Outside Beauty (2 page)

I was full-blooded Japanese and, like Maddie, was conceived in Arkansas.

Pierre, our current nemesis, was a five foot three Frenchman with a good sense of humor and a volatile nature. He was barely taller than I was, but he pumped weights, so he said he could take any of us in a fight. He said that because Maddie called him short. He used to lean his oversized head in to me and whisper things like, “Do you know why the French eat cheese?” I did know, actually, because my mother had told me: “It makes them feel sexier.”

When I saw other girls living normal lives, in what one of my teachers called “a traditional nuclear family,” those girls seemed to be living in a parallel
universe. My mother said that many, many such universes existed side by side. They existed right here at the same time on Earth, and most people in their own universe hardly paid attention to people from the other universes. For instance, there was the basketball universe, where people thought basketball was the center of the world. And there was the college universe, the rich people's universe, and so on. “There are many universes,” my mother said. “Didn't Einstein write about that?”

Every so often when my mother broke up with a boyfriend, he would fly into a rage and we would have to go on the lam. Oftentimes what the men were really angry about was how much money they had spent on her. Many of them were angrier about the money than about being broken up with. I wasn't sure which Pierre was upset about, but he sure was upset.

My mother said that Pierre had a Napoleon complex but that she didn't realize it until too late. Since he owned several shelves full of Napoleon biographies, she might have noticed his complex earlier. One of the things she told us was always to assess a situation as early and accurately as possible, since it was harder to get out of a relationship than get into it—unless, that is, you dumped the guy and perhaps
infuriated or otherwise upset him. That's what happened with Pierre.

As we sped down the expressway, my sisters chatted and sang Beatles songs, but I kept my head out the window, my glasses in my lap. My mother still wanted me to try contacts again because I was getting those little marks on the sides of my nose. She thought that might tip men off to my bad eyes. “Men like perfection in a woman,” she liked to say. “As if they deserved it,” she sometimes added when she was in a cynical mood.

I reveled in the hard wind. My sisters were trying to sing harmony. They sounded terrible.

I started thinking about how yesterday our mother had said that Maddie's father, Mr. Bronson, was thinking of coming up to Chicago to discuss Maddie's future. I brought my head back in. I didn't see Mr. Bronson often, but it was easy for me to remember him. What I remembered most was the way he always shook his head with disdain at other people, even strangers, who he thought were ignorant. Like, once a young couple was trying to cope with a screaming toddler by asking the boy what was wrong. Mr. Bronson stood directly in front of them and shook his head back and forth. When
they ignored him, he said, “There are better ways to deal with that.” They pulled their child away, and Mr. Bronson shook his head again. He looked knowingly at my mother and said, “I could have helped them.”

“Mom?” I said. I leaned toward the front seat. She caught my eye in the rearview mirror.

“Yes, Shelby.”

“What happened with Mr. Bronson?”

I saw a flicker of worry in my mother's eyes, but other than that she didn't change expressions. Then she fluffed her hair and said, “We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.” My mother was very fond of clichés. In fact, next to jewelry, clichés were just about my mother's favorite thing in the world.

“He's in back of us!” Lakey called out suddenly. “Pierre is behind us!” We girls turned around and studied the car behind us. It
was
Pierre. How had that happened?

“Maybe he does have special powers,” I said. He always said he had special powers. He used to stare at light switches and say he was going to turn on the light with the power of his mind. When it didn't go on, he would say, “There, did you see? It almost worked!”

My mother stepped on the gas. She used to date a race car driver, and she could drive really well because he'd given her tips. She said she would have become a race car driver if she had a little more time. I stuck my head out the window again, the wind pounding me. I felt ecstatic. The force of the wind made me breathless. My sisters were crying out behind me, “We're losing him!”

I brought my head in to look. Pierre's car was fading into the distance. I laughed. I felt giddy as we went faster and faster, and I even felt a slight disappointment when Pierre's car disappeared for good.

We were going to Green Valley, California, where Lakey's father lived. I think Lakey's father was the only man my mother ever really loved. He was what my mother called a “manly man,” her favorite kind if not for the fact that, in general, manly men didn't make any money. They did things like construction work, plumbing, carpentering, and landscaping. Lakey's father managed a deck and fencing company, and he spent most of his free time fishing, hiking, and hunting. Once, he sent us stuffed animals for gifts. That is, he sent real animals that were stuffed. Mine, sadly, had been a rabbit.

Sometimes I secretly wished my mother had loved
my
father. Other times I wished Lakey's father were my father. And still other times I didn't think about the fathers at all.

For our road trip my mother put me in charge of guiding us to California. I took my responsibilities very seriously and studied my map collection even though reading it in the car made me dizzy. “Mom!” I called out. “Can we drive up to see Yellowstone?”

“What's Yellowstone, dear?”

“You know, Yellowstone.”

“It sounds like some kind of diamond.”

Everybody knew what Yellowstone was. “Mom, it's a national park.”

“A park? Honey, we don't have time to see a park.”

“How about Carson City, Nevada?”

“Now you're talking.”

Maddie was in charge of watching the gas tank; Marilyn and Lakey were in charge of money, mealtimes, and motels. So in this way—as a team—we made our way across the nation.

I, however, was not good at what my mother called “baton changes.” In Davenport, Iowa, I suddenly noticed something. “Mom, we have to change from I-88 to I-80.”

“Just say when, Shelby. You're in charge of the map.”

“The map doesn't have an inset for Davenport.”

“Say when!” Marilyn and Lakey shouted.

My mother was signaling as they screamed. It was too much pressure! I couldn't figure out the map. The car swooped past a sign. I turned and stared at the sign, looked at the map again. “I think that was it,” I said.

“Too late,” my mother said. “I'll get off at the next off-ramp.”

So we lost an hour tooling through the streets of Davenport. Maddie snuggled against me when she saw I felt bad.

We finally found ourselves on I-80. A young couple stood on the side of the highway hitchhiking.

“Pick them up!” we all shouted.

“They're in love,” cried Marilyn. “Aren't they cute?”

They looked like they were about twenty. My mother pulled to the side. In our car the woman sat in the man's lap, and he kept kissing her neck the whole time they rode with us. I wondered if he just kissed her neck all day, no matter what they were doing. We let them off at a truck stop to catch another ride
northward. Even as the woman stuck out her thumb, her boyfriend held her with both arms.

We found a deli outside of Iowa City and bought sandwiches that were almost as tall as they were wide. We ate on a blanket in a field off the highway. The grass danced around us. It seemed like a wonderful world, where you could grow up and someone would kiss your neck all day while you hitchhiked across the cornfields.

Maddie suddenly started coughing and trying to clear her throat. “Are you okay?” I said.

She nodded, but her face grew red as she coughed. I stood up, ready to do the Heimlich if necessary. Then she blew out from her nose and expelled . . . a piece of lettuce.

“Maddie, that's gross!” we said.

Mom just shook her head. “It's beyond me how you girls are ever going to catch husbands,” she said. “Let's get going.”

In a few hours we came upon a series of shacks with a sign in the parking lot saying
MOTEL
.

“Stop here!” commanded Marilyn and Lakey. Since they were in charge of our accommodations, our mother pulled over. Such misers those girls were.

That night in the double bed the four of us shared, Maddie whispered to me, “I feel something on my feet.”

“Me too,” I whispered back.

We both screamed at once and jumped out of bed, Lakey and Marilyn following. I turned on the light and pulled back the sheet, and we saw a dozen black bugs scurrying for cover.

My mother took off the mask she wore to sleep better and also to hold the moisture in the delicate skin around her eyes. She squinted, even though that caused wrinkles. Sometimes my head was so filled up with all these little rules about beauty and comportment that it felt like there was no more room in my brain. “Why did you choose this place?” I asked.

“We don't tell you how to read your maps,” Marilyn pointed out.

We never got into big spats, but little ones—those happened a lot. But we got over them fast. And we liked to follow a rule to always call ourselves “we” instead of “I.” It was impossible to do all the time, but we tried.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING MY mother went out to make some phone calls, and when she returned to the room, she said she had an appointment in Des Moines. She looked at me and said, “Get us to where we have to go, my love.”

So I leaned over to grab my map collection from the nightstand, but they weren't there. I pulled open the drawer. They weren't there either.

“Uh,” Maddie said.

I looked at her.

She handed me a pile of soggy maps. I caught my breath. She quickly said, “I spilled. See, I had a glass of water by the bed, and when I wet my pants, well, I forgot about the water, and
really, I just . . . somehow or other . . .”

She had indeed wet the bed that night, and I had gotten up to get sheets from the manager. Even though Maddie was six, every so often she still had an accident. In fact, she wet her bed once and Mr. Bronson lectured her and made her do the laundry in the middle of the night, and she was only five at the time. She'd had to stay with him for a whole week because that was his agreement with Mom. I looked at Maddie with irritation. “That's so—so Maddie-like!”

“You know I can't help it,” she said, then started crying.

I pulled her to me and petted her hair. “I meant it was Maddie-like to ruin my maps, not to wet the bed.” We weren't sure, but we thought Maddie wet the bed because she was such a deep sleeper that when she had to go, she just slept through it.

I unfolded the soggy Iowa map. Maddie pulled at my shirt. “Are you still mad at me? I said I was sorry.”

I looked at her big eyes. “Of course I'm not mad.” Maddie was frequently apologizing to someone. It was impossible to stay mad at her.

I quickly deduced that I'd need a closer view of the area to get us to the address Mom had given me, so I pulled out the phone book I'd just seen in the
nightstand drawer and started hunting for a local street map. My mother wouldn't hesitate to spend thirty dollars on a tiny jar of facial cream, but city maps that would allow us to get around our destinations more easily? Out of the question. I carefully wrote directions on the paper pad in the motel room. Marilyn packed up the motel soap and one of the washcloths.

My mother stood over me as I studied the directions. She shook her head. “My sweet, hard-working Shelby. How did I ever give birth to you?” But she said it affectionately.

We checked out and got in the car. We stopped next on a street full of small office buildings and followed our mother single file as she strode up some old stairs. We entered an attorney's office and sat in the waiting room having orange juice and rice crackers while she spoke with the lawyer. I reached out to touch the plant next to me. Marilyn met my eyes.

“Fake,” I whispered. Our mother had told us that fake plants were the product of a weak mind.

My mother and the lawyer had closed the door behind themselves, but the wall was made of clear glass, and the transom over the office door was open. So I had a fair idea of what the dynamics were. The
lawyer was what my mother called a “proper man.” Proper men were often disguised by fashionable clothes or hair, but you could recognize them by the way they stiffened when approached by unusual creatures, like my mother.

The attorney was a proper man of the bombastic, mustachioed Caucasian persuasion. We saw from a plaque on a wall near us that he was a member of Citizens for a Free Democracy, whatever that meant. I repeatedly heard him say to my mother, “I used to practice in Illinois, so I know the law there. And in my opinion you're living in a fantasy world!” I could see he was attracted to her. I knew the signs. He was trying to impress her with loudness, which he thought made him appear strong. I saw sweat breaking out on his forehead as my mother crossed and uncrossed her legs. It seemed that whenever he couldn't think what to say because he was nervous, he repeated, “You're living in a fantasy world.” The lawyer actually reminded me of Mr. Bronson, except Mr. Bronson wasn't a lawyer. He
was
a proper man of the bombastic, mustachioed Caucasian persuasion. It was odd. It was like my mother was talking to Mr. Bronson's twin.

“Do you owe him money?” the lawyer bellowed. “If you do, you're living in a fantasy world!”

“I do not owe him anything.”

“You said he loaned you money!”