a dark comer behind the throng of people. The band is playing “Mood Indigo.” Raquel Welch is standing in front of me. She’s just standing there in her ill-fitting blue gown, small and unglamorous, thinking no one is looking at her. Light doesn’t spark off her as it does the girls in the contest, as I can see it coming off me. The nostrils of her thick nose flair with each breath. She really is, as everyone sneers, Mexican. But I love the dark, the earth. She had a baby two weeks ago. Her second baby. She has milk. I’m sucked into her as into a cave, the hole so visible from the recent birth. Why are you wearing a dress that’s too large? Maybe you almost died. Bridgit comes through the crowd to take a picture of me. She recognizes Raquel and takes it of her instead. “ Raquel Tejada!” she emotes with the flashbulbs and instantly the dark sullen figure becomes sparkling light. But too late for the photograph. And before world fame. Before plastic surgery, age and film make you large. Before silicon, before Italy, before the starry debut. Before the great actress. You stand in front of the old photographs of my hometown, a stage coach on dusty Main, the army with Kit Carson the day before the massacre, Nuevo printed in white ink above,your head, I’m a white ghost behind you. Miss Angel in her turkey feathers. Your hair is cropped, your head too small. You are too small, sinking, the deadly vortex, your mother’s, a wetback maid for the rich. Into her you must sink, be a fading beauty at twenty, acquiesce to anonymity, live on this earth through the lives of your children, be smoke, not flames. Postpartum blues. You are a woman being removed from the world. Along with her camera Bridgit is carrying a copy of The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Suzanne. “ Are you reading that book, too?” Raquel asks. “ Oh, yes! I can’t put it down!” My sister can be chums with anyone. “ My mother gave it to me while I was in the hospital,” Raquel says. “ My mother’s so dumb she thinks because it shows Hollywood in a bad light I won’t want to be a movie star. It just makes me more determined than ever.” “ Me too!” Bridgit exclaims. “ But I can’t even let my mother see I’m reading it.” They both laugh, ta lk about some scene or character they love. I’ve never read that book. Someday I must. I’m sure I’ ll learn some basic things that have always escaped me. But I still have the photo my sister took of me and Raquel that night. It’s as important as another one I carry, of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. A detective friend took it on a studio lot about the same time Bridgit took hers. The two famous sex queens are standing in very high heels and very low-cut dresses, facing the camera. Monroe has one arm around Mansfield’s deeply indented waist, the other slid into her enormous left breast. Mansfield has one arm around Monroe’s shoulders and the other plunged up her dress into her crotch. Both blondes are laughing uproariously at the joke, their big joke on the world. They were consummate comedians. When I think of their deaths, Jayne’s like my cousin BobbieSue’s, I think they were murdered. Someone, the government, despite the world’s insistence on the Dumb Blonde, got wind of how smart these women were. And Raquel. In my sister’s photograph you can see the birthing of a person who must become an artist of her own body, personality and being. She is deciding in the very moment to become the world’s most beautiful woman. She will pay any price for this. You can see, any. price is worth it. Years later when I can’t remember being the girl this story is about, when the world will have changed so much, I’ ll zip past newstands in supermarkets and drugstores all over Los Angeles, past two or three, sometimes as many as a half-dozen covers of Raquel’s midsection: the famous flaring navel, her trademark (there was the letter to the editor of Playboy magazine in 1975 celebrating her navel as the most beautiful ever created, bemoaning the fact that no other woman’s belly button could make the writer as horny), the widewinged shoulders, the flaming bones of her face. THE MYSTERIOUS RAQUEL. WHO IS RAQUEL WELCH? Photographers know she’s had children from the marks on her famous belly (pregnancies being the cause of her stretched navel) but where the children are, where she has suddenly 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. come from, how old she is, who her husband is will remain manipulated mysteries for years. I will always be sorry she didn’t come on as Raquel Tejada, a name more beautiful than Raquel Welch, but in shooting for Hollywood fame in racist Southern California she obviously had to erase her Latin American heritage. In Southern California anything south of San Diego is Mexican. In a short and sweet presentation, ‘Miss Congeniality,’ “ the girl who is easiest to get along with and helps the most,” is awarded to Lily Walker. Then the real announcements begin. By order of placement, the top seven that is, the Queen’s Royal Court and then the Queen. As each name is called a squeal comes from the girl and then the slow dawning that she isn’t Miss Angel seems to overtake her as she arrives at the front of the room to receive her tiara and sash. Princess Six, Princess Five, Princess Four. When there is only the Queen to be announced and my name has not been called I know she is not me. I look across the faces of the four of us who remain. Diane explodes like a Fourth-of-July firecracker, each successive explosion more beautiful than the last as she jumps, cries out, stumbles ecstatically, tears falling in the spotlights and camera flashes, toward her robe and crown. The band is playing, “ Ramona, I hear your mission bells r ing ing ...” Annie, last year’s Miss Angel, as she forfeits her crown, is bawling. The three of us, Ella, Susan and myself, the three of us who have not placed, are just standing there wondering what else is expected of us. Cal Johnson runs up, “ Now girls! Don’t be bad sports. Go up there and congratulate the new Queen and her Court.” M echanically we start doing as we are told, when Cal grabs my arm. He looks into my eyes. “ Do you realize you came in last. Last! When are you ever going to learn to smile?” I’m bobbing for apples the last church Halloween party at his house, how sexual it is, nose and teeth in the water with the boys’. “ And didn’t you promise me you’d have your hair thinned?” “ It’s just that the judges couldn't see your pretty face, honey.” Cal’s wife is suddenly beside us, she who is 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 Angel. Heavens! You should have though t 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 Angel. But there won’t be a next year for me. I watch Raquel Welch leave the Angel 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 Angel contest. I’m going to Sarah’s for Easter vacation. I’m wearing white three-inch high heels, a lot of makeup. 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 fuschia 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 not 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 Iwill 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. He takes a picture of me with his new Japanese camera 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 Angel 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 she is so different, so d ism issable—why? I see her 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 Angel, 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 Jam drawing men, that is, luring them. We watch the horse races, my head nestled into the arm pit of my tall sailor. I love to listen to him talk, his sexy New York accent. We walk around the agricultural exhibits. We ghsp 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 scores of the two men judges I would have been Miss Angel. But Raquel Welch gave me the lowest points possible. Zero in every category. Raquel is a chapter from The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, which will be published June 15th by Graywolf Press of St. Paul. Sharon Doubiago grew up in southern California and has spent much of her adult life traveling the North and South American continents. A frequent contributor to the CSQ, Sharon is currently at work on Son, a booklength feminist narrative on raising a male athlete. Stewart Mead is a Twin Cities artist whose work will be shown beginning May 21st as part of the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Gail Swanlund is a free-lance designer in the Twin C ities. 42 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988
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