A DAY CAME WHEN THE GIRL RAN HOME, eyes kindling with excitement. There was a teacher in school who would teach the girls to be twirlers, with fire batons and everything! The mother frowned, put down her cigarette, and stood, arms akimbo, pushing the new baby in his rocker with her foot. Sparked by the girl’s excitement, the brother raced out of the room with a Mohican ululation, the little sister did a shimmy to the music on the radio. The mother had to look away when she took a deep drag and, letting it out through her nose like a dragon, told her daughter, No, my pretty one, you know we don’t have the money for baton lessons.
The girl struggled with the bitterness that stirred in her. Trained as she was by now, she didn’t open her mouth. She bowed her head. Set the table.
It was the face the girl made, sharp as a needle, that the father saw when he looked up through the steam of his sauerkraut and pork supper. And the next day, old Joe Helmuth came into the kitchen with one hand behind his back, his favorite bitch clicking along behind him. He leaned over to whisper in his stepdaughter’s ear. Her puffy, once-pretty face lifted, broke into wonderment. She clutched his hand and put her cheek on it, wordless.
Then old Joe Helmuth looked at his stepgranddaughter as she pinned the hem on a dress across the table and asked her what she thought he had behind his back. She guessed a silver dollar, but the hand came out waving a baton in saucy imitation of a twirl. Give your old granddaddy a little kiss, he said, and she did, a big one, and didn’t mind his scratchy moustache or the way his lips lingered a half-second too long on her own.
Now the father worked at the kennel all day, mucking the dog shit from the concrete floor, no matter that he had two years of college, no matter that he had once been a government employee. And with the father at work so long, the mother was able to finish her chores before supper, and the girl had time to practice. Lordy, did she practice. She took that hollow ringing in her and twirled it away, twirled in the basement in the foulest weather, when her hands stuck to the metal in the cold and she could not practice on the lawn. In her bed at night, her fingers flicked imaginary batons in the air. She sent batons spinning up like whirligigs into the night sky, batons flipping around her body like ions to her atom, batons spinning about her like glittering wings. She twirled through her legs and over her body as if her batons were her very own limbs. The mother paused to watch her daughter practice out the kitchen window and plum forgot to bread the chicken. The father took her in the early mornings to the far-off competitions, drinking coffee from a thermos as she snoozed against the car door, and praying a little to his forgotten God before she marched onto the field.
A natural, said the baton teacher, clasping her hands to her breast, rolling her eyes cloudward. A natural, smirked the boys on the football team as she marched at the head of the marching band in her knee-high boots, in her spangly little leotard, in her hat like an upended loaf of bread. She was the head majorette in her sophomore year of high school, hers the sole white costume amid the others’ discontented blues. The other twirlers dropped, one by one, nastily, all humdrum twirlers compared to her, until, at last, she stood alone. Before the thousands of awestruck fans, she tossed her solo batons until they spun above the bleachers on the football field. The fans lost the thin bands in the dusky sky and gasped when they fell into the girl’s hands, streaking stars.
THE GIRL SPENT HER EVENINGS plucking her eyebrows, hair by hair, until they were as thin and arced as scythes. She swabbed the roots of her hair with cotton soaked in peroxide until she was blond as the day she was born, reduced with cottage cheese until her arms were twigs, smeared petroleum jelly over her lips and hands to keep them supple. She hemmed her skirts to mid-thigh, then hemmed still more. She wore her sweaters tight until her brother, embarrassed by his horn-dog friends, asked if she didn’t think her sweater kittens were going to freeze, exposed as they were. She looked at him coolly and changed into an even tighter sweater, so tight one could trace the label on her brassiere.
And she said Yes to the boys who called for her, despite her daddy, who snarled and barked at them, and Yes to the football players who jogged after her before practice to ask her to the movies, and Yes to parking in the makeout lane, and Yes to their hands under her skirts, and Yes when they pushed their jeans down their thin hips because by then she forgot what it meant to say No. She caught her father in her room one evening holding her underwear up to the window, panty by panty, examining. She caught him staring at her above the goulash and she had to look away, in confusion, a dank feeling in her stomach. When Stepgranddaddy Joe Helmuth came for Easter supper, he settled his bitches in the corner with a bone, and Fritz the old collie wobbled over and sniffed them with panting eagerness. After Joe Helmuth said the prayer and the rest of them dove into their food, he looked long and hard at the girl, her makeup, her hair, the neat halves of each portion left on her plate in service of her diet. Then he said to her mother with a mouthful of lamb, Better watch my little wifey like a goddamn hawk, else she’s going to turn into her mother, my dear. He pointed at the girl with the tines of his fork, and the father dropped his napkin and pushed up from the table and went to pace the lawn, kicking at the dropped chokecherries.
The girl then looked at her mother with the purple sleepless bruises around her eyes, at her smallest brother, who drooled in bubbles and seemed only to have attention for the way the cigarette smoke shattered against the overhead lamp. And there was something icy in her gut then, something hard, and she stopped saying Yes. She stopped saying much. She smiled, coquettish, and posed for the photographs for the school paper, for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, and she twirled, but no longer went out with the boys.
Instead, she spent her nights and weekends at beauty pageants. Why not? she’d decided one Saturday night, restless and imagining the boys with their boy smells. Why not? She already had the sparkly leotards. By Monday she had stitched together an evening gown. By summer, she had won enough for a coughing blue Hornet and went chugging around the state, preparing for Miss America. She dreamed of the big payout, the scholarship to the college of her choice, vague classes with lab coats and fat books and professors with leather patches on their coats, four years, a real college, not two at a stupid technical school. But when she brought home the sashes and the crowns, the bouquets of red roses, she didn’t tell a soul where she’d gotten them, not even her mother, who had smoked herself foul-smelling and unpretty. In a box under her bed the girl buried Miss Hummelstown, Pennsylvania Milk Princess, Miss Lancaster County, Central Pennsylvania Cheese Duchess, and even Hershey Queen. All that long hot summer, the smell of chocolate rose from the factory, a memory made sensual, all that she’d won.
Her mother watched her come into the house, this fine, thin girl. She pulled her sudsy hands from the sink and she walked toward her, holding them out to the girl as if to clutch her, to hold her, even briefly, before she had to let her go. But the daughter backed away from the soapy arms with a look of disgust, and fled the kitchen to the room she shared with her incurious, moody sister, to recount her tiaras and to straighten her sashes in order.