about to be deserted, her tone more gentle. “We’re so embarrassed for you.” The minister of the Friend’s Church says, “You were holding your shoulders up just fine, and then halfway through the interview you let them slump again. I prayed you were over that old problem.” I haven’t been able to stomach him since I heard him preach that any man who thinks he can worship under a tree on Sundays rather than in a church is a sinner. I’m looking around for Gino. Mr. Nordahl, the school principal, stops me. “Your answers were just too deep, dear. It’s a disgrace you came in last, a disgrace that Diane is our new Miss Ramona. Heavens'. You should have thought more about your answers.” A lady from the Eastern Star has tears in her eyes. “ For next year’s contest,” Liz is saying. “You must let me cut your hair. There’s nothing wrong with the rest of you. Everyone knows you have a good face.” I nod to them all. I will not be Miss Bad Sport on top of Miss Last Place, Miss Ugly Ramona. But there won't be a next year for me. I watch Raquel Welch leave the Ramona Town Hall on the arm of don Juan. I’m on the train from San Diego to Los Angeles. It is the week before my sixteenth birthday and the day after I place last in the Miss Ramona contest. I’m going to Sarah’s for Easter vacation. I’m wearing white three-inch high heels, a lot of make-up. Much more than in the contest. A pale mint-green suit: straight skirt and soft sweater, dyed-to-match. My first sweater since I was thirteen. The train, used mostly by business men commuting between the two cities, races along the beautiful coast, the tracks lined in yellow and fuchsia ice plant. The men keep saying you are so beautiful. They keep buying me screwdrivers and saying you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. One who sits awhile with me says, “ I know you are a fashion model, anyone as beautiful as you are has to be.” But I am neither cute nor coy, nor do I drink their drinks. My old strangeness, my inability to be anything other than deep, the physical ache too much smiling brings my face causes them all to leave me shortly. I see my face in the hot window speeding along the ocean, the water beginning to well up in the eyes that change to whatever they’re near over the glary light of the aqua-blue-and-white-ribboned sea. Last place. But the tears of humiliation I will not let fall. The day is beautiful. The hills wild with the flowers of spring. And so am I. In July I meet Sergei’s aircraft carrier, the USS Hornet, home from the Orient. I design and sew a beautiful red dress for him. With his new Japanese camera he takes a picture of me standing among the thousands of other loved ones on the dock. I want to be an adult. I want control of my destiny. I want to make love to him every day and night. On the road up to Ramona he confesses his Japanese prostitutes. It is a pain different, deeper than any I’ve known. He says they are a different kind of girl than me, I have nothing to worry about. Losing the war and the Bomb made them that way. He helps my father dig the hole for the new swimming pool. I watch the two men I love the most from the window, digging. I feel dug into. If I have nothing to worry about, if they are so different, so dismissable—why? I see them naked in the large room of mattresses, Japanese on top of him. Why were you with her? I stayed a virgin for you. In a week we are secretly engaged. On the day we buy our rings, in downtown San Diego, we drive up to Del Mar, to the San Diego County Fair. Diane has not placed in the Fairest of the Fair Contest, though next year, Susan, one of the three of us who came in last, will become Miss Ramona, Miss Fairest of the Fair, and place second in the Miss California contest. Ella disappears for ten years. I meet her one day on Telegraph Avenue, a Berkeley radical with a Ph.D. in Russian Studies. Don Juan is strolling the promenade with two princesses on his arm. A fat Indian woman dressed in purple silk guesses age and weight for fifty cents. She guesses me fifteen pounds under my weight and ten years older than my age. I win a beatnik doll. We have our portraits drawn by a chalk artist. As I sit a crowd gathers. He asks me my hobbies. I say drawing and sewing. In his picture I am drawing men, that is, luring them. We watch the horse races, my head nestled into the armpit of my tall sailor. I love to listen to him talk, his sexy New York accent. We walk around the agricultural exhibits. We gasp over the fat hogs, the ridiculously groomed sheep, the unabashedly randy bulls. In a lighted case near the exit, the year’s score cards for all the county’s animal competitions are displayed, including the beauty contests. I refuse to look, but Sergei does. He discovers that from the score of the two male judges I would have been Miss Ramona. But Raquel Welch gave me zero in every category. Writer Sharon Doubiago is based in Portland. Her last story in CSQ was “SON II,” which was reprinted in Utne Reader and won several prizes, including the annual D.B. Houston S1000 cash award. “Raquel” is reprinted with the author’s permission. It was recently published in The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, ®1988 Sharon Doubiago, by Graywolf Press, P. O. Box 75006, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 55175. Artist Marly Stone lives in Portland. Her most recent illustration in CSQ was for “Body and Soul” by Sara Graham. 14 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
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