Duckling Ugly (2 page)

Unprepossessing.

It was another one of those nice words for “ugly.” Even nicer than
plain.
It was just a coincidence that the judge’s computer came up with that word for me to spell, but still it bothered me. Momma would have called it ironic. The Almighty showing He’s got Himself a sense of humor. I’m sure that’s what she was thinking out there in the audience.

Well, she’s not me. The contests she went out for when she was my age were beauty contests, not spelling bees. She was possessing,
pre
possessing—there was no “un” about it.

“Contestant thirteen,” the judge’s voice boomed.

In the previous round, there had been five more eliminations. Only six of us remained. I stood up and felt the searing spotlight on me again.

The judge looked at the word that had been thrown up on his
computer screen, and he hesitated. He glanced at the judge next to him, who only shrugged. He took a deep breath and turned to me.

“Please spell
abomination.
”

Some gasps of surprise from the audience. A few snickers.

The heat I felt in my ears, then cheeks had nothing to do with the lights. I knew I was going blotchy red. I tried to tell myself it was just coincidence again, but deep down I knew it wasn’t. This word was too easy. The other kids were getting words like
cairngorm
and
pneumonectomy.
Whether this was the Almighty having a major laugh or something other, I couldn’t figure out yet.

“Abomination,” I said. “
A-B-O-M-I-N-A-T-I-O-N.
Abomination.”

“Correct.”

I sat back down and looked at the crack-nail toes sticking through the tips of my sandals.

There’s that old joke: “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone.” But they’re wrong—because with me it goes deeper than the bone. It goes right to the marrow. I once overheard our pastor say to one of the other parishioners that looking at me was enough to question your belief in God. Momma overheard it, too, so we left that church and found another.

Four more contestants were disqualified, one after another. It was down to me and some brainiac who kept nervously cracking his knuckles.

“Contestant thirteen,” came the booming voice.

I stood.

When the judge looked at the computer screen this time, he took his time. He called all the other judges over. They conferred, then sat down again, looking back and forth to one
another. When the head judge got on the microphone, he didn’t offer me a word to spell. He offered me his apologies.

“I’m sorry, Miss DeFido…but the rules are very strict,” he said. “We have no choice but to give you the word that comes up on the screen. You understand?”

I nodded.

“There’s nothing we can do about it.”

I nodded.

He took a deep breath and said, “Please spell…
grotesque.
”

And this time there was unrestrained laughter in the audience; the chuckling, twittering voices of students, and parents, too. This was no accident. Somewhere out there, I knew, there was one kid, or two, or a whole gaggle of them who were secretly gloating over having somehow pulled this prank.

I knew what I had to do. Holding my head as high as I could manage, I spelled the word.

“Grotesque,” I said.
“G-O…”
I leaned closer to the microphone.
“T-O…
” I grabbed the microphone stand like a rock star.
“H-E…”
I looked out over all those people in the audience. “
L-L.
Grotesque.”

Silence from the judges. Silence from the audience.

Finally, the head judge leaned toward his microphone. “Uh…I’m sorry,” he said. “That is incorrect.”

Then, in the front row, a newspaper photographer stood up and brought his camera to his eye.

Go on, take my picture,
I thought.
Go on. I dare you.

And I smiled for him, as wide as I could, stretching my lips over my terrible teeth.

The lens shattered with such force the entire camera fell to pieces.

People nearby shielded their eyes from the flying shrapnel, and the photographer, his hands and face bloody, stood for a moment staring in shock, then raced down the aisle in pain.

“Cheese,” I said.

Then I took off the number 13 sticking to my shirt and left.

My mother found me walking by the side of the road ten minutes later. She pulled up in her classic pink Cadillac—the kind they got sticking out of the roof of the Hard Rock Cafe. It has wings like the Batmobile and funky bullet-shaped taillights. Everyone knows when Momma drives down the street. When she saw me, she slowed down, matching my pace.

“Cara DeFido, you get yourself into this car.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“Because it’s a twenty-mile walk back to Flock’s Rest.”

“So I’ll hitchhike,” I told her.

“And who is it you think’s gonna pick you up?”

“Yeah,” said my brother from the backseat. “One look at her and they’ll break the land-speed record to get away.”

Momma turned around and tried to whack him, but her headrest got in the way. “You just shut that piehole, Vance,” Momma said.

“Hey, I’m just trying to help!”

The way Momma saw it, she was the only one allowed to tell me how ugly I was, and she had no qualms about doing it.
“Honey,”
she used to say when I was little,
“you’re as ugly as a duckling
coming out of its shell.”
And then she would kiss all those ugly parts of my face.

It might sound horrible, but you gotta understand, she said it out of love. Okay, maybe a little out of bitterness, too, but mostly out of love. See, my momma, she’s smart enough to know there’s some things the world doesn’t forgive. The world can forgive you for being stupid. It can forgive you for being blind, for being deaf; it can even forgive you for being bad. This world doesn’t forgive ugliness, though—and if Momma had pretended that I wasn’t, it would have been a cruelty beyond measure, because how could I ever face the world without being prepared for the nastiness it would eventually kick back at me?

I knew she couldn’t be too mad at me for what I did at the spelling bee, because she had raised me not to take any guff for being ugly. Some kids need tough love—well, Momma raised me with ugly love.

Even now I could see the love behind her stern face. I knew she wanted to jump out of that car, hug me, and make all the meanness in the world go away. But just as she wouldn’t give me that hug, I wouldn’t ask for it. We both understood that sympathy was one step above pity, and we would have none of that.

“I don’t like what happened in there any more than you do,” Momma said, “but if you think I’m gonna let you walk home, you got something else coming!”

“I swear, Momma, if you make me get in that car, I will look into your rearview mirror, and your side mirrors, too!”

“So what?” said Momma. “I’ll just buy new ones, and take it out of your allowance.”

“What allowance?”

By now Momma’s patience had worn as thin as her mascara. “Cara, I am not gonna say it again. Get in this car!”

I looked at the road before me. It was straight, the ground was flat, and in the distance, I could see the mountains. Our town was at the base of those mountains. It was getting late in the afternoon, but I didn’t care if it got dark. I could probably be home by midnight if I walked fast enough. Then I saw the billboard about a hundred yards ahead, featuring my father’s smiling face, before his hair went salt-and-pepper. It was one of the really old billboards back from the days when he had a dozen used-car lots around the county, instead of just one.
DEFIDO MOTORS
, the billboard said.
WE TREAT YOU RIGHT-O AT DEFIDO
. The sign was faded, but it didn’t stop his face from looking down on me. I wondered how many of these old billboards were on the road between here and home. I could bear a twenty-mile walk, but not the prospect of Dad glaring down at me ten times larger than life, over and over again.

“Did you call Dad?” I asked Mom.

“And tell him what? That you spelled a four-letter word?”

“Technically,” said Vance, “it was one four-letter word, and a couple of two-letter words.”

“I had every right to do it!”

Mom didn’t answer right away. She just kept that stern expression, then said, “Maybe you did, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

Then another car passed, heading back toward Flock’s Rest, and one of my classmates shouted out the window, “Hey, DeFido, wha’cha doing there? I don’t see no sign that says
COYOTE CROSSING
!”

There was laughter from the other kids in the car, and they peeled out.

Momma pursed her lips and ignored it, the way she always taught me to ignore it—but I think it hurt her more than it hurt me.

“If you walk, you’ll have nothing but your own thoughts for company,” she said. “And some evil company they’ll be. The sooner we get you home, the sooner you can get your thoughts on something else.”

“Ah, she’ll just go into her room and do some more of those stupid ink drawings,” said Vance. Momma gave him her best dirty look, and he wilted like a fern in a frost.

In the end, I got into the car. Not because of the long walk, not even because of having to face my dad’s billboards. It was that passing car that made me realize I couldn’t make the walk…because I knew everyone riding back to Flock’s Rest from the spelling bee would pass me, and I couldn’t bear the thought of every single driver having something to say.

I
touched the tip of the wolf-hair brush to the surface of the ink and watched as the ink slowly wicked up into the brush, until it shone wet and dark.

At first I didn’t know what had drawn me to Chinese ink painting. I didn’t even know anyone Chinese. There was something about the simplicity of it, and the feel of a single bamboo brush carving up the white void. It just felt right. Then I learned that the art form began as a way to write the complicated symbols of the language. It all made sense to me then. Ink drawing was the Chinese version of spelling! I even went as far as to learn the seven basic strokes of Chinese writing and use only those strokes in the things I drew, so it all had a mysterious Zen look about it.

I wasn’t a master artist or anything, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t draw for others. I did it because of how it made me feel. I could lose myself in those brushstrokes—and as my brother had so rudely guessed, that’s exactly what I did when I got home from the spelling bee.

My favorite subject to draw was “Nowhere Valley,” or at least that’s what I called it. You see, there are two places I like to go
when the outside world becomes too cruel. Nowhere Valley is one of them. It exists only in my head: a hidden place of rolling hills covered in hundreds of shades of green. I imagine myself walking along a meandering stone path, breathing in the smells of wildflowers and orange blossoms. People wave to me from their pastel-colored houses as I pass, and I wave back. I hear voices filled with joyous laughter, not mocking laughter. Sometimes I see the valley in my dreams, but more often I see it in my daydreams. My simple brush drawings can almost capture the essence of the place. I wouldn’t dare add color, because there’s no pigment in the world that could do justice to what I see in my mind. Adding color would be sacrilege—like colorizing a classic old movie.

Today, however, my heart was not in my brush. No matter how I drew the hills and paths, my imaginary valley gave me no comfort. So I rinsed off my brush, capped the ink, and decided to visit that second place I go to when life gets the better of me. It was the only place I knew where the residents didn’t care how ugly you were. That’s because they were dead.

“Vista View” has to be the worst name ever given to a cemetery. First of all, the word
vista
already means “view” in Spanish, so the name is really “View View.” And second, when you’re six feet under, you’ve got no view, except for maybe your own toes, so pointing out the beautiful view is kind of insulting to the dead, don’t you think?

Vista View hasn’t always been a cemetery. Back in the day, it was a botanical garden—the most beautiful in the state. Winding
trails and beautiful trees and flowers from all over the world filled the place. Our town of Flock’s Rest got its name because of Vista View. Flocks of all kinds of birds would make their trek over the mountains and be drawn to the lush greenery of the botanical garden, where they’d fill the trees and ponds, making a racket that could be heard for miles. The woman who owned the place entertained bird-watchers in her little white house on a hill, smack in the middle.

But then the place went bankrupt. An undertaking conglomerate bought it and decided it was a fine place to plant people instead of trees. Now rich people from all over bury their loved ones there, paying more for a little burial plot than most people pay for homes. The beautiful trees and stuff are still there—only now those winding paths are all lined with gravestones. As for the old woman, they let her stay on in her house, but I don’t know if I’d want to live in the middle of dead people, no matter how nice the view-view was.