I'm fifteen. A glamorous couple has moved to town. They are unlike other adults, they don’t have children, she’s on TV a lot, commercials for Johnson’s floor wax, Kellogg breakfast cereals, chocolates for losing weight. Liz Carter. She was Miss Chicago. She was fourth runner-up in the Miss America contest. She opens a charm school, Liz’s Charm School. I take my paycheck from the drive-in, sign up. I know only too well how uncharming I am. She instructs, “ You must learn to walk with your knees bent so that you glide, as if on roller skates. When I won the Miss Chicago crown the judges debated whether I had roller skates on beneath my gown. Before they crowned me they sent someone backstage to check me out.” She takes us to see the movies Picnic and The Man With a Golden Arm. Liz was best friends with Kim Novak before Hollywood discovered her. Liz says Kim is really a fat slob with black hair and pimples. Just look what she has managed to do for herself. The beauty business will be your best investment. Liz isn’t beautiful to me. She’s too old, as she herself always says. She’s twenty-six, a fading beauty, her life of glory gone. She talks incessantly of the war to stay beautiful and “ alive” for her husband, to keep him happy. All she can really do is to try and help us, to share what she learned when she too was young. Thirteen lessons, thirteen weeks. She teaches us how to sit, how to walk, how to wear clothes,' how to put on make-up. Every week she urges me to cut my hair. “ I had hair as beautiful as yours, as thick. Only...” a tone now suggesting hers was superior because “ it was black.” “ But long hair causes you to slump your shoulders, it makes you stick your head out in front of your body, to lead the way. It looks like your brain weighs too much.” She takes us to the Miss North Island Beauty Pageant sponsored by the U.S. Naval Station in San Diego. Terry, the first girl, leaps from the side curtains, struts out before the audience of hundreds, sailors and San Diego dignitaries, her chest and her smile expanded. She teases and flirts and winks at the judges, sashaying her high little ass beneath its ruffly skirt at them, juts her bottom lip, drops her eyelids, hands on her hips, for the boys in the front rows. She throws us all big tongued kisses. The place comes down in a roar, the pandemonium of the seventh grade. None of the twenty other girls is able to match her exuberance, her strut, her blatant sexual- fun strut-tease. But now the bathing-suit competition. Terry is called out again, the obvious winner. There’s the roar again, these guys love her. Again the seventh grade: they’re panting at the mouth, they’re close to jacking off collectively. But in her metallic-green one-piece, Terry is timid. Now she doesn’t strut or prance, she hesitates, head bowed, the triumphant smile gone. She takes the obligatory turn-arounds, then walks out the ramp, tripping slightly in her high heels. The roar of the boys, deafening when her name was called, is diminishing with each stringy step until there is only embarassment in the hall. She is skinny, everything, legs, bottom, chest, arms, the bones protruding from the base of her chicken neck. “ If only she had strutted in her bathing suit,” Liz instructs, “ she would have won. We would have seen her triumphantly thin, like a model with a boy’s body. But she thought herself skin and bones. Beauty is an illusion. If you want to be beautiful, you must become a great actress.” The next year Liz’s husband, Chuck, coming up the canyon from the beach at Del Mar, drives his convertible right off the five-hundred-foot drop into dry, boulder-filled Lake Hanson. Liz, in her grief, prepares to receive the insurance settlement. But then the insurance company The spotlight blinds me. I can’t see anyone. But I’m smiling. I’m smiling till my face hurts, the bilateral sides of my face. People always complain that I don’t smile enough. I’m determined not to lose the contest for that old fault. declares his death suicide. There weren’t any skid marks. Liz’s Charm School closes. She loses the war to be beautiful, to keep her husband happy. One day in my sophomore year Cal Johnson from the Angel Chamber of Commerce and Pilgrim Fellowship, the Christian teenage organization I used to belong to in order to get out of the house on Sunday nights to be with Ramon, drives up the hill to our house with the Miss Angel application. He asks me about Ramon who’s been sent to the San Diego County reform school. “ I don’t know how he is. We broke up.” Mr. Johnson is delighted with this news. “ He was never good enough for you.” He helps me fill out the form. Weight: I lie; ten pounds less. Hobbies: I’ve quit drawing so I can’t say that. Talent: “ I always wanted to play the piano but we could never afford one.” Career plans: marriage. “ You can’t say that. They want you to be domestic, but not that domestic.” Yeah, they want you to be a virgin forever. Maybe I’ll write sex under hobbies. Color of eyes: Mama says they change to whatever I’m near. Measurements: 38-23-35. Measurements is easy because I know my answer will make the judges excited and it ’s not a lie. “Talent,” Cal says, “ is the most important thing next to looks. You have to have a lot of that. And personality.” I have neither of these. Everyone says “ you’re beautiful but you don’t have any personality.” Bridgit has the personality, the brains. “ But you're head majorette. You can twirl a baton.” That’s true. I’m head majorette for the El Angel High School Band. But I’ve never had any lessons or teachers or even examples of what a majorette is, except for the Rose Bowl Parade every New Year’s Day on TV. This isn’t talent, just hard work. I figured the baton out, twirling the silver bar for hours all the summer before the tenth grade. I found twelve girls, taught them what I’d taught myself. I designed our uniforms, drove the forty miles to San Diego to buy the material, sewed every blue sequin on the thirteen white corduroy bodysuits. Now I haul the girls off almost every weekend to march in five-mile parades behind palominos whose shit we strut in, choreograph (a word I don’t know) every football and basketball half time. My favorite is my Indian routine. We tie colored scarves to our ankles and Jight the ends of our batons with fire. The drums thump out the beat, we howl past the feathers in our braided hair. Against the cold, dark night beneath the blinding lights of the Angel Stadium during half time in which the Angel Devils are always winning, we are wild savages before the civilized crowd. “Well,” Cal says, “ baton seems to be your only talent. You better put it down.” The week after the Miss Angel contest he enters me in, Cal Johnson disappears, leaving his family, the church, his insurance business. Everyone fears foul play or that he’s dead at the bottom of one of the steep canyons. At church we pray for him. In my prayers I never forget him. He was the most beloved and respected man in Angel. But then two years later the police find him in the desert in Calexico, remarried and reestablished in the insurance business and the churcb- AII the forms of propriety, or perhaps it was insurance, didn’t reveal Cal’s true self either. c- fe—» The man I want to marry is a sailor at sea. Sergei. He’s a Russian from New York, he’s as tall as Ivan the Terrible on whom I am writing a paper when we meet. Six feet five inches. Nineteen. We’ve known each other only three weeks when he is shipped off for seven-months duty in the Pacific. I have the map above my bed. I follow him, Honolulu, Yokahama, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines. We write every day. I date a different guy at least every other day. Mostly they are sailors. I like them because they come from other states and contrary to their reputation, to mine for dating them, they are gentlemen, I don’t even have to kiss them. None of them is able to make me forget Sergei. For the Miss Angel contest each girl is required to have an escort. Sergei arranges to have his best friend, Gino, drive up from Miramar Naval Air Station to escort me. The gesture is gallant but I wish I was with anyone else. A strapless, peach formal. Expensive. Layers and layers of net and taffeta over a rented hoop skirt. The gown was Bobbie Sue’s, my nineteen- year-old cousin recently killed in a car accident. When Gino, in his dress blues, walks into the long living room that opens onto the whole Valle De Romona, I’m standing alone, watching the sun go down, waiting. He bows, “ I crown you Miss Angel.” In the twilight, the color of my gown, I do feel beautiful, though tight, that terrible awkwardness when I feel social expectations. I can’t possibly fill the need, though I pray to. I love the world. I want to do something for it before I die. At the last minute I put on the mustard-seed necklace my mother gave me for Christmas. Faith. We drive down to the town in his ’54 Ford hardtop convertible. He’s my boyfriend’s best friend. There can be no e lec tr ic ity between us. There is nothing to talk about. Later I think if he had been a potential boyfriend, if there could have been energy between us, the outcome of the night 40 Clinton St. Quarterly— Spring, 1988
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