The Miss America Family Read online

  I walked out the back door toward the pool bungalow in the backyard. I’d talked Dilworth and my mother into letting me live out there for the summer. Pool bungalow sounds nice, a plush idea for the rich, a term my mom has always liked to throw around. Really it’s a one-room shed with wall-to-wall carpeting built on a slab with baseboard heating that doesn’t work, a microwave, a mini-fridge, a bathroom and shower stall. There isn’t really a pool at all. My mother never liked bodies of water, anything someone could drown in, her father having drowned when she was sixteen. She’d filled the pool with dirt so that it was now just a grassed-over mound.

  I passed by Dilworth on the deck. He didn’t look up. He said, “Don’t model yourself after your mother. You’ll end up soft.” He laughed. “Do you know how many times she’s told me she was going to leave me?” He snorted. “It’s only at night when we’re in bed and it’s dark, and she’ll say it real soft when she thinks I’m asleep. But she’d never leave me. I’ll let you in on a secret: your mother needs me. See? She needs Dilworth Stocker. That’s the bottom line.” He laughed some more. “Did you hear that, Pixie?” he yelled up to their closed bedroom window.

  I wondered if it was true. I pictured my mother, her head turned in one direction, Dilworth’s in the other. I’m going to leave you one day, Dilworth. One day, I’ll be gone, just like that. I hoped it was true. “She’s asleep,” I said.

  “It’s one of the few things she can handle.”

  I spent the afternoon on the far side of the bungalow where I’d set up an old folding chair. I tilted my face to the sun and closed my eyes and I thought of the dorm master whose apartment had attached to our dorm rooms the year before, a quiet older bachelor who played with homemade rockets, set off in a nearby field. Rudy thought he was an old fag, but Rudy thought everybody was a fag, which probably means that Rudy’s a fag. (And there was that one time that was weird with Rudy near his dad’s docked boat when we were out in these high weeds spying on some girls, and Rudy kind of came on to me.) And I thought of the minister and his stolid wife who I lived near freshman year, always quiet. When you walked into their place with some sort of question, like the time of the hall meeting, all you could hear was their clock ticking on the mantel. Then I flashed briefly on the breathless Miss Abernathy, a first-year English teacher who’d touted the benefits of perfect pronunciation, projection, posture, and whom Rudy said he heard screaming out, “Fuck me, fuck me,” like a porn queen, from her open bedroom window, her fiancé’s car parked on the street below. I’d asked how he could know it was Miss Abernathy, and he’d said, “Please! Would she stutter it? Would she mumble or slur? No one can project like she can.” I’d have taken living with any of them at the end of the hall over Dilworth and my mother. (Miss Abernathy most of all, for obvious reasons.)

  Eventually, Mitzie appeared, still in her tap shoes with their black-ribbon bows, carrying a baton with pink streamers tied to each end. It was so humid that her curly hair was frizzy, a tight puff on top of her head, like a Q-Tip interrupted by a pink headband. She was thick like her father, but with fine little features, our mom’s nose and chin and upturned eyes. She presented me with a tin of homemade cookies that Helga had made. Helga is the German maid who’s come Tuesdays and Thursdays ever since we moved in, before Mitzie was even born. She’s a big woman with such droopy eyelids that she often has one of them sort of taped up with a butterfly Band-Aid so she can see. She likes to dole out advice, a lot of which makes no sense. I’ve always wondered if she’s using cryptic German clichés that have lost everything in translation. She believes everyone should swim, or, so she says, “They will sink in dis life.” She once tried to teach me to swim while my parents were on a European vacation, and I nearly drowned. That was all my mother needed to hear. That’s when she had the pool filled with dirt, first thing when she got home. I’m still a shabby swimmer.

  Mitzie was always a lonely kid. I remembered being like Mitzie, the only kid in a houseful of estranged adults, their world so lofty and strained, a tightrope, and the kid, me or Mitzie, it doesn’t matter, having to walk that tightrope in the spotlight just to take everybody’s mind off how much they hate everything and each other. There was a time that I knew I was the only thing keeping my mom going. She doesn’t remember it that way. Somehow she’s idealized that string of men, trudging in and out of our house after she divorced my dad. At night, I prayed to get sick. In winter, I snuck outside in the evening with a wet head when my mother was off somewhere picking up men, and I was with a ditsy teenage babysitter talking all raspy into the phone with her boyfriend. I’d take off my shoes and walk around on the freezing pavement. I wanted my lungs to fill up again, so my mother would have to take care of me. And during the days I would be her sweetheart, her doll baby, the perfect child, coloring quietly, singing for her. Once I pushed my face into a birthday cake just to make her laugh.

  It was a lot of pressure, and I could tell Mitzie felt it, too. Of course, I’d outgrown any cuteness, and I’d never been one to bring Dilworth and my mother together anyway, always a sullen obstacle to be shipped off to boarding school. But Mitzie was in the hot seat. I could tell by the way she’d walk into a room where my stepdad and my mom were sitting in their two distant chairs, oceans apart in the same room, the way she’d try to buoy them up with her cuteness, her curls, her tap shoes and princess wand—a tightrope walker, really. They should have just suspended a rope near the ceiling and let her teeter up there with a tutu and umbrella.

  I ate the cookies and watched her twirl her baton just a few feet away. She’d throw it up and drop it, throw and drop, throw and drop, while she gave a little monologue of non sequiturs. Things like: “I wrote a story about a cow who wouldn’t give milk to this angry farmer and a calf named Jenny who saves the day and won first place in a contest at school.” Then she’d say, “Daddy took the door off Mom’s changing room. Took it off the hinges because he was tired of hearing her slam it. But she got a new door with a gold handle that locks. They don’t have fights. They have tiffs.” A distinction that maybe Dilworth had made for her, to console her, but it was a little too British a word for Dilworth. I wondered who else could have taught it to her. It was a little too fancy for my grandmother. She’d have said spats, but mostly avoided conversations with Mitzie, whose voice grated on her nerves. Maybe it came from Helga, a translation of hers from something German that she looked up in a dictionary. It certainly didn’t come from my mother. She’d never soften anything. And then Mitzie’d say, “Don’t tell anybody but I like the color black better than most of the others, because it’s like the dark and because that crayon is always the sharpest.” Finally, digging her baton out of the weeds beside the bungalow, she said, “When I grow up, I’m going to live out here. I’ll probably be a Miss Somebody, too, like Mom was, but I’m not going to have tiffs and lock my door. I’ll be more like you.”

  And I wondered what she could possibly see in me that anyone would want to grow up and be. My ears were probably getting sunburned, not to mention those webbed toes. Maybe she didn’t know about the webbed toes. There’s not even that much to physically grow up into. Mitzie, for god’s sake, will probably tower over me one day. In any case, it made me feel old and wise, almost worldly. “Don’t grow up,” I told her. “It only gets more confusing.”

  Pixie

  How It Begins:

  Moth Wings and Fish Gills

  I can’t begin with the gun. Nothing starts where you think it does. I was a housewife, and I became dangerous. Sometimes it’s the only way possible to regain footing in the world. My mother let her guard down, let her secrets loose, and it changed my life. But by that time, I’d been disappearing into the past for a long while. I can tell you that I remember standing in the frozen foods aisle of the Super Fresh last summer. The outside air smelled like dung from the local mushroom farms, and it was lovely to be in the grocery store, crisp, odorless. I had the glass door propped open, looking for deals on frozen beans or the vegetable medle
y. The chilled air was rising up, fogging the glass, and suddenly I remembered my mother as she charged down 24th Street in the cold, the big buttons on her coat lined up to her throat, her pocketbook—clicking with nitroglycerin pills for her angina—clenched in the lock of her elbow, and me there at her heels, just sixteen. This is how easily I would slip, and I would disappear, letting one detail illuminate the next and the next until I found myself in a memory so well lit that it was hard to distinguish from the present.

  My mother had taken me with her to confession, after which she told me we weren’t going back to church, that there was no need. She walked out of the dark confessional, tall, her head upright, stuffing a tissue into her sweater sleeve. She nodded to me to follow her out onto the church steps. It was cold outside but bright.

  She said, “Every year, the priest tells the story of how Gabriel appeared to Mary and I’ve never understood it. I’ve sat in the pew with all of the heartsick wives, hearing about Gabriel with his sweet talk, no better than a milksop, a drunk in a bar after midnight, no better than any of our husbands, and Gabriel tells her that she’s going to conceive the son of God. Who would believe him, Pixie? What woman would believe him? And Mary asks how it can be, her a virgin. Isn’t she really asking how the child won’t come from rape? I tell you, one day you’ll understand how each year just before the priest tells us Mary’s answer, always the same answer, why some of us are praying she’ll say no, that someone will finally say no. I’ve learned to say it myself, to push the word up from stomach to mouth and then live with the consequences. I’m not going back. You can’t confess a sin you’d commit again if put back in time. I won’t repent.”

  I never interrupted my mother’s speeches on God and the church. It never did any good. It only made her raise her voice and repeat everything until you gave in to it all, nodding along. She liked to say, for example, that we evolved from fish, not the lineage of Adam and his rib, and that every once in a while one of us was born with webbed toes, like the old, fat aunt who’d brought her to Bayonne after her parents were both dead. She’s since claimed Ezra’s toes as proof. She’d learned all about Adam and his rib, yes. And conceded that maybe there were some upstanding citizens who came from Adam’s rib, a bit of mud and breath. “The Lazarskis, maybe, are rib people,” she’d say. “I hear he’s a skin doctor who can remove warts and she teaches piano, has a great big one the size of a pony in her living room. But this family is fish.” She thought that if you come from fish, the world is never quite right, all this air, lungs, the way you think you can see what’s coming, but you can’t really, not even the priests, and here I agreed with her. Could anyone have seen, way back, how my father was going to die? By the time my mother gave up religion, he’d already drowned in the Kill van Kull. He’d jumped in once before, the same way as when he died, with his hands locked behind his back. That time, when he was young and wild, and in love with my mother—he’d described her as a brash-mouthed bony girl swinging her legs off the dock’s edge—he came up with two free fists above his head, shaking water from his hair, beads of light spraying from his head. I knew that my mother’s leaving the church had to do with my dead father. That much was clear.

  That’s what I was thinking about when I closed the fogged-up door on the frozen foods and saw myself glass-reflected, holding my plastic bags of vegetables. I remember, early last summer, catching a reflection of myself when I least expected it, my hips widened by the car door, my blank face in the microwave oven’s flat shine, and more than anything I had the feeling of barely existing, of being nearly invisible. I plopped the bags down in the cart, one front wheel jostling, bucking on its loose bolt. But the rest of the day would be lost. I was considering religion, that there have been times since my mother’s departure from the church when I’ve missed it, that I’ve wished she hadn’t turned her back but had instead found the struggle worthwhile and had passed along some basic faith. Sometimes there’s little I envy more than someone who absolutely, sincerely believes—the type who can hand their worries over to God as if they amount to little more than a pocketful of loose change. Like the check-out woman, maybe, with her chipped front tooth and one slightly dented cheek. I’m sure that I said hello to her, that I asked the bagger, the Gilpin’s boy, if he’d like his first year at Clemson, but I didn’t listen to their responses. Instead I was remembering my confirmation. I chose the name Christina from a book of saints—Christina the Astonishing. She had some sort of fit and was supposedly dead when she flew out of her coffin at her funeral and soared up to the church rafters. The priest and her sister had to talk her into coming down. She hated the smell of the dirty human body so much that she would clamber up trees, perch on weather vanes, and crawl into ovens to escape it. A crazy woman, really, maybe a crazy saint, I mean supposedly she could fly, but I didn’t believe all that rigamarole about saints anyway. I preferred a crazy woman. Sometimes I felt crazy, even then. I didn’t say any of this aloud. I pushed my cart with its pitching front wheel into the parking lot.

  I’ll admit that it’s all a bit gauzy to me. There’s no chronology to memory, and I’m not perfect. My mind still can find a groove in the record and get stuck in a rut, replaying the same bit again and again. My mind is still sometimes more like a damp yard at dusk, fireflies lifting up, lit like a hundred tiny tinderbox fires. I know it doesn’t make sense but I can think of the word memory and see a cloud of moths. And to explain the moths I must start with the only vacation I ever went on with my parents. I was, maybe, twelve, my body just hinting at a figure. It was the last week of the season, and we rented a beach cottage. To get a deal on the cost, my mother offered to help the landlady close up all the little cottages for the winter. This was typical of my mother. She was already nervous about the expense of the trip, and luxury made her uncomfortable, almost itchy. She had a habit of scratching the back of her neck each time she handed over money, as if paying for things could heat up an allergic reaction, an instant rash. She spent most of the vacation scrubbing out cabinets, toilets, shower stalls. I remember watching her make one of the beds in an empty cottage; a moth got sucked up into the billowed sheets. It batted its wings, tacking against the current of air. But the sheet fell, and my mother kneeled on the bed, straightening it with her swift, stiff hands where the moth would stay trapped all winter. I imagined that we would come back the next summer—although I also knew we wouldn’t—and I imagined that I’d lift up the sheet and the moth wouldn’t be dead, reduced to a fine dust of its tiny bones, but it would have multiplied into a million moths, the room filling with tiny white beating wings. Memory can work like that. You can lay something to rest, or so you think, but it isn’t dead. Memory breeds. It swarms. I don’t know that I’m making sense. I don’t know that I’m being clear. But to understand one dangerous act—and it was dangerous, I was a crazy woman—you have to look backward at a rising white sea of moths. It’s not simple. Nothing is, but I’m trying to be as clear as possible.

  I remembered confession, being happy that I no longer had to go. I’d never told the truth, not what I thought of as my own dirty sins, not to anyone, least of all some old chain-smoking priest. I’d say, “I took the Lord’s name in vain three times,” and then I’d fake the Hail Marys. Instead I’d whisper the way I wanted to believe my life would be one day: “Hello, I’m Miss America and this is my perfect family. This is my son, Troy. He plays football. And my daughter, Wendy, who takes piano lessons and tap dancing. And my husband, Stephen. He’s the one in the tweed blazer. We’re all blond and happy.” The way I figured it the world had gone crazy with riots and war. So many of the nice Catholic families at Mt. Carmel Church, good old-fashioned Poles, the ones my mother said came straight from Adam’s rib, had these longhaired kids who smoked dope and burned draft cards. The priest had heard enough of it. He wanted to hear some girl say she’d taken the Lord’s name in vain three times. He wanted to believe in what he saw, a pure girl, a virgin, and I wanted to be that girl, even though I wasn’t. Wh
o would want to be a dirty hippy, listening to Iron Butterfly? I wondered. I’d have done anything to be perfect. The priest probably knew the truth anyway, but together we faked it. Life, as far as I could tell, was as much about faking things as it was anything else.

  If I had confessed honestly, I’d have told the old priest that I’d shoved Emily Post’s blue book of etiquette under my coat at the Bayonne Public Library. I knew it was wrong and that Emily Post herself would have tsk-tsked. I knew that I shouldn’t have been cleaning them out of their manners section one Saturday at a time, but I couldn’t check the books out. The librarian knew me too well. She knew my mother worked as a seamstress with little Chinese women who smoked like stacks, that my dad died because he was a stupid drunk, diving into the river with his hands locked behind his back. Everybody knew that, for God’s sake! She probably even knew that my brother was a shady mechanic, that one day her Buick could have gotten stolen while she shelved books at the Bayonne Public Library, and it might just have wound up with him, so he could make it look completely different to sell it again or sell it for parts, depending on whether she’d taken good care of her precious Buick or not. And even though nobody really knew anything about me—I’d never told anyone about the man, the man who raped me, that I could still see him when I lay down and tried to close my eyes at night, and closing my eyes was like his shadow standing over me, that sometimes even just last summer, almost twenty years later, before the sleeping pills fuzzed over my mind, I could still feel his shadow on me—they could all tell that I was dirty. They knew, I was dead sure, just by looking at me. And I was certain that the librarian would laugh at me, the dirty Kitchy girl, trying to learn her manners! I could see her laughing at me with her coffee-stained teeth and her half-glasses slipping down her nose.