The winners of all the small-town contests in San Diego County proceed to the big contest, the Miss Fairest of the Fair Contest at the Del Mar Fair. The winner of this contest then enters the Miss California Contest. Because I’m told that this contest is my destiny and that if I think myself beautiful enough, if I work hard enough for the next three years I will be Miss California and then Miss America and then Miss Universe, I follow the contests in the paper. I know it is true, as my mother says, all I need is to want it badly enough. It doesn’t matter that I’m really ugly. It is June, my first in Ramona, in the country. The temperature hovers in the mid-80s. Most days are overcast, breaths of steam rising off the giant boulders. I descend the path through the brush, down on the granite slabs that cover half the hill, down to Olive Road, the one olive tree shaking insecurely like a grey old man on a cane in the sunset. The smell of the brush and the granite is pungent, wild. As the sun goes down, the full moon rises. / hate Ramona. I long for asphalt, traffic lights, city kids. My parents took me from my birthplace; they took me from Sarah. They say over and over it was too dangerous. They were afraid of the Friday marijuana raids on the lockers at Los Amigos. They were afraid when Linda Allen had a baby at twelve. I keep trying to tell them it’s wilder in Ramona, the boys in my class are already alcoholics, they think only of sex. I can’t convince them. My parents think people in the country are innocent. The rocks, as I walk down in the twilight to get the evening paper, breathe and twist and discover me. When they do this I lose who I am, I lose my hatred of Ramona to a beauty that’s turned around from all I’m being told is beautiful. The smell of the land is stark like courage. I don’t want to be Miss Ramona. I want to be this road I’m walking now, this sudden drop from Olive, down past Giant’s Grave, the mound-shaped hill Mama always says she could make disappear if she had as much faith as a grain of mustard seed, if you have faith the mountain shall be removed, nothing shall be impossible, and then she’d have a view of town. Down around the tight snake loops curling the spilled granite, past Mrs. Henderson’s, a woman who lives alone in the grove of pepper trees. Everyone in town says I w i l l be Miss Ramona when I’m s ix teen . “Y ou ’re the most beau tifu l g irl I’ve ever seen .” Wherever I go someone says this. They w an t something from me. I wou ld g ive i t i f I could, bu t when they look c lose ly th ey see the tru th . Then I’m ju s t a big disappoin tmen t. Worse than tha t because I’ve aroused the ir hopes. Why are old women who live alone frightening? I’m bored. I know so much more than anyone wants me to know but there's nothing to do with my knowledge. The brush, not so thick as on the hill but more fierce, seems in need of me, a need which as I pass is less and less. At the paved crossroads, a mile from the house, I get the newspaper from the mailbox. MISS LA JOLLA WINS MISS FAIREST OF THE FAIR! Her photograph is in the left-hand corner of the front page of the San Diego Tribune. She is at the center of her royal court, a dark girl in a white ruffle gown. Her princesses surround her. Pat is not one of them. Her name is Raquel Tejada. She is seventeen and a senior at La Jolla High School. I start the climb back in the hot twilight. Venus, the one planet I know, is setting; the full moon, though it is still not dark, is rising behind my shoulder, behind Ramona, the granite woman lying as the mountain horizon who will rise again it is said, and with her, the Indians, whose land this is. Behind her, Mexico, always purple, when visible. And Raquel. Raquel Tejada. The Queen. I’ve been studying the photographs of beauty queens but they keep meshing into the same woman. This photograph is different. A white rose behind her ear, her long dark curly hair. I wonder who she really is. Is she like Pat? Or is she a real queen? The photograph pulls me like the brush pulls me. I’m thirteen, I’m awakening in the deepest part of myself to the world, what it wants, what it thinks, brush, soil, rocks, sky, people, society, stars. I’m trying to understand the politics of beauty, how it works, the steps: from here you must go there to be acclaimed the Fairest. The path is open to me if I want to take it, my mother's instructions in the power of positive thinking is a great advantage, but I’m in excruciating pain for my ugliness, my ugliness greater than my faith—ugly, ugly as an old witch. Sometimes I catch myself in the bathroom mirror and I am beautiful, like the body of Marilyn Monroe on the calendar that hung over Daddy’s workbench in the garage in Los Angeles. Sometimes I catch myself in the bathroom mirror, climbing out of the tub, and I am an ugly old woman, uglier than Snow White’s cruel step mother. At school I read The National Geographic. The Chinese bind women’s feet, the Ubangis stretch their lips, the West Africans stretch their necks, the Incas their earlobes. Some people make scars on their bodies to be beautiful, and tattoos, and some people think fat is beautiful. One day you wear a flannel shirt and they don’t see you. You can stand a long time in the grocery line before the grocer waits on you. The next day you walk in wearing the clothes you’ve bought from your first job, your new lipstick, or you can just laugh in your old flannel in such a way that he will be rude to the middle-aged man in front of you, or anyone, your mother, the school principal. It is so clearly a game, one all people in their choice of being ugly, beautiful or in between, must know. Then there’s my mother, so beautiful. She just is, herself, what she is; no exaggeration, no effort to exist outside herself. Is there real beauty, I keep wondering, apart from what we learn? Is there real ugliness? In the moonlight Raquel Tejada’s features are hardly visible. It’s not her beauty I’m fascinated by. There’s something in the photograph itself. When I get back to the house I study the picture in the dining room light. Daddy builds a redwood drive-in stand. He designs and constructs it himself. Everyone in Ramona says we’ re fools, we’ ll never succeed. But we have positive thinking, we open on a day in August, Ramona’s Heavenly Hamburgers. Nineteen cents. We’re an immediate success! The drive- in, on the south end of town within a grove of old eucalyptus trees, instantly becomes the teenage hangout, the tourist stop. Families drive up from San Diego on a Sunday to see the mountains, in fall the colors, in winter the snow, in spring the wild flowers. I don’t know why they come in summer, in the unbearable heat. But they do. The first day. I’m nervous, self-conscious. What if we are fools, no one comes by? The Pepsi man is installing the tanks. He keeps staring up from the floor at me. My father is sulking behind him, scraping down the mewgrill. I’m wearing my new white waitress uniform, my red- checkered apron. The Pepsi man tells me of his son. He’s 26, he’s already a regional manager for Pepsi in San Diego. "I think you’d be perfect for him. Would it be all right if I give him your phone number?” Daddy explodes. “She’s only thirteen years old, man!” It’s always like this. Working at the drive-in, I come in contact with all sorts of men, not just the junior high boys who make me so uncomfortable. Even when we are much older these particular boys make me nervous. They come to the window and sneer, “What’s so hot about her?" Iswim every day between seventh and eighth grades in the small public plunge in Ramona Park. When I climb out of the water to dive there is always a great uproar from the boys so I learn to stay in the water. Just as I did when I was five I pee right in it. Sometimes older guys building the house across the street stand outside the chain-link fence staring that strange way at me, calling for me to get out of the water. Walking down the hill after swimming all day, through the oleanders and eucalyptus they are hiding in the bushes with their pants down. Playing with their stiff penises, which so fascinate them. “ Hey, Blondie, look at this!” Once, inside the dark, damp ladies bathroom in the center of the park, a sweaty shirtless man grabs me. I get away and never go in that place again, no matter how badly I have to pee. I will feel his wet shoulders in my nightmares forever. Sometimes I enjoy the attention. I study myself in the mirror of the dressing room. I can see it is true, I have a beautiful body. Sometimes I want men to see it. It seems to make them happy. Sometimes, deep inside, my body is thrilled to be walking by them. My body makes me happy. Toward the end of summer Ramon is often in the pool. Our legs touch, then wrap around each others’ . We slip below the surface. We sink beneath their jeers, Are you blind, Blondie, can’t you see he’s Indian? He kisses me with his warm, wet tongue. There is nothing like the compulsion I feel toward him beneath the water. Only if I look at him in a certain way do I see he’s an Indian and then I love him even more. In him I know beauty no one has told me of. When you are told you are beautiful, you know that you are ugly. Women considered beautiful are always the most insecure. You are valued as an object but you know only too well the ways you are flesh and blood and mind and spirit, the ways you cannot satiate a lonely, materialistic world. My shoulders slump. Everyday Mama says, “ Hold your shoulders up, honey. What are you ashamed of? You have beautiful breasts.” Orlon sweaters and straight skirts are the fashionable clothes. To compensate for my bad posture, which I can’t seem to help, and to not disappoint those who seem to gain so much pleasure from my tits, I stick them out when I wear one, when they yell “ sweater girl." By the end of the day I’m exhausted, the strain on my diaphragm. I can’t breathe. So I wear something unrevealing for a week. “ Hold you shoulders up!" everyone yells. “You are 8 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz