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Jackie enters the North Hills Country Club Petite Miss Beauty Pageant because Mom says so.
Mom announced it at breakfast one morning, while Jackie ate her eggs — a soft, runny scramble with American cheese, just how she likes it.
“You’ll do the beauty pageant at the club, this year. Won’t that be nice?”
Jackie nodded, obviously. She swallowed her eggs.
“Jackie, I said won’t that be nice? Big girls answer, when they’re asked a question.”
“I had food in my mouth,” Jackie says, but Mom doesn’t look at her like that explains anything. Her face is still waiting. “Um. Yeah. It’ll be nice.”
No one says anything else about it then. So Jackie guesses that’s that.
*
Now, they’re in a big back room with wood floors and lots of other little girls and their moms. Mom is squeezing her into this bright, floofy outfit, that makes her skin feel tight and hot. But Jackie looks in the mirror — one of the cool kinds, with the bright yellow bulbs studded around like a movie star — and she looks like a princess. Bubblegum blue, and rhinestone shiny. Perfect. Like a Halloween costume, only it’s real. And she’s not allowed to have any candy in it.
(She’s not allowed to eat anything good, while she’s in the dress, actually. No PB&J’s because jam will run down the sides all dark and oozy onto her fingers and onto the fabric. No hot dogs with ketchup, which is her favorite thing to get from the kid’s menu at the club restaurant. And it’s not like she’s gonna have a hot dog without ketchup. The ketchup’s the whole point. No, all she’s allowed to have are these stupid sticky granola bars that Mom keeps in this endless supply from her big leather purse. Mom takes one for herself, and one she hands to Jackie. Jackie watches her mom take bird bites. These bare little nibbles, like she’s swallowing tiny round pellets of air gulps, instead of solid food. Jackie copies her. Makes a game of how small a bit she can make. Just one isolated morsel of granola in her mouth at a time. Sometimes a half of one, if she can pierce it just right with her sharp teeth, that just grew back in after she lost the old baby ones).
While she gnaws at the next granola bar, Mom does her hair. The hairspray makes her hair all hard and crusted like a seashell. She tries to run her fingers against the base — she likes to, when she’s nervous, and this room of buzzing girls and their buzzing moms and the vague hubbub of crowd just through two sets of doors has got her stomach like this flutter cloud of white butterflies. But it doesn’t feel good. It feels like someone else’s head. A scarecrow’s, maybe. If a scarecrow could be a girl.
Jackie whines, as Mom helps her shove her feet into the hard, shiny white shoes with the little, tasteful (that’s what Mom called them), white heels. Jackie braces her palms against Mom’s shoulder as she shoves her foot in. And it hurts . The shoes are hard. (Which she said in the store when they were buying them, but maybe not loud, because Mom didn’t say anything back, just brought them up to the register.)
“ Mom, ” Jackie whimpers. She pushes her voice all puppy dog soft and wounded, which feels right, for the occasion. “They’re not gonna work.”
If she has to walk across the stage all graceful like a gazelle — like a cloud — like a — like a something that doesn’t touch the ground, really, just floats perfect and pristine. Like — oh! Like a meringue sitting on the lemon pie in the diner case. Well, then she’s just not sure how these guys are gonna let her do it.
“Jacqueline Meredith Taylor, are you talking to me like a baby right now? Or do you wanna be a big girl?”
Jackie pouts, sucks on the lip. Tries to make herself tall. Imagines herself stretching all her bones beanstalk long. “I’m not being a baby.”
“Then I don’t know why you’re whining to me. Now give me your other foot.”
Jackie complies, and Mom pecks a soft, dry kiss on her temple.
And then they’re just waiting. Jackie wishes they would talk, or something, but Mom’s just sitting in her folding chair against the wall, waiting until it’s time to start.
So Jackie makes a game of copying her. Makes her back straight as an ironing board too, shoulders pushed back into the seat. Crosses one ankle behind the other, except it’s hard, and her legs keep slipping, because they don’t quite reach the ground, so they’re nothing to set them against.
She’s just — she’s trying to make herself just like all the moms, sitting around the room as they wait, with their hands in their laps and their hair falling just so and their arms long and their everything just right.
She just wants to fold her body how women do.
She wants the — the —
The poise. She read that word on a magazine cover at the grocery store check-out. She likes how it feels in her ears, when she thinks it.
To look out over a room feeling all tall even though she’s not so tall at all. With her beautiful pearls around her neck (Grandma bought Mom pearls when she turned sixteen. Which seems so long from now. A billion and two years). They’ll be shining and cool and picked from the ocean bed just for her, though, when she’s big like that.
Mom just does everything so easy. She’s sipping her Evian water bottle out of a straw, and even that, she’s just doing, like, elegant. Looking cooly down her nose, and being just right. Jackie wants to be just right.
And then they’re calling for the girls to line up at the front of the room to head out on stage for the opening number. So, now’s her chance to be.
*
On stage, everyone is looking at her, clapping for her, the lights bright and hot on her, and the dress twirls perfect as she spins, she feels the weight of it swilling as she moves, and she thinks: right. Right, this is just the way to be.
(Oh, isn’t it? Isn’t this just the right way to be?)
Jackie’s head swells full of the spotlight flash and the squeeze of her feet and the way her ears can’t stop listening for every little murmur in the crowd like — like do they like her? Is she doing this right?
(It is. It is. It’s gotta be, so it is).
Jackie smiles, megawatt perfect, shows all her brand new grownup teeth, and waves big, for the back of the room. Her fingernails — candy blue, to match — glint in the spotlight, like fish scales.
*
She only comes in second.
Even though she did the best and did it all just right and practiced for hours or maybe years. Even though she landed her tap steps perfect with the clack of her dance shoe heels even though she smiled the whole time. And the weight of her hair and her little tiara and just her stupid head on her stupid neck feels so heavy, and her shoes pinch, and her dress squeezes, and she feels herself about to cry up there on stage as they hand her the second place sash.
She doesn’t mean to. The hot tears are just flooding her face all on their stupid own. And everyone in the crowd can see. Which should make her stop — should make her pull herself together. But the tears just go hotter and harder, until she can’t even hardly see. Just a blur of a crowd in front of her, squished together wobbly under the flooding stage lights, her bursting eyes.
She’s not crying out loud, though. Not even a sob or anything. She tries to make her mouth a smile shape. She thinks she manages.
*
In the car, heading home, Jackie is in the back seat, the edge of the seatbelt pressing hard into her collarbone. And it makes the sequin seams on the inside of her dress stamp even harder into her skin. When she gets home later, she’ll find little red marks scattered over her like the chicken pox.
It’s silent in the car. Mom never talks when she’s driving. Mom’s so careful. But at a stoplight, — dark red-stained drizzle drops spattering the windshield — Mom says: “Jackie, do you think it’s acceptable how you behaved up on that stage?”
Jackie nestles back as far as she can into her seat. “It wasn’t fair.”
Mom keeps talking like Jackie said nothing. “A lady is always gracious.”
“Well this lady is tired.”
It’s the kind of thing Shauna could say to her mom, and they’d both laugh. But Jackie’s mom just purses her lips all tight in the rearview mirror. And then the car goes in drive again, and Mom says nothing, and there’s only the roll of tires under the car, the prickle of rain overhead.
“I thought Jax did great. Really, sweetheart, you did,” Dad says, from the passenger seat. “You were a real superstar up there, pumpkin.”
Jackie feels shiny and warm again, for a second. Like on stage, before she didn’t win. Before they didn’t like her enough to let her win. Before it was all for nothing.
“Thanks,” she mumbles.
“You’ll do even better next year,” Dad says, and grins back at her.
Jackie’s stomach squeezes in at itself a little. She pushes her thumbs into the window glass, and drags them downwards. It leaves blue shadow smudges against the fog.
“Next year,” Jackie mumbles. Her dress feels almost fused into her skin, from how hot and itchy-sweaty she is under it. And her stomach’s gurgling, she realizes. That’s the feeling in her gut. She still hasn’t had a real dinner today. “Okay, next year.”
*
Back at home, Mom lets her have dinosaur nuggets with extra ketchup, and Wacky Mac with extra cheese, and peas and carrots on the side. She even lets her sit in the den and eat, from her plastic Cinderella plate, watching TV.
There’s none of the cartoons she likes on — just the stupid boy ones. So she keeps clicking the channels. Lands eventually on Designing Women. It’s the one where Suzanne wants to go out with some guy, a doctor of some kind, Jackie thinks, except that Mary Jo used to be married to him, and they’re all sitting around the table being mad about it, and pretending they’re not. And Suzanne’s swinging her arm around Mary Jo at the table, and she’s in this pink pale suit with tangly silver necklaces twinkle-spangled around her turtleneck, her head all graceful and good posture-y on her neck, like a swan, and her blush is swept perfect and pink and high on her cheeks.
Jackie watches her with her ears buzzing and her face feels all shiny, like when you watch tennis, and your eyes bob back and forth across the court, so you never look away from the movement.
Jackie just — she can’t wait to be that. A — a woman.
It’s just she’s pretty sure it’s the best thing in the world, maybe. To look like that. To — like Jackie wants to crawl inside the TV and make Suzanne look at her, she thinks, make Suzanne really take Jackie in, wants to know what her perfume smells like and maybe feel how the fabric of that pink suit feels. Jackie bets it’s so soft. She rubs the spot on her collarbone where her dress scratched her skin to rough red, and looks at the screen, chewing out a thought on her lip she can’t think of the words for.
Yeah, yeah. She bets that’s just the softest thing in the world.