Pretty Ugly: A Novel (2 page)
Miranda knew it was God’s punishment for her shoplifting and vanity, but the truth was much less supernatural: Her Curves had been recalled by the FDA nine months earlier for being “deceptive and dangerous.” After losing a class-action lawsuit—which revealed, among other things, that the cream had no set formula and was manufactured in an unsanitary former munitions factory in Vietnam—the now bankrupt parent company of Her Curves had been mandated by a federal judge to immediately recall all of its North American products. But Mr. Wiggins, who spent most afternoons drinking whiskey and shooting guns in the alley behind the drugstore, ignored the notice. To the product’s credit, the girl’s chest did noticeably swell up, if only for a few agonizing weeks.
Because Miranda had stolen the cream, she was forced to hide her shame with high-neck sweaters and scarves: a peculiar look for an oppressively humid Kentucky June, but she really had no other choice. If her parents had found out, they would have insisted on taking her to the doctor, and that nightmare was
not
going to happen. Despite being a teenager, Miranda still went to her pediatrician, a kindly old man who had also been her Sunday school teacher since second grade. Odds are he would want to know how she’d acquired the burns, and how was she supposed to explain that?
“Well, Dr. Johnson, I wanted to enter a beauty pageant, because I think I’m so beautiful, but there’s no way I could win with my tiny little mosquito bites so I shoplifted some cream from Mr. Wiggins’s drugstore that was supposed to give me enormous boobs, but it was defective and burned my little-girl chest and now I have scabs on my nipples. Would you please look at them? Thanks!”
The thought of that conversation was worse than nipple scabs, so Miranda chose to suffer in silence.
With the pageant now just weeks away, Miranda found herself right back where she’d started: flat chested and desperate. Undeterred, she charged ahead with her backup plan and took two Nu Woman pills. After an abrupt and painful period that felt like a gallon of spicy salsa fell out of her, she decided just to go with what the good Lord gave her—toilet paper, to stuff her top. It wasn’t very original, but she was pretty sure it also wouldn’t burn the lining of her uterus, either.
Two weeks later, Miranda sat backstage at the Miss Daviess County Fair Pageant nervously curling her hair. In the off months, the unairconditioned barn wood building served as storage for the fairgrounds’ numerous maintenance vehicles as well as home to an ever-growing family of rats. The sweet smell of gasoline and cut grass mixed with the oppressive humidity made the air feel thick and flammable. Even the slighest breeze would have made a world of difference, but in 1991 a local judge fell out of a nearby tree while taking pictures of the contestants changing clothes, and since then the doors were ordered to remain closed during pageants. Putting on makeup was like trying to paint a waterfall. Thankfully, the pageant itself took place outdoors with the closest audience member a good fifteen yards away.
Halfway through the pageant, Miranda was feeling like a contender. Her sportswear outfit looked great, much better than what the other girls, even the rich ones, wore, and her interview question was practically gift wrapped: “Who in your life do you look up to the most?”
Smiling confidently, she answered, “I would have to say my grandmother, because she’s the one who took me to church for the first time and introduced me to Jesus Christ, my personal Lord and Savior.”
The crowd ate it up like deep-fried pickles. The only acceptable role models for young girls in a Kentucky pageant were their grandmothers and Jesus, and Miranda had name-checked them both without sounding like she was pandering. The audience was on her side, and based on the judges’ approving nods she’d obviously impressed them, too. But none of that mattered. The bathing suit competition was next.
At her dressing station—a three-quarter-inch slab of plywood on a couple of sawhorses—Miranda nearly shit a Chevy when she reached into her bag and found an unfamiliar bathing suit.
“Who stole my suit?” she yelled.
Most questions shouted backstage began with “Who stole my…” and were usually ignored save for the random “not me” barked from Nikki Rummage a bucktoothed, spaghetti-thin redhead hoping, at the very least, to come out of the experience with an attractive friend or two. When no one responded, Miranda scanned the room and mentally accused, tried, and convicted several girls she didn’t like.
A note was pinned to the suit, and she quickly snatched it off. “Thought you might could use a little lift! You are a beautiful champion. Have fun and good luck. Love, Mom.”
Padding had been lovingly sewn into the bust, filling it out to a generous and tasteful B-cup. Miranda swallowed the sour knot growing in her throat.
What a reasonable solution,
she thought, shoving the Her Curves incident to the back of her mind, on a very high shelf, where it would be ignored and then forgotten about forever. Slipping into the modest turquoise one-piece, she checked herself in the communal full-length mirror and was charmed by the tastefully bosomed young woman smiling back at her. As a finishing touch, Miranda rubbed two arcing streaks of dark foundation onto her chest, hoping that from a distance it would create the illusion of cleavage.
Perfect,
she thought.
Now … let’s go show ’em what you’ve got.
With a chestful of confidence, Miranda strutted across the asphalt stage and relished the audience’s polite applause, exuberant cheers, and wildly inappropriate catcalls. Miranda’s smile, like her breasts, had never been bigger.
When the time came, all nineteen contestants lined up across the stage and waited for special guest judge Kentucky State Representative Donnie Lane Mather (D-Beaver Dam) to announce the winners.
“Look at these girls up here,” Representative Mather said. “Don’t they just look good enough to eat?”
Marlene Martin, the pageant host and county’s best church singer, smiled through her glistening teeth. “Delicious, Donnie. Just delicious.”
“And now the winners,” Representative Mather continued. “Miss Congeniality
and
Fourth Runner-up goes to … Rose Maddox!”
The audience clapped as Rose, an inexplicably popular gossip who’d gone to college the year before and had apparently traded her virginity for sixteen pounds of leg fat, fake-cried as the reigning queen, Kitty Price, handed Rose her trophy and fifth-place sash.
“Third Runner-up is … April Morgan.”
An audible gasp rose from the crowd. April was a popular cheerleader who was dating the son of the pageant director, and she’d been expected to finish much higher.
“Our Second Runner-up is … Miranda Ford!”
When Miranda heard her name, she accepted her third-place sash from Kitty with a warm smile and sincere hug. However, she wasn’t quite sure that any smile would be able to mask her disappointment. After everything she had been through, Miranda had convinced herself that not only
could
she win but that she
deserved
to win. Her disappointment, however, would not last long. The Daviess County Fair Pageant wasn’t quite done with Miranda Ford.
Three months later, the winner of the pageant, Missy Hale, was forced to relinquish her crown after informing the pageant committee she had married her boyfriend, who she was “pretty sure” was the same guy who got her pregnant. Promoted to First Runner-up, Miranda was told she should be ready to take the crown in the unlikely event that the new queen, former First Runner-up Alexandra Black, was not able to fulfill her duties. And then, just as if God Himself had ordained it, six days before Christmas, Alexandra—along with her uncle, sister, mother, and mother’s boyfriend—were arrested for felony production of crystal meth with intent to distribute.
Miranda’s reign lasted only seven months, but it was one of the most exciting periods of her life. Her picture was in the paper almost every other week, and everywhere she went little kids asked for her autograph. At school, she immediately skipped several rungs of the social ladder and soon went from being a dedicated yet anonymous 4-H member to being recruited for Drama Club vice president. Her prefame friends accused her of becoming “two-faced” and “conceited.” Miranda just shrugged it off as jealousy, but they weren’t wrong. She
was
acting different, because she
was
different. Miranda was a local celebrity now—and she liked it. A lot.
“Look,” she told Lori Caldwell, a close friend since kindergarten, “I have responsibilities now. People count on me. And that means I’m going to have less time for my friends. And if you can’t accept that, then maybe it’s not me who’s being conceited. Maybe it’s
you
for not understanding what
I’m
going through.”
It’s like she said in that interview with the school paper, “Being me can be overwhelming sometimes. I mean, I can totally relate to the pressures of someone like Princess Diana.” She paused to let the scrawny sophomore reporter, who had once tried to kiss her on a church hayride, really
hear
her. “It just never ends, you know? Someone’s always wanting a picture or a hug or just a kind word. But that’s my job now, I guess, touching people’s lives and stuff. And I’m just grateful to have it.”
For seven glorious months, Miranda got to breathe the rarified air of royalty. It’s like she said in her memoir: “I was famous, which meant I was special. And in a world that reveres such things, why wouldn’t I want the same for my daughter?”
“Of course your children are beautiful. But are they
sexy
enough?” Miranda Ford Miller repeated the words out loud to make sure she’d read the ad correctly.
What an appalling question,
she thought. “As if I don’t already have enough to think about.”
After eight and a half years and three hundred sixty-three pageants, Miranda was pretty sure she’d thought of everything, but
this
had never even occurred to her. What kind of pageant mother was she, anyway?
“Dammit,” she whispered, drumming her fingers on the faded yellow Formica of her kitchen table. If she’d overlooked something as fundamental as her nine-year-old daughter’s sex appeal, what else had she missed?
To be sure, Miranda had done a lot right. Her daughter, Bailey, was a legend on the Southern United States pageant circuit, having racked up one hundred twenty-eight wins and ninety-six runner-up titles in her career, placing her fifth on the all-time winners’ list according to the Southern Pageant Association’s Web site. A born competitor and naturally (for the most part) beautiful, Bailey had a commanding stage presence and carried herself with the grace and elegance of a high-heeled gazelle. Her talent, a grueling tribute to Cirque du Soleil’s K
À
set to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” was provocative and perfectly executed, and no child flirted with the judges as intuitively as Bailey Miranda Miller. She was the total package. But according to Glamour Time Photography Studio, that wasn’t enough. Apparently, she also had to be sexy.
Are your children sexy enough?
The words stuck in her head like a bad song.
“I can’t deal with this right now,” she said, and tossed the ad aside like everything else that bothered her. Adjusting the pumpkin and turkey table runner, which was only a few months from turning a corner and being appropriately seasonal again, Miranda pretended to ignore the three days’ worth of dirty dishes snaking out of the sink and across the cracked tile of the counter to focus on what was important: the weekend and the 29th Annual Little Most Beautiful Princess Pageant. Bailey would be relinquishing her crown as Junior Miss Beautiful, and not a moment too soon. What with her pushing seventy-five pounds and all.
Miranda was not proud of how she judged her daughter’s appearance, but the harsh reality was that the average nine-year-old girl weighed sixty-three point eight pounds. Bailey was in the eighty-fourth percentile for weight, and
that
made her vulnerable. No doubt the other mothers had noticed Bailey’s extra bulk just like Miranda noticed the numerous flaws in their girls. Melody Norton’s hair extensions looked (and smelled) like the horsehair they were; Karliegh Sandefur’s flipper (the dental prosthetic that filled in the gaps of her missing baby teeth) only highlighted the fact that her new adult teeth were stained and crooked; and all the makeup in the world couldn’t hide the fact that JoBeth Kanton was just plain ugly. But all of that was better than fat. Fat was unforgivable. Fat was fatal.
Parents who entered their overweight children in beauty pageants were worse than parents who encouraged their handicapped children to play sports. They think they’re doing the right thing, showing the kids that they’re “just like everyone else,” but everyone else, including the handicapped kids, knows they’re not. It just slows everything down and makes people uncomfortable. “Some parents,” Miranda liked to say, “shouldn’t be.”
Most overweight girls who participated in pageants did so because their parents thought it would be good for them, which was akin to saying, “Hey, honey, you know how everyone at school makes fun of your weight? Well, I think you’d feel much better about yourself if you put on a bathing suit and stood next to a cheerleader on a stage under a spotlight in a room full of strangers.” Miranda called them charity girls. Parents of the serious competitors were usually pretty tolerant of charity girls because they never won anything except maybe Congeniality, and there wasn’t a cash prize for that. And that was the problem. Pageants were expensive, and if Bailey didn’t remain diligent, and count every calorie, she would balloon right out of a career.
Miranda had started to suspect Bailey was eating an extra lunch at school. At the very least she was consuming more than the four-hundred-calorie meals Miranda had paid a nutritionist to prepare and deliver every morning. And she was very close to proving it before being asked to leave the school grounds for loitering. Miranda had tried everything to help her daughter lose weight: a gym membership that came with ten private pole-dancing lessons; a consultation with an overly puritanical plastic surgeon who refused to even discuss performing liposuction on a child, even when Miranda offered to pay double; and the “health clinic” in Puerto Rico where Tina Murray had taken her seven-year-old daughter Sephora to get excess fat removed from her love handles and injected into her lips. Miranda decided to put a pin in Puerto Rico when Sephora contracted a still unidentified infection that left her seventy percent deaf in one ear and half of her bottom lip permanently blue.