Miss Route 66

by Michael Lund

  Old Man Simpson, whose house stood on a double lot behind and one lot west of ours, was a cranky sort. If he had children (or other family), I didn't know it. So the owners of the voices would probably have been boys standing in or moving across his back yard.

  Half a dozen years or so earlier, Mark Landon and Billy Rhodes had put up a little neighborhood store in Old Man Simpson's garage, a freestanding building in his large side yard. He'd said they could use it to sell comic books, candy, odds and ends. But then, rather abruptly as I remember, he made them move out. I never knew why.

  Billy lived across the street from Simpson, Mark on the same side up two more houses, but the associations made me think they might be the spies in question. At this time they were both going with other girls, and I had no particular interest in them.

  I decided I could take more direct action. After all, I had nothing to hide here. So I stood up from the hammock and strode purposefully through the side yard up to the street. Though I was moving away from the voices, I was also moving up an incline past the entrance of our bomb shelter to a higher vantage point.

  At the street I turned and surveyed the scene, casually sweeping my gaze over all the back yards but also specifically trying to pinpoint the source of the recent conversation.

  There! Between Simpson's house and the McGregors', two--no three--boys were moving quickly away from me. Yes, it was Billy, Mark, and someone else I couldn't immediately recognize, though he looked familiar. Who was that?

  I didn't learn who it was at that moment in part because I was drawn to a sound drifting from our dining room window, the sound of a flute playing a sweet Mozart melody. It was my mother practicing for our little concert without me.

  Drawing from memory, I pictured her standing, holding the flute level, her lower lip resting comfortably on the mouthpiece. Her stomach muscles tensed as air moved from lungs through practiced embouchure to make music. She played beautifully.

  I gazed across back yards toward Limestone. No boys were now visible. The large pear tree from which our hammock was hung moved slightly in the breeze, almost, to my mind, as if its branches were dancing to my mother's tune.

  When my Mom paused in her playing, I hummed "Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do."

  If I looked close, I could see the miniature pears swinging from branches on the tree across the yard. Fibrous, sharp-tasting, hard as the high heel of a dress shoe, they would be impossible to eat. You couldn't even peel, slice, and cook them into a jam or jelly.

  But they wouldn't stay this way forever. In another month to six weeks, the magic transformation would occur. There would be a day when anyone in the Circle could step out their kitchen door, walk across the back yard, and pull a plump, juicy fruit from any branch. You could rub it on your skirt, take a bite, and it would melt in your mouth, delicious juice running down your chin.

  I thought of Randy and his hardness.

  Do you know I'd never actually seen it? All of our necking had gone on in the dark, of course. And whenever he got so worked up he seemed ready to present himself, I demanded we stop and go home. But of late, my curiosity had inspired speculation. This was ironic, of course, because I had been avoiding Randy and his hardness with great energy all summer.

  All I had to go on in imagining adult male genitalia were the infant versions owned by, for example, the Petersons' nine-month-old son, Jimmy, a regular baby-sitting charge. Well, there was also the textbook outline Sandy and I had inspected. But they had no clear connection to the generous handful of trouble I had once or twice found thrusting around in Randy's jeans.

  Girls certainly had a difficult time getting the facts about sex in those days! I'd never even seen a copy of Playboy, though I knew in general what would be in it: Sandy told me they showed breasts and rear ends. But Playgirl was still in the future, and all the Kens who went with our Barbies had no gender.

  I recalled the athletic figure of Paul Thornton striding down the sidewalk. Surely he had gender! But looking at his slide rule didn't reveal that which it might have represented.

  Now that I think about, Randy had never seen me without clothes either. I wondered what he concluded when he looked at the underwear models in the Sears catalog. I suppose now he imagined the other sex as consisting of simple, perfectly smooth surfaces. What bra and panties covered was more shoulder or thigh or belly. How little could he have pictured the differences between Sandy and me, me and Sally, Tricia and me.

  A boy had said, "Something makes me want to put my hands around Susan's waist." What exactly did that mean? What exactly did he want? What exactly would he do once he had his fingers on my stomach?

  Over time, I have come to consider the disembodied voices of the Circle's middle to be an expression of the neighborhood, of boys I grew up with but who were at that time beginning to see another Susan Bell. The words they spoke might have risen up out of a collective consciousness (Fairfield's adolescent masculinity), representing a recognition of change in me as I moved beyond "sweetness" and acknowledging my body and my identity in a new way, a rival to Sally Winchester.

  Standing at the edge of the street in front of my house that summer day, I didn't quite take all the mental steps necessary to endorse this conclusion. But I knew I liked the way whoever was talking was talking about me.

  This "me" departed from Randy Alexander's definition: a sweet girl he was friends with, but also a girl at whom he relentlessly pointed his mouth organ. (Poor fellow, he would have pointed it at any girl he could get a date with.) He couldn't help himself, but I was now ready to move out of his range.

  In a flash of inspiration I realized the truth. I was not only ready to leave Randy behind. I was ready to be the next Miss Route 66!

  Volume Two: Ensemble. Chapter 1

  To enter the Miss Route 66 Pageant, girls had to meet with Mr. Pierce, Fairfield High's assistant principal and Senior Consultant (whatever that meant!) to the pageant. Early in the new school year, my senior year, I went to see him to get the application form required of all contestants.

  I didn't do this at the high school, however, but in an office he was allowed to borrow six months of the year at South Central Missouri State College. The college hosted the event, and Mr. Pierce was given temporary space for his work in the basement of the central building on campus.

  There was a visitors' parking lot at the south end of the campus, and one gorgeous morning in September I left the family Rambler there and started off to get the form. I was ready to put into action the new self I'd found over the summer, the flute-playing, flat-tummied, boy-attracting me.

  Although she was not entering the pageant, Sandy and I had been coaching each other on how to walk, how to stand, how to move in our last year before college. We'd also reviewed our wardrobes, seeking the most flattering outfits. I looked for low-slung slacks and skirts that fit snugly on my hips. Sandy had decided her derriere was her best feature.

  "All right, watch me walk up to the counter," she had said the previous weekend when we were drinking sodas at Fanny's Dairy Delite. "I'm trying to get a jiggle of rump with every step."

  And, by planting each foot firmly to conclude a stride, she did impart an extra kah-thump to her walk. It showed in the action of her a-bit-larger-than-average behind. Her breasts were large too, but they didn't stand out on her body the way they would have on a more slender girl.

  When she returned, I said, citing a familiar formula, "It's good. A 'backfield in motion.'" With the tight shorts she was wearing, boys would notice. "Now check me out."

  I had decided that my hips had to go side to side with my walk, giving a pendulum swing, tick-tock, to my flat belly in the center. I tick-tocked to the counter for an extra napkin.

  "Ooh, that's good too," said Sandy when I returned to the booth. "And it will work in the swimsuit event."

  I'd explained to Sandy that I was pretty sure I'd enter the Miss Route 66 competition this year. I could play the flute at the talent show, even though I wasn't as skilled as Eli
zabeth Rogers on the piano or Mary Dunkin at dramatic readings. They, like Sally Winchester, were veteran contestants. She, of course, remained the favorite.

  I could probably have gotten advice on movement and dress from Tricia, who was headed back this week to Drury. But I didn't want to be her "younger sister," a lesser version of the more talented Bell daughter. And I didn't have to compete with Sandy, who could be my confidante throughout.

  I was also a bit irritated with Tricia for the favor she'd asked of me: I was to take care of her African gray parrot until Christmas, as she was leaving her summer apartment for the dorms with the beginning of school. I couldn't find a way to say no, but I really didn't want the responsibility. She insisted it was just for a few months, and then a friend of hers, who was bringing a male bird back from overseas travel, would take Tricia's bird as her parrot's mate.

  I couldn't believe my parents were allowing a pet bird to live upstairs in Tricia's room, but they were. And now I had regular responsibilities of feeding Juliet, cleaning her cage, and providing her company.

  Tricia explained that parrots are among the oldest domesticated animals, intelligent and gregarious. Without companions of their own species, pet birds will mimic human speech, the talking parrots ("Ahoy, mate!") of pirate stories. They are monogamous, commonly mating for years if not for life. Some pets have lived as long as seven or eight decades.

  While I wasn't to live with this bird for more than three months (Tricia promised!), Juliet was to have a profound effect on my life. You might even say she kept me in the Miss Route 66 Pageant after Mr. Pierce nearly drove me to quit the competition.

  Of course, I knew from the beginning that this pageant was going to be a challenge. It meant taking a new version of my private self out into the public arena. This transition was underscored by the location of the contest, the SCMSC campus.

  Walking along the sidewalk that day, I marveled at the clean order of the campus, its immaculate appearance. The lawns and plants here were neatly kept, perhaps because this was primarily an engineering school and it had all the equipment necessary for lawn mowing, bush trimming, sidewalk edging. Too, with only a handful of girls among several thousand students, it was believed that buildings and grounds needed only a lean, functional look with little ornamentation.

  The heart of the campus was the original quadrangle, laid out for a land-grant institution of public education in a new state. (I also had to learn this history as part of the pageant preliminaries.) The Land-Grant Act of 1862 was a federal government response to public demand for new colleges to teach agriculture and manufacturing, fields deemed crucial to the industrialization and prosperity of America after the Civil War.

  The SCMSC campus was constructed on a plan I still believe to be the most suitable for an educational institution, the quadrangle. Each building around the quad represents a way of thinking--science, math, humanities, the arts, etc. The open space in the middle suggests a common field in which ideas from all disciplines are shared. And the buildings facing that open area create comforting borders within which students are protected while they learn.

  I realize some object to this layout as an "ivory tower," isolating professors and students from the outside world. But I prefer to see it as a complete structure, a harmonious form promoting the process of growth and fulfillment.

  Against this finished backdrop that fall day, then, I hoped I was exhibiting the emerging mature identity of a young woman, perhaps that of a college coed. It wouldn't, I knew, be easy.

  Mr. Pierce's pageant office was in Norwood Hall, which lay on the south side of the quad. It featured a large, jutting circular foyer, which, some of my friends said, made the building look as if it were pregnant.

  Walking my new tick-tock walk, was I thinking I might run into Paul Thornton along the way to or from Norwood Hall? I'm sure I was. I don't think I would have been interested in other students, though. I could consider Paul a local boy, but young men from other places would have been too intimidating.

  Randy had finally caught on that the baby-sitting and family obligations I kept citing were exaggerated, and he was no longer calling. Perhaps more importantly, he was finding that buxom Henrietta Thompson's schedule was open every time he asked.

  There's something else in my romantic life I must admit here at the start of my pageant competition. Well, it's not so much romantic as physical, as involving sex. No, I wasn't sleeping with anyone. But I was giving in to the temptation of modest self-abuse more than I'd been taught was healthy. I'd discovered how easy and how satisfying this forbidden act was.

  Nowadays, of course, it would be rare for any girl my age not to know what I was just learning--that such gratification is always at one's own control (I almost said "fingertips"!). But these were times of quiet but thorough repression, subtle but powerful guilt. (I'm not sure that's all bad, by the way!) Mothers and older girls kept to themselves whatever they had learned about the mysteries of lovemaking. And enjoying your own body was at best vulgar, at worst a mortal sin.

  This discovery of my own potential to satisfy myself came, I must acknowledge, in part thanks again to Randy. He didn't explain it, of course, but the fact of his frustration in necking with me had left a significant impression in my mind. Sometime that summer it must have occurred to me that I might pursue more purposefully the completely physical goal he was trying to reach.

  Another agent in this new (and, I'm afraid, potentially addictive habit) was Juliet, my sister's parrot.

  2

  The appearance of Mr. Pierce's basement office contrasted with the bright, scrubbed look of the campus outside. Down a windowless hallway, in an isolated corner, it was more like the lair of a spider or some hibernating beast. He was here from 10:00 o'clock to noon on certain Saturdays.

  However, the assistant principal knew me (Fairfield High was not large) and greeted me with a pleasant smile. He sat behind a small desk, flanked by two tall file cabinets, the records, I assumed, of past pageants. He motioned to me to have a seat.

  "So, you're coming out of your shell, eh, Susan? Going to step up on the stage and wow the judges."

  "I . . . um, I think I will enter. But I need to find out all about the requirements, the different categories of competition, you know."

  There were papers stacked loosely on Mr. Pierce's desk. The cigarette dangling from the fist of his left hand and an ashtray overflowing with butts added to a sense of disorder in the office, of things not quite put away or taken care of.

  "Sure, sure," he said. "Here's our manual," he pulled a stapled package of duplicated sheets from a desk drawer. "And the application. You'll need your parents' signature, of course."

  "Yes. I've talked to them." This was not true, but I didn't think they'd object once I told them. After all, their older daughter had blazed the way for a Bell girl to assume a public identity in Fairfield and beyond.

  "The evening gown is straightforward. Just go down to Simpson's Clothing Store and they'll fix you up. As for swimsuits . . . hmm, what size would you be? Let me see."

  He gestured for me to stand up, moving himself around the desk to get a better view. I could see that one corner of his shirt was not completely tucked in the waistband of his trousers.

  I stood, a bit nervously. "I'm a . . . Junior Seven."

  "Yes, I can see that. Very nice. You might, with your figure, ah, think of a two-piece suit. More of the girls go with them each year. Yes, I think so."

  He seemed almost ready to reach out toward me, to confirm by touch what his eyes told him.

  He stopped there by the side of his desk, though, and said pleasantly, "And what will your talent be?"

  "I play the flute," I offered, sitting down again.

  "All you girls will probably be trying for first runner-up, anyway," he chuckled. "Sally's so good." His eyes got hazy for a moment, imagining, I suppose, her baton whirling, her legs kicking up her skirt as she marched, that high bosom. "Still, there's always a chance . . . if . . . ." His
voice trailed off, and his eyes refocused on me.

  "There's an organizational meeting in two weeks. Bring your completed form. I may have to see you again, individually."

  He gave me a thin smile and a bit of a wink with this last statement, though I made little of it at the time. I was happy enough to have taken this first step, to have followed through on my new sense of self. I didn't know then how far this step would take me, not just in the pageant but in my understanding of how people pursue their destinies. Nearly all the contestants who came to that organizational meeting would find their lives affected in ways they never anticipated.

  I couldn't wait to tell Sandy about my progress. I would see her in school the next day, of course. But school was the place where merely "sweet" Susan Bell existed. And the environment of high school seemed limiting after my visit to the college.

  Fairfield High School lay about four blocks east of downtown and the college on 10th Street. It had replaced what was invariably called "The Old High School," even though this earlier building, one block closer to town, was officially named "Fairfield Junior High School" at the time and for the next several decades.