The Miss America Family

by Julianna Baggott

  Mr. Pichard was wearing a light blue cable-knit cardigan, the kind Mr. Rogers was so fond of. He was built close to the ground, hunkering yet spry, like if you tried to take anything he’d get there first, and I had the feeling that he was waiting for me just to try it. He had a crooked nose that veered off to the left, as if it was impolitely pointing out the hump on his left shoulder. His wife was also short, but she was thin with little breasts swung way down by the thin belt of her plaid summer dress.

  Mr. Pichard looked at me and then to his wife. “I bought toy trucks. You said he was a boy! A little boy!”

  “He’s sixteen,” my father said.

  Richard piped up, “I told you he was sixteen. I told you he’d more likely appreciate a subscription to Penthouse or a bouquet from Condom World. Can’t you remember sweet sixteen?”

  Mr. Pichard ignored his son, which, I’d come to realize, was the only way that he dealt with him. “Well, what will I do with all these toy trucks!” he said. “I bought a shitload of toy trucks!”

  Hester said, “Remember when you overordered the buckle shoes? This is like that time he overordered the buckle shoes. Remember? We had too many buckle shoes for years and years.” She smiled at me.

  But I wasn’t really there. I could only think about being gay, my father’s gayness and mine, possibly, also. I’d taken biology, for God’s sake. I knew about genetics. Maybe Rudy was gay and he saw it in me, too, and that’s why he took me out into the high weeds after we’d gotten stoned. I was afraid now that it wasn’t my webbed toes at all that the girls at St. Andrew’s School had instinctively been warded off by, but my deeply rooted gayness, so deeply rooted that I was unaware of it. I wondered if Janie Pinkering had suspected it or noticed it right off like I had Mr. Pichard’s nose, and if that wasn’t the transformation she’d been striving for, the transformation into heterosexuality, the transformation that, even after having had sex with her, I’d failed to make. Obviously, my father had failed in just the same way with my mother. I wished that I could talk to my mother, to ask her how it was possible that she’d neglected to tell me that my father was gay, a giant snag in their marriage, no doubt. I wanted to ask her if she’d thought I was gay, too, like Dilworth had. But I assumed that it wouldn’t be possible to get in touch with her for at least a few days, maybe weeks. Who knew how long it took to get over shooting somebody? There were a lot of questions to ask. I thought about the slight trembling in her hand as she applied her lipstick, the small wobble in her step, how I’d told her I’d be home when she got there. I felt sick about it all over again.

  As if he’d heard what I was thinking, Mr. Pichard said, “Who knows who plays with trucks anymore these days? Maybe he plays with dolls. You can’t tell.”

  “Look at the three of them,” Richard said, gesturing to Mr. Pichard, my father, and me, touching his mother’s sleeve. “You can’t tell gay from straight. Will the gay man please take one step forward.” Mr. Pichard glanced nervously at my father and me and then back at Richard. “They all look so charmingly straight, don’t they? Lemonade, anyone?” Richard asked, swooping out of the room.

  “I am straight,” I said. “I mean, I don’t just look it.” I wanted to get that cleared up right from the start.

  “Of course, you are,” Mr. Pichard said. “I bought you trucks, didn’t I?”

  “Too many,” Mrs. Pichard reminded him. She lifted up a crystal bowl of candies and offered them to me. “Like the buckle shoes.”

  “I’m sixteen.” I picked up one of the pink candies but it was stuck solid to the others. I shook my head. “Thanks, anyway.”

  “He’s sixteen,” Mr. Pichard said. “Of course.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Pichard added.

  My father clapped my shoulder. “That’s right.”

  But I couldn’t stop. “I’m not gay,” I said and then rambled on, “I’ve been umphing the Pinkering girl. I was their gardener, but I’m learning to drive now. I’ve got my driver’s permit.”

  They all stared at me nodding and smiling. Richard stepped into the room with a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of waxy, flower-printed paper cups. “Lemonade!” he sang sweetly.

  “Your barn door is open,” Mrs. Pichard said to the three of us, ignoring Richard. We all looked down, and Mr. Pichard zipped up.

  Pixie

  How to Find Your Husband in Bed with Another Man, Gracefully

  Hopefully,” I told the little psychiatrist at the next session, “you’re learning something from all of this. I’d hate to think that you aren’t paying attention. It’s for your own good.”

  She ignored my comment, but I could tell she’d thought about our last session. Her lips had a shine to them, like she’d put on Chap Stick, a big step for her, and her hair was clipped back, still frizzy at each side and one poof on top. Her sweater was navy blue, not exactly feminine but a step in the right direction. She wanted to show me pictures. “Just ten,” she said. “And you can tell me a story about what you see.” She held up a black-and-white picture of a young woman carrying books. In the background, a strapping young man was working on the farm with his shirt off, and an older pregnant woman was leaning against a tree.

  “I suppose you want me to reveal my own story, to cast my own family in these parts?”

  “You can tell any story that you want.”

  “Okay, fine. Here it is. I’m the girl, right? She’ll leave, but with no guidance from the pregnant woman. I mean, she’s incapable of guidance, stuck as she is, only nagging advice on what not to do. A.k.a. my mother. And the farmhand isn’t exactly going to take her away from all of this, but it’s hard to say who he is in the story. Should he be my father? Just about to die on everybody? My brother about to go off to war? Or my ex-husband? The farmhand could very well be gay.”

  “What would make you think he’s gay?”

  “He’s handsome. He’s unattainable. It’s just a distinct possibility. I’ve learned these things the hard way.” I explained to her that I married a gay man. Actually, I fell in love with him. I didn’t particularly care for sex, so he suited me. That’s one way to marry a gay man without knowing it. Your libidos will appear to be similar. Russell never looked at me like the men from that chain-linked yard, with their feet soaking in metal tubs, never lustfully, like a chieftain of some shabby yard tribe in Bayonne. Sex had bad implications for me, and Russell was tall, and even though he was thin, his body was heavy. I hated the heaviness of it, the way it could press the air from me. But sometimes, and not often, just every once in a while, it was different, and I wasn’t like St. Christina the Astonishing, hovering above the bed, looking down from the ceiling’s corners, but I slipped into my own body and could feel my skin touching his skin. It felt the way I’d always imagined it should feel. I thought how silly I’d been to think that I was dirty. I almost forgot why I’d come up with that idea in the first place. He’d look at me like I was an innocent angel. Even in the most ordinary moments sometimes I’d catch him gazing at me the way a sinner gazes at a statue of Mary, someone who could save him if only he had enough faith, and he was acting like he believed, acting his heart out. I thought he was beautiful, and he thought I was beautiful. We admired each other. We often kissed in public. His arm slung around my neck, he’d stop walking just to kiss me on the mouth and we’d smile at each other, then continue on.

  I met Russell one afternoon while I was teaching an at-home dance lesson. My client was an older man, a retiree of some sort, with clumsy, wandering hands. His wife was upstairs, dying slowly, and so sometimes a nurse would bustle into the room to ask him a question. He’d sigh, pulling the needle from the record. “I don’t know,” he’d say. “Can you leave me be for just one hour? Just one goddamn hour?” And then he’d sit in his chair with his head in his hands, and it would take him a while to become light again, to be ready to cha-cha. He was recovering from one of these moments, and I was pointing at a foot chart, talking him through the chase step when there was a knock at the door. H
e said, “You can get it.” And I did, and there was Russell with his white teeth, his long hair pulled back and hidden under his suit collar. He had one finger on the trigger of an all-purpose cleanser like a cowboy in a western, someone come to save me.

  I said, “It’s not a good time.”

  And he agreed, “No, it’s not a good time. I’m not having any fun at all.”

  “I mean, the man of the house is, well, not feeling right.”

  “Me neither,” he said, sighing, looking up the street at the line of houses that had shut their doors on him, or worse, had invited him in out of sympathy, buying only the $1.25 sampler. “I’d love a doughnut. That’s what I want. If I have to spray one more fucking demo strip, I might shrivel up and die right here on this guy’s front stoop. You know?”

  And I did know. I was tired of the endless count of one, two cha-cha-cha, steering the old man through the foxtrot, the rhumba, while reigning in his wayward hands, tired of being the person I was. Russell and I left together, the foot chart still on its easel, the cha-cha record still on the turntable. We ate doughnuts, and got married two weeks later.

  My mother came to the wedding at the justice of the peace. I’d invited her but hoped she wouldn’t come. She helped me attach my veil. I remember her clenching the bob-bypins in her teeth, whispering, “I thought I taught you better.” But she’d never taught me anything except the merits of not being happy. If I’d known then that she’d fallen in love with a butcher, Mr. Graziano—which I think now may have been the case—I’d have told her to run off with him, to claim some happiness, but she was afraid of love, petrified of it. I, for one, wasn’t going to repeat her mistakes. I was making my life up as it came to me.

  Russell and I were excessively happy. It was what we wanted to be. He was out most of the time, but that wasn’t too unusual, I thought. My father hadn’t been home much either. But when he was home, I wasn’t like my mother, stern and unforgiving. I always remembered the cottage vacation and the fight over the beautiful hat, and so when Russell was home, I made sure that I was happy, that we were all happy, that if he ever decided to buy me a hat I would pull it from its white tissued box and wear it all around our small apartment. There was no hat in a tissued box, though. Sometimes there was some dope to smoke from his bong, and I’d smoke it with him while he strummed guitar, his eyelids heavy and red. He was in college to avoid the draft, and he’d try to look studious. He’d read his books sometimes and tell me what he thought of it all, philosophy and physics, and he usually agreed with his teachers. He’d say it was all common sense, though, like he’d have been smart enough to figure it out if the old dead guys hadn’t beaten him to it. He wore little glasses, even though he didn’t need glasses. He was faking it, and I let him fake it because I wanted to believe him. I was confident that we were happy. I was sure of it. And Russell played along when he was there. We thought we were happy and normal because we didn’t know any better.

  We didn’t have much sex. Despite the times that it felt good and right, I still thought, in general, that sex was dirty, and love was pure. But I knew that I wanted a baby, to begin my perfect Miss America family, and I knew what I had to do to get one. Still, we did have sex occasionally. It was the early ’70s; sex and birth control were political acts that we believed were our rights, and it was our duty to claim our rights.

  One night while lying on our mattress on the floor, I brought up the idea of a baby. Russell was reading, hunkered toward a dime-store lamp. I was looking out the window, the ledge lined with a dusting of snow and shuffling pigeons. I said, “I’d love to have a little baby.” And that’s what I wanted, a little tiny cooing baby.

  “I don’t think that it’s necessary to have a baby,” he said. This, in retrospect, was a clue. A child wasn’t necessary to prove he was straight. Marriage seemed to have taken care of that just fine. But I wasn’t picking up on clues.

  “Of course it isn’t necessary!” I said.

  “There are a lot of people in the world already,” he said, taking off his glasses and looking tired and serious. “In good conscience, I don’t think we should add to the population.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to have the kid who’s going to discover the next cure, negotiate the next peace accord. We won’t be raising an idiot! I think other people should stop having kids, but not us.”

  “Still,” he said.

  “It’s necessary,” I said. “It’s absolutely necessary. It’s what I want.”

  Now he was sitting straight up on the mattress. “I don’t know,” he said, sighing, looking up at the ceiling. “Do you want to be one of them? You know, them?” He was talking about our parents, his father, in particular, a dairy farmer who talked to his cows with more tenderness than his children, a man he was always disappointing. We’d both agreed that our parents had screwed up most of the things they’d ever tried to accomplish, raising us being one of those things. We didn’t talk about family much or anything really that wasn’t about the here and now. Russell liked to say things like, “Let’s stay in the moment,” and “The past is the past.” This suited me perfectly, as you could imagine. He helped me fold the sheets, you could say, stuff the closet to maximum capacity, and press against the door till we both heard the safety of the knob’s click.

  I said, “Becoming a father isn’t becoming your father. I won’t become my mother just because I am a mother.”

  He did love me, you know. Not the same way that a man loves a woman, but maybe in a better way. He pulled me to his chest. He stroked my hair. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Let’s make a very little world peace leader.”

  I got pregnant easily, and being pregnant was almost like being Miss America, not the nausea in the beginning, not the throwing up, the backaches, my belly tightening sometimes into a hard ball. But the way people regarded me, suddenly, not only as someone who was going to be a mother but almost like their own mothers. I’d always wanted the stage to be this barrier of respect, but really my belly worked even better. Men opened doors for me, carried my grocery bags. I forgot that there’d be pain, that there could be complications. Wanda’s knitting needle was still in the bottom of my pocketbook. Wanda, however, had done everything wrong. I, on the other hand, was powerful.

  But Ezra’s birth was difficult. I bled all the way to the hospital, gushing through towels onto the front seat of our beaten-up Ford six weeks ahead of my due date. There was nothing the doctors could do to stop it. Ezra’s head was already crowning when they spread my legs for the first time. The nurse yelled for the doctor. I pushed only twice and he was there, too little, born early and weak, the fluid in his lungs not fully squeezed out during the birthing process. My body gave him up too soon, my muscles not woven tightly enough, my bones not holding him in. I blamed myself, my body, for betraying me, the way it had always done what it wanted, taking charge of my life.

  In the recovery room, I begged the nurses to let me hold him. They said he was stable enough for a short visit and so one of the nurses brought him to me, wrapped tight with a knit stocking cap on his head. The nurse left the room and I grew weak, my arms heavy, becoming numb. I was afraid I’d drop him. I said to myself again and again, in a desperate whisper, “Don’t let go. Don’t let go.” That’s how soon it began and last summer it had come back, that smallest of whispers, a tightening in my chest, like a balloon filling with water. Whenever I was with him, I wasn’t sure, moment to moment, whether or not I might reach out and clutch his shirt. I could almost hear myself say, “Don’t leave me. Don’t become a man. Do you still love me?”

  My mother came to visit me in the hospital wearing her ancient thick coat with its oversize buttons, her pocketbook clutched in her fist. She’d peeked in on him in his incubator. She’d asked the nurse to show her his feet. “He’s one of us,” she told me later, in regard to his webbed toes. “But he’s not a healthy child,” she said. “There’s something wrong with him. Don’t get too attached.” This was my mother’s philosophy on every
thing, not to get too attached because it would just be taken away, better nothing to begin with than something and then nothing. She was talking about her parents, of course, and I think she was talking about my father, too. She’d loved him once, because if she hadn’t loved him she wouldn’t have turned so cold. She’d have been indifferent and remained indifferent, right? And, maybe she loved the butcher, too. She certainly needed him, and who can really distinguish true need from true love? From what I could tell, she believed that she paid for that love, that small happiness, that it was the reason so many bad things happened. My mother looked at the world this way, and I wanted desperately not to.

  “He’s fine!” I said. “He’s beautiful!”

  Finally, we were allowed to bring Ezra home. It became harder to live near the ocean. I could feel it out there, the pull and drag of it, like an animal clawing the beach. I was afraid of its rising up. Every night I dreamed of my father drowning, and sometimes my father was so small, just the size of Ezra, four pounds, a body that could fit in the palm of my hand. I felt that if I lost Ezra, I’d lose everything. I remembered Wanda’s baby, the homemade abortion, the baby born alive who died in my hands and how it only reminded me of my father and the skinny sailor on the dock. I didn’t want to live in a world that was always giving you things only to snatch them back.

  But Ezra lived. Even though his lungs would fill up easily, he was alive. He was pink. His cheeks almost fat, and I felt like I’d taken something back that had been mine, that had been taken away. I felt justified, and my role in life was to keep him alive, to keep what was rightfully mine.

  I didn’t get to name him Troy. Although the picture in my head of the perfect family had changed considerably, I still liked my names. “What world peace leader’s named Troy? Donahue?” Russell asked, and so we named him after Pound. Russell didn’t know much about Pound at the time though. He only knew he was a great figure in literature. Only later did he learn that he was a Fascist, not a peace leader at all. By then it was too late to change it. Ezra was a very bright baby, and at five months he knew to look when someone said his name; sometimes he’d clap his finger-splayed hands. Nobody knows much about literature and Fascists anyway. There’s no need for Ezra to ever know. Sometimes I’ll introduce him as being named after the great literary figure when I know the other person doesn’t know too much about the world, and to make Ezra like his name. Anyway, his middle name was John, after Lennon. You can’t really go wrong there.