The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills (4 page)

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
“Slirting,” an activity popular with the BRGs, is a neologism derived from “slumming” and “flirting.” Participants go after socially undesirable males for sport, flirting with them, teasing them, leading them on, and
potentially even obtaining free drinks or other items from them, only to humiliate them ultimately. TR and her pals enjoyed targeting a hangout popular among guys from the county, because they felt that “slirting with rednecks” was a particularly thrilling way to reinforce their sneering superiority. (As an anthropologist, I try to record behaviors without moral commentary, but let it be known that I find “slirting” to be reprehensible and disgusting.)

“Well,” I said when the door had closed behind them.

Margo released a pent-up growl. “I can’t stand them!” Her fists were squeezed so tight they’d turned white, and I could see a pulse bound in her throat.

How much easier it was to be at an anthropologic remove
, I insisted to myself.
Distance
, I thought.
Safe distance
.

“Margo,” I said. “You’ve got to get a little more anthropological about this stuff. Step back, disengage from the enemy tribe. It’s much safer.”

Margo glared at me. She was still clenching her fists when I noticed a handsome college-aged guy walk in. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a college brochure in which everyone is reading contemplatively on grassy lawns or in the midst of an Ultimate Frisbee game. I turned my head down to avoid his glance.

Why avoid the gaze of handsome guys? His gaze was a trick, and I knew it. The guy was a FreshLife leader from the local
Baptist college. FreshLife is a fellowship group for high school students that tries to make God seem like your cousin’s friend’s hip, young Hollywood uncle and Jesus like some spring breaker gone wild — gone wild with praise, that is. If you were cool with Jesus, you were a VIP at the hottest spot in town. FreshLife seduced you with the handsome college-aged leaders and free beach trips. Then on Monday nights, you were expected to gather and sing songs to acoustic guitars and play weird, embarrassing games involving Cool Whip or egg tossing. I know because I’d gone before, at my mom’s request, of course. They usually only threw in two minutes or so of God talk — it was just the manic games and singing I couldn’t stand. And the retreats. The retreats were always to places like Myrtle Beach or Gatlinburg, and I’d heard they involved much candle holding and tearful soliloquies from otherwise viperish girls — BRGs included. Given the choice, I would rather read long genealogies out of the Bible for hours at a time. Forced friendliness freaked me out.

The college guy — Colin, I think his name was — looked at Margo and me. Colin was scruffy and, yes, really good-looking. For this reason, he was an extremely effective evangelical tool. The FreshLife attendance (at least the female portion) had surged this year, or so I’d heard. But rather than trying to recruit us, he turned quickly away and headed, scone in hand, out the door of the Mocha Cellar.

Margo gulped her iced tea.

“Hey, that was weird,” I said. “That FreshLife guy totally saw
us and pretended he didn’t. FreshLife Leaders
never
avoid possible targets.”

Margo shrugged. “Weird,” she said.

“No,
totally
weird,” I said. “I fully explored the aggressively friendly nature of the FreshLife Leader in ‘Margaret Mead, Melva, and Me,’ and my scientific conclusion was that they never miss an opportunity to proselytize.”

Margo shrugged again. “Come on,” she said. “I’m too restless to sit here. Let’s walk around outside.”

We walked to Melva’s uptown, which features the old court square — our one, sad point of pride. The outskirts of Melva, the part of town along the highway, can be depressing — the fractured stoplights, the Kmart, an ugly hunk of mall, too many all-you-can-eat restaurants, and the ever-crowded Alston-Henry Barbecue. Of course, then you drive uptown, and things get a bit snobbier, or classier — depending on your view. There’s the old banker’s house, the M. Scott Werther mansion — one of the big, restored Victorian relics of the days when Margo’s recent ancestors dominated state politics. Manicured women power walk their fluffy dogs by those graceful old porches and cupolas. The shops surrounding the court square sell handcrafted beaded jewelry from Charleston, sleek silver pens, and monogrammed linens from an Atlanta boutique. Two upscale restaurants with fresh flowers on every table serve sweet tea in cool blue glasses and herbed sweet potatoes. In this part of Melva, an old name is worth more than any amount of money — which is good, because recently, money has been in short supply.

For the majority of Melva, the two things that hold the most importance are 1) biscuits and 2) Wednesday night church supper. Trucks might be number three. Wrestling and high school football four and five. In other words, Melva is a town of biscuit-eating sports enthusiasts who smile, pray, and sing the national anthem while the town seems to be crumbling under everyone’s feet.

“This court square’s gotten to be so cheesy,” I said, pointing to Kassie’s Kozy Korner: A Kidz Shop! This is what passed for cuteness in Melva: alliterative misspellings.

“As opposed to?” Margo asked.

“I dunno,” I said. “As opposed to nothing. I’m just sick of how nobody cares about anything outside of this place. No one has any interest in the world outside Melva. Everyone thinks Melva
is
the world.” I gestured to the Confederate War Memorial plaque in the square. “That,” I said. “That’s the world. That’s the extent of what anyone knows here. It’s the court square and Miss Livermush and that’s it. The end.”

“But it gives you something to study, right?” Margo asked. “As an anthropologist?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Nincompoops engaged in nincompoopery.” But then I saw TR’s wickedly pretty face smiling in my mind and had a flash of inspiration — the entire plan. It was too perfect. The surest way to get into
Current Anthropology
yet.

“I’ve got it!” I said, feeling my heart begin to pound a little more strongly. “You know what I have to do? I have to
enter
Miss Livermush after all.”

Margo looked askance at me. “What? Seriously? Your mom’s gonna weep with joy,” she said. “But why the sudden change of heart?”

“I’ve got to see the pageant
from the inside
. I need to experience the perspective of an actual participant!” I practically yelped. “It’s regional, it’s quirky, it’s perfect! Don’t worry — I’m still gonna help you take down TR, but this is how I’m going to get my real material!”

It would be so easy: I could take notes on pageant preparations, read some Livermush Festival history for context, and then just observe. Now that I stopped to think about it, the whole thing was a research bonanza. This was my ticket into
Current Anthropology
.

Margo raised her eyebrows, then gave me a thumbs-up. “Yes!” she said. “It’ll be so much better to have company!”

“Now,” I said. “I was gonna tell you this earlier. Guess who walked up to me and started a conversation during lunch today?”

The rules of the Melva’s Miss Livermush Pageant and Scholarship competition are as follows:

There was one more guideline that you wouldn’t see on the official rules: Although the contest was technically open to anyone, the contest participants were invariably, monochromatically white. This added to the pageant’s overarching antebellum nostalgia. There was a similar pageant sponsored by the Association of Black Civic Leaders that tended to attract any girl of non-Euro ancestry.

If you meet those requirements, as I’ve said before, there is basically no getting out of the Miss Livermush Pageant. You
have
to participate. Or else. You’re out. Off the island. People would stop inviting you to Sunday lunch at the Country Buffet after church, and you wouldn’t get monogrammed towels from the neighbor ladies as your high school graduation presents. There’d be no invitation to the post—Miss Livermush mother-daughter tea waiting in your mailbox. Which was why my mom was so horrified at the mere idea of my refusal to participate.

There was also the Livermush Festival Dance afterward, which basically everyone in Melva age sixteen and above attended,
moms and dads and grandmas and all. It was the community’s time to see and be seen, and that’s why it was such a big deal.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
Melva, North Carolina, has long been known as the Livermush Capital of the World. Livermush is a traditional Southern favorite — a meat product made of pig liver and head parts (mmm, right?), cornmeal, and spices. To celebrate this culinary tradition, every spring for decades Melva has held the Livermush Festival uptown. (I always forget that often outside of Melva, and definitely outside of North Carolina, people have never heard of livermush.)

Now that I’d decided to get the inside view of Miss Livermush, I was contemplating my strategy while watching the E! entertainment channel evening news roundup. The E! channel was my major televised source for pop cultural information (a trick I’d picked up from Margo), and it gave me some good topics to discuss with my non-anthropology-minded peers.

FACT:
Most of the other kids at MHS only knew of the existence of other countries if Angelina Jolie had adopted a baby from them.

So, I thought strategy. I definitely needed a performable Miss Livermush talent, and I had zero performable talents. The talents I possessed were best practiced in libraries, not on stages. The academic portion of the competition was my only real competitive edge. The judges evaluated your livermush essay, your GPA — but even so, everyone knew that a pretty girl won each year!

Grabbing a handful of sugary cereal from the box open at my feet, I crunched, turning my attention back to E!. Clips of celebrities in formal gowns flickered across the screen. Periodically, the host would offer commentary, her breasts bobbing treacherously like floatie devices.

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
The ancient Greeks linked breasts with distinctly feminine divine powers. But they also told stories of Amazon
women who cut off their right breasts to better draw back their bows. At Melva High School, breasts were merely associated with “hotness,” “sluttiness,” and whether you wanted to “hit that” — at least according to what I’d overheard in hallway conversations of the masculine variety.

It occurred to me that whoever won Miss Livermush actually had it pretty good — there was scholarship money at stake. A lot of scholarship money. Winning a scholarship could change my whole life plan. I’d been thinking about applying to colleges I’d heard had particularly good anthropology departments — Harvard, Michigan, UC Berkeley, or even the University of Arizona (where Dr. Aldenderfer taught). But then my mom said, “Arizona? That’s a great school — great for people who live in Arizona, but you know it’s much more expensive because we’re out of state. And I’m sure that the UNC and NC State anthropology departments are excellent!”

So I was going to apply to the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in the fall. Maybe I would find a good excuse to email the anthropology faculty ahead of time. (“Dear Dr. So and So, I am an incoming freshman. Please be on the lookout for my forthcoming articles on American adolescence in
Current Anthropology
.…”)

But maybe if I had some extra scholarship money, I could apply to those other schools too. Go far, far away from Melva — far from the North Carolina state line. Maybe I’d end up the
undergraduate anthro star at Berkeley. Or maybe Arizona was exactly the place I’d fit in. There, in the circle of the intelligentsia, I’d become non-awkward and beautiful. I’d befriend all the anthropology professors and grad students. Guys would abound who said things like, “My dream girl would definitely skip cool parties in order to rewatch DVDs of
The Wire
and National Geographic documentaries,” and “Subtitles?! I LOVE subtitles!” I paused for a minute, almost forgetting the Miss Livermush entry form in my hand.

I also needed a Miss Livermush escort. Didn’t I? Although escorts were not required, it seemed most girls chose to have one. Escorts had no clear-cut role in the pageant itself, but they were listed in the program and counted as your date for the dance afterward. So in that way, it was a big deal: Your date was publicly announced. I saw Jimmy Denton standing before me in his dark jeans and T-shirt…. No, no, no, no. Not even a possibility.

Then I thought of Paul. Paul might have been willing, but what about The Girlfriend? She’d probably want him to escort her. I didn’t really understand Paul anyway, and apparently never had. There had been the humiliating incident of the Disastrous Almost-Kiss — an incident that had utterly confused me, an incident on which I did not like to speculate because it was too embarrassing, an incident I hadn’t mentioned, even to Margo, because I couldn’t tell if I’d just wildly misread the whole situation. It had happened last year, before The Girlfriend came along.

THE DISASTROUS ALMOST-KISS (????)

One weekend Paul and I had gone to his house to eat burritos and watch an old movie. This was not atypical — at least it had not been before The Girlfriend came along in all her legitimate girlfriendness. And that night, it had almost seemed like something might happen, something more than the same old Gal Pal Janice story. I wasn’t sure what to think about it because the possibility felt so strange — Paul, my friend, as Paul, my boyfriend? I had never consciously thought about him that way, at least not prior to that evening. Maybe it was that he’d complimented my hair that evening. Maybe it had been the way his mom had jokingly winked at us before we’d started the movie. But I have to admit, at least that particular night, the hint of whatever in the air, the tension between us — well, it was exciting. I’d felt trembly in my throat the whole night. When our hands had accidentally brushed over the salsa, Paul had blushed and recoiled as if burned. And when the movie had finally ended, we’d both sat there silently, watching the blank screen and listening to only a faint electronic whirring. The lights were out, and we were motionless, neither daring to turn on the light nor to face the other.

Finally Paul had said, a little too loudly, “Janice.” I’d turned in the darkness to face him. As if drawn by a force unseen, our faces had moved closer together. The tips of our noses were almost touching. In the movies, I knew that the kissers always closed their eyes, but mine were wide-open. I was so close to
Paul’s face that if it hadn’t been dark, I could have seen his pores. Then, suddenly and startlingly, Paul jumped up.

“Shoot! I forgot to feed Barker. I haven’t fed him at all today!”

Barker was the Hansen family’s ancient golden retriever. I liked Barker. I didn’t want him to starve to death. But as I watched Paul flip on the lights and slip out of the room, I felt a growing horror. The guy I’d been about to kiss had leapt to his feet to feed his dog. This could only mean a couple things, both of them bad: Either he realized that he desperately did NOT want to kiss me and could figure no other way out of the situation, or he actually DID realize that he needed to feed Barker, meaning that he’d been thinking of his pet dog just as he was about to kiss me. I didn’t know which possibility was worse.

When Paul had come back from feeding Barker, he was whistling. He bent down to the DVD player and pressed EJECT, removing the disc and popping it back into the case.

“Boy, Barker’s never been so happy to see me. Poor old guy, he was starving.”

Still seated on the floor, I’d nodded, looked at my watch, then said I needed to get going. And that night, lying in bed, my whole face had burned in humiliation — so hot that I thought the pillow would ignite. I’d then avoided Paul for a while, and he started dating The Girlfriend, and the whole incident of the Almost-Kiss had never come up.

Maybe, I thought now, he hadn’t been planning to kiss me at all — maybe he’d actually just been practicing meditation. Maybe he was a narcoleptic. Maybe the whole Almost-ness of
the Almost-Kiss was a figment of my idiot imagination. Maybe I had no insight into patterns of adolescent male behavior at all.

A knocking at the front door broke my reverie. I looked at my watch. It was almost 9 p.m., a strange time for anyone to show up at our front door. I rose to go see who it was and met my mom in the hallway.

“Are you expecting someone?” she asked. I shook my head.

On opening the door, there stood Margo — or the person formerly known as Margo. I stared at her, and she stared back at me. We said nothing. This new person had hair that had been carefully straightened and highlighted, unlike Margo’s hair, which was normally a mass of wild curls. She wore tasteful makeup — mascara, just a hint of blush, lip gloss. Her fingernails were impeccably manicured — true, in a color that I’d most often seen on loudmouthed girls named Misti Krystal or Gennyfer Tammi-Ann — but still! And her shirt, it was soft and formfitting and —

“Ralph Lauren?!” my mom exhaled, unable to help herself. You had to drive to Charlotte to get clothes like that, and my mom, I knew, secretly imagined herself to be a fancier person — the sort of person who drove to Charlotte regularly for Ralph Lauren — although she would never fully admit to this vanity. She salivated over brand names and couldn’t help invoking them whenever possible. In this way, my mom was not unlike a rap video.

“You like?” Margo asked, giving us a twirl. She was flushed
and looked a) older b) happier c) innocently eager for approval d) pretty. Really, really, teeth-clenchingly pretty.

“Wow,” my mom said. “Margo, you look great. Like someone from a makeover show.”

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment, Mom.”

“She knows what I mean, don’t you, dear?” my mom said — my mom, who is a great fan of makeover shows and anything else with a “before” and “after” image. “And it’s very much a compliment.”

Margo nodded. “You two really like?” she asked, eyeing the lovely architecture of her own ankles as she arched and flexed in the new kitten-heeled sandals she wore.

My mom and I nodded, still staring at her. She was experiencing all the benefits of The Cinderella Effect. The transformation. I should confess that I felt a familiar feeling creeping up into my throat, a feeling perhaps best labeled “jealousy.” I nudged my mom, and she gave New and Improved Margo a little hug, waved to us both, and then went back upstairs.

“Margo, what happened?” I whispered now that it was just us. I thought about TR’s schizophrenic-homeless-woman comment earlier in the day — but no, surely that wasn’t it. TR said stuff like that all the time.

“I needed a change,” Margo said. “I figured, Janice, if you’re going to work on your seeing-the-pageant-from-the-inside anthropology project, then I need to work on something too — like maybe actually putting some effort into the pageant, just to
see if I could place, you know? I’ve been working on a solo part for the next chorus concert anyway … and I could really use the scholarship money. So I told my mom I was gonna try to ‘look more presentable,’ as she calls it, and she let me borrow her credit card. And I was kinda sick of wearing those ugly clothes. Becca’s old shirts and stinky thrift store pants and whatever.”