive than she had in weeks.
* * *
Miranda, meanwhile, stood in front of the bathroom mirror rubbing hemorrhoid cream under her red, swollen eyes. It was a trick she picked up from a veteran pageant mom.
“That stuff was made to reduce swollen tissue,” she’d said. “How does it know if the tissue is on your face or your bu
tt?”
Wise people fascinated her.
Miranda inhaled deeply and watched the door, wondering what was taking Bailey so long. Her stomach burned. Brixton had been up all night tossing and turning, trying to soothe her mother’s tears, and Miranda was sick about it.
“My happiness isn’t your responsibility, sweetheart,” Miranda whispered as she rubbed her belly. “Your job is just to be beautiful and perfect.”
Having her daughter’s future mapped out made pregnancy so much more enjoyable. Bailey and J.J. had both been dream pregnancies despite their respective thirty-five and forty-two hours of labor. Junior, on the other hand, had been a demon fetus. Miranda spent every morning of the first trimester spewing vomit and curse words into the toilet. She lost six pounds, which she couldn’t even enjoy because the rest of her looked so haggard. Making matters worse, persistent night terrors—including a recurring one about Santa Claus slicing off her toes with a scalpel—prevented her from getting any rest. A mild sedative was prescribed, but she lost the bottle and was too embarrassed to ask for a refill. The truth was, Ray had snuck a couple of the pills and accidentally spilled the rest down the sink.
At nineteen weeks, Miranda briefly considered terminating the pregnancy and telling people she’d miscarried. It was an appalling idea for someone so staunchly pro-life as Miranda, who in high school once had to disinvite an exchange student to a church lock-in after rumors surfaced that the girl had had an abortion back in Russia.
“It’s just so awful,” Miranda eventually confessed to the anonymous voice at the other end of the pregnancy hotline. “I believe every life is precious, but I totally understand why some people choose to kill their babies.”
In the delivery room, her new son made up for nine months of agony by sliding out without so much as a push. The doctor, a young Indian fellow whose name Miranda never learned to pronounce—Prajapati or something—was a last-minute replacement for her regular OB-GYN, who ironically was a patient in the same hospital undergoing surgery for what turned out to be inoperable prostate cancer. Dr. P, as Ray called him, snatched the newborn’s leg just millimeters before hitting the floor. The young doctor laughed and said something in Hindi, or maybe it was heavily accented English, Miranda couldn’t tell. Either way, it seemed rude. But Miranda didn’t dwell on it. The important thing was that Junior was finally, mercifully out of her body. It was still the thing she liked most about her youngest son.
Just before dawn, Miranda had given up on sleep and moved to a chair by the window. She’d hoped to watch the sunrise, but her eyes felt fat and heavy like overfull water balloons. The stillness was suffocating. Hotel room silence was different from regular silence. Five A.M. anywhere is abnormally quiet, but five A.M. in a hotel room is outer space.
After everything she’d accomplished, the idea that Bailey wasn’t worthy of being on a reality show was painful and insulting. Yes, Starr was thinner and had won more titles, but so what? Bailey was a better person. Shouldn’t that count for something?
When her last fingernail had been chewed to the quick, Miranda started devising a plan to get Bailey noticed by the reality show producers. Relinquishing her Little Miss crown guaranteed some attention, but giving up a title wasn’t as sexy as winning one. She had a real shot in the Princess category provided no one discovered she’d cheated; but even that wasn’t going to be enough. The producers needed to see that Bailey was a superstar, and that meant she had to steal the focus from Starr Kennedy. Superior Miss was their best and only chance. If Bailey beat Starr in the best overall category, essentially being named the prettiest, most talented girl in the whole pageant, it would be the greatest upset in the history of regional children’s pageanting and worthy of TV attention. It was a long shot, but not impossible.
“Maybe the other mothers could even help us out,” she whispered to Brixton.
Rumors spread like viruses at pageants, and Miranda was going to start the Ebola of rumors. At breakfast she would tell Joanna Lawson “in strictest confidence” that Bailey’s weight gain was the result of precocious puberty and early menstruation, not frivolous overeating. Miranda figured if she told Joanna by eight o’clock, the judges would know by eleven. At the very least it would be worth a few sympathy points from each of them, and that could make all the difference. Then she remembered another ace up her sleeve: Bailey’s sexy new photographs. Miranda had expected the pics to be controversial, but now if some uptight prig grumbled about inappropriateness, she could simply say, “We are talking about a girl who has just received her color and become a woman. What exactly is the problem here?”
Miranda looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and sighed. She was now as old as her mother was when Miranda was Bailey’s age, and that made her feel ancient. The thin smile lines around her mouth and eyes seemed to be reaching out to each other like desperate lovers, straining to meet and deepen their bond. She made a silent vow to smile less. Her hair was dry and brittle, so she wrapped it into a loose bun, but the yellow highlights made it look like a Thanksgiving centerpiece. The tube of hemorrhoid ointment was empty, and the swelling around Miranda’s eyes was barely noticeable. Her actual hemorrhoids, however, were bulging and stung like she was getting a tattoo on her butthole. She hated the sensation because it reminded her of the tattoo she got on her nineteenth birthday.
After drinking too many banana daiquiris, Miranda staggered into a beachside tattoo parlor in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and got the Chinese symbols for “peace” and “harmony” tattooed on her ankle. Years later she discovered the symbols actually translated to “rabbit nephew,” and she cried for three days.
Using the heel of her hand against the countertop, Miranda managed to force a dime-sized dollop of Wal-rhoid from the tube.
“Thank Jesus,” she said as she hoisted her foot up onto the toilet and massaged the ointment into her fiery anus. The relief was sublime. As she rubbed, Miranda was hit with another brilliant idea. While it was obviously against pageant rules to bribe judges, as far as she knew there was no rule against bribing cameramen of third-party reality shows. Wiping her greasy finger on the Shania Twain T-shirt she’d slept in, Miranda rushed to her purse and found twenty-one dollars in her wallet. In the front pouch of her suitcase she discovered a crumpled five and added it to the few emergency bills pulled from the zippered purse pocket where she usually kept her tampons and lighter.
“Forty-seven dollars?” she said after counting it. “What am I supposed to do with forty-seven dollars?”
Three seconds passed between the moment she noticed Bailey’s purse sitting on the dresser and when she casually knocked it onto the floor. Its contents—the pink iPod, three different colors of lip gloss, a picture of Mark Ruffalo torn from a magazine, and a dog-eared paperback of The Lovely Bones—spilled across the carpet. Miranda nudged the purse with her foot until she saw the iCarly wallet Ray got Bailey for her eighth birthday. Miranda casually opened the wallet, pretending to just be curious. Another picture of Mark Ruffalo looked back at her, and Miranda made a mental note to keep better track of what Bailey watched on TV. There were a few phone numbers scribbled on pieces of notebook paper and a school picture of a nerdy boy in glasses who, according to the handwritten note on the back, was named Dashiell and “hearted” Bailey. Then, hidden in a side pocket, Miranda found what she was looking for: a neatly folded, obviously revered twenty-dollar bill. Where had she gotten so much money? Probably from her father. Ray was always spending more than he made. It was one of the reasons they were in so much debt. Money was the thing they argued about most. Money and pageants. Holding the bill between her fingers, Miranda considered the difference it would make to a cameraman. Sixty-seven dollars sounded a lot better than forty-seven, but she still didn’t think it would be enough to bribe someone from Hollywood.
The doorknob rattled, and Miranda let out a small caninelike yelp.
“Mom! Open up, I forgot my key!”
Miranda quickly closed her fist around the money and sco
oped Bailey’s belongings up off the floor, stuffing them hastily back into her purse.
“Hurry up, this ice is freezing my hands off!”
Miranda opened the door, pausing briefly at a mirror to see if she looked guilty.
“I just saw like three guys with cameras coming out of Starr Kennedy’s room,” Bailey said as she entered, “and another bunch of people following Bethenea Jackson around. Do you think it’s about the show?” Bailey asked her mother, knowing full well it was about the show.
“Oh, my God, Bethenea Jackson! Of course!” Miranda wanted to kick herself for not thinking of Bethenea. It made perfect sense that she would be the other one, what with black people being so popular now.
The wad of bills had become damp in her tightly clenched fist, either from perspiration or squeezing ink from the paper. After a series of deep breaths, she turned to Bailey and tried to sound casual.
“So … put on your eyelashes and airbrush your knees. They look a little splotchy.” She slipped on a pair of ratty flip-flops and flew out the door. “Mommy’ll be back in a minute.”
“What about your ice?” Bailey called after, but Miranda was already halfway down the hall, their future clutched firmly in her hand.
As a girl, whenever Miranda was in public she would play a game called Civilization. The object was to imagine that there had been an apocalyptic event where the only survivors were the people in that room. She would look around and imagine the society that would establish from the people present. Who would become the leader? Who would pair up as couples? Who would be the problem citizens that would need to be dealt with? Regardless of who was in the room, Miranda always saw herself becoming the leader. There were often others more qualified for the job, but eventually she knew everyone would see things her way. She gave thoughtful, impassioned, commonsense speeches that turned her most fervent critics into her most emphatic supporters. Miranda was a fair and capable leader who brought peace to the universe. She kicked ass at Civilization. If she could rebuild society from the ground up, she could certainly get her daughter on a reality show.
Pretty Ugly: A Novel Page 8
