Reaching for the package, Kate nearly toppled it to the floor, but she retrieved it in the nick of time. In order to steady herself, she placed a hand on the stereo and inadvertently switched on the power button. The room filled with the harmonies of Crowded House, “Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over,” and Kate’s face lit up with a wry smile of recognition.
Snapping off the music, she said, “Don’t dream it’s over. More like a nightmare that’s never over.”
Kate hugged the square gift box close to her. She fell backwards onto the bed, and she rocked holding onto the present. She remained seated there for as long as possible. Kate’s eyes misted over, and her trembling hands ripped open the card. She deciphered the barely legible words: Dah-lings, I wish you a most blissful trip through the country called matrimony – may all your wedded days be holidays! I love you with all my soul. Yours, Evangelica Kirsten Whiley
Kate slipped the card back into its coffee stained envelope, and she carried the box into the kitchen. Placing the tastefully wrapped present on the counter, she picked up the glass of wine and took a large sip. She leaned against the fridge facing the gift, and her free hand clutched her hair at her temple. Her head felt as if it was about to explode, and so she tugged at her temples to relieve the pressure smashing against her skull.
She unconsciously sloshed wine down the front of her off-white dress. Realizing what she had done, Kate hurled the plastic glass into the sink and watched it bounce around. The throbbing echoing inside her brain prevented the noise from the hurtling object from even registering.
Her knees buckled, and she slid against the fridge. Crumpled in a heap on the floor, Kate called out to the surrounding emptiness, “Why? Why did you do it? Isn’t it bad enough you sleep with my fiancé two nights before my wedding, but then you try to kill yourself?”
While beating the back of her head against the metal door, she said vehemently, “You vengeful bitch.”
Kate’s fingers tugged wildly at her temples, and she prayed for the crashing waves to subside. The inside of her brain felt tender and bruised, and she wished more than anything Vange was standing in the middle of the kitchen; if nothing else, it would be nice to scream accusatory obscenities at her sublimely beautiful face.
With trembling hands, Kate reached for the wedding present and opened it slowly. Her nervous delicate fingers pulled a large crystal platter from the box. A note was taped on the serving plate, which Kate read aloud, “I hope this always reminds you of your quaint lakeside hometown – don’t ever forget where you came from!” Kate crumpled the note in her hand. Overly sensitive of Evangeline’s tone, she took the note to be more sarcastic than sincere. On the face of the platter were sea gulls soaring above a sailboat.
The nautical scene did nothing to move Kate. Dry-eyed, she held the big round glass plate to her chest and remained rocking on the kitchen floor.
Summer, 1985
Having just completed her hippie-dippy dance routine to an old Donovan tune, Kate remained off stage in the wings, where she waited for Evangelica to perform. The sweat poured off of her body, which was concealed under the confines of a foam rubber conifer costume. Ordinarily, the dreary scholarship pageant was hardly the social event of the summer, but tonight the whole town appeared to be packed in the teeming bleachers. They had come to see whether the rumor was true if the Whiley girl could really sing.
Dressed in a tight black velvet gown, Evangelica strutted down to the end of the runway as she had been specifically instructed not to do. For the past three weeks, pageant director and Home Economics guru, Nyda Czerwinski, had made it her private mission to eradicate any show of personality or evidence of individuality from her contestants. All her attempts to curb the excesses she saw in Evangelica’s stage presence were a resounding flop.
“Vangie,” Nyda reprimanded during the dress rehearsal, “you’re swaggering again. This is the queen’s runway, not a catwalk.”
“It’s my pony walk,” Evangelica protested to the woman who peered over her glasses like a nibbling gerbil.
“Whatever it is, it’s terribly provincial,” Nyda said. “And fix those lips!”
“What’s wrong with my lips?”
“Can’t you make them smaller? Stop moving so much. This will never work, can’t you do something about those breasts?”
Evangelica’s milky cleavage was ammunition in her arsenal to thrust in the direction of the other girls. Like boulders released from a slingshot, she seized any opportunity to aim her ample gifts at the other contestants. Despite the director’s admonishments, Kate, along with everyone else, was overtly jealous of Vange’s ample bosom. Eventually, Evangelica grew more outraged with each new attack on her body until she finally yelled from the stage one afternoon, “Listen, the requirements of this pageant never said you had to be light as a feather and stiff as a board.” She tormented the pageant director by grabbing her crotch for emphasis.
Whenever Nyda caught Vange sauntering, she clapped her hands and called for odds-on-favorite Heidi to demonstrate the graceful stride of a genuine lady. “Girls,” Nyda instructed, “watch Heidi, now this is how a queen walks.”
With exaggerated abandon, Vange rolled her eyes, hunched her back and made a gagging face sending Kate into hysterics. Heidi was the daughter off the local hunchback baker. Her own back was beginning to show signs of a slight hump, but it did not detract from her sunny temperament. Heidi had been sent to dance classes ever since she was a toddler as it was her parents’ hope dance would afford her enough refined agility to detract from the dreaded hunch whenever it finally decided to reveal itself. Tall and lean, Heidi was also fortunate enough to have a long thick mane of red hair to cover up the emerging eyesore.
Perhaps cut throat competitiveness was to blame, but the endless rehearsals, where everyone acted so painfully fake, only served to drive a deeper wedge between Kate and Vange’s waning friendship. Against Chelsea’s objections, Kate let Nick and Vange talk her into wasting the summer before her senior year by entering the inane pageant to vie for the title of Miss Portnorth. The closest Kate and Vange came to rekindling their rocky friendship was during the dress rehearsal, when they found Heidi huddled in the shower bawling her eyes out.
If she did not win the pageant Heidi’s parents would not disown her, but rather they would not buy her a car. “Then how will I be able to come home every weekend from college to see my boyfriend?” Heidi wailed. If she lost the pageant, her life would be doomed – her boyfriend would leave her, and she would never get married. The look of horror Kate and Vange exchanged while comforting the sobbing probable queen was one of the few genuinely intimate moments of their friendship.
“Smile like Heidi! Walk like Heidi! Stand like Heidi! Pretend you’re Heidi!” echoed from Nyda’s mouth for the three weeks during rehearsals. Being a decent human being, Heidi did all she could do to alleviate the dictator’s obsession with her, but it only made the potential queen more sickeningly sweet. On more than one occasion, Kate glanced over at Heidi, who smiled without any trace of conceit or bitterness, and she thought, Idiot.
The night of the actual pageant was on of the most anti-climactic of Kate’s entire life. Beginning with her opening line, “Hi! My name is Katherine K. Hesse, and I’m proud to introduce my parents, Kaye and Chief Ed Hesse!” Even though her parents beamed proudly in the spotlight at the front of the gymnasium stage, Kate knew they were embarrassed to have to witness this display of exhibitionism; they were as uncomfortable there as she was.
Compared with Vange, the rest of the contestants were an excruciatingly unimaginative lot, and it was torture that each girl was required to perform a talent-less skit. Heidi had the dance moves she had been perfecting since birth, and Vange had her God-given voice, but everyone else had to miserably fake it. Kate wanted to shrivel up and die of embarrassment for her talent skit, but instead she took the easy way out and donned a pine tree costume covering her from head to toe. Totally concealed as a conifer, she had
danced around the stage to the song, Jennifer Juniper.
“You should really show a little leg,” Evangelica advised. “They make green tights.”
The scholarship pageant droned on until every girl except Evangelica had performed her pathetic talent number. Even Heidi, the presumed queen, had resorted to a series of backflips to the tired Bette Midler song, “The Rose”. From a Distance, she looked like an arachnid carnival sideshow freak.
Once Evangeline took the stage, it was her mission to hold the town hostage till she was fully drunk on their swooning adoration. Kate barged past the director and watched from the wings. She was not about to miss Vange’s singing debut in front of a mass audience.
From the edge of their seats, the spectators lurched closer like death-starved buzzards preparing to swoop down for the kill. Vange clenched the microphone tightly in her trembling hand, and her heart-shaped mouth in all its painted red glory could be seen quavering from the highest row of back bleachers.
As the music began, the crowd simultaneously sucked in their breaths. The fiendish vultures boiled over in a hot swell of skepticism. Their heady breaths and sweaty anticipation revealed a longing to devour this mere dreamer who had the audacity to think she could show up an entire town with the power of her singular instrument.
Shaking at the end of the runway as if on a guillotine platform, Vange’s voice arose like a soft whisper from nowhere. In the wings, Kate chewed her bottom lip, shut her eyes and felt her two crossed fingers dig into her thighs. Then the supernatural occurred, Vange was swept up into a state void of anxiety. Her dark lush voice saturated the auditorium with ageless wisdom to beat back the banality of the scavengers hovering around her. Imperturbably, the female David sang well enough to conquer all of Goliath’s monstrous doubts.
Kate hung back with her mouth agape as Vange sang “Someone to Watch Over Me.” She prayed Vange could feel her encouragement. The audience slumped in defeat in their bleacher seats, for Evangelica had enchanted them into submission with the darkly sweet melody of her song. By the time she reached the rousing climax, the crowd whimpered groveling and submissive at her feet.
When the gymnasium exploded upright, it was to express their acceptance with thunderous applause. The social misfit was elevated beyond their reach – she became more than their sister, mother, neighbor, daughter or friend. And she radiated cosmically aglow on the runway. The boisterous ovation resonated with acceptance. It was music to her ears, and while she lingered for what the director considered distastefully too long, she left them longing for more.
The spotlight reflected a sparkling glint in Evangelica’s eyes that mesmerized the audience, whose energy soared blissfully around her. They continued to pound away, inebriated from her stage presence. Evangelica, who had barely ever left the city limits but had combed its dredges, successfully projected worldliness more sophisticated than anything they had personally encountered. That night she was elevated permanently into the local folklore. Her lush, full voice had forever entrenched its way into their hearts.
Thoroughly enamored, Kate forgot her anxiousness for the pageant to be over with. Standing as if her conifer costume had taken root, Kate forgot she already should be squeezed into her evening gown. The time was fast approaching for her to hobble across the stage in heels and an ill-fitting borrowed prom dress in order to reveal what her favorite holiday was.
On her way to the locker room, Evangelica discovered Kate lingering overwhelmed with awe. Breathing heavily and sweating slightly, Vange asked defensively, “What? Didn’t you think I was capable?”
Speechless, Kate shook her head trying to find the right words, but Vange risked no chance of hearing anything resembling doubt, and she snapped, “Don’t worry, Kate, I’ve got this.”
When her time came, Kate unenthusiastically paraded around the stage in a gown that made her look more like a white cloud than a celestial virgin. She did not care if she stammered through her rehearsed answer, “Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It encompasses all the warm family feelings of Christmas without any of the commercialism.”
Standing frozen on her designated stage mark, Kate watched Vange shimmy up to the microphone in yet another sparkling, form fitting dress. Nyda-the-Living-Dead insisted wildly from the wings the gown was obscene because the back was cut so low it flirted with the crack of indecency. Nyda rushed out on stage and wrapped a shawl around the offending contestant in order to reign in her burlesque act. Undaunted, Vange was the only girl who mildly flirted with the Master of Ceremonies, “I love all holidays, Dick. I’ll gladly seize any opportunity to make merry and be festive.”
Filled with trepidation, the contestants became jittery mannequins as their smiling lips dried to their teeth while the dictator director rattled of her annual spiel about how the pageant could not be successful without all the little people, the social munchkins who were comprised of past contestant losers, and their mothers and younger sisters.
Kate stood stiffly and did not doubt for an instant that Heidi would be crowned Queen of Portnorth. It would be impossible for the judges to select a sacrificial virgin queen among this crew, without settling on Kate, who smacked of frigidity and offered no stage presence whatsoever. So they were forced to settle for the next best thing, which happened to be an outgoing girl with a long standing boyfriend to whom she would become safely engaged once relinquishing her royal duties; only Heidi fit the bill.
Gussied up like cattle on one last ditch effort to finagle their way off the prized butcher block, each contestant was allowed one last trek down the runway. As Kate walked her final walk, she recalled Vange’s inspired dress rehearsal stunt. For motivation and inspiration each girl was draped with the winner’s cape and crowned in order to practice walking down the runway, but Vange had swung the cape out into the phantom audience with irreverence as she briskly charged her way back up the runway. There would be no such antics tonight, and Kate meekly returned to her penned off position with the other cattle.
Kate watched Evangelica walk her final strut, and she wondered what Vange was thinking. Kate hoped Vange did not harbor any delusions she had any serious chance of capturing the crown, which would be a coup of magnanimous proportions. Brimming with character, Vange would no doubt send the cubic zirconium tiara blasting to bits if it was ever placed on her head.
As everyone rightly suspected, the crown went safely to Heidi. Amongst snickers, one of the pigeon-toed Derry girls teetered across the stage in dangerously high heels considering her pregnant state, and she relinquished the crown to the new Miss Portnorth. Kate felt genuinely happy for the slightly hunchbacked queen because, with the exception of her wedding day, this was probably the highlight of her life. Evangelica, holding onto her talent award, was not so happy for Heidi and visibly fumed under the spotlight.
During the annual Limestone Festival, which was merely an excuse for the entire town to ingest mass quantities of alcohol under one tent, Heidi reigned regal over her intoxicated subjects. They dutifully paid homage to her bland beauty and big 80’s hair. The moment of glory was lost on Vange and Kate, and so they danced a Tango amidst the country line dancing Garth Brooks and Don Juana-bes. Evangelica even made T-shirts for her friends, which she and Kate wore over their formals, advertising the “W’Limestoned Festival.” The two loser contestants were sent into hysterics when Thad nearly shook Heidi’s crown off as he exclaimed, “Quasimodo, Queen of Shithole, USA!”
Kate’s proud mother later reprimanded her by lamenting, “With all the respectable girls in the pageant, you made a poor choice dancing wildly with Shayla Whiley’s daughter. Instead of making a fool of yourself, you could’ve danced nicely with Queen Heidi!”
Kate often wondered what would have become of Heidi if she had not won, and her parents had not bought her a coveted car to enable those faithful weekend trips home from college to visit her boyfriend. The Ford Escort was probably the reason Heidi dropped out, returned to Portnorth to get married and became a home daycare pr
ovider. Six years and four kids later, Heidi’s long locks were shorn, which caused the little hump on her back to grow more prominent.
Of course, Evangelica won the talent award; there was never any question, but she later claimed it meant absolutely nothing at all to her. During the ceremony Evangelica out-performed special guest Miss Michigan, who was a professional pageant maven whose only ambition was to be crowned Miss USA and Miss Universe. From that night on, Evangelica’s voice became a renowned community asset, and she was asked to sing the National Anthem at high school sporting events and the annual Little League kick-off extravaganza. Her voice graced many local weddings, even Queen Heidi’s.
It was not until her daughter Jule’s death that Nyda Czerwinski finally resigned her position as pageant dictator. The realization her own daughter would never be crowned pushed Nyda over the edge, and she plummeted into the depths of small town insanity.
Although the merciless dictator of queenly attributes invited Vange to perform at subsequent pageants, Kate thought it ironic Vange, who was never queen, became the staple entertainment to liven up the otherwise dreary ceremony. If she happened to be in town, Kate usually attended the shows and left immediately after Vange’s performance.
The last time Evangelica was asked, she had grown tired of delivering a performance that made the audience wonder, “Heidi who won that year?” By that time, the pageant gig had merely become a masochistic venue for her to prove she really was refined queen material. On her final trip down the hallowed runway, Vange wore ripped stockings and a short leather skirt, and she grinded out the Tina Turner song, “I Might Have Been Queen.”
Trying the Knot Page 26