The Miss America Family Read online

  Mitzie went right to her. She stood beside her. She said, “Everything’s okay, right?”

  And my mother said, “I shot your father, but he seems to be fine.” We could hear Dilworth talking on the downstairs phone, the wince in his voice. His blood marked things here and there around the room. Mitzie’s eyes were wide, taking it all in. She hiccuped a little sob but didn’t cry, not really. She started talking in her screechy voice about swimming and her friend Bonnie’s new bike with pom-poms streaming from the handlebars.

  My mother said, “That’s nice,” and “Would you like pompoms?”

  Mitzie said she would, in fact, but she could wait for a birthday. “Are you going somewhere?” Mitzie asked.

  “I believe so,” my mother said. That’s when she got up and dressed in the pantsuit and started packing her bag. “Someone will come for me. That’s what happens in a case like this. Some sort of professional. I’m not sure, really. It’s my first time.” And so my mother finessed shooting Dilworth. In fact, the more she talked to Mitzie about the novelty of the evening’s events, the calmer she got. Mitzie, too, calmed down, buying my mother’s explanation that things like this happen, that it was new to us, but that it’s something that’s almost bound to happen eventually to every American family, like the death of a beloved pet, but maybe not even that tragic, maybe just the breakdown of an old car.

  I walked downstairs where I found Dilworth and followed his orders. I called my mother’s psychiatrist. It was obvious from his craggy voice that he’d been asleep, and who wouldn’t have been? It was the middle of the night. I said, “I’m Pixie Stocker’s son and we’ve got a situation here.”

  “What kind?” the doctor asked.

  “The serious kind,” I said. “I don’t want to say that my mother shot her husband, but it seems like my mother shot her husband, in the arm, only. He’s on his way to the hospital right now. Maybe she was just cleaning the gun out.”

  The doctor said that he’d be right over, and I waited on the front stoop. I could hear Mitzie through the open upstairs window, chattering about the sag of her ballet tights at the crotch and how much the Worthingtons’ cats seemed to like her, that Mrs. Worthington said that maybe she’d give Mitzie a kitten one day, if her parents approved.

  The doctor was old and bowlegged. He walked up the path like a rocking bowling pin just about to tip over. He had some other people with him, two stocky men in jeans, T-shirts, and white coats, like sloppy scientists, and he told me that he was going to take her to the hospital, that it was where she needed to be. I pointed upstairs, but I couldn’t go up to watch. I couldn’t stomach my mother’s sweet disposition, the way she’d say, “Oh, just one moment please,” as she remembered her toothbrush or eyelash curler.

  My mother didn’t take long. But before she walked out the front door toward the waiting car, she said, “Ezra?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you be here when I get home?”

  I nodded, because I was choked up all of a sudden, scared, I guess, because nobody else was. And then I said it out loud, because I knew she wasn’t really looking at me. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be here.” But even as I said it, I knew that I probably wouldn’t be there, that Dilworth would probably start working on farming me out, and that I’d be working hard to get farmed out. I felt naked and folded my arms across my bare chest.

  She said, “You know, it’s already done. There’s nothing to do now but let it play itself out as gracefully as possible.”

  The doctor took her arm. They walked together to the car. The door was open. Its interior light lit the brick path. The two stocky guys sat in the front seat. The doctor sat in the back and my mother was seated beside him, her soft, blond hair lit up on top of her head, and then someone closed the door. The light went out. Headlights flared and they pulled out of the driveway. I was standing with my empty hands at my sides.

  Mitzie said, “It’ll be okay. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Across the street, I could see Mrs. Worthington in her bay window. Her living room was dark, but there was just enough light from the dining room to show the outline of her body, shoulders hunched, one hand up to the window to cut the glare, a cat stretched out on the sill. I tried to imagine what she saw: my mother taken away in the dark car, and me and Mitzie alone on the step, my skinny chest and Mitzie in her nightgown.

  I said, “No, Mitz, it’s not all going to be okay. Everything is not fine.”

  “What do you mean, Ezra? Mommy said so. Didn’t you hear her?”

  I glanced down at Mitzie, her eyes filled with water now. It was hot enough out, but she looked like she was shivering; the hem of her nightgown shook. “I must not have heard her say that,” I said. “I must have missed that. I guess you’re right.” I felt like I was going to cry and I didn’t want Mitzie to see me crying. “Go up to bed. It’s late.”

  “Not till you say it, Ezra. Not till you say it’s all going to be all right.”

  “It will,” I said. “Everything will be all right.”

  She turned away and trotted upstairs. The wind was warm. I wanted to believe what I’d said, but I couldn’t.

  As Dilworth had requested, Helga arrived soon after in her trusty red Ford Escort with its bent radio antenna. She helped Mitzie fall asleep, humming what sounded like patriotic German marches, even though Mitzie could have fallen asleep just fine by herself. She now seemed more fine than she’d ever been, as calm as Mitzie Stocker gets. I fell asleep on the living-room sofa for a few short hours. Helga had me up early, pushing her meaty hand into my thigh, bouncing me into the sofa cushion. She had already packed a bag for me.

  “Your father is comink,” she said. “He’s on his way to pick you up and take you to Baltimore with him.”

  I’d been to the city a number of times before with my mother on shopping trips and once with Dilworth to an Orioles game, where we wore matching hats and pretended to like each other. But I’d never been anywhere with my father, really, much less to a different city. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean, he usually just takes me to the Columbus Inn for crab and corn bisque.”

  Helga was firm. “He will take over your care for a while. Until Mrs. Stocker iss home and running her householt again.”

  Sure enough, my father pulled up in the driveway and beeped the horn of a shiny silver convertible, top down. I wouldn’t even ask because I knew it was not his. He hopped out of the driver’s seat, wearing a pair of small, round sunglasses, faded jeans, a one-pocket T-shirt. He wasn’t tan as much as he was even. His wavy hair was receding just a little up front but was longish and curly in the back. He was handsome, embarrassingly so. It made me shrink.

  He said, “Hello, Mitzie. Helga.”

  Mitzie waved and Helga nodded.

  My father took my bag for me, gallantly, like I was a girl and I let him. I mean, I wasn’t going to hold on to it and get into a tug of war. “Here we go. A road trip!”

  Helga and Mitzie had followed me to the door. “Be careful,” Helga said, eyeing my father.

  Mitzie said, “I wish I could come with you, Ezra.” She hadn’t been remotely invited. “But I’ve got a lot to do here.”

  I said, “I know. But don’t take it so seriously.”

  “I won’t,” she said, but she seemed determined. I wondered who was going to visit my grandmother and if Helga was really taking care of her birds. I remembered suddenly the dead bird in the Nescafé jar hidden in the Pinkerings’ pachysandra—unfinished business.

  My father threw my bag in the backseat, and we climbed in, buckled our seatbelts, and zipped out of the driveway and down the street, passing by the neat lawns and stone walkways. It looked pretty, manicured, delicate.

  “So,” he said. “I hear your mother shot the old tight end.” His tone was cavalier, but there was a nervousness in his eyes, a flickering, that led me to believe he was concerned.

  “Yep,” I said, but I felt a little defensive. My father always started out too chummy.
I hated that, and I was feeling bad for Dilworth. I remember how he’d been with me alone in the kitchen, proud of my conquest of “the Pinkering girl.” “You don’t know him,” I said, but I think I meant, You don’t know me. “He’s not so bad.”

  “No, not now,” he said. “I mean, he got shot. He didn’t deserve to get shot.”

  “He was a quarterback,” I said.

  “Right. That’s right.” My father drove with only one wrist on the wheel, his hair whipping around on top of his head. “I blame marriage,” he said. “It’s not a healthy way for people to live. Especially not your mother.”

  “I think she liked being married to you,” I said.

  “Oh, God, no! Who would want to be married to me? I turn into Clark Kent, always trying desperately to stay Clark Kent. I lose my cape completely. I’m no fun and then, well, I screw it up. One day I just can’t pass another telephone booth.” He smiled at me but could tell I wasn’t interested. “That’s a bad analogy, though. I mean, I’m no superhero. We all know that.”

  “I’d hate to be Superman,” I said. “No pockets. You can’t be casual in a getup like that.” It wasn’t my joke. I’d heard Christopher Reeve say something like that once.

  My dad laughed. “So, you’re okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. I was still thinking of my mother, how I couldn’t do anything for my mother, how I’d done what Dilworth told me to do, and I felt like I’d betrayed her. On top of that, I’d told her I’d be there when she got home, and here I was gone already. I imagined her in a white hospital room with the bowling-pin–shaped doctor at her side and then I remembered Pete Duvet describing the particulars of being crazy, talking to puppets, doing crafts, being asked how he felt about everything. I wondered if my mother was doing any of these things, if they were making her take pills coated in peanut butter, and if these pills made her talk about that night in her parents’ house when she was just a kid my age, with her mother screaming and her dad and her dead brother, Cliff. I was thinking the words, My mother shot her husband while he was asleep in bed. My mother’s in an insane asylum, even though nobody had called it that or called it anything, for that matter. But saying it over and over didn’t make it any more real.

  My father told me where we were headed. “We’re staying with a friend of mine, with his parents, actually, where he’s been staying since a messy breakup. It’s not the best circumstance. It’s not optimal, but I promised we’d visit for a little while. I promised I’d stop by, and explained your situation to him as well.” I wondered how he’d done that: Poor kid’s mother shot her husband. Poor kid’s mom’s in the nuthouse. “Plus, there’s an opportunity in Baltimore that I can’t pass up, a big one. My ship’s coming in.” He turned to me and smiled, showing all of his white teeth, and flicked his eyebrows up and down. I was tired of all of his little schemes, lofty in their vagueness. He went on, “Plus, the way this guy puts it, his parents could eat him alive.” I pictured monsters. He paused. “You tired? You look tired. You can sleep if you want to.”

  I couldn’t sleep, but I didn’t feel like talking. So I tilted the seat back and stared at the blue sky, the clouds, swag after swag of black power lines. I looked up into the cabs of eighteen-wheelers, the tanned arms of truckers, their elbows cocked out of windows.

  When we started to wind through the city, I propped the seat up. The stop-and-start traffic made it hot, the sun beating down on the top of my head. People noticed the car and stared at us, disappointed, I thought, in just seeing me in the passenger’s seat, not a blonde to go along with my father, not, for example, an exquisite beauty like my mother, but just some pip-squeaky kid.

  I watched people clumped at an intersection, a girl adjusting her underwear by reaching up under a short pink skirt. We drove away from downtown, the harbor, the Domino Sugar sign, up Charles Street, past Johns Hopkins and some big stately homes with yards. Finally, we ended up on York Road. We passed a WE BLEACH TEETH billboard, a check-cashing store, a Chinese restaurant with its string of plastic colored lanterns and plate-glass storefront painting of a red dragon.

  “This isn’t the most direct route,” my father confessed, “but I think we’re getting closer.” And then, changing the subject, he said, “I should warn you that Richard—that’s the guy we’re visiting—he’s very gay. I forget to warn people. He’ll look tame today because he’s with his parents, but he’s very flamboyant. I don’t know how many gay people you know, I mean besides me, and so I thought I’d just warn you.” And so this was how my father told me he was gay. Quite simply, he told me only when he had to tell me, when he was about to get busted; I’d realize soon enough that Richard was a loose cannon, capable of saying anything. My arrival had come up unexpectedly. My father hadn’t had time to figure out another plan. In his defense, he probably hoped that I knew, that by sixteen, I’d put the pieces of the puzzle together, or somebody had just come out with it. In any case, I hadn’t known, and it was shitty timing, wasn’t it? The worst timing of all. I mean, my mother had just shot her husband, for Chrissakes.

  “What do you mean, besides you?” I said, because I had no idea what he meant.

  “I mean that besides me I don’t know if you know any gay people.” The car was slowing down now. My dad was looking up at house numbers, trying to be casual, as if it were just a glitch, a momentary miscommunication in our little chitchat. But he was nervous, too nervous for someone just glancing at doorways. He was gripping the wheel tightly now, and there were little bubbles of sweat on his forehead.

  “You mean you’re gay?” I said.

  He pulled the car over in front of a fire hydrant and looked at me, both hands still on the wheel. “Of course!” he said, incredulous, but fake, too. He knew that I didn’t know. He had to make sure I knew before I met Richard, before Richard let it slip somehow, and this was the way he did it, by pretending not to know that I didn’t know. “Didn’t you know that?”

  “I thought you were in politics. I thought you were like a politician!”

  “Is that what your mother told you?” I nodded.

  “Your mother romanticizes me. I gave up politics years ago, like everyone else. Back in the ’60s everything was political. But that doesn’t work. I mean, I can’t very well be out with everyone I meet. I’m a businessman. I always figured you knew, though. I mean, how couldn’t you!” He was a little breathless, his eyes exhausted but lifted up by his raised eyebrows as if still flabbergasted, in a complete and utter state of shock, almost as if it were my fault for not having been told.

  I was pissed that I was the last to know. I thought of how my mother always spoke of my father, all of that business of “He is who he is” and “You can’t change somebody,” that he was trying to buy some life for himself. I thought of how Dilworth never talked about him at all—which I suppose was a real act of restraint, a kindness almost, since Dilworth was the type to use all his ammo. But at the same time, I remembered Dilworth hadn’t thought I’d had it in me to umph Janie Pinkering. I now realized that he’d thought I was gay, like my old man! I decided that British had been one big code for gay, the same way Dilworth would say, “He’s a little man, very intelligent,” meaning Jewish. Even Helga that morning had eyed my father suspiciously. She was probably in on the secret. Everyone knew! I was disgusted.

  “I know plenty of gays!” I said, indignant. “Plenty.” But I didn’t really. I’d only heard rumors about the teacher at St. Andrew’s with his homemade rockets, the one Rudy thought was gay, and that time in the high weeds when Rudy got real weird. I turned away from my father, looking at the neighborhood, the gutter littered with glass and plastic bags. It was a shitty part of town. Broken-down row houses, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and a pancake house up the street. We were the only white people in view, at the bus stop, the flag-happy car dealership across the street. I thought, I could get shot here in the silver convertible. Shot and killed with my gay father. It seemed to me now that everyone had guns and were
just itching to use them. I imagined the L.A. girls I’d always pictured him with, blondes in bikinis, and suddenly their chests grew hard, their jaws square. They grew Adam’s apples and muscled arms. I imagined my father kissing one of them, his perfect face kissing a man’s tough lips, the coarseness of his stubble, my father’s hands running through another man’s hair, and I wondered, although I had some pretty sick ideas, what exactly my father did with his lovers next, if they had sex and what kind, if my father had ever taken it. I thought, My father’s a fucking faggot, an L.A. fag, and how I could just add that on to My mother shot her husband. She’s in the nuthouse. That the two went together nicely; it was just perfect! I thought of that day Rudy and I’d gotten stoned and spied on some supposedly naked women, and Rudy went crazy, really, and pulled out his dick in the high weeds all lit up with sun. I thought about opening the door and throwing up on the street. I wished I hadn’t let my father carry my bag to the car for me.

  “We’re here,” he said, regretting it, but not really regretting it either. I mean he’d timed this thing so he could weasel his way out of it. He pointed to a house, slightly tilted forward from the row, like a bucktooth. It was a quaint house with flower boxes and the typical Baltimore fresh-scrubbed front stoop. I figured they’d held on to the place even though everything changed around them.