Pretty Is (13 page)

Which is getting away from the question of motivation, which I still can’t answer, and which also calls for a martini. To hell with Martin. He doesn’t know the whole account, that’s all: I was kidnapped by a charming maniac for six weeks when I was twelve.
That’s
my story. Of course I drink.

*   *   *

For a while after the tiara incident it almost looked like my life could become a different kind of story, a boring and potentially depressing one. To someone else it might have looked that way, I mean;
I
was never in doubt. Not long after I settled in at Grandma Mabel’s, I called Gail and arranged to meet her at the Arrow Diner on a Saturday morning. I wanted this conversation to take place in public, so that she would have to more or less behave herself, and away from my father. I was cashing in.

“I need photos,” I said. “Good ones. I need a portfolio. For modeling.”

“You have—”

“The pageant photos aren’t good enough.” I looked past Gail at the cheap oil painting on the wall behind her—a weird still life with bananas, grapes, something that looks like a doughnut. Diner art. Next to it, a black-and-white print of the Eiffel Tower. “I’m not talking about headshots for cowtown pageants. I’m talking about trying to get an agent.”

Gail looked more surprised than I had expected; I had caught her off guard.
Good
, I thought.

I was growing quickly, at that point, and I was already half a head taller than Gail. And I was very skinny. It gave me a mean kind of pleasure, sitting across from her in that red vinyl booth with carefully mended seats, to see how uncomfortable the contrast between us made her. I was wearing tight jeans and a dark flannel shirt—my uniform in those days. I had on only the most discreet touch of makeup, my nails were unpolished, my long hair casually (but carefully) pulled back, with the exception of a curl or two around my face. Next to me Gail was all swelling flesh and excess flowing fabric and bright clashing colors. With cruel adolescent insight, I knew she felt it. I knew she had noticed that all the old men at the counter slid their eyes sideways to look at me when we came in, and never glanced at her. I didn’t give a shit about the gossipy, leathery old farmers, slurping their coffee and trading what passed for news, but I knew Gail expected to be appreciated.

To make matters worse, I had let her order first, and now she had a heaping plate of eggs and bacon in front of her. I had black coffee and toast. I knew that would make her feel like the pig she was.

I pressed my point while she chewed. “Obviously I can’t use a local photographer. No one can do what I need. We have to go to Omaha. Even that’s not really good enough, but it’ll have to do. And I need you to make up something convincing to tell Daddy. There’s no point in making him worry until something actually happens.”

She raised her too-sculpted eyebrows and made a desperate grab for the upper hand. “So you expect me to lie to your father for you? And you think I have nothing better to do than run you around Omaha, is that it, missy? Anything else?”

“That’ll do for now,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee. I didn’t even like coffee then; I just liked the idea of it. I watched Gail thinking. You could practically see the gears grinding. “We can have separate hotel rooms if we have to stay overnight,” I said nicely.

She put down her fork and tossed her crumpled napkin on the table. She forced a fake smile and kept her voice quiet. “You little bitch,” she said. I smiled back. She grabbed her big purse and began to scrabble for her wallet.

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “It’s on me,” I said. Which I had taken care of pretty smoothly, I thought, slipping Ada Watson a ten-dollar bill as we made our way to the table, letting her think I was taking my stepmom out for a treat.
Please.
As if. “I’ll make arrangements and let you know when we need to do this,” I added as Gail awkwardly wiggled herself out of the booth, knocking her napkin onto the floor and slamming into poor Ada, who was returning with my change. Gail lost her control then and stormed out, muttering audibly. Heads followed her, if only for a second;
now
she had their attention.

I finished my toast and coffee, in case anyone was watching, and left Ada a big tip.

*   *   *

So I had set things in motion, and before long Gail and I did make our trip to Omaha. After that, it was a matter of waiting.

You have to understand how small Arrow is: when I say
town
, picture a wide main street, just a few blocks long, crisscrossed by three dead end roads. Even in the middle of town, houses weren’t all that close together; space was one thing we had plenty of. The businesses on Main Street occupied low-lying, featureless modern buildings: dingy white and gray and beige rectangles. Years ago a tornado had swept through town, and Arrow had rebuilt with tornadoes in mind: hunkering down, safe from the elements. Even the churches huddled against the ground. Everything looked just as bleak in the hot dusty summer as it did weighed down by snow in the winter. We had a tiny bank, a couple of shops, a bar, a diner. A school. We played six-man football because we didn’t have enough kids to field a normal team. (Of course you couldn’t just do away with football altogether. Not in Nebraska.) For gas you had to drive down the road a ways, back to the state highway. Just outside the town center was the grain elevator. You could see it from miles away, the same way we could see the one the next town over.

All the same, moving off the farm and into town was a pretty dramatic change. The town kids—maybe a couple dozen of us, altogether, from little kids to older teens—were into loitering. The kids I hung out with were mostly a year or two older than I was. There wasn’t much to do in Arrow after dark, but they did their best: getting high on the school playground, climbing the water tower, lounging on the sidewalk outside closed businesses on Main Street like they were posing for some gritty teen movie that nobody ever came to see. Before long I had attached myself to a guy named Scott, who was more or less the leader of this little group. I didn’t even realize how official this was until another guy was teasing me one night, calling me a virgin (which was considered the worst of all possible insults), when Scott grabbed me and pulled me toward him, all of us shadowy in the widely spaced streetlights, and said, “Fuck off, asshole. You’re talking to my fucking girlfriend.” The other kid backed off, and I didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be any need to. It wasn’t exactly romantic, but I had already noticed that it was good to be claimed in that crowd; otherwise everyone was always jostling for your favor. If you were a girl, I mean. The town kids were considered cooler and tougher than the farm kids: They stayed up later at night. They didn’t have to go to the barn in the morning or after school. They had more leisure. They smoked cigarettes and wore black and listened to punk or heavy metal instead of country or classic rock. The girls wore lots of black eyeliner; one or two of the boys even pierced their ears. People figured that this behavior did not bode well for their futures.
Our
futures. Soon I was considered one of them, more or less.

I knew perfectly well I was only biding my time and trying to amuse myself in the meantime.

Yeah, I took advantage of Grandma Mabel. I was nice to her, though; don’t think my treatment of Gail was typical. I was really only a monster to Gail. My monster self scared the hell out of me, to tell you the truth. I felt sick that day I made my deal with Gail—literally sick. I checked out the other people in the diner, wondering if they had monster selves too, or if I was different somehow. Even now I don’t know for sure. But I think Grandma Mabel actually enjoyed my company, for the most part, and although you could say I got away with a lot while I was there, you could also say that I protected her from knowledge that would only have freaked her out.

I didn’t tell Grandma Mabel about Scott—it seemed like the kind of thing she was better off not knowing—but she saw us together one day. It was a Saturday and we were hanging out downtown with some of the other kids, wearing jean jackets although it was freezing out, trying to scrape enough snow off the ground to form snowballs. Grandma pulled up in front of the House of Beauty in her ancient Town Car—she drove everywhere, even two blocks away—and I didn’t see her in time to make sure I looked innocent. She didn’t say anything then, just gave me a look, but she was waiting for me in her rocking chair when I got home, her old crocheted afghan wrapped around her shoulders. Her steely gray hair was freshly permed, the tight curls lined up in neat rows. “That boy’s too old for you, Carly May,” she said—not judgmental, just matter-of-fact. “You’ll get into trouble with that crowd.” She said it like trouble was a done deal, like it was on its way and there was no stopping it. And then, as she neatly refolded her afghan and draped it across the back of her chair before heading into the kitchen, she added, for good measure, her favorite warning: “Pretty is as pretty does. Don’t you forget that, Carly May.” I always figured Grandma Mabel was just bitter; whatever pretty was had nothing to do with her after a few decades on the farm. But I also used to wonder what the hell that was really supposed to mean. What was it, after all, that pretty
did
?

For one thing, Grandma Mabel said darkly, pretty gets you in trouble.

I told her not to worry.

Then later that winter I got a call from an agent in Chicago—Shelley Silver, Martin’s predecessor. That’s how things finally got started. The threat of Arrow and all the awful fates it had to offer faded into the background and seemed to disappear.

Lois

I discovered a Chloe Savage fan site, and I’ve developed a habit of visiting it regularly. It’s updated more frequently than you might expect. It’s a rather sad affair, run and designed by someone who declares himself Chloe’s biggest fan and seems to favor pictures of her in which her clothes are half off, or she is pouting with overpainted lips, or languishing convincingly in bed with a costar. In other words, it’s not necessarily her talent of which he is a fan.

I study these pictures as I have the other Chloe-images I have found. I think what I am looking for is some trace of our shared history. I’d like to say that I have picked up on some minute but revelatory detail, some almost imperceptible sign that only I could read. But her eyes seem cold—mercenary, even—and her flesh perfect and forbidding. She might as well be a stranger. I wonder about her life, and inevitably my imagination butts up against the walls of her presumably glamorous world. My assumptions all come from movies and magazines: I picture an endless succession of sulkily handsome actor boyfriends, parties where everyone is doing expensive, fashionable drugs, occasional stints in exclusive rehab centers, thousand-dollar shoes, exotic facials. Perhaps some of it is accurate; perhaps none of it. The only sense that I
do
get from the photos is that she is sad. And I don’t trust it. She is an actress, after all. Publicity shots aren’t exactly windows into anyone’s soul.

Maybe—I barely force myself to acknowledge this possibility before it scuttles away again—maybe I want her to be sad.

*   *   *

I remember one winter, home for Christmas from my private school, creeping out to the formal living room in the middle of the night and sitting beneath the Christmas tree: not the modest family tree but the impressive, towering guests’ tree, tasteful and elegant but also, somehow, so beautiful in the dark that it hurt to look at it. And that’s why I ventured out in my nightgown at two in the morning, knowing no guests would still be up: so that the tree could inflict that strange pain on the part of me we refer to as the heart. What is it, I wonder, that pain? Some combination of magic and melancholy, hope and disillusionment. Or perhaps I am generalizing from my own experience, assuming that what is true for me must be true for others. But who knows what other people feel? In any case, I suppose I went out and sat under the tree because I wanted to cry. It worked; I
did
cry. But what I could not dispel was the sense that some part of my self stood off to the side, not crying, merely watching, as if at a play. I saw myself in my red flannel nightgown, the soft colored lights gently illuminating my face, the contrast between my dark, tousled hair and my pale, sad skin—a sad girl, a tragic girl, even, against such a lovely backdrop. But even as I reveled in the release of hot tears, my outside self suggested mockingly that if I were crying for an audience, even if that audience consisted only of me, I couldn’t be crying for real—that my feelings were false. At that I only cried harder, and—startled into a flash of real, unstaged feeling—wished quite fervently to be someone whose emotions were more straightforwardly channeled; someone whose passions flowed more freely and naturally. Someone like Carly May.

I did not notice my mother glide up behind me. I noticed her presence only when she placed a hand on my shaking knee, then smoothed my hair in a rare motherly gesture of comfort. She, too, wore a long flannel nightgown, hers in a Christmassy plaid; her hair, too, tumbled loosely down her back. I caught a faint whiff of gin, not strong enough to worry me; I saw smudges of paint on her fingers. She’d been out in her studio, then. I wondered if she did that often, made time for her art in the middle of the night. There were a few short hours before she would have to get up and prepare an elaborate breakfast for the guests. I found myself in the uncomfortable position of imagining, for just a moment, what it must be like to be my mother—and then the sensation of her hand on my hair, unfamiliar as it was, brought me back to myself.

“What’s the matter, little Lois?” she asked, so softly that her voice barely rippled the surface of the room’s dense atmosphere.

I didn’t know how to tell the truth, even had I been sure I wanted to. What
was
the matter? Everything was the matter—the world—magic, melancholy, the lovely tree—hope and the lack thereof. There are no words for what was the matter; I’ve felt it since then, though not as powerfully as I did at sixteen, when everything seemed so monumental. “I’m just sad” is what I settled for, looking not at my mother but at the tree, feeling suddenly very small beneath it, crying still more for the sad girl and her distant, enigmatic mother, as if we were characters in some Christmas story I was reading.