Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  It started with my wife. I told her the news, and she got a little huffy. Not right away; I told her right before supper, and it took until dessert before she started sulling up. Seemed funny that she’d be so upset about a beauty pageant. Remember, I was a lot younger then, and I didn’t guess that maybe she was feeling like a dog-eared wife; I just supposed she was jealous.

  What I should have done, soon as she started taking on, was to say something smart, like “Baby, you’ll always be my beauty queen,” or “I’d give first place to you, but they wouldn’t let you enter—wouldn’t be fair to those other poor girls.” Something like that. But that kind of smarts takes years to learn, and I hadn’t learned it yet. So when she was huffing over the pie, I said something dumb instead, like “Can’t a guy have any fun?” It’s important, when you’re thirty-odd and married, to act like you want to look at other women. You haven’t let yourself admit that you’re not much interested anymore. So things went from bad to worse, and I spent that night on the couch. And a few nights more, before the thing was over. Hell, I spent so much time on that damned couch that I wouldn’t sit on it anymore. Right after the contest was over, I went out and got myself an armchair.

  The beauty pageant was a three-day event, kind of a stretched-out Miss America, lasting through the whole fair. I got there early on Friday and watched them setting up the stage. Right about noon all the girls started showing up, and their mothers. I have never seen so many outfits in all of my life. They were only supposed to wear three—bathing suit, casual, and formal—but they each brought dozens, jammed into their cars and pickup trucks, and what have you. Then the squabbling started, over who was going to sit where in the tent they’d set up for a dressing room. It all looked pretty much the same to me, but they seemed to think one place was better than another, and there was a lot of ugliness. Name calling, tears. The mothers were worse than the daughters. They actually threw things.

  I was just standing there, taking it all in, when one of the mothers spotted my judge’s ribbon. “Hey,” she called out to the others. One woman froze where she stood, hefting a box of powder, about to let fly. “Here’s a judge. Let him decide.”

  And they all looked at me, all those wide women’s eyes, quiet now, and expectant.

  “I ain’t the senior judge,” I said. That spot was reserved for the mayor. I looked around for him or Floyd, but they weren’t in sight.

  “Don’t matter,” said the same woman. “We’ll stand by what you say.”

  “All right, then,” I said, playing for time. “All right.” And I racked my brain. “Alphabetical,” I decided. “Y’all are listed alphabetically, I’ve got a list somewhere.” I found it in a pocket. “When I read your name, go to the next empty spot, starting front to back.”

  Everything was just fine until I got to the R’s. One of the mothers started whooping “Unfair.”

  “Cecily’s right in the sun,” she said. “See how fair she is. She’ll be red as a lobster by Sunday.”

  They set to fussing again. I held my hands up and said “Hush,” but it didn’t help.

  “Y’all said you’d stand by what I decided,” I said, in a very strict voice, but no one was listening.

  I left them there to fight it out; I didn’t have to be back for a couple of hours, and so I spent that time wandering over the fairgrounds and drinking a share of bad lemonade. When I got back, everything was orderly; the girls were getting into their costumes and painting their faces. The tent flaps were closed, and it must have been mighty hot in there, but all was peaceful. I listened for a while to the buzz of girls getting ready. It was kind of interesting, something I never heard before. Like being there before a date and hearing what goes on in that bedroom they stay in for fifteen minutes while you talk to their father.

  The first day, the girls had to do a walk, in casual clothes, and answer two questions. That went off fine; there were fifteen girls in all, and Floyd Beeman, the fire chief, who got to do the asking, picked easy questions. The girls were anywhere from fifteen to eighteen, although most were around sixteen. They walked out and turned around, and posed while their mothers took pictures, and then they walked back again. They came out one by one later for the questions. That was all so we could get a good look, and start figuring out who we favored.

  That was easy. I like brunettes, and your mother was a blonde, but there was nothing to touch her on that stage. Some of the girls walked too fast, like they were nervous; and some were awkward. Not Beth. She swayed out there like a lily, real cool, and gave just a little smile when she posed at the end of the runway. The other girls were smiling their faces off—you couldn’t see for the glare off their teeth—but Beth had a real sweet little smile, made you wonder what she was thinking.

  There was only one other girl come close to her for just natural beauty; although in my opinion, she didn’t. The other judges kind of liked her though, and it may have had something to do with her being the police chief’s daughter. She was very good-looking and had some class. She moved like she was dancing, and she got some applause. But when your mother come out, that girl looked like a wallflower. I could see Tom and Floyd smiling and nodding. Beth had won the first look over.

  The question and answer helped us weed out some girls. The questions were dumb, like, “What do you admire most about your mother?” but some of the girls couldn’t handle even that; they stammered and blushed, and one poor thing even started to cry. Beth handled that category well, but so did the police chief’s daughter. In fact, she started all the mothers in the audience to sniffling a little, with her speech. The score was getting closer.

  Saturday was the bathing-suit category, and that day’s crowd was bigger and rowdier, mostly high-school boys come to see the only part of the fair that interested them. They whistled and carried on, and part of the difficulty of the thing was how the girls held up under it, whether they kept their poise. We were all surprised that afternoon, when a little thing from the far western part of the county came out in her bathing suit. In a dress, she hadn’t looked like much, and she’d been real shy during the questioning, but in her swimsuit she was a knockout, and she caused quite a fuss. Now it looked like there was more competition for Beth, but I still had my money on her.

  Sunday was the longest part of the contest; the girls came out in formal wear, and paraded up and down one more time, and then each one had to give a little speech. The topic had been given to them beforehand: “America’s Part in the War Effort.” By now, I was getting tired of looking at the stream of girls going by. I know you can’t believe that, young as you are, but if you ever spent three afternoons in a row looking at a lot of girls who look a lot alike, you’d understand. It’s not like they did much except smile and prance around, and that’s entertaining, but not exactly riveting, especially when you’re the judge and you have to sit up straight and pay attention or catch hell from some girl’s mother about how you were looking the other way when her daughter came out.

  All the speeches were pretty much the same, a lot of guff about Democracy and Our Brave Boys. Don’t get me wrong; I’m as patriotic as the next fellow, but it’s the same thing again. Once you listen to twelve speeches all alike you begin to get a little cynical.

  Beth was next to last, and she came out front like the other girls had, and she gave her little smile, and she started speaking from memory. Right away, it was clear that this speech was going to be different. I don’t remember what all she said or how she said it, but there was nothing about Our Brave Boys in it. It was all about war being wrong, and how when countries disagree it doesn’t mean the people in ’em have to kill each other.

  Well, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a fuss, before or since. First people got real quiet, and then the crowd started stirring and waving like a cornfield with the wind on it, and then someone stood up and started booing. They all took it up, then: booing and hissing, and some boy threw an ice cream at the stage. It hit Beth on the chest, and sort of slithered down
ward, and landed on her shoe, but all the time she kept speaking, although no one was listening now. I was getting a sinking feeling, because I knew she couldn’t win anymore, and I guess I wasn’t as unbiased as I should have been. I was torn; I sympathized with the crowd some, because a lot of women had lost their sons and boys their brothers, and they needed to believe in the Cause. Beth’s getting up there and tearing down the war was like breaking their hearts even more than they were broke already. She was ripping the flag off their loved ones’ caskets, and it was a cruel thing to do.

  But it was brave, too. There was real passion in that speech, before the booing got so loud you couldn’t hear her anymore. She obviously meant what she was saying, and hard as it was for me to listen to it, there’s something admirable in saying what you believe, when you know it’s not what people want to hear. A few years later, a whole generation would take on like she did, but they would have a bunch of people like themselves, all agreeing with them, and this was one girl, alone.

  The uproar went on for a while after she’d finished; the poor girl that followed her gave a sweet, predictable speech in front of an angry mob. Nobody listened; she ended by running off the stage.

  There was a half hour or so for deliberation, during which the girls filed on stage again, so we could use them for a reference, I guess. When Beth came on, there was some more angry noise, but it had settled down some. People were turning their attention to the next thing—the judging.

  We muttered and whispered amongst ourselves, but we couldn’t come to a decision. Floyd was all for putting three girls down, and none of them Beth; and Tom, the mayor, wanted to give her third. The choice wasn’t any more about who was going to come in first on the list, but only where to put Beth on it. No matter what Floyd said, she couldn’t be left out entirely; it was a beauty contest, after all. But at the same time, there weren’t two girls prettier than she was, and none of us wanted to get the mob going by giving her first.

  I told them about Fred’s system, and to do them credit, they heard me out. But when I was done, Floyd said, “Big help,” sarcastically.

  “It won’t work, Gene,” said the mayor. “Beth would usually be the favorite. She always wins these things. And we got no lack of pretty girls up there, but not one kid among them. Old Fred’s rules just ain’t no good this time. We got to figure it out ourselves.”

  So we fussed some more, and hissed back and forth, and wrote our votes down, and argued about them. It took us most of an hour to come to a decision, and by that time, the crowd was hot and mad.

  When Tom got up to announce the vote, there was a hush. The crowd had swelled: some nincompoop had made an announcement a few minutes ago over the loudspeaker; that brought a good number of fairgoers over. A bigger number had shown up before the announcement, hearing the ruckus, and being naturally curious. Tom cleared his throat. I didn’t envy him. No matter what he said, someone was going to be mad. Beth had upset a lot of people, but she still had a lot of admirers in the town, who hadn’t been here before, and who wouldn’t have cared if she’d gotten up and spouted Bolshevism.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Tom. And he read the list, into a dead silence. Beth was given second place. The police chief’s daughter got third, and the dark horse in the bathing suit took first, which was enough of a surprise to distract the crowd a little. The mother of the winner started to sobbing, and the chief’s wife got indignant, and the boys were hooting and hollering for no particular reason. During the confusion, I slipped off and went to stand by my car. My wife hadn’t spoken to me for two days, and I was feeling a little raggedy.

  “Hey,” said Beth, coming by, carrying her pumps hooked onto two fingers, walking barefoot.

  “I thought you’d be having your picture taken,” I said, surprised.

  “My mother’s furious with me,” said Beth, and giggled. “It’s the first time I haven’t won.”

  “You would have—” I began.

  “I know,” she said, and her face got serious again. “I always win,” she said, with a far-off look. Then she came back from wherever she’d gone and turned to me. “Don’t feel bad,” she said, patting my shoulder, as if I was the one who needed comforting. “It was the only thing you could do.”

  And she walked away. I watched her go, and almost went after her, to ask her why she’d done it, why she’d given that speech when she knew it would lose the contest for her. I’ve thought about it some since, and I’ve always wondered why I didn’t ask her. I guess it had to do with the way she looked and the way she sounded. She didn’t look like a kid in a beauty pageant; she was like a grown woman with that secret smile, and I respected her enough to let her keep her secrets.

  Besides. I have the feeling she thought she won. Not the contest, acourse, but something.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Confessor

  THE DOCTOR HAD asked her once about her goals; she had been surprised at first and then blank. She knew she’d once had them, but so long ago—a pony, a husband, a house like her grandmother’s—that they no longer made sense. She’d been ashamed to confess them, but the doctor hadn’t scoffed. Well? he’d said. Do you have what you want? No pony, Joan had answered, smiling. Then more slowly: I do have a husband. And what about the house? Yes, and a house, bigger even than my grandmother’s. She’d wrinkled up her face. I have other things too, she’d said. Things I never even wanted. A career. Two careers, really. You’re even a little bit famous, said the doctor, and she’d nodded. But … It’s not enough, said the doctor, putting a little twist of a question onto it. No, Joan had answered, with the relief of confession; no, it wasn’t enough.

  Did all of it show on her face, like a television program or a computer display? She pulled out the desk drawer which had the mirror in it, and stared down. Her face, oddly framed by sloping reflections of the wood panels, looked back at her, calm. Looking down like this gave her a double chin.

  She shut the drawer hurriedly when the knock came at the door.

  “Your eleven o’clock,” said Miss Hastings, in her tinny voice. She managed to inject disapproval into every sentence, reminding Joan of a teacher she’d once had as a girl. Miss Lamont, of Maryland; appalled by her pupils’ Pittsburgh accents, she’d dedicated herself to correcting them. She’d sat on the edge of her desk, taking class time away from Huckleberry Finn, swinging one foot like a pendulum. “House; say it,” and the students chorusing after: “Hass.”

  “Milk,” she’d said, the short i hissing between her drab, unpainted lips, and “melk,” the children had bleated helplessly. Looking back, Joan couldn’t believe how polite they’d all been, how obedient. Even the day that Miss Lamont’s swinging foot had caught the metal wastebasket in front of her desk. The thing had gone clanging across the room, skittering under desks, sending out a shower of pencil shavings and balled-up pieces of paper. They hadn’t laughed, not even then. Instead, an awed silence had fallen, a curtain of privacy, leaving the teacher alone at the front of the room, opening and shutting her mouth. Joan remembered her own laughter, never released, how it had hurt to hold it in. Sometimes she felt a tightness there, as if it had lost its way inside her all that time ago and was still trapped, looking for escape.

  She looked down at the file on her desk. Sally Shane.

  “Send her in, thanks,” she told Miss Hastings.

  The girl slunk in through the doorway. Joan was astonished: where had she come from? Surely she would have noticed this student before. The girl was perhaps five two, carrying at least a hundred and seventy pounds. Fat as she was, she moved delicately, settling into the armless chair in front of Joan’s desk with hardly a sound.

  “I’m Mrs. Corbin,” Joan told her. “And you’re Sally?”

  The girl nodded.

  “We haven’t met before, have we?” asked Joan, tapping the girl’s file, wishing she’d looked at it before. But she didn’t like to read the file now. The first few minutes with a student were crucial, and eye contact an importan
t part of rapport.

  “I’m new,” said Sally.

  That explained it.

  “You’re in the tenth grade?” asked Joan, estimating.

  “Ninth,” said Sally, and added grudgingly, “but I shoulda been in tenth.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Huh?”

  “You should have been in tenth?”

  “Yeah. I had trouble with math last year.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Huh?”

  “What school did you attend last year?” clarified Joan, hiding her irritation at the repetition of the ugly monosyllable.

  “In Harrisburg,” said Sally, shortly.

  “What a coincidence,” said Joan. “I’m from Pittsburgh.”

  Sally looked only slightly interested.

  “Well, how do you like Naples?” asked Joan.

  Sally shrugged. I’m losing her.

  “Not as nice as Harrisburg?”

  Sally shrugged again, and then burst out: “We had a big yard back home, now we don’t have any.”

  “You miss that,” Joan said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Sally, falling silent again.

  “Being new can be hard,” said Joan. “That’s what I’m here for. Did you have a guidance counselor at your school in Harrisburg?”