Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker

by Kathleen Hale

  She was talking about Vanessa Williams, around whom a new scandal was swirling. According to TMZ, there was some kind of mix-up about her coming back. Williams’s people had expected her to receive a public apology, on live television, from the Miss America Organization, which had historically shunned nonwhite people, and had slut-shamed Williams in front of the entire nation. But the Miss America Organization believed that Williams was the one who would be apologizing to them.

  Anyway, by the time the hosts charged onstage, waving at no one, and announced Williams’s entrance, all of that unpleasantness seemed to have been resolved—because then there she was, Miss America 1983, floating onstage in a fabulous, iridescent toga. After she finished singing her song, Miss America director Sam Haskell III entered. He wrapped his arm around Williams’s waist, held the microphone to his wormy lips, and smiled.

  She smiled back at him, presumably picturing a mailbox.

  “Though none of us currently involved in the organization were involved then,” he began, already reneging all responsibility, “on behalf of today’s organization, I want to apologize.” A few people clapped. “To you, and to your mother, Miss Helen Williams, I want to apologize for anything that was said or done that made you feel any less the Miss America you are and the Miss America you always will be!”

  Then Haskell and Williams did something crazy—in front of everyone, they told each other, “I love you.”

  The only thing I could think of was that maybe it was code. In his book Deford writes that Miss Americas win based on poise—a sort of indescribable attribute that he explains like this: “When a judge says that he has found a girl with poise, all the others realize that … it means: ‘I love you.’” So in this case, maybe by telling each other “I love you,” Haskell and Williams were staging a truce—saying, “We’re both winners here,” or something?

  But in reality there would only be one winner. An hour later, Miss America (formerly Miss Georgia) staggered gracefully down the runway in her crown, and the camera cut to Williams. Her expression was so fierce and steady it elicited whispers from those huddled around me about whether she’d had too much Botox. Her still and stony face seemed to say, Under my rictus of congratulations, I have nothing but pity for you, Miss America—but before I could consider it too deeply, I felt an internal swelling that, at first, I thought might be the pretzels coming up, but then I recognized it: love.

  I loved the new Miss America. As she sobbed, I nodded soulfully, witheringly, satisfied with her delicate reaction—because by then I knew by heart that it was only proper to win modestly, and that it was up to me to judge. And although some instinctive part of me wanted to blame Vanessa Williams for her unwillingness and/or physiological inability to smile, I forgave her, too, because that’s the ladylike thing to do. I smiled for both of us, knowing it was my job as a woman to feign happiness.

  It wasn’t the first time that week I had felt love. A few days prior, I had been grinning through pain. Some combination of salty sea air and nonbreathable body shapers had conspired to give me a full-blown bladder infection. On my way back from the CVS downtown with my Cipro tablets and Uricalm Max, I decided that giant cotton underpants were more practical than synthetic vagina hammocks and detoured to the outlet mall, trudging zombielike in the wake of flocks of scooter-riding tourists to wait in line for granny panties. Just then my symptoms kicked in again. I had the sudden, unstoppable urge to pee, threw my grown-up undies on the floor, and scrambled to one of the public toilets at the Atlantic City Greyhound bus terminal, the refuge of the desperate.

  While I winced on the toilet, a child’s foot slid under the stall divider, brushing my ankle. I assumed some little girl was trying to peek at me. But then the child’s calf slid into my stall, and then the rest of the leg, and the head—and it wasn’t a little kid at all, but a petite young woman with neck tattoos and the plunger of an empty heroin needle clenched between her teeth, melting into my stall. She had tied off with a cell phone charging cord, the same one I had in my purse.

  By the sinks, the women who parked their scooters in the hall now murmured to one another, voices slowly rising for someone—“anyone!”—to call the cops.

  I pulled up my shorts a little too soon, peeing on myself, and got down on my knees to shake her, dragging her into my stall and thinking, “Her arms are so soft.”

  A man shouted from the doorway, “Hey, Cricket, come on, you’re going to get arrested.”

  Cricket’s eyes rolled open. Her color looked good. She hadn’t overdosed, I thought. She was just very, very high—not that I knew anything at all. I just watched a lot of TV.

  As police sirens wailed in the distance, I thought about how hard it is to sneak up on an actual cricket. They have ears in their legs, and their tympanal organs make them extremely sensitive to vibrations. But this Cricket had no awareness of my presence. I leaned her against the partition and untied her cell phone cord without eliciting any reaction. I wondered what her talent was—everybody has one. A melody or dance seemed likely. Of all the singing insects, scientists agree that crickets are the most musically gifted. They keep a wide variety of songs in their toolbox, each with its own individual purpose: mating, rivalry, a new relationship. Their chirping is thought to bring good luck.

  “Ugh,” Cricket said, her blue eyes rolling open. They were gorgeous, like the sea.

  The cops were yelling now, warning ladies to get out, they were coming in. I wriggled the syringe out of Cricket’s mouth and slipped it into my back pocket, thinking that maybe if she didn’t have it on her, she wouldn’t go to jail. I stuffed the cell phone cord in her purse. I tried to lift her, but she was heavier than she looked, and she slid back down.

  Walkie-talkies crackled. The cops were banging on my stall.

  “Come out,” they shouted.

  I let them in.

  “I think she’s just drunk,” I lied. “Wait—I think I know her.”

  But they were pushing me away. They could tell by my clean hair and my shopping bag that I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t a beauty, but I wasn’t a junkie, either. Each of us has her place.

  Outside, I tossed the bloody needle in a trash can and walked to the Taj Mahal, remembering my husband and the crab: “Don’t you dare try to save it.”

  The truth is I wouldn’t even have touched her if she hadn’t been so beautiful.

  * In scholarships, but still.

  * The weeklong competition began with three nights of preliminaries, allowing attendees who showed up in person to watch every one of the fifty-two talented young women (one for each state in the union, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico) perform in bikinis and evening gowns before the group was narrowed down to fifteen for the official TV broadcast.

  * The bikini part of the competition was officially banned in 2018.

  * From their butts.

  * I’ve tried and failed to call contestants of Miss America anything but “girls,” mostly because that’s what those closest to the pageant call them. “I don’t think they mean it pejoratively,” Kate Shindle (Miss America 1998) assured me over the phone. “That’s always just been the casual term that was tossed around.”

  ** “Sometimes I have things planned,” Blizzard told the Press of Atlantic City, regarding her upcoming gig at Miss America. “Sometimes things just happen.”

  * By the time natives returned to Bikini more than forty years later, they recognized nothing of that home. They were forced to leave again not long after because of radiation in the food supply; the island is still considered uninhabitable.

  Snowflake

  A lot of things caused Susie pain: scented products, pesticides, plastic, synthetic fabrics, smoke, electronic radiation—the list was long. Back in the “regular world,” car exhaust made her feel sick for days. Perfume gave her seizures.

  Then she uprooted to Snowflake, Arizona.

  “I got out of the car and didn’t need my oxygen tank,” she said, grinning at me in the rearview
mirror. “I could walk.”

  There were about twenty households where she now lived. Like Susie, most of the residents in Snowflake had what they called “environmental illness,” a controversial diagnosis that attributed otherwise unexplained symptoms to pollution.

  My knees knocked together as she swerved onto another dirt road. Mae, a filmmaker, was busy shooting scenery from the front seat. We’d come for four days to find out why dozens of people chose to make their homes here, and Susie had agreed to host us only if we did not seek outside opinion from psychiatrists regarding their condition. “He’s got it bad,” she said, nodding at a neighbor’s driveway. The sign out front read: NO UNINVITEDS.

  My eyes darted over barbed wire cattle fences and dead juniper trees. White mountains swam in the distance. We stopped, and Susie motioned for Mae to open a gate decorated in yellow Christmas tinsel. A shadowy figure stood at the top of the gravel drive, surrounded by shrubs and sand and nothing.

  * * *

  The idea that modern conveniences cause pain dates to the mid-nineteenth century. In 1869, Dr. George Beard published several papers blaming modern civilization and steam power for ailments such as “drowsiness, cerebral irritation, pain, pressure and heaviness in the head.”

  According to him, other indications of chemical sensitivity included “fear of society, fear of being alone, fear of contamination … fear of fears … fear of everything.”

  Beard called the illness “neurasthenia.” Susie called it being “sensitive to the whole world.”

  Susie had warned us that Deb, a sort of roommate who lived in her driveway, was extremely sensitive to scents. In order to protect her, Mae and I had agreed to various terms: we would not get a rental car or stay at a motel, because those were places where chemical cleaners were used. We would wear Susie’s clothes and sleep at Susie’s house. She also made us swear not to get any perms before we came, which made me think she had been in the desert for a long time.

  For weeks, Mae and I avoided makeup, lotion, perfume, hair products, scented detergent, fabric softener, dryer sheets. We used fragrance-free soap and shampoo, as well as a natural deodorant, which, according to the description on the box, was basically a rock picked off the ground with a cap on it.

  Despite our best efforts, Deb’s sensitive nose picked up on chemical exhaust, which she said was “off-gassing” from our pores. For her, we reeked like a Bath & Body Works store flooded with vodka—or, as she put it, “floral, with chemical solvents.”

  “You’re fragrant,” she said.

  Mae and I exchanged nervous glances, worried, based on Deb’s expression, that they’d send us packing. Snowflake was not easy to get to. I’d risen at dawn, vomited on a tiny six-passenger plane, and walked one mile down a busy highway in a town called Show Low (160 miles from Phoenix) to get to Susie’s car.

  “We’ll do our best to get you cleaned,” Susie promised us. “I got lots of hydrogen peroxide.”

  It was decided that the best way to get us straight from the car into the shower, where we could wash the outside world’s chemicals away, was to enter the house completely naked. So Mae and I took off our clothes and marched without dignity across the gravel driveway. We had known each other for about an hour.

  “You can have the first shower,” she said, wrapping herself in a towel.

  “Thank you, Fay,” I said.

  “It’s Mae,” she said.

  Susie’s bathroom, like the rest of her one-room, off-grid house, was wallpapered in heavy-duty Reynolds Wrap. Above the toilet, a small, sealed window looked out at the desert. I saw a gnarled juniper tree and a wild hare scampering into a hole that Susie had said contained a nest of baby rabbits. I scrubbed off with a bar of olive oil soap and inhaled the metallic scent of hard water. It was the only thing I could smell.

  Someone knocked. Mae reluctantly asked if I wore underwear. “We’re playing dress-up!” Susie shouted from the other room.

  I realized what Mae actually meant was Did I wear Susie’s underwear? I hesitated for a moment, considering the alternative: going commando in a sandy environment.

  “Hey, Kathleen!” Susie yelled. “Do you—”

  “I wear underwear,” I called.

  Later, we gathered in the kitchen. Deb was sensitive to grains, GMO foods, preservatives, and all artificial flavoring and coloring, so we ate cabbage soup for dinner. I foresaw a painful night of off-gassing.

  Afterward, Mae and I ducked behind a curtained-off partition to consider our sleeping arrangements: two metal cots, one broken, and zero blankets (because blankets were absorbent and, according to local logic, our pores might still be off-gassing dangerous chemicals). Nighttime in the desert is freezing, and Susie’s house did not have heating, because heating was poison. I wanted badly to be unconscious and regretted my semi-recent decision to start weaning off sedatives.

  Asked whether she might at least have some padding to cover the iron springs, Susie retreated outside, shouting over her shoulder, “FYI, the rats here are aggressive.” She returned with dirt-caked bathmats, which smelled strongly of urine, and I imagined that Susie’s territorial dog, who was asleep at the time with his eyes open, was probably the culprit, although I could also imagine a family of aggressive rats peeing on the rugs in some kind of vindictive jamboree.

  “There,” she said, turning off the lights. “Comfy.”

  That night Mae and I, basically complete strangers, climbed into the same cot to stay warm. I tried to be professional about my role as big spoon. But eventually I removed the modesty towel that I had stuffed between my crotch bone and her tailbone. We needed it as a blanket, and full body contact, with the minimal warmth that provided, seemed like the only route to sleep. I’d never experienced such extended cold. And I grew up in Wisconsin, a place so freezing I once saw a drunk boy start to cry in the middle of publicly urinating.

  “I’m putting my arm around you,” I said to Mae. “I was trying to be professional before by keeping it pinned to my side, but it’s been numb for an hour now and I worry if I don’t cuddle you it might have to be amputated.”

  “You don’t have to use the verb ‘cuddle,’” Mae pointed out. “Just do it and we don’t have to talk about it anymore.” We huddled in wretched silence. Susie’s voice echoed in my head.

  “Etiquette is: you defer to whoever’s the sickest in any household,” she had said in the car, but at the time, I hadn’t recognized it as a warning.

  I reminded myself that whatever discomfort we felt paled in comparison to how she and Deb had suffered in the regular world.

  * * *

  Susie grew up in forested Northern California and spent most of the 1970s in the Bay Area, working odd jobs and traveling with her boyfriend. As friends started dropping like flies from an illness nobody could understand, Susie endured respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurological symptoms. It hurt her feelings when doctors suggested she might just have anxiety.

  While the AIDS epidemic kicked into crisis mode, Susie’s symptoms got worse, intensifying whenever she smelled smoke or saw power lines. Unable to function, she moved back home, where, through an autodidactic game of trial and error, she identified what triggered her worst symptoms. She slept on her parents’ porch or on the bathroom floor, because those were the only places she could breathe. Her mother collected rain for her to drink.

  Now using a wheelchair, she returned to San Francisco to pursue a master’s degree in disability policy. She launched the Reactor, an environmental illness advocacy newsletter, which circulated via an underground network of hypersensitive people throughout the country. An environmentally ill reader told Susie the air where he lived was “clean enough for him to manage,” and in 1994, Susie followed him to Snowflake, where the tiny community (only a handful of people at the time) immediately rallied around her. Within a year, her father and neighbors pooled their resources to build her a house—“a little, safe place.”

  Meanwhile, across the country, her future roommate Deb’s
life had never felt more dangerous.

  * * *

  Like Susie, Deb’s initial thought was AIDS. After ruling that out, she juggled endless skepticism. Even those who believed she felt ill wrote it off, saying she’d bounce back.

  Deb had always been strong. As a child living on Lake Michigan, she sailed and played sports. After attending Michigan Technological University and getting married, she worked for nine years as the only female metallurgical engineer at Bendix aircraft; her specialty was failure analysis.

  When she became pregnant, Deb kept working with metals, inhaling zinc and cadmium—nobody told her not to—but all she could smell was her coworkers’ cologne and aftershave. Scented products sent her body into crisis. She vomited a lot.

  After giving birth in 1992, Deb left work to parent full-time. She lived in a moldy house with a smoky furnace. Infections blowtorched her sinuses, turning into migraines that hit her like an ax. Her weight plummeted to seventy-five pounds. Doctors said she was anorexic.

  Finally, Deb couldn’t take it anymore. She left Michigan when her daughter was sixteen and became itinerant, sleeping in her truck, because unlike plastic or drywall, metal emitted no chemical fumes and was safe.

  The same word-of-mouth network that beckoned Susie eventually led Deb to Snowflake, where she performed chores for the environmentally sick in exchange for food. By the time Susie spotted her out boiling clothes for a neighbor, Deb had been living in her truck for five years and needed a place to park. The two women became a domestic duo. Deb cooked “clean food” for Susie on the hot plate. They made each other laugh and protected each other. Susie remained compassionately straight-faced when Deb finally admitted she hadn’t seen her daughter in seven years.

  By the age of sixty-seven, Susie had finally put her master’s degree to use, although not in the way she had originally intended. She had become Snowflake’s unofficial welcome wagon, local therapist, and advocate. She sat with men and women who were sick with something no one else believed in, and she believed them. She fielded at least five long phone calls a night from the bedridden and lonely, talking to them for as long as they needed company. She helped people with the arduous paperwork involved in collecting government aid. She reassured them that their illness wouldn’t kill them—it would only “hurt, a lot.”