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 he 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 the grocer 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. But then there’s my mother, so beautiful, but so apart from this game. She does nothing to be 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 Angel says we’re fools, we’ ll never succeed. But we have positive thinking, we open on a day in August, El Angel’s Heavenly Hamburgers. Nineteen cents. We’re a success! The drive-in is on the south end of town within a grove of old eucalyptus trees, instantly, the teenage hangout, the tourist stop. The tourists driving 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 new grill. 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 alright 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 came 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'?” I swim 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, or the road, or the park, 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 orleanders and eucalyptus they are hiding in the bushes with their pants down. Playing with the ir s t if f penises, which fascinate them. “ Hey, Blondie, look at th is !” Once, inside the dark, damp ladies bathroom in the center of the park a sweaty man without a shirt grabs me. I get away and never go in that place again, no matter how badly I have to pee, but I will feel his wet shoulders in my nightmares forever. But 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. And 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 an Indian? He kisses me with his warm, wet tongue. There is nothing like the compulsion I feel toward him underneath 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 unreSometimes 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, climbing out of the tub, and I am an ugly old woman, uglier than Snow White’s cruel stepmother. vealing for a week. “ Hold your shoulders up!” everyone yells. “ You are beautiful, can’t you see that?” But the opposite is always the truth. Ramon has to talk to me. “ It’s important.” We hide in the dusty arroyo where the seventh grader raped the first grader. I’m wearing my baby blue sweater I worked weeks at the drive-in for. “ It’s hard to tell you this,” he says, looking down the rocky cut where it goes under the road. “ Let’s go down there.” We can hear the cars rumble over us. I’m afraid of the rattlesnakes. But his hands are on my breasts, his penis against me. At first I resist. At night I pray to resist. I know this is wrong. But then the tide starts deep and back inside, wildly- building waves that make life worth all the pain, that has to crash on the shore. Even so I don’t let Ramon enter me. He’s helping me to hook my bra when he says, “ It’s Eddie who says I have to tell you this. For your own good.” He sighs, then angrily grabs me by the shoulders. “ Why, when you wear sweaters, do you stick your tits out so far? Don’t you know everyone laughs at you? The guys can’t stand you for it. They say you’re cheap, you’re teasing them.” I want to die, lie down in the gutter, let the rattlesnakes have me. I can’t even let Ramon know, my pride is so devastated, I have to hang onto something. The waves of shame, of public humiliation wash through me “ You are too beautiful for your age,” the President of the Board of Education says when I enter the essay-speech contest on democracy to win a trip to the United Nations in New York City. My grade on the essay on which our names are not printed is fifteen points higher than the skinny undeveloped boy who wins. for months. I will never wear a sweater again. Though they are my best clothes, though they are the wonderful fashion. Daddy teaches me to drive. Swimming, learning to drive. I can’t get a license until I’m sixteen, but because they’re always working at the drive-in they let me take the car home and back for errands. As long as I take the back roads. I love being in the car alone. Now the waves are of freedom, of exploration. I take two- wheel-rutted dirt paths off the back roads, back into the hills among the giant boulders, onto the reservations, into places of Angel I never knew before, rock ’n’ roll blaring from San Diego. I come to flash streams running across the road. I plunge right in and pull out the other side. When the water stops me, my parents’ Ford stuck midstream, I wade out, walk home all night in the dark. I’m afraid but curious too about the land, the canyons and valleys, the mountains and rocks and dams. The night. I feel the coyotes, the mountain lions, the jack rabbits watching me. I’m afraid of the oak trees because tarantulas nest under them. But then when I touch the gnarly trunk I know every person who has passed here through all time. Sometimes I know I am the first to place her foot on this rock. When I finally get home Daddy screams and screams. I’m grounded for weeks. To graduate from eighth grade in California, to get into high school, every student must pass a history test with emphasis on the Constitution of the United States. I’m terrified of another public humiliation. For the whole year I study. I buy NO-Doz pills and stay up nights studying under the blanket so my parents won’t see. the light. My class is noted for its high number of intelligent students. At the end of the year, when the scores come back from the state, I’m told I passed. Everyone is raving about Neal Hopkins, one of the three boys in my class with genius I.Q.s, how high his score is, one of the highest in the state. His picture is in the El Sol. On the day of graduation, I see the scores. Mine is a half point beneath his. I was a close second. I don’t understand why no one said anything about it. My speech for graduation is called “ Freedom.” C. I write my first stories in the eighth grade. I write science fiction. I write a story about a beauty contest called “ Universe,” an outer-space competition of creatures from all.the galaxies, creatures of bizarre and spectacular shapes and sizes. I don’t call it Miss Universe, because in the universe such a competition would not be limited to one or even several genders and of course it wouldn’t be limited to the unmarried. It’s clear to me that these are provincial ideas of the little part of Earth I live on. Miss Earth this year is a deer. She competes with enormous star-shaped flower creatures, fla ir ing mole shapes, a beast from Revelations, kings like strange fungi I’ve seen in the oak groves, glowing white. The winner is from Venus, a being shaped a little like an earthling, except for the green iridescent husk that robes its body and its noseless face. Everyone has an ugly nose. If you came from a world without noses you’d think we were deformed with our knotty protrusions. I write another story about the last couple on earth after the Bomb. They drive from town to town across the United States in the cars they find strewn everywhere. In their lifetime they will never run out of gas, which seems like heaven. But they worry about the future. Who will know how to make gasoline? Though there is no one to marry them, their obligation to have sexual intercourse is very clear. c . > Mama reads about an art class offered Saturday mornings in Ramon Park by a world-famous painter. Mr. Gavinsky, eighty-three, showed at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933. She encourages me to take the class because I keep a sketchbook and draw all the time. Drawing, I’ve discovered that all objects are animate. But it ’s the pleasures of following the lines of the human body that I especially love. Mr. Gavinsky is crabby and his paintings are not interesting to me, muted landscapes of oranges and browns. To me the land is electric, Fuchsia, indigo, silver. Still, I’m excited about learning something. But he ignores me, talks only to the middle-aged women who comprise the rest of the class. On the third Saturday he asks me if I don’t think I should drop the class. “ A girl like you couldn’t possibly be interested in what I have to o f fe r . Bes ides , you are distracting.” I leave quickly, walking towards town. Fighting the tears. Inside I’m screaming. How dare you think you know who I am! But anger is something a girl like me cannot show. As with so many feelings that give away the heart. The privacy. It’s all you have. & “ You are too beautiful for your age,” the president of the Board of Education says when I enter the essay-speech contest on democracy to win a trip to the United Nations in New York City. My grade on the essay on which our names are not printed is fifteen points higher than the skinny undeveloped boy who wins. When Bridgit enters high school she tries out for cheerleader. Just as Mama has fretted, there’s no trace now of her former brilliance. “ Bridgit thought herself average and so now she really is average.” Our mother bemoans the power of thought. But Bridgit is very popular. She used her magnificent brain to achieve that, I figure. And her breasts are far from average. Suddenly they are much larger than mine, much, much larger. They call her Jayne Mansfield, Anita Ekberg. I’m sure they’re the results too of the power of her thought. As a little girl, big boobs, as she called them, were her greatest dream. She’d sneak Mama’s brassieres from the dresser drawer, fill the D cups with water-filled balloons, put on Daddy’s white T-shirts and, for whole days, parade around the blocks, jugging, it seems now, into her future body. It’s a surprise when she isn’t voted cheerleader. Late that summer we are secretly informed by the student-body president, a good friend of Bridgit’s, that in fact she was voted Head Cheerleader; she received more votes than any other girl. But Mrs. Deal, head of the English Department and the committee that counted the votes, put her foot down. “ I will not stand for that girl to be out there bouncing up and down before all of Angel, no sireee!" Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 39
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