Such a Pretty Face

by Ann Angel

  Norma Fox Mazer

  1. IN SEVENTH GRADE AT MALLORY CENTRAL SCHOOL

  Mr. Giametti says, “I want you people to learn to love poetry and understand metaphors,” and he reads us this poem:

  Music

  is a naked lady

  running mad

  through the pure night.

  We seventh graders are not ready for this. Not in Mallory, not in our small town on the Canadian border in the north of New York State that almost no one in the world has ever heard of.

  Later that day, I find a note in my locker, which reads:

  Beauty H.

  is an old cabbage

  boiling mad

  on the pure stove.

  I think this is pretty funny, and I even like the boiling mad part, especially because I know that people think I’m wussy, but inside me I’m not—only, that’s not the point here. The point is, I’m about to show the poem to Gracie Pryor, who has the locker next to mine, but then I turn the paper over and see the drawing on the other side showing a girl with a head like a cabbage, and in case I don’t get that it’s meant to be me, there are the letters B. H. in a balloon with an arrow pointing to the drawing, and I just stand there, staring at the little drawing that, to tell the truth, does, in some weird way, look like me. Cabbage head, I think. That’s me. That’s what I look like.

  2. IF I COULD BE ANYONE

  I’d be a girl with a name that nobody would ever notice. I’d have a plain, ordinary name like Ruth Ford or Bea Stone or Lyn Smith, and I’d wear glasses, and my skirts a little too long and plain white blouses, and I would be an average student and sit in back of every class and be someone nobody ever noticed for any reason whatsoever. However, and I say this without any intention of boasting, I am not that average student. I have 20/20 vision, and like all the girls in our town of Mallory, I wear my skirts short, my blouses colorful, and my jeans tight.

  Once I had a friend named Mary Jones, which is maybe the plainest of all names, but Mary Jones was somebody you would always notice. Mary Jones had straight, white-blond bangs hanging in her eyes and a tilt to her chin that made her look like a baby movie star. She lived out past the bus lines and threw dramatic tantrums whenever her mother was late picking her up, terrorized our teacher with more tantrums, and on the playground one day bit her middle finger and then mine, drawing blood to seal her promise that she would be my friend, and mine only, forever.

  When she moved away in the middle of the year, I sorrowed for a month, which is a very long time for a seven-year-old. I never forgot my sorrow at Mary Jones’s desertion, and that is exactly when I promised myself I would never break a promise.

  3. THINK OF THIS

  My parents, in a moment of insanity or, more kindly, misguided enthusiasm, named me Beauty.

  Beauty Herbert. This is the name that I bear from year to year. Not even a middle name or initial to ease the oddness, the strangeness, the sheer wrongness of that name.

  When I was little, it didn’t matter. Little is a different time. As far as I have been able to determine, everyone thinks little kids are beautiful. I believe I am right in saying that.

  Question: How many times do adults say, to even the ugliest of babies, “Oh, you little beauty”? I’ll tell you how many times. Many. Many, many, many. Uncountable numbers of times. Infinite numbers of times.

  But it is one thing to be an infant, ugly or otherwise, and be named Beauty, and it’s quite another cuppa cocoa, as my mother likes to say, to be thirteen and so named.

  You may take my word for it.

  And if you think I’m making a fuss over nothing much, it’s only because you have never been saddled with a name that people, and especially boys, find endlessly funny.

  4. BOYS

  Boys, boys, boys. Boys are creatures. Yes, I know we’re all creatures, biologically speaking, but boys—boys are different creatures. I’m sorry if I’m being sexist about this, but they are. You know they are. They shove and jostle and grin with a lot of teeth showing, and they look at you if you’re a girl and not gorgeous and hot and say mean things to your face. OK, not all boys. I know that’s not all boys, but so many of them are that way—sort of mean and scary—but you know what, I still like them. I like boys, and I want one. I want a boy for myself. There is this one boy I see in school, and secretly I call him my boy. My boy has hair the color of dried-out grass, sort of brown gold. My boy’s eyes are that color, too, brown with gold bits. My boy plays baseball, and I’m on the girls’ softball team, so we have something in common, although he doesn’t know it. I’m not even sure he knows I’m alive, but I know he is, and I know his name, and whenever I see him, I think to myself, There’s my boy.

  5. WHAT I DO EVERY MORNING

  Wake at 5 a.m. Tiptoe around my sisters, who snore and mutter and sleep on. Make my bed, wash, brush teeth and hair, pull on clothes, and look in the mirror no more than three times. Make breakfast for my little sisters, wake them up, herd them along to get dressed, check that Fancy, who’s retarded—yes, she is, even if Mom and Dad insist on calling her slow—hasn’t forgotten to put on underpants, make a pot of coffee for Mom, check if she has enough cigarettes to last the day, drink a glass of milk, find my books in the clutter, yell good-bye, and walk to school, dreaming, Someday . . .

  6. SOMEDAY I WILL DO THESE THINGS

  Live in a big city.

  Rename myself.

  Lose weight.

  Learn not to giggle at the wrong times.

  Become someone other than funny-looking Beauty Herbert.

  7. NAMES

  I keep a book of names, acceptable names, and add to it whenever a name settles in my mind and refuses to leave.

  My four present favorites are Rebecca, Bethany, Joseanne, and Michelle. Previously, I had other favorites, including Wendy, Shawna, Krystal, Kelli, Jessie, and—oh, this is one I believe I will go back to—Victoria Rose.

  8. MY PARENTS ARE CRAZY

  I sorrow to say this, but yes, they are. Crazy. I know this is not a nice way to talk about your parents, but what is the use of being thirteen and nearly grown-up if you don’t begin to think the things you want to think and say the things you want to say?

  At the same time, you do not say these things to others if you live in Mallory, which is, I sorrow to say, the armpit of New York State.

  In Mallory, if you are a girl, you are called upon to be nice, agreeable, and pleasant, but as yet there is no ban on saying the things you want to say to yourself.

  So I have come to the point, to the very place, where I say everything to myself that I believe. If not to anyone else, then to myself.

  So.

  My parents are crazy. People have mental illnesses and they can’t help it, but that does not include my parents. They are not mentally ill. They’re just crazy nuts.

  Blossom, darling, my father says in syrupy, adoring tones to my cigarette-smoking, sweaty-smelling, slow-moving mother. H. H., you’re always right, my mother says in hoarse, sugary lilts to my love-handles-never-keeps-a-regular-job-Mr.-Fixit-fixes-everything-everywhere-but-in-his-own-home father.

  “They say it’s going to rain,” my mother announces over her first cup of coffee. “They say we might get a tax increase. They say the schools aren’t doing their job.” She says the same three things every morning of every day, but still my father, Huddle, looks at her adoringly, as if she’s spoken Truth from the Mount.

  So.

  Ignore my name, for the moment. Consider my father’s name, Huddle Herbert. Huddle Herbert? Where did this name come from? I’ll tell you where it came from. Not from his parents. They named him Herbert. Herbert Herbert. Do you see a pattern here? Already, in my grandparents’ generation, names bear a sinister weight. Why would they name a child Herbert Herbert? Why not name him Bobby Herbert? Or Billy Herbert?

  In any case, my father renamed himself, and only he knows from what strange tree he plucked the name Huddle. He says it was this name, though, that made my mother fall in love with
him. This is quite possible.

  Does any of this make my sisters’ names, which are Mim, Faithful, Fancy, Autumn, Clarity, and Charity, reasonable names?

  I think not. I say not.

  Take my sister Mim. I have several theories on the subject of this name. What are they, you ask? I’ll tell you. Theory #1: Still dizzy from the delirium of naming me, their first child, Beauty, and totally clueless, they searched for another equally awful name to give their next child. Theory #2: Since my sister was born small and skinny, they searched for a name they thought minimal. Theory #3: They thought it was a good joke.

  Poor Mim. Hers, I sorrow to say, is a crazy name.

  I do not know if Mim suffers from her name, as I do from mine, since she rarely speaks, unlike the rest of the Herbert family, who chatter-chatter-chatter endlessly.

  Endlessly, I say.

  I see that I am becoming very critical of my family, especially my parents, but also my sisters, who, after all, are innocent victims of my parents’ foolishness.

  Don’t they say that this is normal for adolescents? Don’t they say that the teen years are the time when you begin to criticize what you have always before accepted?

  9. PROMISES TO MYSELF

  I promise to chatter less.

  I promise to eat less junk food.

  I promise to smile less at stupid things I shouldn’t smile at.

  I promise never to smile when anyone says how interesting after hearing my name, or that’s different, or how weird, or how anything.

  I promise to try to keep my promises.

  I promise not to hate myself if I can’t keep all my promises all the time.

  10. HOW TO SURVIVE A NAME

  Stay small. When you are small, you are also ignorant. You don’t think about your name as a name. Your name is like your toes or your belly button. It’s just there. You think you were born with it.

  Stay cute. When you are cute—and small—you do not realize that this is not a constant. Is not an unchanging state. Is not something that will never end.

  Begin to understand this in first grade, when your front teeth fall out and your parents look at you and laugh. And laugh. And laugh. And your dad says, “Toothless Beauty.” And your mom says, “Tootless Beauty,” at which they both laugh and laugh and laugh.

  Smile uncertainly. You are not sure what’s going on, but you know it’s something new.

  Look at yourself in the mirror. Although you’re only six years old, you will have a Moment of Truth. You will see your chubby, rough-skinned arms; your fat, crooked legs; your gaping smile.

  Accept the news that descends on you. You. Are not. A beauty. You have the name, but not the game.

  Forget the mirror. You don’t care that much when you’re six. Or seven. Or even eight. When you’re nine, you can still manage a smile when the dentist gives you the once-over and then the twice-over and says with a snicker, “Your name is Beauty?”

  Don’t think too much about the tone that says as plain as cheese, Beauty? You? Uh-uh! No way.

  After this, try not to think about your name at all. Especially after your twelfth birthday.

  Remind yourself that your name is what it is, and you are not what your name says you are. You are not a beauty.

  Remind yourself that this is all right.

  Remind yourself that a name is just a name.

  Remind yourself that when you are eighteen, you can change it.

  Write this down: “When I am eighteen, I will change my name.” Put the paper under your pillow. Look at it every night. Whisper those words to yourself.

  If you still can’t help brooding over your name, say it twenty-five times quickly.

  Now laugh, because it’s no longer a name, just a sound.

  Tim Wynne-Jones

  I

  It was Tiny Rathbone who found Bella. He was in the auditorium, alone, he thought. He was working up a skit for the end-of-the-year talent show. Maury Kittel was going to play a fantasia for trombone; Tiffany Voltemand and Melissa Wong were doing interpretive dance. There were three comedy acts, four singer-songwriters, and five thrash bands. A bunch of jocks in drag were going to lip-synch to “Oops! . . . I Did It Again.” Tiny wanted to do something a little different.

  He was sitting on the lip of the stage, wearing a lime green bathing cap, a bright orange flotation device, a shiny blue swimsuit, and red water skis. The towline hung limply between his legs and snaked off into the front row, a yellow umbilical cord connecting him to the shadows.

  He was making it up as he went along. The stage would be empty. The houselights would go to black. A hot special would come up directly overhead, and there he would be, watching the towline unwind.

  “To be, or not to be, that is the question . . .”

  Tiny’s voice filled the auditorium. It was a high and mighty voice for such a diminutive creature, and he listened to it with pleasure until the darkness and the empty seats soaked up every last decibel. Then he heard a sound that was not his voice, a faint groaning sound. He looked around. The stage behind him was set for My Fair Lady. He was sitting in Professor Henry Higgins’s book-lined study. The professor wasn’t home.

  He turned back toward the auditorium, straightened his arms, and slightly arched his back. He remembered to keep his tips up. Then he cleared his throat.

  “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles . . .”

  He paused, let the towline fall. You couldn’t start with Hamlet. Where did you go from there? He listened to the stillness, the distant hum of emptying halls. And then he heard it again, unmistakably a low groan.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing. He dropped the towline and worked his way out of the skis. He stood up, rubbing the circulation back into his ankles.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he shouted. No one came out. Nothing stirred. A groan, he thought. A lightbulb went on under the lime green cap. The skit could start with a groan. Yes.

  He would rise from the primordial ooze. He would borrow some reptilian costume from Tiffany Voltemand. There would be low, eerie lights and a murky reptilian sound track, and he would materialize somehow . . . from where?

  The trapdoor. Perfect!

  He marched upstage and heaved back Professor Higgins’s threadbare carpet. There it was. Tiny had emerged from that very hole as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This time, however, he would emerge as some much-earlier life-form, something just learning how to breathe. He would slither out of the hole and crawl into his spotlight, blinking furiously. He would stand and strip—always a showstopper—and underneath his snakeskin he would be in his brave blue trunks. He would sit on the stage edge and put on his skis, and as he recited Hamlet’s soliloquy, the music track would change from monks singing a Gregorian chant to Mozart to Beethoven and then jazz and Hitler and the atomic bomb going off and rock ’n’ roll and Martin Luther King and Eminem and a Burger King commercial. He would water-ski across history—as much as he could squeeze into about four minutes.

  What did it mean? Who knew? Who cared!

  The tape would end with a CNN report from some war. No, better: The tape would end with the moment toward which all of history had been leading, Mr. Scales coming on over the loudspeaker to remind everyone about the new dress code.

  The crowd would go wild. He could already feel the warmth of their laughter. For one bright moment he wouldn’t be tiny at all. Triumphantly, he hoisted open the trapdoor. And that’s when he found Bella.

  She was curled up like a fetus on a ratty mattress at the bottom of the hole. She groaned, and her arm tried unsuccessfully to reach up toward him but instead fell limply across her eyes.

  Tiny jumped down and knelt at her side. Her beautiful face was deathly white and lying in a pool of vomit. An empty prescription drug container was stuck in the sick; a half-empty bottle of Evian water stood beyond the tangle of her g
olden hair. He grabbed the bottle and splashed her face. She startled and her eyes opened. Wide. Such wide, staring eyes.

  I have seen that expression before, thought Tiny. Then her eyes closed and she stopped breathing. He doused her lips with the last of the Evian, and then, with a hand pressing lightly on her stomach, he bent down to give her the kiss of life.

  “Hey, what’s going on down there?”

  Tiny glanced up. It was Horace, the custodian. “Call 911!” Tiny shouted, and returned heroically to his task. He was still at it when the ambulance arrived.

  II

  Tiny visited Bella in the hospital. He thought a lot about what to wear, deciding, finally, on the rabbit suit. The dog had chewed up one of the ears, and the fluffy tail was hanging by a thread, but otherwise it looked good.

  Wendell Swain was sitting on a chair pulled up to Bella’s bedside. They were holding hands, or at least Wendell was. Tiny observed them silently from the doorway. They looked as if they had been having words. This was an expression Tiny liked, as if words, like doughnuts, left telltale dust on your lips.

  “Am I interrupting something?” he said.

  Wendell stood up, quickly. “Uh, no,” he said. Then he did a double take, the way you do when a rabbit is standing at the door, holding a dozen helium-filled balloons. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. He chuckled. It was one of his charms. Wendell was the handsomest boy at H. P. Lovecraft High: school president, captain of everything, scholar, saint, and master of the sociable chuckle. He was not on his game today, however, Tiny noted. It was a hollow kind of chuckle that fizzled out pretty quickly. Wendell looked drained and slightly dazed. “I was just leaving,” he said.

  “Good,” said Tiny, stepping decisively into the room. “Bella and I need to talk.” He stared at her. Her dark eyes gathered him in, drew him toward her. It was an uncomfortable sensation, as if she were a black hole and he were a dense little planet that had gotten too close.

  Wendell sighed. This was highly uncharacteristic. Sighing had not gotten Wendell where he was today. He turned to kiss Bella good-bye. She inclined a pale cheek toward him, but her eyes stayed fixed on Tiny. As Wendell left the room, he bent to whisper in Tiny’s floppy ear. “Thanks,” he said. “For what you did.”