Pretty Is (9 page)

And, as always, there were the pageants, an endless circuit of freak shows. Half the time, I was on the road with Gail. Now I wasn’t just Carly May Smith from Arrow; I was Carly May Smith the abducted girl, the miraculously rescued girl. I was a freaking sensation. Reporters always wanted comments from me. The judges knew who I was. The other parents steered clear of me; the other girls seemed shy.

I could have quit, obviously. I had told Zed I would quit; he had hated my pageants. I think I really meant to at first, but then somehow it felt more rebellious to keep it up. Who was he to tell me how to spend my life, anyway? A criminal. A loser. A dead man. Someone who couldn’t help me now, that was for goddamned sure. It made sense that the world would treat me differently now, since I sure as hell
felt
different. The truth was, too, that at least the pageants got me out of Arrow. And for that alone they were worth it—worth the trouble, worth spending hours with Gail. Worth the guilt of breaking my word to Zed, especially since the guilt faded a little more every day.

Gail was always a little pissed off. I had changed, she said, like it was a crime. You used to look sweeter. That was true, no doubt about it; I also used to
be
sweeter, but of course Gail couldn’t care less about that. She was right, though; the appearance of a certain kind of sweetness mattered, at least to the judges. On stages across the Midwest I would stand in a line with the other girls, shoulder to shoulder. Most of us were pretty much the same height, although at the hick local pageants you always got a few shorter girls—bigger girls, too. Usually, though, I’d be sandwiched between two girls whose shoulders were level with mine, whose arms and legs I might almost mistake for my own if they somehow got mixed up. In a police lineup, I don’t think anyone but our mothers (or coaches, as in my case—I was always careful to make it clear that Gail was
not
my mother) could have told us apart. We stood angled to the right, left knees crooked gently in front of right knees. This was supposed to be slimming. It also made us look like one of those strips of accordioned paper dolls I remembered from when I was little. Connected at the elbows, each one exactly like the next.

When it was your turn to step out of line, you were suddenly supposed to be an individual, not to blend into a lineup but to demonstrate how different you were. Suddenly you had to be the one with the brightest smile, the most graceful walk, the most wholesome air. The sweetest, in other words. But that was also the tricky part: Sweetness alone wasn’t enough. You had to simultaneously pull off blushing-farm-girl-next-door and potential pinup. Really, whatever they said, you had to be both, once you got past the local Dairy Queen contests. And sometimes even then.

I didn’t win as easily as I had as a preteen—as easily as I had preabduction, you might say. Gail made this connection and, through some twist of Gail-logic, managed to hold it against me. At the Midwestern Cornhusker Teen Queen pageant, I failed even to place, and I thought Gail might actually smack me afterward, she seemed so pissed off. I was slightly disappointed when she didn’t; I was always looking for things to use against her. A reporter approached her about doing a story on my struggles—“Teen Beauty Queen Haunted by Kidnapping,” something like that. Gail actually said no, turning down a chance at publicity for the first time ever. But there were still triumphs: When I was fifteen, I became Miss Nebraska Teen USA. And I learned Gail’s dirty secret. It was a turning point, that weekend, in more ways than one.

Like the other pageant families, we were staying at a hotel in downtown Omaha. Just Gail and me. Daddy would come down for the competition, he had promised, although he made it clear that he would rather spend his weekend some other way—mending fences in the west pasture, maybe. I wouldn’t have minded if he hadn’t come; his presence made the pageants harder for me. When I saw him sitting in the audience, my mind split in two: half of me saw the competition the way I wanted to see it, as a perfectly valid way to win prizes, praise, attention, whatever. But the other half saw it though Daddy’s eyes, and then it was suddenly gross, a little sleazy, exploitative, degrading—nothing to be proud of. Then I’d remember
his
contempt for pageants—Zed’s—and his disapproval would get mixed up with Daddy’s, and their contempt would seem to become my own, and before I knew it the whole scene would seem cheap and disgusting to me, too. I’d feel ashamed and pissed off at myself for feeling ashamed. The contests were less complicated for me when he stayed away.

But before Daddy showed up in Omaha, it was just me and Gail. We didn’t like each other any more than we ever had, but over the last couple of years we had figured out how to deal with each other. It helped that we wanted the same thing, though for different reasons; in fact I couldn’t quite understand why the hell Gail was so anxious for my success. Maybe if she’d had a daughter of her own, I would have been spared. She obsessed over the details: the dresses, the hair, the makeup, the smile, the attitude. She was an expert on mascara. It all comes down to the eyelashes, was one of her favorite theories. Like my teachers at school—and later Martin, of course—she saw attitude as my biggest problem. “Don’t smile like you’ve already won,” she would say. “And don’t smirk like you’re laughing at some private joke with yourself. You have to look sweet. You want to be an actress, right? Act.”

This was my second year trying for Miss Nebraska Teen and the first year I’d really had any kind of chance, though at fifteen I was still a little on the young side. Also a little on the
flat
side. The maximum age was eighteen, and the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds had obvious advantages over most of the younger girls. Familiar as I was with Gail’s big, loose, freckly bosom, I was in no hurry to grow large fleshy appendages on my chest. But I worried that my failure in that department had become a drawback. You could do things with tape and strategically designed bodices, but you could only do so much.

Anyway … Gail’s deep dark secret. I was returning late in the morning from a rehearsal for our opening song-and-dance number. We were pretty strictly chaperoned as a rule, but our guardian for the morning had decided it was safe to let us off the elevator on our own floors without actually walking each of us to our rooms. Most of the girls had a mother with them, anyway. But Gail had stayed behind, much to my delight, complaining that she had a headache.

I got off the elevator on the ninth floor of the Sheraton and took my time strolling down the hall. In general I liked hotels because they made life seem clean and simple and uncluttered—as if you could just open the door, walk in, hang up your coat, and start fresh. But I knew our room that day would be stuffy and overheated, with some stupid soap opera blathering in the background. That was Gail’s headache routine. Feeling in my pocket for change, I stopped at the vending machine in an alcove off the hallway. I bought a Coke, which I wasn’t supposed to have. (Bad for the skin
and
the figure, said Gail the expert.)

As I turned away from the machine, popping my soda open, a man suddenly rounded the corner. I almost ran right into him. Most of the pageant girls were pretty paranoid; we had to listen to constant lectures about the dangers of strange men. I felt weirdly superior to the other girls in this respect; I’d already had my strange-man experience. Sort of like lightning not striking twice: I was immune. What was most disturbing initially about this man was that he seemed so unsurprised to see
me
, which made me suspect he had been watching me and had deliberately engineered the near collision. He had the kind of face I’ve always hated: full, wet lips and a sinister mustache, pale narrow eyes, flushed cheeks. He looked sort of hot and
damp
, like he had just gotten out of the shower, only not as clean.

“You must be one of those beauty queen girls,” he said. Which was harmless enough because it was true and also obvious; the hotel was totally overrun with us, and I was carrying a dance costume over my arm. But maybe it was just his stating of the obvious that gave me the creeps.
Act normal,
I thought, and took a sip of my Coke.

“Think you’ve got a chance?”

I shrugged. “You never know.” Which was true; you never did. The judges had issues of their own.

“Modest, too!” he leered, pretending to be impressed. And he knew that I knew that he was pretending, which meant that he knew that I knew that this was a weird encounter, not actually normal at all. Which made it all the more messed up.

The man stood between me and the hallway; I was basically trapped in the vending nook. “Well, wish me luck then,” I said, mustering all the poise I had. I was very well trained, after all. “I’ve got to get back to my mom.”
You have no idea who you’re fucking with
, I thought. I reviewed self-defense techniques: Knee to the groin. Go for the eyeballs. I watched him carefully, waiting.

He didn’t move. In some way I couldn’t explain, he seemed to widen, to fill the space more completely. To try slipping past him would be to admit that I knew I was trapped. “Tell you what,” he said. “You let me have a sip of that Coke, I’ll wish you luck.”

This caught me off guard. I stared at him in horror for about a second too long. It was like he had asked me for a kiss. His lips would be where mine had been. I couldn’t imagine anything more disgusting. “You worried I got cooties?” Behind his wet smile he seemed to be laughing at me.

“No, here,” I said, coming to my senses and thrusting the can at him. He kept his eyes on mine as he lifted it to his lips. As he swallowed, I darted past him, unable to avoid brushing against him. “Keep it, asshole!” I called over my shoulder. He was raising my Coke to me in a mock toast when I turned and ran.

When I got to room 914 I pounded on the door, not willing to waste time digging in my bag for my room key. Gail didn’t answer right away. When she did, she looked pissed. She was still in her robe. “You’re back earlier than I thought,” she said. As if I could control the rehearsal schedule.

“Sorry,” I said, only bothering with the faintest hint of sarcasm. I tried to edge past her, wanting a closed door between me and Mr. Spittle-mouth.

“What do you think you’re looking at?” Gail said. She sounded weirdly suspicious, and I was perceptive enough to be able to tell that it was the kind of suspicion that’s caused by fear; a sign of guilt. I looked past her and took in the tumbled bed, the silent television, the room service tray with two bottles of beer and two empty plates on it. Gail’s crazy hair, her blurred lips. And the smell: like sweat, but worse.

It was him
, I thought, too dumbfounded to say anything. The wet-mouthed man. I felt like I was looking down at her from a very high perch; like looking at a chicken from the top of a silo, say. She looked small, stupid, lost. Pecking frantically.

I had her. We both knew it.

*   *   *

I saw him at the pageant the next day. He was the father of Miss Teen Kearney, who was plumpish and unpleasant and not one of the girls who worried me. Gail saw me looking and gave me a glare—illogically, since she couldn’t have known that I would recognize him as her visitor—but not before he had noticed me and sent a moistly conspiratorial smile.

Two days later, I won the state title. All along I felt like I was moving in a dream; I had this weird, calm confidence at each stage of the competition. I chattered eloquently through my interview, whirled through my ballet piece, strutted across the stage like I had been born in high heels and an evening gown. I felt so sure that I would win that when I did, I had to pretend to be overwhelmed and surprised and overcome when they fitted the rhinestone tiara on my head and everyone hugged me and the cameras flashed. I was good at pretending.

What I was really thinking was
What’s next
? This crown had been my goal (not to mention Gail’s) for a long, long time, but instead of feeling triumphant, I was impatient, anxious.
What’s next? Now what?
The national competition was the obvious answer; Gail was already talking about it. Plotting mascara strategies. But suddenly a bigger pageant win wasn’t enough; I wanted something not just bigger but
different
.

I rode home with Daddy in his truck, despite Gail’s transparently fake pleas to keep her company. All my dresses and crap were packed into Gail’s car with her frosty face. The truck smelled like the farm, and the radio wasn’t working; Daddy and I rode in silence most of the way. He kept his eyes on the straight dark highway; I closed mine, mostly, and looked at the lights inside my head. At some point, though, something changed in the space between us, and I knew that we had established a truce. It didn’t matter if we understood each other’s choices or thought they were stupid. What mattered lay deeper, safe from Gail or crowns or whatever else the world had in store for us. Or so I thought then. We didn’t exactly toss the word
love
around in my family, but I knew it was there. I’ve hung onto that moment for a long, long time.

Gail drove behind us the whole way home, as if unwilling to trust us out of her sight; her headlights flickered pissily in the rearview mirror. “Woman ought to know better than to tailgate someone for a hundred miles,” Daddy muttered at one point—coming as close as I’d ever heard him to directly criticizing Gail. But I knew exactly why her headlights were probing the cab of the truck so insistently. She was wondering whether I would tell him about the bed, the man, the fake headache. Whether I would tell him, and what.

It was tempting as hell, that’s for sure. But some instinct told me to bite my tongue.
Wait and see
, said a voice in my head. And because “wait and see” was more Daddy’s phrase than Gail’s, I decided that I would. I knew this wasn’t a card I could afford to throw away.

Lois

I returned to a sweltering early August, the tail end of summer. It seemed like another world. The inn itself was air-conditioned, but our quarters were not. I retreated to the shady back porch and read in the hammock, day after day. I walked sometimes in the woods behind the house; I had grown unaccustomed to the freedom to roam as I pleased in the daytime and felt a pressing need to stretch my long-confined body, but I couldn’t stand to go into town, where I was convinced that people stared at me. Probably they did; I was a curiosity, a story everyone told, a cautionary tale for young girls. I would have been a media heroine of sorts, had we allowed this to happen, but we did not. When reporters turned up at the inn, my parents drove them away; they screened calls with a fierce vigilance that betrayed the depth of their fear and anger. I wanted only to be left alone, and my parents wanted to pretend nothing had happened.