The Miss America Family Read online

  The rest is sketchy, her stories, a ratty photo album kept in the back of her closet with her dusty accordion box. There’s a diary up there, too. I’ve seen it a couple of times, but would never open it. I don’t want to know any more than I already do. I know too much about my mother already.

  Sometimes I look at my mom when she’s not looking at me, like I did that morning before Dilworth marched in to announce my summer plans. She still had that full, teased blond hair. The skin around her blue eyes had gotten softer. She had a few wrinkles, but her makeup was always perfect, her lips always glossy. I’d seen lots of pictures of her when she was younger. I’ve seen the old reel-to-reel tape of the beauty pageant a bunch of times before. Dilworth liked to pull it out every once in a while when he had a trapped audience, a little dinner party usually made up of his golf friends or dental buddies and their wives, although this type of get-together had eventually stopped happening. He’d let it slip that she was in the pageant ages ago and that they had the old footage in a dusty closet upstairs. Then the guests would say, “Oh, let’s see it,” the women politely, the men more adamant, “C’mon, Pix, bring it down!” and even though he made fun of it, singing a bad Bert Parks rendition of “There She Goes, Miss America,” he’d also say, “Yeah, Pix, let’s have a look-see.” She’d always protest at first, “No, no, c’mon, now. That’s ancient history,” but Dilworth liked to keep control, liked to direct the dinner party from the head of the table with his senseless jokes and scotch-glass gavel. Soon enough, feeling good, a little high on scotch, he’d get his way and there she was on the screen. And once she was up there, he’d get all glassy, sit back and smile at himself for having been smart enough to marry her.

  I’ve always wondered what it was like to see her up there onstage for the first time in your life, as if she weren’t my mom at all, but some beautiful girl, someone anybody could fall in love with, singing—amid the blinking stage-prop octagons—the opening number “The Sound of Young” in her short chiffon cocktail dress, her shiny stiff hair piled high on the crown of her head, the ringlets at her cheeks. Her talent isn’t on the tape, because she didn’t make it to the final ten, but I can imagine her fingers flying over the accordion keys and arm pumping smoothly, her bright, bright smile saying into the microphone how she’d like to help the poor, those in need, especially in war-torn countries; that’s what she’s told me that she said, meaning, I assume, Vietnam, the war-torn country of the era where her brother was about to get blown up. I was thinking, there in the kitchen, how she was so pretty once, still was, and my real dad had been this lean, handsome, ultra-cool type who sang with his eyes closed and had white, white teeth from having been raised on excessive amounts of Wisconsin dairy products. He was still good-looking, too, always on the verge of closing a big deal and making a million dollars. This was back when I thought he lived this mysterious life in L.A. that I’d always imagined to be filled with beautiful blondes in bikinis, beach parties, and volleyball, like a surfer movie—all this, of course, before I found out he was gay. And so I asked my mom there in the kitchen that morning, right out, “Do you think I’m good-looking? I mean all the genes are there.” I didn’t look up from my plate.

  “Men don’t have to be good-looking,” my mother said, sniffing a perfume sample in the magazine. “The world is ruled by ugly men married to beautiful women. Beautiful, young women, Ezra. Don’t forget young. My god, once you hit my age, it’s suddenly midnight and you’re back in your rags with only one glass slipper to show for it all.” My mother was on this kick that she was a faded beauty. You could tell by the way she sighed that she’d decided she was old and that her life was what it was always going to be.

  Her response didn’t help me much. This was my mother being my mother. At St. Andrew’s, I never got the girls. I’m still a kind of sickly kid, not as sickly as my mother once thought I’d be or even still imagines I am, but I was always benched on some freshman or JV second-string team because of an earache, allergies, an itchy rash of a sort that the dermatologist had never seen before. I’ve never known what to say to girls. I ended up telling them about something I’ve read, or some tiny, useless fact that one of my teachers had thrown into a lecture because he was showing off, like John Gough was a blind botanist from the 1600s who identified plants by touching them to his lips or that a kid in China had grown two small extra tongues in puberty. And I’m pretty useless among most of the cool guys. I flinch when somebody throws a ball to me, and cool guys always seem to be tossing a ball around. At St. Andrew’s, I had two good friends. I don’t see much of them these days since I’m no longer a part of the student body. One is named Pete Duvet who’s been to every psychologist in the world—Rogerians, Adlerians, psychoanalysts, and behaviorists. He’s painted pictures, talked to puppets, made little straw hats, and opened up on any desires to fuck his mom—not an attractive woman—and kill his dad, an easier job since the guy’s an asshole. He takes imipramine pills every day, but they give him dry mouth and sweaty palms, the pills chafe his throat, so he coats them in Skippy, jars of which he keeps in his closet, and that doesn’t help the dry mouth. He’s sweaty, always clearing his throat, and he smells like peanut butter. My other friend is Rudy Smithie who’s really the one who should be on the couch. He’s freaked me out before. He’s really not right in the head, but he’s brilliant at masking it. Neither Pete nor Rudy is very athletic either. We’re all pretty scrawny. Once during a faculty versus students soccer game, the physics teacher missed the ball and accidentally punted Rudy into the back of the net. And for a long time after there was the joke that the physics teacher had scored Rudy Smithie.

  I took a sip of juice and asked again, “But am I good-looking?”

  It was quiet for a minute, only my mother snapping magazine pages. She’d rubbed a perfume sample on her wrist and the room was now filled with the musky sweetness. Mitzie was still screeching and tapping overhead. My mother let the magazine rest open on her lap. “Honestly,” she said, “you remind me of your father, that first time I saw him, selling cleanser door-to-door, a sweet Wisconsin boy. Your father. Well, he is who he is. That much you must remember. You can’t change somebody.” And this is the way she always talked about him, vaguely, wistfully. But then we both heard the sound of tires over gravel in the driveway, my stepdad home from golf at the club, where he pays over his head for a membership that he tax-deducts as if he’s only out there on the links to discuss teeth and woo patients. My mother pointed out the window. “Not that smacked ass.”

  We watched my stepdad park his car in the driveway, walk to the trunk, take off the sock pom-pom bonnets of a few of his clubs to inspect them for dirt and sand in their ridges—a picky bastard. He nodded, finding enough to possibly throw off his game. He swung the bag up and over his shoulder. I knew he’d wash them in a bucket later that day. Mitzie was still going at it, full-on, overhead.

  My mother asked, “Are you having sex at school?” I knew she asked me right then because she wanted a quick answer, that she had a snappy one-liner all warmed up and she didn’t really want to get into a big heart-to-heart about it. She isn’t mushy. One thing she’ll tell you that she learned as Miss New Jersey is that you smile even when things suck and somebody else is wearing your crown. She was still looking out at my stepdad’s car although he was strolling up the walkway by then.

  “I don’t think I have to answer that,” I said, swirling a triangle of French toast around in syrup, my ears filling with heat.

  My mother looked at me. “You should have sex,” she said, knowing that my answer meant no, I’d never had sex. For two years, I’d been a virgin at a boarding school where girls were actually lying in their beds just one hallway away, changing their clothes, taking showers. Sometimes it seemed absolutely unbelievable to me that I hadn’t ever had sex just once with one of them, even maybe by accident, something slipping into something. I mean, they were so close and fully naked a couple times a day. My grandmother has her own personal theory of e
volution, that we come from fish. There’s the story of how she came to see me in the hospital only to look at my webbed toes. I’ve theorized about my webbed toes, too, and that maybe I wasn’t meant to be a man but a fish of some sort and that the girls could sense that I wasn’t really a man, that they were instinctively predisposed not to have sex with someone with webbed toes—even though I didn’t know any St. Andrew’s girls who were aware that I have webbed toes; I never went barefoot—but intuitively they sensed that any union with me could lead to an infant fish, with the right mix of recessive genes, not a baby at all. Not that we’d be after a baby, but you see what I mean.

  “It’s best to have sex when you’re young,” my mother added, looking out the window again. I probably got my idea to make up my own set of rules from my mother. She likes to make up life rules, things like: You should always spend money on shoes; you’d be surprised how often you’ll be judged on their quality. When you’re expecting a day of hard work, like, say, moving day, dress nicely and people won’t expect as much from you. And, Everyone should always keep their own private bank account, no matter how deeply in love they think they’ve fallen. She nodded her head after she’d said this one about young sex, as if she’d just made this rule up and, yes, it was a sturdy rule, one good enough to live by, for whatever reasons.

  You can see how I could hate my mom for bringing it up, for saying I’m like my father who only visits once a year, swooping by always in a different convertible borrowed from some “old friend” in NYC, never using the word lover or partner or boyfriend, anything to tip me off, my father, who may as well be a fucking ghost, and for handing me Dilworth Stocker as some sort of manly role model, while even she thinks he’s a joke. And my mother was stunning, telling me to go off and have sex, knowing that I couldn’t get someone like her, a beauty queen.

  That’s when my stepdad came in, propping his clubs in the corner of the kitchen so they wouldn’t thud and clatter to the floor. “So,” he said. “Breakfast at noon. Isn’t this living?”

  My mother shooed him away with her hand, back to her magazine now.

  “Very impressive, son,” he said. “You know that no one will really care about that degree you’ll have one day from some snooty college if you can’t wake up before noon and feed yourself?”

  This wasn’t really an argument with me. I’ve learned that much. This type of thing has nothing to do with me. It was an argument by way of me, through me, but not directed at me. Once upon a time, there was something between Dilworth and my mother. He’d pat her hand, almost shyly, when she laid something down on the table for him and she’d smile. He’d brag to his friends in front of her, “My girl’s world-class,” but that was ages ago. There was no affection left. It evaporated or it got buried. Whatever way affection disappears, theirs was gone.

  “Yes, yes,” my mother said. “And everyone is just swooning over your degree in dentistry from some institute in Baltimore.”

  “And what was it that you did back when we met? What was your line of work again?” He was calling my mom a whore, really, because, I guess, she kind of was for a short time in her life. “I suppose you’d like to go back to that or maybe serving ice cream at a Dairy Queen. There’s got to be something an old Miss New Jersey is good for.” And he laughed. He always laughed at his comments like this, as if it was just a joke not meant to be cruel at all.

  “Am I supposed to take you seriously? A man with frogs on his pants?”

  “They’re turtles,” he shouted. Dilworth was always wound up pretty tight.

  “Tortoises, I think, technically.” I added. “We learned the difference in third-form biology.”

  “Look,” he turned to me. “No one knows what third-form means. Enough of this British schoolboy talk. Americans say freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. You got me? We’re Americans living in America,” he said, as if Dilworth Stocker could exist anywhere else on the planet. He turned to my mom. “I’m not paying that kind of money so he can become British. Much less a British Episcopalian. At the last function, I met the priest and his wife.”

  “Technically, he’s not a priest.” I liked being technical with my stepdad. He had few immunities built up against anything technical that didn’t have to do with teeth. It was also a habit from school. In such a tight community, certain catchphrases take over and soon everybody’s starting each sentence the same way—from the headmaster to the lowest toad. “Technically,” the headmaster would start his sentence, nodding his large headmasterly head. “Technically,” your science teacher would say. And soon enough you’d be turning to your buddy, saying, “Technically.”

  “Of course he’s not a priest. He’s married! That’s my point. Are you all idiots, here? Am I living among idiots or what?” It was little tirades like this that made it almost impossible to take Dilworth Stocker seriously. I looked at him, standing there red-faced, a little blue polo player on the nipple of his pink shirt, and I couldn’t hate him. I could only think that he was a boob, a ridiculous boob. I had to remind myself that his mother took off and he was raised by a furnace salesman, a rough guy hard on the belt, stories Dilworth told when he was making the point that I was raised soft and he was raised the right way to become a man. Dilworth took a deep breath, tried to calm down. “I got you a job. You’ll be in the great outdoors. You’ll get some muscle, a little sun. Maybe you won’t look so pale and runty. Congratulations! You’re Bob Pinkering’s gardener.”

  It was suddenly quiet. Mitzie had finally worn herself out, flopping down on her canopy bed. My mom and I just stared at my stepdad. I didn’t want to be Bob Pinkering’s gardener. Of course, I had no idea then how Janie Pinkering would affect me. I pictured Mrs. Pinkering in a sharp pantsuit, a spry woman stepping out for a hair appointment, leaving me with clippers and a mile of uneven hedge.

  I’d met Janie only one time at somebody’s country club wedding. I remembered her as a twelve-year-old girl with braces, her bangs curled up too tightly with a curling iron. She had a red bubble welt on her forehead where I guessed she’d burned herself wielding the curling iron. She was wearing a taffeta dress that gaped around her shoulders and flapped open at her flat chest. We were introduced and told to talk to each other and even dance, but we ignored each other, eating mints and peanuts off the bar. I might have remembered that she was actually one year older than I was, but she was stuck in my mind as that awkward twelve-year-old, and I figured things had only gotten worse.

  I also knew that the Pinkerings had real money. Dr. Pinkering didn’t make much more than my stepdad, but both Mr. and Mrs. Pinkering came from a long line of money, unlike Dilworth Stocker, the son of a furnace salesman, and Pixie Kitchy, who was raised on nothing but air, her father a delivery man, her mother a seamstress, her brother a mechanic before he was blown up in Vietnam. I imagined that Janie would be off at horseback-riding camp or sailing school. But I didn’t say anything. When Dilworth Stocker made up his mind, he was entrenched—even more like a truck than his usual truck-likeness. I could tell he wanted to say something else, something even more final, a summarizing statement. He liked to sum things up. But there was a pause, my mom and me just staring up into his face, his sunburnt nose, and suddenly he seemed a little wary, shaken, aware that we outnumbered him. He nodded, meaning, So there, I’ve spoken. The truth was that he was already a little afraid of my mother, and he should have been.

  He turned quickly and hustled out of the room, whistling as he took the stairs two at a time as usual. We could hear him turn on the upstairs shower to get the hot water going, the jingle of his belt as he undressed.

  “I guess I’m the Pinkering’s gardener,” I said.

  “It’s good to be something. You’ll like it,” my mother said. I took this to mean that she’d been Miss New Jersey once and now she was just a dentist’s wife. She stood up, straightened, and walked out of the kitchen and upstairs to her bedroom, where, I assumed, she fell asleep on the sofa watching the miniature TV with two white pills dissolving
on her tongue, as she often did.

  Now that she was through with tapping, Mitzie started playing with her Barbies. I could hear her talking for them in a singsong. I just sat there with my syrup-smeared plate in front of me. See, I really had nothing better to do. Soon enough my stepdad walked by on his way to the deck, picking up his shoulder-strap golf bag on his way. His wet hair was slicked back with the black fine-toothed comb that came free with every barbershop hair cut. He sat out there in an Adirondack chair, scrubbing the heads of his clubs, shining them up with a white rag, one at a time.