a funny sound with his tongue. “What’s a fellow gonna do with two older sisters like these?” We leave Jason in the fourth grade, the teacher looking like the witch who ate the little brother. “ Can’t read? Jason, you could be with me for years.” Then the four of us follow the principal through the dust of the playground over the dry arroyo that separates the elementary school from the row of four classrooms that constitutes El Angel Junior High School. At the end of this day, on the bus ride home to Olive Hill, I will hear how last week a seventh grader raped a first grader in this arroyo. “ I hope Jason will be okay,” Mamafrets. This annoys Daddy and the principal. I’m afraid, my body too large around us. Mr. Nordahl and our parents disappear into Mr. Silverman’s sixth grade class, leaving me and Bridgit in the open corridor looking out on the desert. We will learn later that Mr. Silverman is the smartest man in Angel. Also the cruelest and most evil. His greatest disgust is dumb kids. He persecutes them. He’s Russian and that’s probably why he’s hated. Now I see that he may have been Jewish, but that was a concept I didn’t encounter until I was an adult so I can’t say for sure. “ In this school,” Bridgit suddenly announces, her voice echoing down the hall. “ I am not going to be smart. I am going to be average. From now on, I will get Cs.” I look at my sister alarmed. I die in humiliation, in the prison of my limitations. My mind seems capable of learning anything, but my ability to move myself into the world is so blocked. “ Why?” “ Because,” she says very firmly. “ Boys don’t like smart girls.” Suddenly, Mr. Silverman appears at the door. The longest eyebrows I’ve ever seen. At least two inches, shining silver in the sunlight as if coated with vaseline, like I use to thicken my eyelashes. They stick straight out from his forehead, shading his deepset, gleaming, silver eyes. “Welcome, Bridgit.” He shakes her hand as if she’s a man. “ I see here from your records that you are a brilliant student. My class is most fortunate to have such a student come along at this time. Welcome to El Angel Sixth Grade.” And the door slams, taking my little sister, newly embarked on the road to averagedom, enveloped in the brilliant Mr. Silverman’s arms, with it. My sister and I usually have the same perceptions of the world but I don’t understand her declaration that boys don’t like smart girls. All my life I will think they only like perfect girls. The most beautiful, the smartest, the most graceful, the kindest. The principal and my parents leave me at the door of the seventh grade. So I walk in. All eyes turn. Three or four whistles crack the air, wolf whistles, cat calls, the boys out of their seats, leaping from their desks. Is she stacked! The teacher, Mrs. Williams, is meek, bored, uninterested, ill or something. I keep hearing an obscenity I’ve only heard hissed from Peeping Toms in LA, or read on the walls at Paramount. Fuck. One boy, taller than me,4s balanced on one hand, swinging around the top of his desk, screeching whee-whee- wheel Another is on top of Mrs. W illiam ’s desk chanting Blondie! Blondie! Blondie! I stare at the linoleum in front of me while Mrs. Williams announces my name over the din. The white dark-stained thing lying at my feet is a used Kotex. She leads me to the desk next to the monkey boy, who is now moving an unpeeled banana back and forth in his mouth singing my favorite song, I am the great pretender. The girls stare at me, still and sullen. One growls as I walk by her. After I sit down a condom blown up like a balloon shoots across the room, hits me in the face then lands on my desk, deflated, saliva, snot or something spilling out of it. Everyone roars with laughter. “ It’s a Everyone in town says I will be Miss Angel when I’m sixteen. “ You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” the grocer says the first time I shop in his store. Wherever I go someone says this. I want to hide. They want something . from me. rubber,” the fat girl in front of me whispers. There’s a motherly tone in her voice. She tells me not to worry. “ It’s just a joke.” When the bell rings for recess she says “ Stick with me. I’ll protect you.” In those last cruelest months of seventh grade, Judy is my only friend. £— a veryone in town says I will be Miss Angel when I’m sixteen. “ You’ re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” the grocer says the first time I shop in his store. Wherever I go someone says this. I want to hide. They want something from me. I would give it if I could, but when they look closely they see the truth. Then I’m just a big disappointment. Worse than that because I’ve aroused their hopes. “Smile!" they beg. “ You’re too serious,” they complain. It’s hard. Nobody can see their own face. You can’t see yourself walking down the street. Bridgit and I attend the Miss Angel Beauty Pageant held in El Angel Theatre, which is owned by a man named Hugh Hefner. Everyone knows his name because from Angel’s sister theatre in Escondido, eighteen miles down the mountain, he has just launched a new girly magazine, Playboy. Now he’s moved back to Chicago and the Angel Theatre is in disrepair. The glamorous high school girls parade in bathing suits across the stage beneath the screen, which in the glaring spotlight, is torn, has coke and beer stains. We eat popcorn and agree on the girl we think the most beautiful. But she doesn’t even place. The winner is Pat Dawson. In our few weeks in Angel we already know about her. She’s the school whore. Judy explains, “ Out-qf- town judges don’t know reputations or real personalities.” It’s our first experience with a small-town scandal. All Pat’s term the whole town chokes and gags about the whore Miss Angel. My mother, however, uses Pat as one of her examples in her on-going lectures about the great and secret power, the power of positive thinking. We are all in the car, Jason who has just failed fourth grade sitting between me and Bridgit, driving around the hills, exploring, as we always do on Sundays. Mama and Daddy are telling us again. “ Jason could learn to read if he put his mind to it.” ' “ Of course Pat’s not beautiful. Anyone can see that.” We all laugh with Daddy. “ But forthat night, forthe purpose of winning the Miss Angel contest, she thought herself beautiful. And so she won.” £ - ^ - 3 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 Angel, in the country. The temperature hovers in the mid eightys. Most days are overcast, breaths of steam rising off the giant boulders. I descend the path through the sagebrush, down over 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 sage and the granite is pungent, wild. As the sun goes down, the full moon rises. I hate Angel. 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 Angel, 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 to a beauty that’s turned arotind from all I’m being told is beautiful. The smell of the land is stark like courage. I don’t want to be Miss Angel. 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. 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 sage, 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 apd a senior at La Jolla High School. I start the climb back in the hot twilight. Venus, the one star 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 they say, 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? Is she a real queen? The photograph pulls me like the sage pulls me. I’m thirteen, I’m awakening in the deepest part of myself to the world, what it wants, what it thinks, sage, 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 advan-' tage, 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 stepmother. At school I read The National Geograph ic. The Chinese bind women’s feet, the Ubangi’s stretch their lips, the West Africans stretch their necks, the Incas their earlobes. Some people make scars on their 38 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988
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