You understand why this bout has to happen, but there’s nothing you dread more than squaring off with Mimi. At least your fan club is here to bolster your spirits. This has got to be more Gorgeous Girls than you have ever seen in one setting. More sizes, shapes, and colors, too: petite to Amazonian, boyish to zaftig, porcelain to bronze. One of the girls—long strawberry-blond hair, hooknose, and athletic build—stands a full head above the crowd, so she is the first to spot you and the photographer stepping out of the elevator. She taps the shoulder of the girl to her left and says something into her ear, which starts a game of telephone until all eyes are fixed on you.
This is why you hurried here, why you kept this morning’s good-byes short and sweet. You don’t just know this role—you relish it.
Even if you hadn’t already met Vicky, you could have guessed that she would be the one holding the clipboard, commanding the brigade with the efficiency of a drill sergeant. Her acne is worse than you remember; she tried to tamp down the redness with pancake makeup to little success. When her attention is pointed toward you, she smiles and offers only the shyest of waves. This tugs at your heart. You so enjoyed how free she was with her affections last time you met. (Your fans don’t often swoon.) The attention she has shown your character has been instrumental to your success, but more than that, it felt to you like friendship. It shouldn’t, really, and if your life were richer, maybe it wouldn’t. You had so looked forward to more of the same, not only from her but the other girls as well. Instead they follow Vicky’s lead and keep their distance, acknowledging you only with smiles. And so, instead of the full embrace you imagined, you and Vicky share an awkward handshake. “It’s good to see you again,” you tell her, an earnest truth despite your greeting, and she says, “You, too,” before she introduces you individually to each grateful girl while the photographer taps his foot.
The photographer wants to take the picture outside in front of the arena, beneath the marquee. His plan is to place you at the bottom step and pose your multiples behind you. It is late afternoon and the lighting is terrible, but he hopes to make up for this with a semiartful shot: Athena at the Parthenon, ascending into infinity. This works for you, so you and your blond army follow him to the corner of 14th and W.
You and Vicky bring up the rear, and as you walk, she gathers courage and begins conducting an unofficial interview. She is less concerned with wrestling and rivalry than she is with other, more trivial affairs, like where you shop. Other questions include What was it like being on I’ve Got a Secret? and Is Spider McGee a good kisser? You answer each one with patience and enthusiasm, slathering on the kayfabe for maximum effect. Eventually, you reach the arena. Vicky stares up at your name on the marquee, sighs, and says, “Your life sounds dreamy.”
You could go a lot of ways with this. You could avoid a response altogether. It isn’t really a question, after all; it’s a statement. Your life sounds dreamy. Or you might test the waters of real friendship and let her in on the most surprising revelation of your transformation: this life is far from what you thought it would be. But you have been doing this long enough to understand that Vicky does not want reality. She has no desire to see the complicated young woman you are most of the time. Besides, she has gone to a lot of trouble. You owe her something, don’t you? No, don’t burden her with the truth. Don’t tell her that your life is dreamy for only a couple of hours a day, at best. Don’t tell her how much those hours cost you.
“Yeah,” you say. “It kind of is.”
The photographer claps his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, ladies,” he says. “I need to get a better look at you before I put you into spots. You know what that means.” When no one rushes to shed her outer layer, he snaps his fingers a couple of times. “Let’s go, let’s go. We’re burning daylight.” After a collective startle, the girls brave the cold and their insecurities and take off their trench coats, revealing their swimsuit-clad figures.
First and foremost, the girls are human, and so their bodies have all the normal, reasonable deficits: old white stretch marks, new purple stretch marks, cellulite, knock-knees, bowlegs, flat feet, duck feet, legs like tree trunks, legs like twigs, crooked teeth, teeth smeared with red lipstick, droopy bosoms, imposing shelflike bosoms, nonexistent bosoms, downy chest and stomach hair, faint mustaches, hairy moles, birthmarks, jutted jaws, cleft chins, freckles, dark circles, back fat, front fat, unruly corkscrewed hair, flat limp hair, hair with split ends, too-short hair, and lots of platinum hair with dark-black roots. And because they are human and teenagers to boot, and because it is too cold to be standing around in a swimsuit, their shoulders hunch forward, their arms fold around chests and torsos, their heads drop.
I wish I could tell you that you aren’t mentally cataloging all of the more unfortunate features or, at least, that you also register the plentiful number of exquisite ones: heart-shaped faces, perfectly set dark eyes, lovingly manicured nails, spotless complexions, huggable middles and caress-able curves, elegant noses, plump lips. I wish I could say that when you look at them, you see how they are all just as complicated as you. Instead, you come to this disappointing conclusion: The Gorgeous Girls are not terribly gorgeous.
At least you have the decency to keep this thought to yourself. The photographer is not nearly as delicate. “Oh no,” he says, under his breath but just barely. He lets the camera drop to his side. “No, no, no. This is not going to work.”
Vicky sidles up to you and the photographer, and you search her heavily made-up face, which is several shades darker than her rapidly goose-pimpling body, for signs that she has overheard him. If she has, she is keeping it to herself. “Are you going to arrange us, or should we just figure it out ourselves?”
“Hmmm,” he says, brain spinning, eyes wide and frightened. “I’m not sure yet, Miss—”
“Darnell. Vicky.”
“Vicky. I’m rethinking things. Now that I see all of you, you see. Hmmm. Is quantity the way to go? I wonder. I need to think. Here, let me start with Gwen.” He grabs you by the arm and leads you roughly, hurriedly to the initial step, where he wants you to stand. “Don’t worry,” he says in a whisper. “There’s no way I’m going to let all those dogs in the photograph.”
While your own thoughts haven’t been much kinder, this strikes you as unnecessarily cruel. “Those girls went to a lot of trouble to be here.”
The man snorts. He lets the camera hang around his neck while he kneels to direct you into the stance he wants, and you comply, too shocked to do otherwise. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll be the bad guy.”
Before you can reply, he is on his way back toward the crowd, rubbing his hands together, apparently ready with his excuses. From your position, it is hard to hear just exactly what it is he tells the girl-huddle, but you make out composition and essence and resolution and desirable, and watch in horror while he handpicks five girls he finds suitable enough for the picture, whittling his imagined infinity down to a row of stunned bridesmaids.
The operative word here, Gwen, is watch. Despite your horror, you do nothing beyond standing, stony and silent, in your pose as the girls who didn’t make the cut pick their trench coats out of the pile. Many of them—rattled and disappointed but still loyal—stay to watch the shoot; a dozen or so others pick up their purses and walk out. One of the selected girls shows her solidarity by exiting with this smaller group and loudly declaring the happenings bullshit and you a goof. Another spectator, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand, rethinks her loyalty and joins them. While the photographer leads the four remaining girls up the stairs to position them, the deserters cross back over W street, where the whole group of them are stopped by a woman whose face you can’t see but whose shape you recognize instantly.
How convenient that Mimi should be passing by at just this time! What could she have possibly been doing here? She stops to speak to them, and the girls respond with angry animated motio
ns, pointing back toward the arena, toward you.
This must be hard for you to watch—the fury and bruised esteem of your fans, not to mention the smug, self-righteous look you can just imagine on Mimi’s face. But when you shift your gaze back to the thirty or so girls who stay, your eyes fall on an even more painful sight: Vicky.
You know all too well the rejection she is feeling. You should have protested. That’s what a real champion would do, anyway. She wouldn’t have just posed.
• • •
One night later, just before the match, you stand at the back of the arena awaiting the announcer’s call. This has now become so routine that it sometimes borders on dull, but tonight, you have all the old jitters: cotton mouth, butterflies, goose pimples, etc. For the first time since your very first match, Mimi will be in the opposite corner. You hoped to speak to her before now, take her temperature, but she was too preoccupied with some activity in her dressing room. From the sound of it, there were multiple people in there with her. You don’t know what that is about, or what kind of retribution she might have planned for you, and the anticipation is brutal. Making matters worse is this business with the Gorgeous Girls. Before the match, you sweet-talked Sal into upgrading their free tickets so they’d be closer to ringside. This is small compensation, to be sure, but you hoped it would salve any still-smarting wounds and lessen some of your guilt. Now, you are panicking. What if they don’t come? What if the botched photo shoot has turned them all against you? What if you have to look down at a series of empty rows—ringside, no less!—all the while pretending nothing is out of the ordinary, keeping a silly grin on your face? Because you certainly can’t make your fears known to your audience.
Costantini plastered cards with your image in every storefront in every working-class neighborhood in the city. For those who might have missed these, there was also the picture of you in today’s paper, looking confident and queenly. Now, this dank, drafty area is teeming with fanatics who answered the call and have come to cheer you on. It hardly matters that you dread tonight’s stroll down the aisle more than any since you ceased to be a taunted and maligned heel. You have a job to do.
And so, once you are summoned—Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the sweetheart of the ring, Gwen Davies!—you step into the aisle and get to work. You cut a slow and gracious path through the outreached arms, the giddy smiles, the cardboard signs (Sweetheart, Be Mine!), the tokens of affection (single roses in cellophane), the unintelligible jumble of adoration: love, dropkick, legs, gorgeous, pin, hold, face, touch, bombshell, win, love, love, love. You answer your fans by squeezing their hands, mouthing thank yous silently but with exaggerated slowness, pretending not to see the flicking tongues or the hands cupping imaginary breasts, accepting the acceptable tokens, and pressing your lips to the ends of your fingers and blowing kisses at worthy targets—the man who holds both of his children aloft so they can see you through the crowd, the couple whose sign says they drove fifty miles to be here. Best of all, when you reach the front row, you find twenty-odd Gorgeous Girls, Vicky included, elbowing one another, clasping hands, bouncing up and down, and making a satisfying amount of noise. What a relief; they are going to give you a second chance. Some of them are, at least. After you make your way into the ring, you point to the blond-haired, red-mouthed girls (I see you!) and quickly shed your robe, climb onto the turnbuckle closest to them, and stretch out your arms, welcoming them back into the fold with one large embrace: Take me, I’m yours.
The noise dies down and the announcer, holding a microphone suspended from the rafters by a long black cord, summons your opponent—Screaming Mimi Hollander!—to the ring. Mimi appears in the aisle and marches past the revelers and their taunts, her head aloft, jaw set, eyes blank. This, of course, is not out of the ordinary. Here’s the unusual part: she isn’t alone. Shortly after Mimi appears, a group of women fall into step behind her and follow her through the crowd. There are eight of them, all dark-haired and clad in black suits.
Now you know what Mimi was up to in her dressing room, don’t you, Gwen? She was schooling these girls. Those shuffles and furtive whispers were all part of Mimi’s crash course in the art of the heel. Now, she is parading her pupils out as a supporting cast of evil sidekicks. The effect, you have to admit, is awe-worthy. Perhaps their heads are not held quite as high and mighty as their leader’s, but they are still convincingly wicked: their fists resting defiantly on their hips, their mouths drawn closed into steely, resistant puckers. And that’s not all they’ve learned. When the spectators direct their surly energy toward them, those insults, the same ones that would so easily weaken your resolve, pump them up. Chests inflate. Dark energy rises.
Amateurs, perhaps, but better heels than you ever were.
It’s only as they come toward the ring, toward you, that you begin to realize these aren’t just random women. Your first clue: the one directly behind Mimi is wearing a wig, and the girl behind her has hair so asphalt-black it could only be artificial. But why? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just recruit dark-haired girls? Take a look at the next girl, Gwen. Recognize her? Sure you do. It’s the tall girl from the lobby, the strawberry-blonde who spotted you and whispered to her friend: It’s her! And there’s the friend behind her. You know her, too, don’t you? She was also at the shoot. And when she made the cut and her friend didn’t—when her friend bundled herself in her coat and hurried out of the park before she could leak a public tear—she did what you should have done: declared it bullshit and walked away. And now here they are tonight, in solidarity with Mimi, in defiance of you and all that you represent.
Mimi climbs through the ropes and takes the microphone from the “stunned” announcer while the troop forks off and marches around until they have the ring flanked. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Mimi growls. “You think Gwen Davies is pretty goddamn gorgeous, don’t you?” The crowd screams their answer, an undeniable affirmative. Mimi strolls closer to the Gorgeous Girls’ VIP section and stares down. “I know you ladies think so. What is it you call yourselves again? The Gorgeous Girls, right?”
The girls take the bait and scream their unflinching fidelity. Vicky puts her fingers in her mouth and whistles.
“Well, ladies, you’re right. Let’s face it: Gwen is gorgeous. But there’s a lot more to grappling than being gorgeous, and tonight, I am going to kick her gorgeous ass.”
This uncorks the crowd. The jeers, hisses, and invectives that follow produce a din that shakes the walls. One could argue that this passion is born out of love for you, but when you see the way Mimi works them, the way she gets the lot of them eating out of her hand, you see the problem with this argument. They don’t hate her because they love you; they love you because they hate her.
Now you understand what Mimi tried to explain on that bus ride to Tennessee: the heel is the show.
“And just so you know, y’all aren’t the only entourage in town. I brought my girls with me tonight. Allow me to introduce the Go-to-Hell Girls. Ladies, tell them what we think about all this gorgeous nonsense.”
The girls hop up on the apron, two per side, and hang one-armed off the ropes. They are no prettier than they were earlier in the day. They have the same wide noses, the same thick thighs. The heckling is merciless. Nevertheless, they are radiant in their go-to-hell glory, each brazenly extending a finger to the crowd.
This might have been the end of it if it weren’t for Vicky. Perhaps she handled yesterday’s disaster with grace, but it appears this mutiny has pushed the limits of her tolerance. If she must go to hell, it seems she plans to take a few girls with her. She hops out of her chair, leaps to the ring, and yanks the wig off the first girl she can reach. The wigless girl jumps on top of her, and that’s all it takes. Soon, girls from each side rush into the fray.
You can’t exactly just stand and watch this happen, so you scramble out of the ring and into the melee. The girls are unskilled in the art of self-def
ense but filled to the brim with anger, so the battle hovers somewhere between school-yard rumble and barroom brawl: chairs overturned, fistfuls of hair grabbed, blouses snatched open, faces scratched with long, manicured nails. You wade through the bodies, try to gently coax the girls off one another, but they’re not having it.
This is your first rodeo, but Mimi and the ref, who followed you out of the ring, are riot veterans. They are all too knowledgeable about what can happen if this doesn’t get nipped quickly, so they cut through the girls with purpose and force, neither hesitating to employ submission tactics when necessary. The ref sticks to bear hugs, while Mimi hooks them around the back or under the arm. While they do this, you continue working your way to the middle, where the de-wigged girl lies on her back, covering her face with her hands as Vicky straddles her and uses both arms, one after the other, to slap the girl repeatedly. When you reach Vicky, you take her shoulders in your hands and say, “Hey, hey, hey. Stop it. Stop it,” but the inertia of her fury is too overpowering: she wheels around and turns those windmilling arms against you. She strikes you once across the face, and that’s enough. When she reaches out to hit you again, you grab her by the wrist. Vicky’s face prunes into a silent cry, but you stay resolved and keep her in this hold, the same one you used against that predator in Oklahoma. In your wildest dreams, you couldn’t have imagined using it on the president of your fan club.
“I’m going to let you go,” you say to her, even-voiced and holding steady in your squat despite the jostling crowd above you. “And you’re going to get off of her and stop this nonsense. Got me?”
Vicky’s mascara-smeared eyes squint into hard, flat lines. She nods her agreement, so you release her. When Vicky steps off her victim, you extend your hand down to help the girl up. Instead of accepting it, she adjusts the strap of her bathing suit, which has slipped off in the battle, and then gets herself up onto her feet. Large swatches of hair have escaped from her strawberry-blond bun. Her face pinks, and there’s a small dot of blood under her eye at the end of what appears to be a scratch. She wipes her eyes with the back of her arm.
The Sweetheart Page 25