The Miss America Family Read online

  She would have laughed at me for trying to be something I wasn’t, but that’s what I’d been doing for years. My mother scrimped and saved to send me to Mt. Carmel High—scrubbing out toilets on her vacation, for example—where, she said, I would finish out the school year, my last, despite her abandonment of the church. “Be dull,” she’d advise me before I tromped off to school in the morning. “Blend in.” She wanted me to be plain. She said that being pretty was only trouble for me, but there was nothing I could do. The nuns had tried to teach us how to say no. For years they’d only taught us to bend at the waist, to kneel and bow our heads, but after the man—after he came for me—I met Jimmy Vietree and learned to push thoughts of the man out of my head. In retrospect, I assume that’s what Jimmy was for, a way to take control, to be the one in power. Last summer I thought often of Jimmy on the damp ground by the tracks, his bony body under mine—always under mine—the train’s one eye bearing down, blinding us while it passed and then Jimmy’s eyes, his gaze so strong on me, his body touching my body, his skin erasing the man, erasing sometimes even my own skin until I was no longer there, but above, way above, looking down. I’d learned that much, like St. Christina; how to rise up almost out of myself. It was easier to soar to church rafters than to be one of the sorry people kneeling below, even when you saw the top of your own head down there, and your own body waiting for you to reappear inside it. And sometimes, once or twice maybe, I thought that I could love Jimmy Vietree, but I could never slip back into my skin. I could only imagine what it would feel like and I bet it felt good, but it couldn’t last. My mother had taught me that much.

  You see, she loved her parents. She liked to recall her father washing his coal-blackened face from a bowl, how he’d stick his tongue out at her, his pink tongue, so pink, pinker than bubble gum, and how he came up cleaner and cleaner with each dip, till the bowl was just a dark cloud of water, until his skin shone bright as scales, and her mother, her sweet mother, already dead of consumption, her throat too gummed for air, pink lungs whistling. My mother believed if they could only have put her into water, she would have learned to breathe through gills. My mother thought that for every happiness there was an equal or greater pain. She’d say, “Don’t you see how if you really love someone, they’re taken away? Just like that. They catch the consumption, a mine collapses, and they’re gone. Don’t love deeply.” She didn’t mention my father. Once upon a time, she must have truly loved him, too. Hadn’t she fallen for him, a young man who’d jumped into a river to show off for her? She said, “Don’t get married. It doesn’t help.”

  Sometimes she scared me when she talked like this, and her eyes took on this strange cast, almost a glow. Like the day she gave up the church when she stopped on the front steps to our apartment building, looking fevered, her cheeks flushed red from having walked so quickly up 24th Street in the cold. She put one foot on a step, her hand on the stone handrail, and she stopped. She said, “One day I’ll tell you everything, when you’re old enough, and I’ll remind you of the Bible passage, how after Mary says yes and accepts that she’s the handmaid of the Lord, that she’ll bear the son of God, how quickly Gabriel is gone. There was some feathered light, I imagine, a flap of wings, and then nothing, just a girl standing there, all alone, blinded by the bright sun. We’re all alone, Pixie. It’s how we come into the world, one at a time, from salty water, for us half fish it’s our only memory of heaven.” I was certain then that I knew everything there was to know. Most of all, I already knew what it was like to be alone. Because even when my mother was saying this, she wasn’t looking at me, she wasn’t talking to me. I was already flying solo. I was already alone. I preferred it. Now, I can see myself driving home from the grocery store, slowing at yellow lights, coming to a complete stop at each red sign, the windows rolled up tight, the air-conditioning on full blast, its cold air making my stiffly sprayed hair shimmy around my head. Anyone would say that I was a woman in control, solitary, perhaps, but a dignified dentist’s wife. I looked the part. I was playing the role, perfectly.

  Even at sixteen, I had an air that was unapproachable. I knew that when you look pretty, even if you’re not trying to look pretty, men think that you’re trying to please them, because they are pleased, like you’ve designed yourself especially for them. And they think that since you made yourself for them that you’re theirs somehow, that they own you just by looking at you. But I wanted to be untouchable. I didn’t want anybody to think that they could come too close. I wanted a permanent stage between me and everyone else. That was why I wanted to be Miss Bayonne. And so, as a result, nobody would have ever said to me directly that my brother was some kind of thief and that we were poor when my dad was alive and poorer once he was dead and that I wasn’t the pure virgin that I let the priest believe me to be. But I heard it all the time in whispers around me. And it wasn’t that they weren’t cruel enough. They would have put it right in my face, but they were all a little afraid of me and a little in love with me—even the other girls, lined up in front of the row of bathroom mirrors, staring at me when they thought I was looking at myself—girls like Lizzy Fanowski with her pointy, high nose, and tiny cleft chin, her perfect school sweaters, so new you could smell the wool, and Deb Hastings, too, the kind of girl who did backbends out the windows of boys’ fast cars racing down Broadway, her thin shirts riding up and long stringy hair whipping. They both looked at me when they thought I wasn’t looking. I’m not being vain. It’s just the truth when you’ve got long blond hair and blue eyes and you develop early. People still stare at me that way, not as often, but I can still feel their eyes on me.

  I first noticed it before my father’s death. One summer while stepping out of the Bayonne Public Swimming Pool in my pale blue swimsuit, I looked up and everybody was watching me. And it was like I was given a gun, something powerful, and everybody started acting like I had a gun, like I was armed and I could kill them if I wanted. It makes strangers awfully nice to you. It wasn’t real power, I would learn, and I’d learn to rely on the gun, too.

  Of course it hadn’t always been like this. Once, I was just a little girl, and nobody paid much attention to me at all. I was just a kid, kind of straggly, and I had a big brother and a mother and father, a delivery man for bulk food. The apartment was always the same, I guess, small and chopped up into little rooms and a long bent hall to three bedrooms and the bathroom, but once it hadn’t seemed so bad. The air hadn’t been so stale with smoke and blackened pots, the stir and stir of beans, the way in summer that the exhaust from the street lifted into the unstitched screens, and, in winter, the dust-and-cabbage-stink layer upon layer cooked on the hissing radiator, and always the TV’s gray light.

  When we were younger, my father was a dreamboat. He’d always wanted to be some sort of magician. He could pull coins out of his nose and scarves from the palm of his hand. He was handsome with a great wide smile and a nose so small you wouldn’t guess he could breathe out of it, much less pull a coin from it. He would shout to me when I walked in the room. “Angel!” he’d say. “Come on over here and sit on my lap.” And I would balance on his jiggling knee and then hug him around the neck. Some days when he came home from work, he’d knock at the front door, and when you went to open it, he’d pratfall into the house, a straight fall, face-first, and then at the last possible second his hands would flip out, magic, and he’d catch himself. Of course, sometimes my parents fought. My brother, Cliff, would call me to his room and sing in my ear, “Fly Me to the Moon,” and he had a pretty voice, too. But sometimes in summer you could see the fresh bruises on my mother’s arms in the morning, and once or twice, my father with a puffed eye.

  My father wanted to be good. He won the money for that summer cottage vacation off a bartender who worked at the Catholic War Veterans over on 8th Street. The cottage was small but quaint with real shutters on the windows, not the ones you see everywhere nowadays nail-gunned onto Colonials, my Colonial included. My father fished on a long pier while
Cliff and I dug with shovels and buckets in the sand, and my mother sat under a rented umbrella, reading True Romance magazine, when she wasn’t cleaning. This was around the time they grew colder to each other, and he started drinking too much. My father wore his thin white short-sleeved shirt flapping in the breeze, his Guinea T-shirt, always a solid white, showing through underneath. He had a Hula girl tattooed on his forearm who danced each time he twisted his wrist the right way. He caught a golden, gold-eyed fish and held it up over his head for all of us to see, and that night my mother fried it up. It was the first time we’d ever eaten seafood, because my mother didn’t ever cook it. She said she didn’t believe in it, because she thought we came from fish. But my father was proud of his catch and she gave in. The rest of us ate it while she stood by the kitchen sink, humming. My father came out after dinner with a present for her. She opened the box filled with tissue, and inside it was a smart hat with pink ribbon, but she wouldn’t wear it, even though she thought it was beautiful. She said, “It costs more than a ham.” He wanted her to wear it, begged her to put it on, but she got angry. “It’s three pairs of school shoes. It’s enough bread for a year.” After all, it had been her idea to haggle with the landlady, reducing the cost of the cottage by scrubbing things clean for winter, setting mousetraps, too, in each low cabinet.

  Finally, he yelled at her. “Where’s my girl?” he asked. “Where’s the one I married, the one who loved me? Who’d do what I told her to do and was happy to do it?”

  She stood up and said, “Marriage is a rotten deal. It’s for cheats and fakes. And,” she got choked up, “you know I don’t believe in eating fish! How could you eat like that in front of me? Picking your teeth with the fine, white bones.” And here she’d go on and on, because she’d been standing by that sink, humming, yes, and thinking, too, of exactly what she was going to say sometime when no one expected it. “Like Mary, I’ve pondered many things in my heart, kept them all locked up there till it feels like it will explode. Angina, my doctor says, but more like the swollen hearts of martyrs pressed to death beneath stones.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re a crazy woman!”

  I don’t have to tell you that it didn’t help her to practice all of her little speeches, because no one understood her. She yelled out, “You could have just eaten a cousin, an aunt, my father!” She ran into their cottage bedroom, slamming the door behind her, and my father left the house, stormed out. They weren’t a perfect match. Later that night, I waited up for the sound of him coming in the door. He walked back to the bedroom door and knocked softly, and she said, “Come in.” But, I guess, eventually he stopped coming home to knock on locked doors or she stopped saying, “Come in.” Things changed.

  When I was in the midst of all these memories last summer, I could be stopped at a red light, spraying Pledge onto the mahogany coffee table, painting a fingernail, and there was a sudden flash of my father’s face in my mind’s eye and tears rose up in my eyes, a sting in my nose and my throat. He got older, tired, and my mother colder, stern. He liked to stay out late drinking, and he gambled all of our money away on the stinking Mets, before they became the Miracle Mets, of course, always hoping for the big payoff. He pissed it away until my mother hated him, but she’d never really admitted it. My brother hated him, too. And I was the only one who loved him, who’d tell him that everything was going to be all right.

  The night my father died, he knocked on the door, a faint tap really, and I opened it, and my father fell into our living room, but his hands didn’t flip out at the last second. I think that’s what he’d meant to do, but he fell down hard on his face. He started to laugh, but this sobbing laugh that turned crazy. I hadn’t seen him for more than two weeks. Sometimes he’d do that, disappear on a bender. This time I hadn’t seen him since the night the man broke into our house, somehow, and found his way to my bed. Although I didn’t remember everything from that night, I knew that it was my father who’d caught the man in my bed and knocked the man over the head with Cliff’s bat to save me. I guessed that was what had put my father over the edge this last time, sending him on a two-week drunk.

  My father just sat there on the floor, blood from his nose smearing his teeth, and my older brother, Cliff, started yelling at him. He wanted to kill people in Vietnam. He thought it was his war and when he turned eighteen two months later he joined up first thing. Cliff died there. He was tall and skinny with a pretty mouth like a girl’s. I remember how he’d always tried to make his mouth small and tight, curling in his lips. He said to my father, “Look at you. You’re pathetic.”

  My mother sat up straight in her chair, her nitroglycerin tablets for her unruly heart rattling in her pocket. I was waiting for her to start in on him, to ask him how much he’d pissed away. But that night was different. She stood up slowly. She said, “What do you want?” She shook the words from her mouth. Her eyes filled up, like she hated him and was sorry, too, like she knew it was the end of something already.

  And I just stood there, wanting to clean my father up. He needed a good bath, a shave. I kneeled down to him. There were fine, wiry strands of the green carpet pressed into the wet blood. He looked around at us like he’d never seen us before, his eyes passing from one of us to the next, like he was a stranger who’d wandered into the wrong apartment. He put his hand on the floor, the Hula dancer tense, pulled taut against the muscles and bones of his forearm, and then slack as he pushed himself up, letting one hand drop to his side, and running the other shakily along the wall. He stumbled out the door.

  We found out later that he took an old rusty bike lock and key from the shed and went to one of the docks down by the refineries along the Kill van Kull, where he shouted about being Houdini’s long-lost son till he had a little crowd of sailors and whores and drunks. He slipped the key into his mouth, locked his hands behind his back, and jumped into the river. We’d heard the story many times over of how he’d done it before, when he was around Cliff’s age. He’d handcuffed his wrists behind his back and jumped into the river with a key in his mouth, but that time he’d come up, breathless, smiling. He always grinned at the end of the story, said he did it to impress some girl whom he’d sometimes pretend not to remember. But you could tell by the way he looked at my mother, saying, “Now, what was her name? A real spitfire. Who was she again?” and by the way she looked someplace else real quick, embarrassed, that she’d been the girl and also that she wasn’t that girl anymore. My mother was cold, even her hands, almost blue-looking and toughened. I couldn’t imagine that she was ever a young girl. The way I figured it my father wanted to be that boy again, that maybe it was some special moment when he’d felt most himself, or the self he wanted to be, and he was trying to return to it. It was the only reason I could think of. It was a beautiful reason, and if my mother had never told me the truth last summer, I could have believed this forever. But it wouldn’t have been for the best.

  This time my father didn’t escape. I’ve imagined the key settling into the bottom of the lake in all that dust that rises up. I’ve imagined the key sliding down his throat. I’ve imagined him writhing, panicked, the water pouring into his mouth, maybe even filling his lungs till they were taut with water. I’ve thought of the big, dark refineries, smoke spilling from their stacks, and the sailors and whores and drunks leaning over the edge of the dock, watching the rolls of his breath bubble up.

  The police told my mother that one of the sailors stripped down and dove in after him, that the eighteen-year-old pulled him up, already dead. I’ve imagined the eighteen-year-old, not yet sent to Vietnam, but scared already, holding my dead father on the dock. The kid almost naked, just in his wet underwear, maybe crying. The whores and the drunks, the other sailors, too, wandering away, smart enough not to get mixed up with a dead body. Just that kid, a skinny kid, skinny as Jimmy Vietree, skinny as Cliff and Ezra. I see the kid kind of rocking my father until the police showed up.

  You see, memory is its own animal. It can h
ibernate, spawn, and rise up—moths in a well lit room, each thin body lifted by fierce wings. It doesn’t make sense, but sometimes the moths are fireflies—their fiery hearts are what light the room. I’m trying to explain memories as things with wings. I’m trying to explain my mind, and it’s a faulty, desperate thing. Listen, an ordinary woman, unpacking groceries in a bright kitchen in a cheery Colonial, a mother of two, a dentist’s wife, could choke to death on so many white moths and fireflies.

  After my father died, my mother stitched my beauty-contest dress on the weekends. I told her it was for a school dance. She could hear me practice the accordion, a good old-fashioned, wholesome instrument that I bought secondhand at a pawn shop. She knew that I was nervous about something, but she didn’t know I was set on being Miss Bayonne and then Miss New Jersey and then Miss America. I knew that she’d say that dreaming is dangerous, that this thinking big will only come back to curse me for my swelled head. She’d say, “Who do you think you are, a princess?”

  No, I certainly was no princess. I had a lot going against me. I was reading Emily Post like it was the Bible. I memorized this: “Introducing oneself is sometimes the most practical way to begin a conversation with a stranger seated next to you at a party. ‘I’m Betsy James. That’s my husband sitting opposite you. We live in the country and raise show cattle and dahlias, but we come to town very often in the winter to hear music.’ ” Well, I couldn’t really introduce myself like that. I was only sixteen and I wasn’t married. I didn’t know there was such a thing as show cattle and I’m still not sure what dahlias look like. I didn’t live in the country. I lived in Bayonne, New Jersey. My brother was a thief, my mother worked with Chinese women, and my father was dead. I had trouble paying attention in school—although I worked hard because Miss New Jersey had to go to college, right? I didn’t really know how to play the accordion at all even though it came with a Henry Silberhorn instruction book all the way from Chicago, and I didn’t really have much help with things like elocution and poise, necessary in a beauty queen. But I had one thing going for me, just one: I was beautiful. People could say what they wanted to, Emily Post included, but I believed that in America beauty could take me anywhere.