Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  Now, in the girl’s wide-set eyes, there was the spark of upset and accusation, as if she stood in judgment of her mother—of Khin’s pathetic diminishment in the face of ordinary motherhood and her own superior dignity. Never before had she dared look at Khin that way.

  “You are your father’s daughter, aren’t you?” Khin snapped at her.

  And it was true. Louisa had always adored Benny, as he had her. The injustice of that exclusionary love—the injustice of all three of Khin’s eldest children preferring Benny after everything she’d done for them—struck her so forcibly, she had the momentary thought that she hated Louisa, hated all of them.

  In October of that same year, a terrible thing happened. They woke to a loud banging coming from down the hill, and soon discovered half a dozen Burma Army soldiers assembling a hut at the bottom of their driveway. Benny had been sentenced to an indefinite term of house arrest, one of the soldiers informed them. “Without charge or trial?” Benny asked the soldier, but the ignorant thug had no idea what he meant.

  Khin had all but forgotten the larger world of politics, of the war, since returning home to Insein. Of course, she knew from Benny that the Burma Army had been focusing its offensives on the hills rather than the delta region, and she’d thought with concern of Lynton out on the front lines. But the threats he faced—the threats they all continued to face with the war unresolved—menaced her as if for the first time.

  And all that first day of his house arrest, Benny sat as if menaced in his study, amid the forest of his papers and books, staring at the shadows on his wall to glean some truth they obscurely reflected. He could have been a child both fascinated and frightened by his unknowable surroundings.

  To rescue him, Khin finally charged into the room with a shot of brandy. “Does this sentence have something to do with what you weren’t at liberty to tell me?” she ventured to ask. She meant what he wasn’t at liberty to tell her about the source who’d informed him of her affair with Lynton.

  The face Benny turned to her twitched with confusion. “If it does,” he finally responded, “either I’ve been discovered, or I’ve been an idiot.”

  That was all he would say. But it was enough. Khin later reasoned that he had either been turned on by someone he trusted or discovered by the enemy—that enemy being U Nu’s government or Ne Win’s army. Ne Win, whose children attended the same school as Louisa, Johnny, and Grace, she thought with a shudder. How carelessly Khin had brushed shoulders with that despotic general’s wife, Katie, whose tight little mouth always seemed to be suppressing a smile of disdain when she passed Khin on the school grounds. How stupid Khin had been not to find a way into the woman’s good graces. How self-absorbed and naive. It would be impossible now for Benny to conduct business—and, as it was, the diminished returns from his ice plant were barely keeping the children schooled and fed!

  Still, there was something reassuring about the thought of Benny being hidden from others’ scrutiny, hidden from others on whom he might turn his own scrutinizing eye. Surely his view of Khin would be altered now that she was the only woman within his sight.

  The Miss Burma idea came about several months later, when they were hosting a dinner for a small gathering of friends, one of whom asked what Benny proposed to keep himself busy with, to which Khin spontaneously answered, “With his thoughts, of course.”

  She hadn’t meant to be derisive, but all she’d seen Benny do since his house arrest was sit and scratch out the occasional line in one of his notebooks (notebooks she’d peeped at to find an impenetrable morass of tangled English script). Anyway, her mocking tone with Benny and his with her had become something of a habit, so she wasn’t surprised when he, seemingly unable to restrain himself from deriding her in turn, surveyed the dining table with a sort of glee and said, “Khin would no doubt rather I spend my time drumming up business from within my new prison. Or, if I really must engage my higher faculties, she’d probably be happier if I were to join the government’s scribes and report for the Nation”—the Rangoon Nation being one of the country’s sanctioned newspapers. “You would prefer that, wouldn’t you, darling?” he said, turning to her. “Just think of what I’d write. Perhaps a little ditty about the Miss Burma pageant later this year—if I could somehow contrive a way to go and watch it.”

  His outburst—which she’d heard over a pounding in her ears—seemed to have taken him aback more than it did her; yet on the heels of it came a suggestion that deeply injured her: “Or, even better,” he pressed on, while his friends hid their embarrassed faces over their soup bowls, “I could do much as you once did, my dear, and get to work on a campaign making our Louisa over and entering her into the beauty pageant.”

  “She’d have to win Miss Karen State first,” one of his friends helplessly put in.

  “Why not use her loveliness to our advantage?” Benny said, ignoring him.

  It was a new low for him, these depths of cruelty to which he sank; not quite submerged within their murkiness herself, Khin made out obscurely the resentment he must have felt toward her since she’d sacrificed some of Louisa’s innocence for the possibility of his release—a release he hadn’t actually wanted, she suddenly glimpsed. And now he was stuck in this house with her.

  “Now that I think of it,” Benny said to the table, “Louisa becoming Miss Burma would give me something useful to write about, wouldn’t it?”

  “Come now, Benny,” his friend said, sweating over his soup. “Hang this beauty pageant business—”

  But Benny was too far into an argument that, once made, he’d never be able to take back, she feared. “It would certainly give Louisa—and us as a family—a platform in the international sphere, wouldn’t it?” he sputtered. “Yes, that would be ‘an angle’ as the Americans put it. Might even get us back in the government’s good graces. And the money! It’s no secret that I’m an utter failure as a businessman, that Khin has had to make terrible sacrifices—”

  “Stop,” she heard herself say weakly from her end of the table.

  Her face was trembling, and it made her all too aware of how pathetic she must have appeared, like a debased servant who’d been made by her master to impersonate the mistress of the house.

  “I can’t deny that the idea of Louisa being crowned appeals to my vanity,” Benny kept on. From his tone it wasn’t at all clear that he was still speaking facetiously. “To think of my daughter’s picture looming on their billboards . . .”

  To think of exactly that, for Khin, was suddenly to imagine herself becoming even less distinct. The more prominent her daughter became, the greater the shadow she would cast. And hadn’t Khin been at risk of standing in that shadow as far back as her freest days with Lynton? She could already see it . . . Lynton alongside Sunny in some army truck on some highway, coming across just such a billboard featuring Louisa’s outsize beauty.

  But a thought occurred to her, one as frightening as it was rich with possibility. Well, and what if Lynton did confront such a glaring reminder of them?

  Might not the memory of Khin outshine Miss Burma’s face?

  14

  The Miss Burma Problem

  Who was the ally and who was the enemy?

  It was a question that preoccupied Benny soon after he was thrown into house arrest. It was a question that preoccupied him partly because the indefinite sentence was entirely benign given his sporadic meetings with the American (to whom he’d repeatedly insisted that Khin was ignorant of Lynton’s present whereabouts), and partly because all communications with Hatchet had abruptly come to an end. Of course, William Young might have given the tip that had done Benny in. If that had been the case, well, Young could have been placed in the field precisely to assess the Karens’ threat to America’s and Burma’s interests and relations. Or perhaps it was as simple as Hatchet having wanted to finish off their association the moment he’d accepted that Benny was never going to lead him
to Lynton.

  And it was a question that preoccupied him whenever he dared to consider the question of Lynton and Khin. Had she passionately loved that Karen warrior, who had managed to care for her and the children in Benny’s absence?

  Benny had made the preposterous suggestion about Louisa running for Miss Burma with Lynton in mind. After all, Khin had been fresh from the man’s bed when she’d entered Louisa into the child pageant with the supposed aim of securing Benny’s release from Insein Prison. Her every act of loyalty since their separation—­including her persistence now by his side, in this house-cum-prison—struck him as compensation for the greater happiness she must have known with that other man. And in the presence of their dinnertime guests, without really wanting to hurt her (but perhaps wanting to goad her into an outburst that might relieve them of everything that had gone unspoken between them), he had pushed so hard for Miss Burma as his new solution that she’d visibly cowered at her end of the table before saying, “If you’re so convinced, Benny, I’ll see what I can do about it.”

  And, God Almighty, did she ever proceed to do just that!

  Of course, he could have spoken up instead of mutely standing by (beside equally mute Louisa) while Khin went on to pore over fashion magazines and cut patterns for gowns and bathing suits, to be stitched together from her own dismantled petticoats and sarongs. Of course, when she later that year announced that she’d registered Louisa for the 1956 Miss Karen State pageant, he could have put his foot down and cried defeat, demanding this must not go on. But Louisa showed no sign of being negatively touched by her mother’s carrying on. Rather, the perpetually serene looks the now fifteen-year-old girl increasingly cast Benny seemed intended to reassure him that he shouldn’t trouble himself with concern about this pettiness. And he knew that to say anything to Khin would mean claiming responsibility for what he privately came to refer to as the Miss Burma problem. (“But I thought this is what you wanted,” he could imagine her arguing. “A subject for your writing—what did you call it? An angle? A platform?”)

  The truth was Khin seemed to have become invested in Louisa’s winning the ultimate title—as if, in addition to the potential financial and political rewards, her own self-worth might be salvaged by means of it. There was something personal and desperate about the way she began to harass the girl, constantly detailing how Louisa could improve upon herself (“Don’t tug at your bathing suit—it’s supposed to be tight—and pull your stomach in whenever you think of it.” “You could do some toning exercises.” “Are you washing your forehead up to the hairline? You don’t want pimples all over your face!” “You see the women in the magazines, how each of them stands without slouching, as though she’s wearing a beautiful necklace she wants everyone to see . . .” “Your calves are too big—that’s unavoidable—but if you stand just so it will be less evident.” “You’re not going out without makeup, I hope!” “Pinch the tip of your nose for ten minutes a day—your father’s is so big.” “One scoop of rice, no more.” “Did you forget to apply your face paste? Your skin will be ruined.” “If you see Mrs. Ne Win, address her politely. She greeted me this morning. We’re making an impression!”).

  Something unsuitable was happening to Khin. She seemed to be alternately harassed and exalted by the visions she was intent on conjuring out of the substance—certainly not the soul—of their eld­est daughter (as though what she were conjuring were a perfected version of herself). At any given minute, she might instruct the girl to put on some dress she’d sewn and call for the family members to come admire it (Benny was quite dazzled by the sight of Louisa, whose figure had worrisomely taken on the dimensions of various Hollywood starlets’, in a gleaming mandarin gown and gold lamé heels, the latter of which Khin had “borrowed from a friend,” or more likely purchased on credit). Then she would just as suddenly decide that her creation was inadequate, that the outfit in question had to be altered; and, after commanding Louisa to take the thing off, she would station herself at the dining table to rip out seams and reposition hooks, while inconvenienced Johnny would invariably skulk off, and the rest of the household would be thrown into disarray—the younger, neglected children grabbing for attention that Louisa and Hta Hta could only semisuccessfully supply. If Khin was determined to remake her own world, she was just as effectively unraveling their shared one.

  Yet one day—about a week before the Miss Karen State ­pageant—Khin seemed to remember her stake in him. All afternoon, light had poured in through the window in his study, enlivening the dust motes that rose from his desk while he wrote a long letter to Rita (with whom, since his latest incarceration, his correspondence had again become of urgent significance to him). The night was already deep, though, the last light having left him alone—relentlessly alone with his thoughts of Hatchet and Lynton, of whom he dared write only in his private journals—when suddenly Khin appeared in his doorway.

  She was wearing a kimono, something silken and festooned with flushing pink orchids (something new, he anxiously observed), and she had just bathed. He seemed to feel heat coming off her skin in feverish waves, and when he turned to more fully take her in, he noticed she’d applied makeup to her eyes in the style she’d sometimes worn when they were young, with little black wings darting out from the far corners of her lash line. That gesture—toward her youth and away from their aging—touched him, as did the gleam of girlish embarrassment in those made-up eyes. He was reminded of the first time they’d stood alone together, when she’d bared herself to him with such complete submission to her new role as his wife, to the requirement of their spontaneous intimacy. And it came to him that all of her maddened activities of late might have been directed toward just this—toward a rekindling of something almost extinguished within her and between the two of them.

  “Am I interrupting you?” she said softly.

  “Not at all,” he told her.

  “Would you make love to me, then?”

  “Excuse me?”

  What an idiot he was, asking her to explain what he all at once utterly wanted. She was still a young woman, not yet thirty-five, still luminous, still hungering for a contact he could provide. But as though to convince him of all of this, and as though to persuade him to give her what she needed (just as she had on their wedding night), she took the comb from her hair (the same sandalwood comb he’d given her then!), reenacting her initial gesture of seduction—the unraveling of her incomparable hair, which he’d always been powerless to defend himself against.

  For a moment, he stood observing her, now cloaked by the hair that reached to her feet and seemed almost to want to protect her. Then he went and took her warm face in his hands, and kissed her, and found alcohol on her breath. And (shoving away the thought that perhaps she’d been less loosened than misdirected by that alcohol’s influence) he drew the kimono off her shoulder.

  “Don’t stop,” she said, clutching the kimono and closing it again over her chest.

  “Khin—”

  “Don’t speak.”

  “All right.”

  He buried his nose in her hair, in the crook of her neck. It was like entering a deep and endless flower, his senses primordially awakened.

  “Tell me you want me,” she said.

  “I want you.”

  Firmly again, he drew her closer and pulled the kimono aside (and then pushed away his confusion about why she was fighting to keep herself clad, drawing the kimono up over her shoulder again).

  “I want to see you,” he said.

  “Please don’t talk.”

  “But you’re beautiful.”

  “No.”

  He reached within the kimono to try to take her ample breasts in his hands, but she jerked away, staggered back, wrapping up her fountain of mussed hair with one hand, clasping the kimono over her chest with the other.

  “What is it?” he said.

  With a desolate, panicked glanc
e she took in the surface of his room—of his desk—where he spent so many of his hours away from her. She seemed to be looking for an outward cause of a festering inner condition.

  “Were you writing a love letter?” she said. And there it was: the old accusation, a habit she couldn’t quit.

  “Maybe,” he lied, because he couldn’t seem to quit the habit of their distrust, either.

  “Who is she?”

  “Someone I got to know in prison. Someone very dignified.”

  Immediately, he was sorry. But it was too late. In her stricken face, he saw so much hurt he couldn’t speak.

  Not even when she said, before rushing out of the room, “Why is it so hard for you to love me?”

  Over the next few days, before the dreaded Miss Karen State pageant, Khin retreated behind the fog of their thickening estrangement. When they were in the same room, her glance would not penetrate as far as him, and he had the sensation of vanishing, of being vanished. He no longer existed for her. All that existed was Louisa’s beauty—or Khin’s refashioning of it. That was the lighthouse that promised to deliver her from the life she’d built with him.

  She woke before dawn on the day of the contest—Benny heard her scurrying up and down the stairs—and by the time he came down for breakfast, she was dressed and almost calm, having her morning conversation in the kitchen with Hta Hta, while Louisa sat in her bathrobe at the dining room table, her own hair and makeup already done. There was nothing garish about that makeup, he saw as soon as he sat across from his daughter. On the contrary, the artistry typical of so much of Khin’s sewing and gardening—the delicacy, the ­naturalness—had been brought to bear on the girl’s lovely face, so that his next impression, when Louisa smiled sympathetically at him over the light morning meal of coffee and fruit she’d been permitted, was that somehow Khin had managed to clarify rather than muddy what was already there: the imprint of authenticity, of decency, and also of . . . of what? As Louisa continued to take him in, he became aware of being read by her intelligence, of being assessed . . . And there was something smoldering beneath the surface of her astute gaze, something that told him that she, too, was acquainted with inner demons. What she had survived (whatever she had survived, for Benny still didn’t really know what had happened to his children during their years apart)—what she had suffered and overcome—had made its mark and dignified her beauty, made it extraordinary.