The Patron Saint of Ugly (37 page)

No response.

“Mustn’t keep Cedrick waiting,” Grandma said, though she’d kept the man standing at attention for decades.

She pried me off the bed and led me downstairs, past that painting of Mom in the Hall of Cracked Mirrors, her adoring eyes aimed across the room at Nicky—his heart’s desire fulfilled at last. Grandma rushed me through the farewell lineup of Opal, Cookie, and Muddy, all snuffling, holding out mementos I barely had time to snatch: a feather duster, a transistor radio, and, from Muddy, thankfully, my father’s saw.

Outside, as Cedrick opened the back door of the Cadillac, I heard Cookie singing, “‘There is a balm in Gilead!’”

I looked back at the house and saw Grandma heading inside, clapping her hands as if I were so much chalk dust. Cedrick nudged me between the shoulders and I fell into the back seat, where I was surrounded by blackened windows and automatic locks snapping down all around. Bluster the hatchet man, indeed.

As the car sped away I performed my own disappearing act. I imagined myself bouncing on a diving board, sproinging higher and higher before vaulting into the air, hugging my knees for the biggest cannonball of my life.

Suddenly, from the car radio, a voice announced Valentina Tereshkova’s impending U.S. visit, and I thought that if she could blast into space, so could I. My rocket would be my own body, and in my mind I launched myself and flew ever deeper into the cosmos, planets flickering by as I set my destination for Pluto, that perpetually dark ball that would hide me. But when I looked to the solar system on my wrist, Pluto was inexplicably gone, leaving Neptune to bring up the orbital rear. I would have to drift aimlessly, but even that was okay. Grandma’s war paint would protect my hull from stinging barbs, sideways glances, tragic deaths of sundry family members, even betrayals by one’s own mother. I determined I would not feel anything. Period.

Archie, I’ll burn through my refugee years in New Hampshire as quickly as I burned through your questionnaire—now a pile of soot at the bottom of the barbecue pit. Tell the committee it’s a saint’s prerogative, but really, that was tiresome stuff.

Grandma ensured that my home for the next several years would be a cramped dorm room that I shared with roommates who came and went as if the place had a revolving door, most of them lasting less than a week because my makeup would smear off overnight, giving them the crack-of-dawn fright of their lives. On those mornings, the traumatized child would be led from my room by our dorm monitor, young Sister Joanie, who scanned not only my smudged face but Dad’s saw, which was hanging brazenly, if unused, above my bed (the curriculum at Saint Leoma’s did not offer shop). Rumors spread among the students about who or what I was—a failed experiment, ax murderer—assuring my outcast status, but at least no one came looking for miracles. That sainted nonsense thankfully hadn’t yet trickled outside of West Virginia.

Sister Walburga, the principal, was a German import who goose-stepped around campus spinning a Bakelite yo-yo, an innocuous-looking pastime until some girl wore her skirt too short or arrived late to morning Mass. Then Walburga would fling that yo-yo at the offender’s head and reel it back in without batting an Aryan eyelash. I was her target more than once because, though I was never tardy to chapel, I spent the hour earplugged to Cookie’s radio while perfecting my Etch A Sketch skills. God hooey, remember.

I thought about Nicky constantly, especially since I was living his boarding-school dream. No doubt roommates would have been lining up to share a dorm with him. Countless times I traded spots with him in the crumpled station wagon, my embalmed body buried six feet deep beside my father and his sewn lips. My own hell. How different Mom’s and Nicky’s lives would have been if my brother had lived. This only amplified my guilt—an emotion that could penetrate my hull—which sent me to a windowless carrel in the school library to resume my encyclopedic penance, and where you can probably still find my initials carved into the desk and gum wads stuck in secreted locales.

One academic requirement was that each girl had to master a musical instrument. By the time I made it to the music room for a private conference, the only choices left were cymbals and the tuba. Sister Joanie, also the music teacher, could tell I was uninspired. She put a finger to her lips and paced back and forth in her ugly nun shoes. Finally she looked at me. “Do you still have that saw hanging in your room?”

I nodded, dumbstruck.

“Go get it.”

I raced back to my dorm, returned with Dad’s saw, and hesitated just a second before handing it over. Sister bent the blade back and forth, scrutinized the curlicues. “It’s quite lovely.”

I bit my lip to keep from feeling. I bit it even harder when Sister lifted a bow from a pegboard, sat on a stool, tucked the saw handle between her knees, and drew the bow back and forth across the blade to sound a perfect E note.

“Do you know ‘Good Morning, Heartache’?” I pitifully asked.

Sister looked at my puckered face. “No, but I’m sure we can figure it out.”

Sister Joanie sat me on a stool, positioned the beloved instrument between my knees and hands, and showed me how to perform my new penance, replete with Dad’s torch songs, which I continued in my room daily, even after lights-out. I ignored shoes hurled at my door and fists pounded on walls to get me to stop playing the music that tormented everyone’s dreams.

I never heard from Opal, Cookie, or Muddy, who I later learned had no idea what hellhole Grandma had shipped me to. I did, however, receive care packages of makeup as well as allowance checks from Grandma, but no invitations to visit over the summer or holidays. I also never heard from my mother. Not once. Initially I tried calling Grandma’s house, but the operator always droned, “The number you dialed has been disconnected.” Letters to her were returned unopened. Finally Grandma had the decency to admit that she’d carted Mom off to a sanitarium, though she refused to tell me which one.

Eventually even that was okay. Call it self-preservation, but during those space-drifting years, I decided that I didn’t need anyone. Not my mother, who had betrayed me. Certainly not Grandma Iris, who abhorred me. It was better not to risk relationships, since they would inevitably lead to pain.

I turned fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen at Saint Leoma’s, adding five inches in height, obliterating my prepubescent pudge. I was a voyeur to milestones other girls celebrated, like first dates and first kisses. I didn’t attend mixers with our brother school, though I peeped into the crepe-papered gym to watch couples slow dancing. A weird feeling percolated as I watched all those mating rituals that had me smooching my pillow and practicing terrestrial exploration beneath the sheets—a carnal sin, I know—neither of which assuaged the yearning for human contact that was getting harder and harder to contain.

After I yanked my diploma from Heil Walburga I enrolled in Mount Sexton, a Catholic college five miles to the west of my boarding school, where most of the castoff Saint Leoma’s girls matriculated. I again took up residence in a library carrel and in a frighteningly similar dorm room with a bevy of roommates who also couldn’t suffer my saw playing and removable face. Not to mention the collection of anti-
malocchio
charms I had amassed that had the girls scratching their heads: metal street signs, bowls of rusty nails, jars of cat’s-eye marbles that I hoped would protect me from even harsher penalties than the loss of my entire family—though what could be harsher than that?

Instead of making friends, I amassed credits toward my double majors: geography and library science. My other preoccupation was outer space. On July twentieth, 1969, I trespassed onto my dorm roof with a telescope to gape at the moon, hoping to spot the American flag planted there. I rubbed my hand across my stomach, wishing someone would plant a flag and claim me. I was on the rooftop four months later to gawp at Apollo 12. I bought a sleeping bag, put fresh batteries in my radio, and skipped classes during the Apollo 13 scare. Though the rest of the country was by then blasé, I hiked up again for Apollos 14, 15, and 16. Campus police busted my ass the last time and confiscated my telescope for six weeks.

I remained frequent grist for the rumor mill—
born skinless so she wears liquid flesh!—
but eventually I had competition. Yvette Guillaume transferred to the college in my junior year, a girl who had been bounced out of two dozen schools across the country, starting when she was in first grade. The nuns considered her an irritant not only because of her impertinence, but because of her political activism, her Sally Bowles haircut, and her military garb. I watched from a distance as she organized hunger strikes in the cafeteria on veal day and dive-ins during synchronized-swim meets to denounce the insulting smiles the athletes were forced to wear. Her unchecked fury both thrilled and frightened me.

To my apolitical shame, I did not sit-in with Yvette’s antiwar set during the Vietnam protests, though my birthmarks participated. That little land sliver on the Indochinese peninsula on my hip was now inflamed and itchy. My scratching often drew blood, and though the area scabbed over time and again, I just couldn’t leave it alone.

Nor did I join Yvette’s feminist crew and picket the town’s beauty pageant, or hurl my bra into a Freedom Trash Can to mingle with high heels and girdles. As the can was set ablaze I spotted Sister Joanie, who taught music at Mount Sexton too. It was fitting that she was there, since the older nuns had begun needling her when she opted for modern nun apparel: simple blouse and knee-length skirt, a veil that barely covered her hair—
Jezebel
. I was hoping she was going to toss in a starched wimple, but she just cheered the girls on. When she spotted me rubbernecking from across the street, she raced over. “You should throw away all that makeup, Garnet! You don’t need it.”

My face flamed at the idea of what those girls might do if they saw my undiluted geography, a less sympathetic abnormality than being born without skin.

I ran away without saying a word.

Charismatic Yvette was at the center of numerous crushes. Both town boys and doe-eyed college girls hovered around her on campus, socialist tracts clutched in their hands. Plenty of other girls hated her, since her teachings often countered their charm-school lessons, especially the ones encouraging them to act dumb. “Read the damn book instead of balancing it on your head!” Rumors abounded about why she had been shipped to the hinterlands: Ex–Manson Family member. Founder of the Weather Underground. She also had a revolving-door cast of roommates, and they left not just because she tried to indoctrinate them in her leftist ways, as parents claimed. Gossip circulated about Yvette’s weird rituals; they upset some of the students as much as my melting face. Not surprisingly, the nuns devised a plan to kill two troublesome birds with one stone.

My favorite holiday during those years was Halloween, the one night when I could have paraded through the streets without makeup and fit in completely, though I never had the courage to try. I no longer had a taste for candy, but if I
had
gone ringing doorbells in my real face, I would surely have amassed the most loot of all. Instead, I attended the Halloween cult-film festival at the town’s movie house, where patrons smuggled in Boone’s Farm and joints. Year after year I went, and I began to recognize other folks who had made this their ritual too, especially the hippies who always sat three rows in front of me.

On October thirty-first, in my senior year, I sat in my usual spot enjoying the aroma of pot wafting up from the hippies. We laughed our way through various Frankenstein sequels, yelling “Yes, master,” at inappropriate times.

Afterward I bumbled to my dorm, though I wasn’t eager to arrive. I had been informed that yet another roommate would be installed that day. The moon was eerily bright; chilled wind gusts swayed my hair. Drunken teenagers wobbled by. A girl in a sandwich board painted like the new Pong game. A boy dressed in a rumpled Columbo coat. Several Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao masks because of Tricky Dick’s recent visit to China. One Nixon bumped into me, the papier-mâché penis jutting out from beneath his coat poking me in the hip. He slurred, “Pardon my dick,” slipped off his mask, and handed it to me as a goodwill gesture.

I strapped the thing on, though I could barely see through the eyeholes as I made my way to my room and slid the key in the lock. I opened the door and found Yvette Guillaume in her underwear sitting on the twin bed where I had thrown my dirty clothes, which were now heaped on the floor.

Her face was covered in white-white Kabuki paint, thick eyeliner, lethal eyebrows, little rosebud lips, much more dramatic than my own everyday makeup. I was trying to make sense of what she was doing with the length of Ace bandage unraveled on the bed. She was binding her right foot in a figure-eight pattern, looping the bandage around her toes and arch, then back around her heel. Over and over she crisscrossed until the bandage was used up and she secured the end with a safety pin. I wondered what her injury was until she pulled out another bandage from a silk bag beside her, unrolled it, and bound her left foot in the same fashion.

Finally she gazed up at the ceiling. “Are you going to stand there all night?”

I sputtered behind that Tricky Dick mask, trying to come up with a retort, but she shimmied under the covers without even removing her makeup and clicked off her lamp.

Her bed was empty the next morning and I stared at garish makeup smears on her pillowcase. I was as alarmed as all my ex-roommates who had awoken to a similar spectacle had been.

I didn’t want to return to my room that day after classes, so I holed up in the library, pretending to read. I kept thinking of Yvette in my room, perhaps scheming about how to indoctrinate me, but into what? The library closed and I was freezing as I crossed campus in the rain, my own Kabuki makeup running. I bolstered my nerve and slid my key in the door, wishing I had that Nixon mask to hide behind. I prepared for the traumatized look on Yvette’s face when she saw my dripping skin.