Miss Route 66

by Michael Lund

  And Blind Bill was the voice at the front of the stage that guided participants and audience on the night of the pageant itself. He would charm family and friends in the opening minutes, introduce the contestants in each area of competition, announce the narrowing field of finalists until we all arrived at a single Miss Route 66.

  Never clashing over territory, the two men performed their tasks well, bringing many elements together into an impressive (given our small-town small-time-iness) night of entertainment for the residents of Fairfield.

  As we neared the pageant (and the slumber party that was to precede it), I thought I might be able to ask Mary Dunkin about Mr. Pierce. She had guided me through the process with hints gained from experience, not the kind of demoralizing suggestions Sally was always coming up with.

  "Mr. Pierce seems to be especially nice to Sally, don't you think? I mean, he does assume she's the winner."

  "It's not just that," Mary said. She looked over at the pageant's Senior Consultant and this year's frontrunner. They were making sure her high baton tosses wouldn't get tangled in the ropes that raised curtains and props.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, he's nice to all the girls. You know the joke about the traveling salesman?"

  "Which one?" I couldn't remember any right then, though I'd certainly heard some. That Mary would know some risqué jokes as well as Shakespeare surprised me.

  "The traveling salesman's truck breaks down," she began, looking around to make sure no one had come close enough to hear. "And he asks a farmer if he can spend the night in the barn."

  "Of course."

  "You can picture the traveling salesman in a nice suit and tie, the farmer in overalls. He's a bit of a hayseed."

  I thought of him as a hillbilly, an image the rest of the nation still has of Ozark country folk.

  "The farmer's daughter is beautiful, of course," I noted. I did know the genre.

  "Yes. Stunning and . . . " (in a whisper) " . . . stacked!"

  In my mind's eye the salesman appeared in the form of Mr. Pierce. And the daughter was Sally.

  "So the farmer says, 'You can sleep the night in the barn, but stay away from my daughter when she comes to milk the cow in the morning.'"

  "Um-hm." My attention shifts to the farmer's daughter. Has she been waiting for just such an opportunity? A good-looking city man to run away with. Does she already know what he wants to do? Has she been practicing in her bedroom how she would respond when the traveling salesman invited her up in the hayloft?

  "When the farmer awakes," concluded Mary, "the salesman, the car, the girl, and the cow have been gone for hours!"

  3

  Two days before Sally's slumber party, Larry Thornton stopped me in the hall at school to report that he'd won the science fair competition.

  "Congratulations! So you'll go to the regional fair in Jefferson City?"

  "That's right. Me and my worms." Once again a funny little smile played around his eyes.

  "And your data. I mean, you couldn't have done it without all us dumb worm-haters who filled out your questionnaires and proved the public's ignorance."

  "True. Let me thank you once again." He took a stiff bow. "The cause of science thanks you, too."

  Larry's eyes were, I noticed, conspicuously focused on my tummy. I was wearing slacks that fit snugly, and a light knit top under an unbuttoned sweater hugged my midsection. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, tick-tocking my hips.

  "Do your worms live that long?" I asked. "So long that they can make it until February?"

  "Oh, not the same worms. The great-great-great grandchildren of the worms you petted months ago." His eyes bounced up from my belly to my face, but then wandered back down again.

  "Hey, I didn't pet them! I just looked at one as he crawled all around on you." I made a face and gave a mock shiver, remembering the slimy-looking, brown creature squirming on Larry's fingers, reaching for the dirt, its home. After the shiver I sucked my tummy in even more. "And don't tell me again about their disgusting reproductive habits."

  I was really just joking here, trying to keep the conversation light while watching to see where his eyes were directed. Too, I was hoping to figure a way to return that charm bracelet with its cute little musical instruments he had given me. So much time had passed since he'd done it that I didn't even know how to bring it up.

  "It's not any more disgusting than the reproductive habits of other creatures, even humans," said Larry seriously. Now his gaze stayed on my face.

  This was hard. I wasn't prepared for an earnest talk about human reproduction with a boy. How had I let the conversation wander to this subject?

  "So, you still work at the worm farm, even though you're getting ready to make some scientific breakthrough?"

  "Sure, I'm saving for college. I hope to get a scholarship, but, even if I do, I'll want pocket money."

  "Yeah. Did you know Sandy's working at the Dairy Delite? She's getting experience."

  "That's good. What about you?"

  "Just . . . you know, practicing the flute, and, um, the beauty contest." I remembered his brother's coming to my first little recital, which had been a dry run for my pageant performance. Larry had been accidentally excluded. I wouldn't have invited him, but I also wouldn't have prevented him from being there when Sandy invited him.

  "Why don't you come see the worm farm with me sometime?" he asked. "It's neat after dark."

  "How so?" I wondered if this might be the chance to return the bracelet. I'd have to do so without offending.

  "I've got to work tomorrow night for a couple of hours," he went on. "I'll show you."

  "Well. . . ." I guess I could stand another hour's lecture on worms, especially if it ended with his gift returned.

  "I'll pick you up around 8 o'clock," Larry said, taking my hesitation for acquiescence. "You need something to keep your mind off the contest anyway."

  There was some truth to what Larry said about pressure, so I accepted his proposal.

  I had been pleased with myself all along for taking the step of entering this contest. And throughout the early meetings and rehearsals I'd stayed quite calm about it all. But it had been like an exercise to this point, preparation for something off there in the future that I hadn't fully seen myself doing.

  Now the event was just a few days away. Instead of empty seats out in a dark auditorium there would be a live audience--family, friends, strangers. Judges would scrutinize my clothes, my stance, my every move. This theory I'd entertained that I was a new person was going to be put to a real test, under lights.

  This was one of the few times I actually wished Tricia were here to help me. She had put herself in front of the public so many times. How did she do it? All those people looking at her. What did it feel like? How did she keep her composure?

  Years later, of course, I've come to recognize that it wasn't so easy for her either. All those trips to the bomb shelter were a way of evading boys, sure. But they also meant escape from being on display to anyone who attended the plays she was in. She knew she was an object, something others possessed as they held her in view. In their minds they could make her what they wanted; they could define her. She'd had to learn how to survive such public examination.

  When I looked at myself head-on in Tricia's mirror, I was both subject and object, the viewer as well as the thing viewed. I could only be so harsh in such a self-examination.

  Even when I was critical of my stance, my modest breasts, my plain face, I still couldn't forget the thoughts, worries, and dreams that were inside the person standing there. I knew the story behind every expression, the reasons leading to each gesture, the hopes inspiring any move.

  I was, that is, not an Other separate from a Self, and this posing was not the same as subjecting myself to a truly critical analysis.

  "Hello there," said Tricia's pet parrot.

  "Juliet, Juliet," I asked. "Who am I to you?"

  "Pretty bird," she offered
.

  I turned sideways, examining again my body's long, lean profile, the slender frame and flat belly that had dazed Randy Alexander months ago. In my mind's eye, I tried to imagine being pregnant, my middle swelling out. I arched my back and pushed out with my stomach.

  But I couldn't really think of myself as a mother, as a woman who produces babies. I wasn't ready to nurture another soul with my own soul so fragile, just emerging.

  "The Mother Road," I thought. America's highway giving birth to dreams, feeding new generations with hopes. If I were to become Miss Route 66, wouldn't I have to do something like that?

  Well, probably not. The acts of Miss Route 66 were hardly so noble. Pose with the mayor, stand nearby as the first spadeful of earth is dug for a new municipal parking lot, wave at the crowds streaming into the Phipps County Fair in July.

  No, all I had to do was be pretty. (Not just sweet, but pretty.) I turned back to look head-on into the mirror.

  Was this someone who could attract men? Randy, yes. Larry, perhaps. Paul, apparently not. Mr. Pierce, yes.

  I thought again about the look in the eyes of our assistant principal when he'd sat opposite me at Fanny's Dairy Delite. The unfocused gaze, the drool at the corner of his mouth, the finger on the rim of the Coke glass. Ugh!

  I saw my own fingers there in the glass before me. They ran up my sides, and then down. They touched my breasts. They passed across my belly. They went further.

  A funny thing had happened along the road toward the final event of the Miss Route 66 competition. After having worried and worried that my own pleasure was sinful, I'd discovered recently that the sense of guilt that had been haunting me was waning.

  This was good--or, more likely bad--in some abstract moral code, I knew. But in my heart it was causing less and less sting.

  I asked Juliet. "Is it really wrong? Should I stop? Will it hurt me?"

  "Pet me," she answered once again.

  Did I deserve petting? Should I provide myself pleasure? Was I an object to myself, or was a deeper voice within me telling me simply that I was worthy of pleasure?

  4

  When did young girls of that era discuss such matters as physical pleasure? A slumber party with a few close friends would be the perfect opportunity for talk to turn to sex. But the truth would be hard to find in so much giggling, a few exaggerated claims, much guesswork derived from little experience.

  The slumber party I was headed for, with the other Miss Route 66 contestants, would be even less likely to answer my most pressing questions. We didn't know each other that well, and our one overriding interest, the Pageant, would probably be the main topic of conversation. I might, however, learn some more about Mr. Pierce.

  Sandy Johnson, as my best friend in the neighborhood and at school, was the one person who might reveal her own secrets to me in this area, if I was willing to be open first. I stopped by Fanny's Dairy Delite to see if we could talk.

  "Let me tell you about ice cream," Sandy said as soon as she had a break and could join me in a booth.

  "I know about ice cream."

  "Oh, you only think you do. For instance, when was it invented?"

  "Invented? Hm."

  "Yeah! Well, it's probably as old as the Middle Ages. Knights and all used snow with salt in it to cool their drinks. Most drinks had fruit, but some also included milk or cream. So probably the first ice cream came along back then."

  "OK, that's interesting. But I want to talk about something else." I could see Sandy had gotten into her work.

  "Of course, a big breakthrough came in the late 1920s with electricity and mechanical refrigeration. The average dairy plant was soon manufacturing hard ice cream. And now, Americans probably eat more than twelve pounds of ice cream apiece every year. We might be as famous for our ice cream as for democracy."

  "Oh, I don't know about that."

  "Listen, I'm telling you some things you might need to know when you're Miss Route 66." She leaned forward and tapped my Coke glass with her plastic spoon.

  "You think I'm going to give speeches about ice cream?"

  "I think you need to know that it's important to Route 66."

  "How so?"

  "Places like this, Fanny's Dairy Delite, they're part of what traveling down the highway is all about. People have to stop, and they need something to eat or drink when they do."

  I could see that she had a point. Especially in the hot summers, when families took that vacation trip to see the American West, they could suffer from the heat. We local kids stopped there too, of course, on our regular cruising about town.

  "OK, I give you that. Are you learning all this from your bosses?"

  I had never really thought much about Mrs. Flora Hamilton, the retired nurse, and Miss Madeline Powers, former teacher. They'd been running this shop for as long as I could remember, and my friends and I had been coming here ever since we had permission to travel about town on our own. But I didn't know who these two ladies were or what went into the operation they ran.

  "Flora is the one who has learned how to make ice cream, the machines and all. Madeline keeps track of the books, the business regulations, permits. They're sharp ladies."

  "How long have they been running the place?"

  "Since the early 50s. Madeline realized people would be traveling more then. I guess, because the war was over and all."

  She had been right, of course. The postwar boom, returning soldiers, and a confidence in our country had inspired journeys to new places and holiday travel down the Mother Road.

  The women had chosen a nondescript building, a metal shed with a rounded roof, alongside the highway. When they opened, it had been on the edge of town and along the main route of travelers. Now the town had grown out around them, and their address was on Business Route 66. But, as Sandy later told me, the proprietresses had put up enough billboards on the approaches to Fairfield that they had regular traffic most of the year and did a heavy business throughout the summer months.

  For their publicity campaign, they had decided they needed a logo, a distinctive emblem. Madeline drew the outline of a motherly figure to be their "Fanny." And that figure of a slightly stout, cheerful matron sporting an apron and waving a welcome appeared on the big sign mounted above the door and on dozens of billboards along Route 66 to the east and west.

  "The secret to their success, though," said Sandy, "is their ice cream itself."

  Fanny's sold soft-serve ice cream, what was sometimes called "Ice Milk" in those days. And now that I think back, it was about the only place in my early childhood where you could get soft ice cream. Kids loved to watch it pour out of the machine's nozzle and fill up a cone, then form that multiple-bulbed tower above the cone, topped with a twirling tail. (My Dad, of course, preferred the old-fashioned, regular ice cream, insisting that the new stuff was for sissies.)

  "I bet you're going to tell me how they make it," I admitted.

  "Sure. It's a good story."

  "Since I can't stop you," I laughed, "go ahead."

  "Flora explained it to me. At one point--I don't know--twenty-five years ago, some people in the business were using small freezers. They would freeze a specific amount of ice cream during one operation and then fill again for the next batch."

  "OK." I was glad Sandy had a new interest here, but I wasn't sure I needed to know all this detail. Maybe she should sit down with Larry and hear about worms for a while!

  "Anyway, these batch freezers were a key step along the way to soft ice cream. Some bright guy eventually figured out that this type of equipment could be used to eliminate the hand dipping of ice cream. Just let it be made in the freezer and then poured right out of the freezer before it got completely solid."

  "So you like working here?" I gestured around the shop, at the ice cream makers behind the counter. I was familiar with the silver cylindrical bodies of the two freezers, each with a spigot on the bottom--kind of like a beer keg on its side.

  "Yeah. Wait a minute. Let
me finish. See, what they came up with was a dispensing freezer, one that froze the ingredients inside the machine. The stuff wasn't as hard, of course, as regular ice cream, but it held its shape long enough to be eaten."

  "I think it tastes better," I admitted. In fact, hard ice cream freezes my mouth, and I often stop enjoying the flavor after a half dozen bites.

  "Hand-dipped ice cream is also hard to scoop. And for someone feminine like me," Sandy smiled and patted her hair. "For someone feminine like me, soft ice cream is much better."