Beauty Queens (20 page)

In the morning, her mother appraised her over the orange juice. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Mary Lou said with irritation. Inside, her heart pounded. She wondered if some trace of last night’s episode remained.

Then there was the time with Billy. She was fourteen and he was sixteen and so sexy. Lying there beneath him, his shirt opened to reveal the broad expanse of his chest, the ripples of muscle across his stomach, she wanted him. The wanting was a physical ache. She’d pushed him onto his back and straddled him, her thighs squeezing gently against his sides. It started softly: She licked his neck. His smell undid her. She wanted more. She licked again.

“Hey, that’s usually the guy’s job,” he said as if he were joking, but she could tell there was a scold in it. Like when she took an extra helping at the dinner table and her uncle would tease, “Putting on your winter coat there?”

A minute ago, he had been doing much the same to her. Why couldn’t she answer in kind? She pressed her lips to his, tasting, enjoying, wanting. The itching in her palms began. But this time, it spread fast as a brush fire on a windy day. Her hunger was uncontrollable.

Billy’s eyes widened at the sight of her in her wild state. “What’s wrong with you?”

And Mary Lou had run away — from Billy, from the passion surging through her. She hid all night in the cornfields, crying softly in shame. When her body finally settled, somewhere around dawn, she returned home. Her mother sat at the kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee, worry etched into the lines of her face, and when she looked up to see her daughter at the kitchen door, an expression of sad understanding softened her eyes.

“It’s hard to be a woman,” she said, and poured Mary Lou a glass
of milk in a Princess Pony glass. Her mother waited until Mary Lou’s tears stopped and she’d finished her snack, and as dawn’s first light pinkened the claustrophobic kitchen, she told Mary Lou about the curse that had plagued the women in her family for generations. Wild girls, they were called. Temptresses. Witches. Girls of fearless sexual appetite, who needed to run wild under the moon. The world feared them. They had to hide their desires behind a veneer of respectability.

“But I feel
so much
— it’s like I want to eat up the world,” Mary Lou warbled through the snot-slick tears on her upper lip. “Why is that wrong?”

Her mother cradled her softly then. “You learn to hold it back, to numb yourself to it,” she said in a bitter voice. “Until one day, the world forgets to look at you. And then it doesn’t matter anymore.”

The next morning, they’d gone to see about the ring that could contain her curse. She had taken the vows that were supposed to keep her safe from her own impulses, her own desires. Mary Lou learned to be afraid of her own body. What if it betrayed her again? Already, Billy avoided her, and hurtful gossip spread about “that wild Mary Lou.” Stinging slaps of names bit at her skin in the school hallways:
Whore. Slut. Nympho. Easy. Trashy. Trampy. Not the girl you bring home to Mother.
But Mary Lou didn’t really want to go home to someone’s mother. She already had one of those and, frankly, one was more than enough.

Mary Lou wore the ring faithfully. She studied the coy girls, the ones who pretended not to get the dirty joke that made Mary Lou stifle a laugh. The ones who practiced the shy, downward glance, who pretended giggly outrage when a boy made a suggestive remark, who waited to be seen and never made the first move. The ones who called other girls sluts and judged with ease. The good girls.

Occasionally, from the school bus windows, she would see other wild girls on the edges of the cornfields, running without shoes, hair unkempt. Their short skirts rode up, flashing warning lights of flesh: backs of knees, the curve of a calf, a smooth plain of thigh.

Sometimes, it was a girl just waiting for a bus, but in her eyes Mary Lou recognized the feral quality. That was a girl who wanted to race trains under the moon, a girl who liked the feel of silk stockings against her skin, the whisper promise of a boy’s neck under her lips, who did not want to wait for life to choose her but wished to do the choosing herself. It made Mary Lou ache with everything she held back.

Over a dinner of leftover veggie meatloaf, she asked her mother about these girls on the edges of life. Had they been cursed, too? They seemed okay. And their clothes were bitchin’.

“I’m not their mother,” she answered, as if that settled it.

Mary Lou’s sister, Annie, walked in then, her eyes haunted, her shirt covered in spit-up formula. Her mother gave a small nod as if to say, “You see what happens?”

“Don’t forget your vitamin,” her mother said.

“I never do,” Annie answered in a rag-thin voice.

Annie had been a wild girl, too. Together, the sisters had sailed out over the creek on a tire swing tied to a fat tree limb by a knotted fist of rope. They took turns flinging their heads back in defiance of gravity, letting the ends of their hair trail along the water’s surface, reveling in the feeling of weightlessness. Later, they made tiny tattoos on their skin with a blue Sharpie.

“I’ll be a sorceress,” Annie said, inking a star into her palm.

“I’ll be a pirate queen named Josephine,” Mary Lou said. She’d chosen an ancient Celtic design she’d seen in a book from the library.

“I’ll turn your ship into a dragon.”

“I’ll tame the dragon and ride it to the ends of the world.”

“That’s a very good plan. Let’s be pirate queens together and roam the seas like we own them,” Annie said. “We could ride motorbikes across the Indian countryside and watch the sun turn the land the color of saffron. It does that, you know. Or we could go to Prague and put our hands on the crumbling stones of the churches and imagine all the other hands that have touched there.” Annie
read from a copy of
On the Road
she’d checked out of the library. “‘The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.’”

Annie shimmied out of her dress and Mary Lou saw that her sister’s body had ripened over the year. She was sixteen, and her breasts were full and firm. Her hips curved like treble clefs, notations in a music Mary Lou had yet to hear.

Annie passed her hands up those curves. Her eyes had a dreamy quality. “I feel like I’m too much for one body to hold. Do you ever feel like that?”

“No,” Mary Lou answered. She was twelve.

“You will, Pirate Queen.”

With a fierce yell, Annie cannonballed into the cold, clear water, making as much of a splash as possible, soaking Mary Lou in her wake. For the first time she could remember, Mary Lou had the sense that her sister stood apart from her, that though she could jump in after, they would not share exactly the same water. She tried not to be afraid.

One Thursday in March, the circus had come through Humble, Nebraska, like a rogue spring wind, the kind that kicks pollen into the air and sends the shoots up too early. Annie bent toward the sun of that circus like a March daffodil, blooming full. She especially loved the daring acrobats, and one in particular, a dark-eyed, ruddy-cheeked boy named Jacques-Paul. He had a crooked front tooth that reminded Mary Lou of a lady crossing her legs, and when he smiled, there was something slightly naughty in it. Annie felt the pull of that circus in her bones. She spent her afternoons with the lion tamers and clowns. The bearded lady taught her to play the mandolin, and the snake charmer said she was a natural. But she always ended up in the big tent, her eyes trained on Jacques-Paul as he defied the odds, grabbing through thin air at nothing, finding temporary safety in the bar at the last minute.

“Climb,” he commanded and extended a hand.

Annie shed her shoes and stockings and scaled the ladder. On the platform, she closed her eyes and put out her hands. And then she was screaming and laughing far above the net, his arm around her waist like the surest harness.

It was during lunch period that Mary Lou saw Annie standing by the chain-link fence that guarded the middle school’s muddy running track. Her battered, butter-plaid suitcase was at her feet. She’d stopped wearing her hair in pigtails, and now it ranged about her shoulders like kudzu, untamed, uncontainable.

“I can’t live in a cage,” she told Mary Lou without tears. “I’m leaving with the circus.” Jacques-Paul leaned against the hood of a beat-up blue Impala playing with a yo-yo.

Mary Lou wanted to ask her sister about the plans they’d made, about being pirate queens who played by their own rules. “What will you do?” she asked instead.

“I’ll see the world’s biggest ball of yarn and play my mandolin outside diners. We’re going to take pictures at the Dinosaur Pit. Jacques-Paul’s going to teach me to be an acrobat. He says I can do it. I think he might be a little wild, like us.”

Mary Lou wasn’t certain. He didn’t smell right. She glanced at Jacques-Paul’s hands to see if they were sure enough to bear a wild girl’s weight. She guessed it was hard to tell just by looking. Mary Lou closed one eye and tried to imagine Annie singing from the passenger seat of that Impala as they traveled the asphalt arteries of the nation. Behind them, the circus wagons were loaded up and ready to roll. All those traps in the back of the bear wagon made Mary Lou nervous.

“You better write,” Mary Lou said at last.

The first postcard arrived on a Thursday. It had pictures like an old Technicolor movie and was from somewhere called Peoria, Illinois. Other postcards followed: Topeka, Kansas. St. Cloud, Minnesota. Marfa, Texas. Norman, Oklahoma. Sometimes, pictures arrived in long, flat brown envelopes. Annie posing with a whip beside the striped circus tent. A bear in a fez on a unicycle. Moss-laden
trees you’d never find in Nebraska. The world’s largest pile of shoes. No note would accompany these. Annie would simply write a caption on the back. “Miss Novak admonishes the tent for its fashion faux pas.” “Bear on Unicycle, Series 12.” “World’s largest pile of air fresheners next stop.” For a time, there were no pictures or postcards. And then there was a strip from a photo booth. In these stacked blocks of portraiture, Annie stared at the camera, unchanged from frame to frame. Her face was pale and her eyes, haunted. She’d written nothing on the back.

Annie returned to them in the fall with a belly too swollen for flying in the big tent. Jacques-Paul sulked about the house, sullen and cramped, till even his shadow grew small. Sometimes Annie stood at the back screen door listening to the night howl, her hands pressed against the metal webbing that left indentations in the pads of her fingers. One afternoon, Mary Lou heard raised voices and crying and door slamming. She came out to see Jacques-Paul packing his tights, harnesses, and yo-yo into the trunk.

“I am a performer,” he croaked. “You knew that when you met me.”

“You’re some performer, all right!” Annie screamed and hurled the rattle she’d gotten at the baby shower given by the Lutheran Ladies’ Auxiliary. The rattle was made of pure silver and had come wrapped in tissue paper from a store in Kearney. It landed with a thud near Jacques-Paul’s feet.

He looked down at the toy and his shoulders sagged under some invisible, impossible weight. “You’ll figure it out. You always do,” he said, climbing into the car. The Impala kicked up dust as it squealed out.

“He didn’t smell right. Even Mary Lou could tell,” Annie cried, her eyes red-lined.

“Cursed,” her mother nearly spat. “Cursed,” she said, softer this time.

Mary Lou rescued the rattle. In the kitchen sink, she washed off the dirt and wrapped it again in the crumpled tissue paper. It didn’t
look the same, so she put it in her mother’s closet among the handbags and summer blankets.

Mary Lou found the pictures of her mother in an old shoe box on the high shelf. In the photos, her mother was young, a girl of seventeen or so, and her face was not so tired. She wore a red dress with big brass buttons down the front. The photographer had caught her midlaugh, and the defiance of her bared teeth and wide lips gave her face a hint of mischief and forthrightness. The girl in this photograph bet the house. Mary Lou could sense the wildness beneath her mother’s skin.

Mary Lou marched in and slapped the picture down by her mother’s knitting. She folded her arms and waited for a response. Her mother squinted at the girl in the photo as if she were a distant relation whose name she struggled to remember. Without dropping a stitch, she nodded at the day’s paper. “There’s a pageant tryout in Omaha this weekend. Thought we could go see what all the fuss is about.”

Mary Lou had never been to Omaha.

This was the reason, then, that she had entered the pageants. Her mother wasn’t having Mary Lou turn out like Annie. The pageants got Mary Lou out of town, plus they were closely chaperoned and the girls were kept constantly busy. Far from any influence that might whisper unwanted thoughts and feelings to her too-weak soul, she was safe from the change. But here on the island, with the warm breeze tickling its fingers over her bare skin, the ever-present threat to survival keeping her body in a state of fight-or-flight, without the chaperones and routines and control — without the ring! — she was at the mercy of her body.

Closing her eyes tightly, she tried to head it off by thinking of terrible things. This is what her mother and the nuns had said to do when the curse came on. But she was too tired to fight it tonight. Her teeth grew sharper; her senses heightened; her skin tickled and warmed till she was forced to shuck her clothes. The wind caressed
her nakedness, and she gasped at the unwelcome, but not unwanted, joy of it. Under the moon’s besotted gaze, she ran deep into the jungle, her body strong, her every sense heightened. That was the shameful part — how good it felt to command her body in this way. How erotic the thrill of it! Like a caged beast finally allowed to hunt. Her mother called it a curse, and she understood that it was, that she had to control her urges. But somewhere deep down, she loved the sheer heady freedom of it. In this state, she was not afraid of the jungle, but part of it.

“I’m weightless, Annie,” she whispered into the syrup-thick air.