Outside Beauty (3 page)

“I said he loaned me money on an indefinite payback schedule,” said my mother.

I drank some orange juice out of the container. Marilyn shook her head at me and sighed, the spitting image of my mother.

“Don't glug it, dear,” Marilyn said. She took a tissue out of her purse—and primly wiped off the area right under my nose.

My mother and the lawyer turned. Their eyes lingered on Maddie. Then they began to talk very softly. We stayed still, but now I couldn't hear what was being said. Maybe Maddie's father was why we were leaving Chicago, not Pierre. Or maybe we were running from both. Or maybe we were running
to
Lakey's father. Running toward men, running away from them, reeling them in, pushing them away. For my mother, all of life revolved around men—or rather, all of life revolved around making men revolve around
her
.

When my mother was leaving the office, she stopped in the doorway. The lawyer had turned to some papers on his desk, pretending he had already started working. My mother cleared her throat, and he looked up. “Brains must have been in short supply
the year you were born. As such, you are no intellectual!” she said.

She'd told him that for our benefit. “Don't ever let anyone push you around,” she always told us. “And I can guarantee you, people will try.” We stomped out of the office, following our mother's lead, and got back in the car.

“What did you talk to that lawyer about?” I asked.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” was all she said.

In addition to my map responsibilities that day, I kept a lookout for Maddie's father. Sometimes we called him Mr. KIA, for Mr. Know It All.

In the car later Lakey looked up from a history book she was reading. “What law school did that man go to, Mom?”

“It was called La Verne,” she said. “I don't even know if it's accredited.”

“Is Harvard accredited?”

“Of course it is.”

“Good,” Lakey said, and we knew that she knew where she would go to law school one day.

When we were safely on the highway, I stuck my head out the window again, the wind blowing my hair into a mess. Maddie stuck her head out next to
me, our cheeks touching. Maddie and I were a “we” within the larger “we” that was the four of us. I wasn't annoyed at her anymore for my black eye. In fact, I kissed her cheek and she kissed mine back. “I like you!” she shouted in my ear. Maddie always got “love” and “like” mixed up. She would say she loved a new dress but she liked her sisters.

The flatlands stretched into the distance, the sky bright blue and cloudless above it. The air smelled like nothing at all, not car exhaust or summer garbage or my mother's perfume. Nothing at all. It was perfectly fresh.

“Let's sing ‘John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt' and ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,'” said Lakey.

Our mother said, “No, those songs drive me crazy. I can't bear it. Can't you girls think of a pretty song to sing?”

When my mother said no, she meant it. She hardly ever said no, however.

“Can we play Why?” asked Maddie. Nobody answered. I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as I could with her sitting right next to me. She did the doe-eyed thing and looked right at me. “Please, Shelby? Pleeeease?”

Rats. “Okay, one round,” I said. “We're sitting in a car.”

“Why?” Maddie asked.

“Because Mom wanted to.”

“Why?”

“Because Pierre was pounding on the door.”

“Why?”

“Because he loves her.”

“Why?”

“Because . . . because she's beautiful.”

“Why?”

“Because she got good genes.”

“Why?”

“Because her parents must have had good genes.”

“Why?”

“Because their parents had good genes.”

“Why?”

“Because that's the way the, whatever, what the great power of the universe wanted.”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows why. Okay, we're done.”

“Can we play Thetheguh? Please please please? Just once?”

“Just once, I mean it. Uh, Mthegom's puhthegurse ihthegis ruhtheged.”

“Whthegy?”

“Behthegecuhthecause shuhthegee luhthegikes ruhtheged.”

“Whthegy?”

“Oh, uhtheguy huhthegate thuhthegis guhthegame! Uhtheguy quthegit!”

She hugged me. “One more time? Please?”

“Last time was already one time. How can we have another one more time?”

She smiled widely and said, “I understood almost everything you said. Someday I'll be as good as Lakey.” She sat back, satisfied. She loved to play Thetheguh. Lakey taught it to us, and it was how we talked if we didn't want anyone besides ourselves to understand what we were saying.

In Nebraska I lost I-80 in Omaha. We ended up in Waterloo, which my mother said was bad luck for Napoleon, but not necessarily for us. Lakey said authoritatively that Napoleon was a military genius who could work for days without sleep. He taught the world the art of maneuverability in war, and when the world learned its lesson, Napoleon began a descent as spectacular as his rise. Lakey was really, really smart. If she ever became president, I hoped she would give me a job.

For hours and hours outside the car window, Nebraska came and went. No offense to the state, but I did not think much of it. I was getting tired of traveling, and it was awfully flat. Plus my butt was sore from the car seat. The Sand Hills made a game attempt to rise from the flatness. All in all, however, we judged Nebraska a bust.

In Wyoming the car broke down. We walked to a phone booth, and our mother called a list of numbers for mechanics. Finally one answered. I heard my mother use her most flirtatious, manipulative voice as she cajoled him. Then she hung up with satisfaction and said, “He'll be right here with the tow truck.” In a few minutes we were watching as our mother flirted with the mechanic, a young guy who lifted Maddie and Lakey together with one arm while Maddie screamed with delight and Lakey frowned just slightly, perhaps thinking of how, since we were going to see her father, it wasn't right for our mother to be flirting with this man. After the car was fixed, Mom decided that Rawlins was a good place to spend a night. Marilyn counted the money and said, “Can we sleep in the car?” We were trying to save enough so that we could play the slots in Nevada. Then the four of us could become millionaires and retire before we started working.

We'd tried the slots once when our mother was in Las Vegas. We got chased away by a man who said we were underage. But before he did that, we won two hundred dollars in quarters. That took us just a few minutes, so Lakey figured if we made two hundred in ten minutes, we could make a fortune in a week.

But we didn't keep going to Nevada. That night we sat in the mechanic's office watching TV and eating popcorn and candy, which was all a sort of bribe while our mother disappeared with the mechanic. I watched impatiently. I don't know why, but I was impatient with my mother lately. I didn't tell anyone this because our mother had always been our undisputed queen. She tutored us on everything except school.

We girls had been in training as far back as I could remember. When I was seven, our mother took Marilyn and me to the safe-deposit box where she kept her jewels. Perhaps I remember it as more grand than it was. But to me, it was splendid, and it was all appraised, the occasional phony piece parceled out to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. “Even poor women like to look nice,” said my mother. “A man who gives a woman a fake diamond is not a man at all,” she said. “It'll all be yours when I die, girls.” She said this last in a cooing voice. At the bank I picked
up the gems and weighed them in my hand. It was as if I were weighing my future. She said her collection was then worth “seventy-five.” She meant $75,000 retail. She took a bracelet from my hands and turned it in the light. She gazed at Marilyn and me proudly as we leaned against each other, gaping. “You understand,” she said softly. “I can tell you do.” She clasped a strand of pearls around Marilyn's neck. She and Marilyn admired the pearls, which looked strangely like a gleaming noose around my sister's throat. My mother suggested we each take one item home, to spend the night with.

At home later I sat in the bathtub for an hour wearing only the bracelet. I held up my wrist to the light or laid it on my stomach and watched the diamonds glisten wetly.

And now we were somewhere in Wyoming watching television. When we got bored with TV, we went outside to lie in a field. It was a hot night. Marilyn said she liked the mechanic. “He's kind of like Larry, except younger, not as strong, not as tall, and not as nice.”

“How's he
like
him, then?” I said. Lying in a field made me feel just right.

“Well, he's kind of strong, kind of tall, and kind of nice.”

“Larry's real nice. He got us ice cream once,” I remembered.

“He did?” said Maddie. “Me too?”

“You were in a baby carriage.”

Larry was a handsome philosopher-hunter. He was the handsomest of our fathers. He'd read actual philosophy books—like, real ones. I used to figure, What did it matter where we came from and where we were going? We were
here
. I still mostly felt that way, but sometimes I also wondered about things.

We continued to lie and stare at the stars. “If Mom likes rich men so much, why did we stop here?” I said.

Marilyn shot me a look and said, “She likes other things, too.”

I ignored her look and said, “Like what?”

“I'll tell you later,” Marilyn said.

“But I want to know now,” I said. Sometimes, lately, I felt impatient even with Marilyn. She whispered something to me, and I said, “What's F-E-X?”

She rolled her eyes, and then I got it.

“Let's twirl!” Maddie said. I looked lazily at her. She was always wanting to hold hands and twirl, but it made me dizzy. Maddie said she liked feeling dizzy. “Pleeeeeeease?” Maddie said. “Pleeeeeease?”

So I stood up, and my sisters followed. We locked hands and leaned back a bit and moved our legs as fast as we could, around and around. I couldn't help giggling. Maddie screeched excitedly. Lakey quit first, collapsing to the ground. So we all lay back. “I feel sick,” Lakey said.

We heard our mother shouting, “Girls! Where are you?”

We sat up. “Here, Mom!” we shouted. She rushed over.

“Where were you?”

“Right here, Mom.”

She and the mechanic stood over us. She put out her hands, and Maddie and Lakey each took one. We returned to the car.

“You girls know better. I didn't know where you were. You
know
better.”

That was true and not true. We knew a lot, yet there was a lot we didn't know.

WE LEFT THE MECHANIC'S SHOP as he watched our mother starry-eyed. I stared after him, wondering whether it was possible that anybody would ever look at me that way. I'd seen men already look at Marilyn that way, but not me. Well, there was Tommy Dime, who had actually kissed me once, which made our glasses click together. His family was originally named Dimitrious, but they changed it to Dime after they moved to America. He wore glasses even stronger than mine, but I liked him anyway.

We stayed that night in another dive, where my mother fell asleep first and I fell asleep last. I figured my mother had nothing to think about, and that's why she slept so easily. What I thought about that
night was my father. See, first I thought about the bracelet Mom had worn that night, and that started me thinking about Mr. Bronson, who'd given her a bracelet that looked kind of similar, and then I thought about how Mr. Bronson always caused trouble with my mother, and then I thought about my own father. Jiro originally came from someplace called Wakayama-ken. In Japan, a
ken
was like a state. He visited me in Chicago now and then for one week, and he always said I could come stay the summer with him if I wanted, but I never wanted.

I guess I felt like my father was nice but kind of embarrassing. He had glasses even thicker than Tommy Dime's. That alone was embarrassing. And every year he bought me a dress that was nothing like what I would wear. I didn't know who would wear dresses like that, except maybe Millie Jamison from the class behind mine. Her mother made her dress like she was seventy years old. I still had last year's dress from Jiro. My mother made me put it on for my school picture. I walked around that day feeling like I was an old lady.

Anyway, in the morning we set out again. In Utah we hunkered down and sped through the Great Salt Lake Desert. We had no idea precisely where the
1950s nuclear clouds had drifted into Utah, but we kept our windows shut, as if that would protect us from ambient radiation.

In Nevada we repeatedly ran from our hot car to the air-conditioned markets, where we put nickels into the slot machines. After losing a couple of dollars, the slots got boring and we planned to roar through Carson City, stopping only at the hot baths. Unfortunately, the baths made us so sluggish, we all fell asleep and almost drowned en masse. We spent the night at yet another cheap place, this one with a cheap casino downstairs. I watched while our mother got dressed. She was not slender and not fat. She was perfectly in between. If she weighed five pounds more or less, she wouldn't have been perfect. Every day she weighed herself, and if she weighed four pounds off, she immediately adjusted her eating. Her skin wasn't oily and it wasn't dry. It was dewy. Even the skin on her arms and hands and neck seemed dewy. And she did just so much exercising and no more or no less. Every day she looked at herself in the mirror to make sure she was still perfect. When she felt one day that she was starting to look older, she changed the lightbulb. She couldn't stand the thought of getting older. She was perfect
now
.

Watching her, I suddenly felt sad. “Mom, will you stay and watch TV with us?”