Like Mandarin Page 3

  Plains Street had no sidewalks, only pebbled borders where dry lawns crumbled into asphalt. Mandarin’s house was small and shabby, like all the homes on her block. Some fortressed their yards with chain-link fences and padlocked gates. Others hid in thickets of cottonwoods or billowy lilac bushes. Mandarin’s blue-gray house looked naked in contrast, without a single bush or tree to shade it from the sun and wind.

  I took advantage of any excuse to pass by, though I rarely saw her. But just catching a glimpse of the place where she slept, ate, and got dressed—the place where she brought her conquests on nights her father worked late at the bar—gave me a thrill.

  When I had approached Mandarin’s house that day, I’d seen her standing outside, talking with some guy. Though I had no experience guessing the ages of men, I supposed he was in his midtwenties. As soon as I was within earshot, I stepped behind a tree.

  “It’s just that I’m real busy,” Mandarin said.

  “But I’m only gonna be in town till Tuesday.”

  “There ain’t nothing I can do about that.”

  “I just can’t stop thinking about you. And I can’t stand it, the thoughta all them brainless bastards pawing all over you. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

  Mandarin plucked a cigarette from the pocket of the man’s denim shirt and lit it. She sat on the top step, absently blowing smoke through pouted lips.

  “What you should do is come with me,” he said.

  She took another drag.

  “Can’t you just picture it? We could get a little place by the mines, a double-wide if I get the raise they promised. I’d come home to you every night, and you’d always be there, taking care a me.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  I heard a hazardous tone in Mandarin’s voice, as if her consonants had edges. The man didn’t seem to notice.

  “Course I am,” he said. “Don’t it sound like heaven?”

  She waved her hand holding the cigarette, brushing him away. “I’d rather be a lot lizard at a highway truck stop than any man’s babysitter.”

  The man hesitated, as if searching for deeper meaning in her words. Then he yanked the cigarette out of her hand and tossed it onto the dry lawn. She jumped to her feet.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “You’re a slut and a bitch, you know that?”

  I gasped into my braid as Mandarin leaped up and struck the man’s chest, twice, three times. He caught her arms and pinned them behind her back. She struggled, but he was stronger. He pulled her against his chest and kissed her mouth.

  Mandarin used to get into fights all the time, with girls, boys, anyone she thought deserved it. In the years after administration had sent her to the Wyoming Girls’ School, she seemed so resigned in comparison, all that fire put away somewhere. I imagined it a sort of turmoil she kept inside, like a scarlet crayon scribble.

  I wanted her to keep fighting. But instead, she let the man pick her up and carry her back inside the house.

  I waited for the fallen cigarette to dim and die, wishing I’d had the courage to run across the street and save her. Then I turned and sprinted down the block, feeling like a child, my braid slapping against the hood of my parka.

  Washokey’s women did not love Mandarin, especially her teachers. Outwardly, they mourned her wasted mind. “Miss Ramey,” we heard them tell her, “your looks. Your adventuresome character. Such a sin to waste them, when you could be so much.”

  But in secret, they gossiped like the rest of us. I was sure of it. They expected Mandarin to fail, every last one of them. And because they expected it, they wanted her to. They didn’t want to be proved wrong. Not by Mandarin Ramey.

  I could see it in their faces—like now, as Mandarin finished the last calculations of a math problem gone horribly wrong. “Nice try,” Mrs. Cleary said, the irony sopping from her voice as she wiped the problem off the board with one brutal stroke of an eraser.

  “Anybody else?”

  Nobody offered. So she zeroed in on the one person who couldn’t refuse.

  “Grace? What about you?”

  I pressed my math book to my chest and hurried toward the front of the classroom. On my way, I happened to catch Mandarin’s eye.

  She winked.

  Blushing uncontrollably, I began to resketch Mandarin’s math problem. Behind me, I heard the other students scraping their chairs over the floor, exchanging notes and whispers.

  All about her. Never about me.

  Sure, maybe most of the attention Mandarin got was negative. But it wasn’t the kind of disdainful brainfreak attention I got, when I got any at all. Hers was lustful. And jealous. Because even as they condemned her, every single girl wanted to be her.

  But nobody more than me.

  I want to be beautiful like you, I thought, as if Mandarin were listening.

  I want apricot skin and Pocahontas hair and eyes the color of tea. I want to be confident and detached and effortlessly sensual, and if promiscuity is part of the package, I will gladly follow your lead. All I know is I’m so tired of being inside my body.

  I would give anything to be like Mandarin.

  I stood in front of my full-length mirror and brushed my damp hair over my shoulders until it hung straight. I wedged my hands into the pockets of my jeans and hiked them down until the angles of my hips stuck out over the waistband. Then, without taking my eyes off the mirror, I began to saunter.

  By now, I had it down. I’d been practicing in secret all year.

  But I could never pull it off in public. I could never saunter down the halls at school, for fear of someone pointing and laughing.

  “Faker!” they would howl. “Wannabe!”

  Like back in fourth grade, when all the popular girls had glued glittery stickers to their temples. I’d talked Momma into buying me a set. Because the drugstore had sold out of the flowers and butterflies the other girls wore, I chose a sheet of lusterless tropical fish. They were still pretty: koi and Siamese fighting fish with trailing tails. But only minutes after I entered the classroom, I was dubbed Fishface, far worse than Faker or Wannabe. The next day, there wasn’t a single sticker in sight.

  I wasn’t a trendsetter. I was a trendstopper.

  Until then, I hadn’t stood out. But nobody had, not really. In early elementary school, when there had been only twelve girls in each class, by decree we were all best friends. There was little competition. The only people who cared about the Little Miss Washokey pageant winners were the grown-ups—and Alexis Bunker. Eight years ago, after I’d disqualified myself, she’d won the crown, and she reminded us about it for years afterward.

  The change came so swiftly I never saw it coming. All of a sudden, the other girls had discovered Glamour and Cosmopolitan, flatirons and eyeliner, and the ability to purchase clothes online instead of at the Walmart in Cody. Alexis’s dedication to the regional pageants became admirable instead of uncool.

  And everything that mattered to me—rocks and books and schoolwork—was deemed peculiar.

  I didn’t want to stand out in a bad way, like I had during the Fishface disaster. But as the years passed and the gap between me and everybody else widened, I couldn’t make myself fit in either. So I did the next best thing: I quit trying.

  I let myself fade into the collage of faces and hallways. And I pretended I didn’t care.

  Now I scowled at my reflection. Behind me, my bed bulged with a mountain of mismatched pillows. A row of swans Momma had cut from pink flowered contact paper trailed along the tops of my walls. My carpet did not quite make it from one side to the other, leaving a strip of floorboards exposed. My computer was a neighbor’s hand-me-down. The stacks of novels on my shelves came from the junk shop and garage sales. Except for the plastic shoe boxes of rocks stacked beside my dresser, hardly anything about my room reflected me.

  Not even my reflection.

  The door banged open behind me. I whirled around, tugging up my jeans. Strands of opera music drifted in thro
ugh the doorway.

  “Dang it, Taffeta! Can’t you knock?”

  She flounced in anyway. “Why? What were you doing that’s so secret?” She wore a blue jumper with white kittens prancing along the neckline. Momma always changed my sister’s clothes after school. As if life itself were a beauty pageant. “Were you doing something obscene?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Momma says come to dinner. It’s Hawaiian salad.”

  Whatever that meant. Momma loved to concoct strange recipes from miscellaneous cooking magazines and use Taffeta and me as guinea pigs. When she stumbled upon a particularly impressive dish, she’d cook it for all her lady friends and claim it as her own invention.

  “Fine,” I said. “Now scram. I’ll be right behind you.”

  As soon as I heard her thump down the stairs, I knelt beside my stack of shoe boxes. I removed the first two—the ones that contained shoes—opened the third, and swapped the quartz stone for a baby geode, the size of a half walnut. If dinner got too infuriating, I could poke my thumb inside the stone, feel the angles and rock candy ridges, and think about geology instead of my mother.

  My Little Miss Washokey fiasco launched our downward spiral, though it didn’t become obvious until Taffeta was born. Now Momma and I moved through our house like strangers, each disapproving of the other.

  Momma’s disapproval of me seemed more like confusion, bewilderment. As if she could never understand how she had created a person so different from herself. A daughter who preferred books to beauty, who cared nothing about winning—until the All-American Essay Contest, and look how that had turned out.

  What I felt about Momma was more of a sourness in my mouth than a feeling, a taste like rotten milk. I hated how everything Adrina Carpenter did was an obvious attempt to compensate for her own fall from grace fifteen years earlier, when she’d gotten pregnant with me. Although her schemes rarely worked the way she meant them to.

  Exhibit A: Femme Fatale

  Employed as a freelance saleslady for Femme Fatale Cosmetics, Inc., Momma took it upon herself to beautify the tri-county area. She found her best success with weathered old ranch wives yearning to make themselves lovely for their livestock and husbands. She knew just how to appeal to the itch she claimed every woman had, an itch that only amplified the farther a woman removed herself from civilization.

  But no matter how successful a businesswoman Momma claimed to be, I knew we lived off the inheritance from my father and Taffeta’s child support, not Femme Fatale profits.

  Exhibit B: Our house

  Because Momma had spent time in Jackson Hole as a teenager, she thought of herself as sophisticated, the most cultured of all her friends—although everybody knew she’d grown up in our house at 17 Pioneer Ridge. When her grandmother died twelve years earlier and left us the house (Momma’s parents had died when she was a teenager), Momma pledged to make it the envy of Washokey.

  The result was a museum of unfinished projects: partially papered hallways, mismatched pieces of secondhand furniture, half-hemmed curtains that hung in different lengths.

  Exhibit C: Décor

  One of the monthly magazines Momma subscribed to included foldout posters of famous paintings. She ironed each one and displayed them in fifty-cent frames from the junk shop, staggered diagonally down the stairway. I knew them like old friends: Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, Degas’s Ballerinas in Blue, Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

  Momma took pride in memorizing the accompanying articles and quoting art-related details to her girlfriends. She only occasionally made an ass of herself by jumbling up the facts. Nobody ever noticed, but it made me shake my head.

  Exhibit D: Me

  Momma’s first hope. Her worst mistake. And her harshest critic.

  When I was younger, Momma’s affectations ranged from mildly annoying to utterly exasperating. But I thought she fooled everyone else—until the spring I turned eleven, when I came across Alexis’s mother, Polly Bunker, talking with Mrs. Snelson in the gas station deli.

  The gas station deli—aka the Sundrop Quik Stop—was the kind of place where men finished beers first and then paid for the empty bottles. It sold milk and sandwiches, fireworks alongside handles of Jim Beam, and novelty crap like rubber cow pies and lighters bejeweled with American flags. I was perusing the distressingly limited selection of paperbacks when I overheard the two women talking.

  “She said it was Armani!” Polly Bunker exclaimed. “But Tracy Drummely told me she put it out four days ago at the Bargain Boutique. The tags said Old Navy.”

  “Oh no.” Mrs. Snelson chuckled. “Military surplus?”

  “You think she’d bother to be more sneaky about it. But ever since she won that Femme Fatale sweepstakes a couple months back, she’s gotten cocky.”

  “Like it’d have fooled anybody.”

  “What big-time designer’d ever pick orange and pink plaid, anyways?”

  When I blinked, I saw plaid. Orange and pink plaid. The colors of Momma’s new coat. Polly Bunker and Mrs. Snelson were making fun of my mother.

  In a tiny town like Washokey, nothing’s worse than being made fun of behind your back—especially by somebody like Polly Bunker, Momma’s so-called best friend and the worst gossip in town. I knew Momma was different than other Washokey mothers. She didn’t drink. She didn’t go to church. Sometimes she played poker, but she wasn’t any good. She didn’t date, claiming that women didn’t need men to be happy; her marriage to Taffeta’s father, an electrician from Idaho with a Mazda Miata so small he drove with his knees halfway to his chin, had lasted less than a year. I always assumed, as she must have, that all these distinctions made her somebody the other mothers admired. Not somebody they mocked.

  The humiliation lingered long after I left the deli. It lasted for weeks, flooding back every time I saw Alexis or Mrs. Bunker, or even the Sundrop Quik Stop.

  But worse than the humiliation was the pity. It felt like Christmas-flu vomit double-boiling in my gut. The worst feeling I had ever felt, compounded because I didn’t want to feel it. Not for my mother.

  As I neared the kitchen, the opera music grew louder and louder until I went around the corner and found its source: an old boom box at Momma’s feet.

  I hated opera music. The women sounded like hysterical monkeys. The men sounded like they were gargling. But Momma loved it—or at least, she pretended to.

  She sat beside Taffeta at the glossy round table and had pulled out a third chair in invitation. A blue pageant dress was draped over the fourth chair, like a guest. I seated myself and stared at the soggy glob of pink-tinged lettuce on the plate in front of me. I recognized chunks of canned pineapple, and what were possibly bits of ham.

  “I found this recipe in Cuisine at Home magazine,” Momma said. “Doesn’t it look divine?”

  She spoke with the bad British accent she’d been working on for a few weeks. Just the past month she’d been trying to talk like a Southern belle.

  Momma was only thirty-three, but the Wyoming sun had aged her face prematurely. That day she’d wound her brown hair into a french twist, and like any respectable cosmetics saleslady, she wore plenty of makeup. Her lips appeared to be shellacked. Mascara clung so thickly to her lashes they looked like spiders. When she slipped one foot from its platform espadrille sandal and switched off the music with her toe, I could imagine her sitting at the table practicing that motion while we were upstairs.

  “So, Grace,” she began. “Polly Bunker called and said you lost the essay contest. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t lose, exactly,” I said. “I got second place. I won fifty dollars.”

  “She won fifty dollars,” Taffeta repeated.

  Momma smiled patronizingly. “You mean they gave you fifty dollars in consolation. That was awfully kind of them. They don’t always give runners-up prizes.”

  I speared a pineapple fragment so brutally the tips of my fork clanked against my plate.


  “Though speaking of winning,” Momma continued, “Little Miss Washokey is coming up. And we all know what an important pageant this is. When Taffeta wins this year, she’ll be eligible for the tri-county pageant, and after that, the state pageant, and after that—if the Lord wills it—the stars!”

  I wondered what the Lord thought about her invoking his name. I glanced at Taffeta. She just sat there, sucking her fingers—a habit left over from toddlerhood. At least it wasn’t her thumb.

  I guessed you could call Taffeta Counterexhibit A: Momma’s final hope. Taffeta’s miraculous voice was proof things might be on the upswing. That year, Momma hadn’t entered her in any pageants prior to Little Miss Washokey. Everybody in town knew about Taffeta’s voice, but Momma didn’t want to reveal her secret weapon prematurely.

  “Grace, you remember competing in your Little Miss Washokey, don’t you?”

  She brought it up at the start of every pageant season. Like clockwork. I felt something gritty between my teeth. I stared at my mushy lettuce, trying to determine what variety of Hawaiian produce could account for a crunch. “Not really,” I replied.

  “Well, everyone else in this town does. Especially Polly Bunker. She’ll never let me forget about Alexis’s win. She wouldn’t have won at all if it weren’t for your debacle onstage. I know you remember.”

  “I remember too,” Taffeta said.

  “You weren’t even born yet,” I said. “Loser.”

  “Grace, enough!” Momma’s accent had vanished. Whenever she was angry, she talked just like every other grown-up in Washokey. “I want to have a pleasant dinner for once. Can’t we ever conversate like a normal family?”

  “We’re not a normal family,” I muttered.

  Momma cleared her throat. “Grace, go to your room.”

  I wanted to roll my eyes. Too little, too late, I thought as I pushed my chair back and headed for the stairs. Why did she even try?

  My fifteenth birthday was coming up in May, but I knew not to expect anything more from Momma than the cake and the box of last-season Femme Fatale makeup she gave me every year. She never asked about the books I read, or the rocks I lugged home. She only looked at my report cards so she could brag about my grades to her friends. She knew nothing about me.