The Princesses of Iowa

by M. Molly Backes

  “You didn’t tell me Mr. Tremont would be here!” I whispered to Jeremy. He grinned and nodded.

  My sister rolled her eyes. “Oh boy. You didn’t tell me she was in the Teacher Love Club, too.”

  “Trust me, you’ll be begging to join in a few minutes,” he told her.

  The three of us grabbed chairs toward the very back of the room, shuffling awkwardly past an older couple to get to them. I was surprised by how many people were there. If many more showed up, it would be standing room only.

  After a few minutes, a tall man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a soft-green shirt stepped up to the microphone. He introduced himself, saying he had been privileged to teach the three poets who would be reading tonight. Jeremy and I looked at each other. Mr. Tremont had a teacher!

  As the man talked, I jotted some of his phrases in my notebook, unsure of what I might need for my homework. “We have seldom been in such dire need of poetry.” People nodded and murmured in agreement as he spoke. My pen flew across the page, trying to capture his words, while a tiny part of my mind was remembering the first time Mr. Tremont had appeared in our stale classroom. Now, as then, I felt the shiver of truth, a sudden understanding that life was so much more than Willow Grove, Iowa, bigger than a sale on bath towels or the price of gas.

  The bearded man adjusted his round glasses and introduced Mr. Tremont. In the front row, a woman went, “Woohoo!” and the audience laughed.

  Looking a little nervous, Mr. Tremont stepped behind the podium. “I only hope that I can live up to that generous introduction,” he said, smiling at his teacher. “Honestly, I wouldn’t be the writer I am without Mark.” He shuffled through the pages in front of him. “And now I’m going to read a poem that he’s never liked.” The audience laughed again, but I sat tensely, poised like a runner at the beginning of a race, my fingers gripping my pen.

  He read, and it was like falling through water, like spinning under a clear night’s sky. I didn’t understand a single one of his poems on a literal level; I was listening too hard for that. Instead, I felt the meaning in my veins, the same way I’d felt the music the night before when the dreadlocked kid stopped me and held me still for once. Made me listen. Mr. Tremont’s words had the fleeting perfection of the moon slipping in and out of cloud on an autumn night, deer paused at the edge of a wood, a flock of geese a moment before they fly.

  The audience seemed to think the other two poets were good, too, but I hardly heard them. I was distracted by questions I had about Mr. Tremont: Did he ever write, like I did, without even knowing what he was going to say? Was he ever surprised when he got to the end of the page? After he wrote, did he feel lighter?

  Afterward, Jeremy, Miranda, and I hung back and watched as everyone swarmed Mr. Tremont and the other poets. Jeremy had his camera out and was taking pictures of everything. The first person to reach Mr. Tremont was a woman, probably around his age, who looked like Shanti. I wondered if they were related. She wore an orange sari, the color of tiger lilies, with gold embroidery along the edges. “Do you think that’s his girlfriend?” I asked Jeremy. He pointed the camera at her, watching, then lowered it and shook his head.

  “Hi, strangers!” Shanti popped up from behind a bookcase, and I jumped. It was like I’d thought her into existence.

  “Did I scare you?” she asked.

  “Only in the straitjacket kind of way,” Jeremy said. I put my hand over my heart to steady it. If Shanti was here, then chances were good that Ethan was, too. The events of the night before, which I’d spent all day so carefully ignoring, suddenly came flooding back to me.

  “Funny.” She looked at me. “So? What did you think? Wasn’t it amazing?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  My sister shrugged. “It was okay. I didn’t really get it.”

  Jeremy clapped his hand over her mouth. “Forgive her. She’s been living in a cave. I’m doing my best to acculturate her, but it’s slow going.” He widened his eyes and staged whispered. “She’s still thinks boy bands make actual music.”

  Miranda punched him in the arm. “I do not.”

  Ethan joined us, carrying Shanti’s purse. “Don’t mind me, I’m just the purse man.” He glanced at me but I looked away before he could make eye contact.

  “You’re not just the purse man, Ethan!” Shanti said. “You’re the best purse man.”

  “I’m touched,” he told her.

  “Anyway, you guys,” Shanti said, turning back to us. “Don’t you feel weirdly shy now? Like you’re not good enough to talk to Mr. Tremont, you know? What is he doing teaching high school? He should be, like, the poet laureate. Of the world!”

  We all turned to watch Mr. Tremont, who was still surrounded by his fans. A short man with a well-trimmed beard stepped forward to hug him. He whispered something in Mr. Tremont’s ear and they both laughed. The woman in orange tapped the bearded guy on the arm and pouted at him until he hugged her. The rest of the crowd began to disperse. “Okay. I’m going to go talk to him,” Shanti announced. “You guys coming?”

  I could feel Ethan looking at me, so I kept my eyes on Shanti. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Mr. Tremont’s face lit up as we approached. “Hey, you guys! What did you think?” Fumbling between shyness and adulation, Ethan, Jeremy, and I told him that we’d loved it. I pulled Miranda forward, introducing her as my sister. Mr. Tremont shook her hand, thanking her for coming. Shanti’s praise was more articulate than ours, and within moments she was deep in conversation with him, discussing some metaphor and casually dropping words like “semantics” and “trope.”

  The woman in orange extended a hand toward me. “I’m Padma.”

  “Hi,” I said, shaking her hand. “I’m —”

  “This is Paige,” Mr. Tremont interrupted. “A future workshopper.”

  Padma’s eyebrows went up. “Oooh, a writer?”

  “Not really,” I said, blushing furiously. “I’m not . . .”

  Shanti held out her hand. “I’m Shanti.”

  “And this is Ethan, Jeremy, and Mirror,” Mr. Tremont added.

  “More writers?” Padma asked Mr. Tremont, looking at him while she shook Shanti’s hand. Then to Shanti, she said, “Padma Madhuri. I thought Iowa only made white people.”

  Shanti laughed. “Right?”

  “You guys came down just for Cam’s reading? What did you think?”

  “We loved it,” Shanti said. “Mr. Tremont, you were the best by far.”

  “Well, I’m happy you guys made it,” Mr. Tremont said. “And flattered.”

  “It was homework, after all,” Jeremy said.

  Padma laughed. “You give them homework? And the homework is to come hear you read poetry?”

  “Not me,” Mr. Tremont said. “Their teacher had assigned them the task of going to hear one of the readings around town this weekend. They didn’t have to come to this one specifically.”

  “Of course they did!” Padma said, and Shanti nodded at her like they were old friends.

  “Obviously,” Shanti said.

  Padma grabbed the bearded guy and pulled him toward us. “Mason, you have to meet these guys. They’re Cam’s students, and they are the coolest.”

  Mason shook our hands, smiling. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Afterward, Jeremy, Miranda, Shanti, Ethan, and I went to Perkins, where Shanti industriously built a sculpture with silverware and creamers while Jeremy and Miranda colored pictures in Jeremy’s notebook with stolen crayons and Ethan dipped his french fries in ranch dressing. I’d waited until everyone else was seated before I slid into the booth, so I could be certain not to sit next to him, but I couldn’t stop sneaking glances at him, worrying he might say something about last night. But he seemed content to joke around with Shanti and Jeremy, and he didn’t catch me looking at him.

  It was the first time I’d hung out with Miranda, outside of obligatory family functions, and I was surprised by how well she got along with
everyone. For once in our lives, she seemed perfectly comfortable, while I felt like a total outsider. Everyone else was so aggressively individual. I felt like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club — no matter what happened tonight, on Monday I would go back to being the pretty girl and once again have nothing in common with any of these people.

  Jeremy and Shanti suddenly jumped out of the booth, throwing bad insults at each other. “I’ll claw a stuffed kitty so fast it will make your mom look slow.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’ll claw your face!”

  Miranda slid out of the booth after them, and I looked at Ethan for an explanation. “Claw machine competition,” he said.

  “Ah.” I went back to not looking at him, pretending to be very interested in the syrup jars instead. They looked a little bit like baby penguins, I thought. Clearly they needed to gather near the coffee pot, which looked like their mama.

  “Um,” Ethan said. “About last night . . .”

  “Right,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry about the sweatshirt. If I’d known I would see you tonight, I totally would have brought it back to you.”

  “Not the sweatshirt. The . . . you know . . .”

  I braced myself and looked up at him. His eyes were warm and dark. “It didn’t — it was just a mistake. I was drunk. I have a boyfriend.”

  It was a lie, of course: I’d been totally sober by the time I saw him. I waited for him to call me out on it, to argue with me, to try to convince me that it meant something. But he just nodded. “Right.”

  “And, um,” I said, feeling like an asshole. “Could we just keep it between us? Because . . . boyfriend. And if it got out . . .”

  “I get it,” Ethan said. “No worries. It didn’t happen.”

  “I’m sorry.” I peeked up at him. “Are we cool?”

  He smiled. “Of course.”

  “Good.” I felt surprisingly relieved. One less person I would have to avoid in the hallways. “Thanks. And I promise, I’ll bring your sweatshirt to class on Monday.”

  “Don’t bother,” Ethan said. “It’s yours.”

  On Sunday, my mother insisted on taking me to get a pedicure. “Nothing like some TLC for your feet to perk you up!” She herded me into her yellow SUV, whistling to herself, and adjusted all her mirrors before backing out into the street. I reached out and fiddled with the radio, searching for something good. She flipped her blinker on half a block before the stop sign at the end of our street. “Did you hear about the Lanes? Of course, it makes sense after last spring. I don’t know if Brenda will ever forgive herself. But still, it’s sad. Poor Lacey.”

  “Yeah.” In the side mirror, my lips stretched into a grimace.

  “Stella says that Jake’s been helping Lacey work through this terrible time. I suppose he understands how she’s feeling, after what happened with his father.” Her voice dropped conspiratorially. “Not that Stella said anything about that, of course. Even at the time, she wouldn’t say a word about it. Of course, that was the summer we were working on the Owens wedding, and no one had a single moment to think about anything else.”

  The morning was overcast, and pale-gray clouds sat against the flat-white sky. I pulled at the zipper on my hooded sweatshirt, running it up and down. My cell phone was still at home, sitting on the table by my bed. They’d all called me the day before: Lacey, Jake, Nikki. I still hadn’t listened to a single message.

  “Marriages take work, you know,” my mother said. “That’s what they don’t tell you, beforehand. They take a lot of work. You have to be willing to give up on a lot of things to make a marriage work.”

  I wondered what she had given up. Everyone loved her. In the summers, on her rare days off from trying to get ahead at Stella Austin Events, my mother swam laps at the club pool. Afterward, she sat in a beach chair under an umbrella, her face in the shade, her long legs stretched out before her in the sun. From her chair she held court, trading secrets with the other women, laughing with the men. It wasn’t until I was in middle school that I’d started to recognize the looks they gave her, the openly appreciative glances, the secret smiles. She soaked it all in as if it fed her.

  “Jake asked about you yesterday,” my mother said. “Did you have a fight?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She slowed long before the turn. “Is it about Lacey?”

  Her shoulder against his — the way she leaned into him, for protection — the way he leaned over her, a shelter —

  “I hope you’re not acting jealous, Paige. Jealousy makes women ugly.”

  “I’m not being jealous.”

  “You know, Delia Easton always had a jealousy problem. It made her into something of a shrew. It’s sad.”

  “Mrs. Easton? Her husband was screwing every woman he could! She wasn’t jealous; she was married to an asshole!”

  “Language, missy. Princesses never cuss.”

  I crossed my arms. “Whatever.”

  “Anyhow,” my mother said. “Delia is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. We have responsibilities in relationships, Paige. The deal is, you stick together for better or for worse, but if it’s all worse and no better, you’re not holding up your end of the deal. You can’t expect someone to be there for you if you’re never there for him, and that means sometimes you have to set aside your own petty grievances.” She pulled into the parking lot of Willow Grove’s little strip mall and eased the SUV into a spot marked COMPACT CARS ONLY.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call infidelity a ‘petty grievance,’” I said.

  She turned to me. “Infidelity is only a symptom of a bigger problem, Paige. And maybe it’s not fair, but when there’s a problem, it always falls to the women to fix it.” She shrugged. “We come by it naturally. We’re nurturers; we nurture. I don’t know the exact details of Delia and Charlie’s marriage, but I do know this: he’s not going to come home if there’s nothing to come home to.” She lowered the rearview mirror to check her eye makeup and wiped away a tiny smudge under her lower lashes. “I’m not going to pretend it’s easy, honey, because it’s not.”

  I wondered what Mr. Tremont or his friend Padma would think of this little lecture. The thought made me feel weirdly embarrassed.

  My mother patted my knee. “You ready? We deserve a little pampering!”

  At Jolie, we settled ourselves into adjacent chairs while a heavyset woman hovered over us, adjusting the massage chairs and filling the tubs with hot water for us to soak our feet. “My daughter has a good shot at being the homecoming queen this year,” my mother told the woman. “Isn’t that exciting?”

  I buried my face in my hands. “Mom.”

  The nail lady’s name tag said, I’M KARLA! ASK ME ABOUT OUR REVLON SPECIALS! She kneeled at my mother’s feet, smiling up at me. “Oh gosh, you must be real proud there! That’s a very big deal, isn’t it!” Her Minnesota accent was so thick that it took my ears a few seconds to translate her words into English.

  My mother looked pleased. “It is a very big deal! We’ve been working toward this for years!”

  Karla nodded, pulling my mother’s right foot out of the water. “I had a girlfriend in high school who missed getting onto the prom court by three votes, and you know what? She never forgot it. To this day, she blames her first divorce on the fact that she was three votes shy of being pretty enough.” She lowered her voice and glanced over her shoulder, as if her high school girlfriend might walk into the nail salon at any moment. “Of course, I say it has more to do with the fact that her first husband loved his six-packs of Schlitz more than he loved her, don’t you know.”

  “I was the homecoming queen myself,” my mother said. “In high school and college, if you can believe that! Of course, that was a long time ago.” She shook her hair slightly, as if she couldn’t quite believe it herself, but I knew that she was waiting for Karla to tell her how she could believe it, of course she could.

  Instead, Karla looked at me. “You know, I always thought it wou
ld be fun to ride in the parade. It goes right past the store there, you know.” She pointed, and I tried not to notice the folds of her arm swinging under the fabric of her sleeve. “Those girls always look so happy.”

  My mother looked at me, triumphant. “It’s a real honor, Paige.” She looked off toward the slatted windows, where potted plants and venetian blinds disguised the view to the parking lot outside. “These are the best years of your life, Paige. They really are. Enjoy them while you can.”

  I wasn’t sure why she was arguing with me when I hadn’t said anything to contradict her, but suddenly I wanted to. I pulled my feet out of the water, shaking them gently. “I know it’s an honor, Mom. But isn’t life actually supposed to get even better than this? Shouldn’t the best years of my life still be ahead of me? I mean . . .” I closed my eyes, searching for the right words to say what I meant, even to know what I meant, as if I could find them etched across the insides of my eyelids, but the slate was blank, and by the time I opened my eyes, Karla had come back with a selection of nail polish, and my mother was deeply engaged in a discussion of the merits of eggplant versus mauve, and she never answered my question.

  “All hail the power of the blue dot!” A circle of people were standing outside the newspaper room as I walked to my locker Monday morning. They laughed and pushed one another, reaching for a piece of paper floating above their heads. “Gather round, all ye infidels, and worship the awesome power of the mystical blue dot!”

  “Praise be! Praise be! The blue dot is printed!” someone shouted reverently.

  Jeremy stood in the center of the crowd, holding the paper and yelling. “The blue dot knows all, tells nothing! It has the power to heal! It has the power to reveal!”

  Without really meaning to, I slowed as I approached them, looking for my sister. She was rarely far from Jeremy these days. I recognized some of the people from creative writing, as well as some of my sister’s friends, but I didn’t see her anywhere. Elizabeth Carr stood next to Jeremy, leading the crowd in its praise of the blue dot through hysterical giggles.