Prettiest Doll (17 page)

We stood on the busy sidewalk, looking up.

“I ain't never seen anything so tall,” I said, and then felt ashamed, that I'd said
ain't,
which I almost never said, that I was showing what a hick I was.

“It's amazing, isn't it?” Heidi said. “I grew up here and I never get tired of looking at it.”

Dan stood next to me, head tipped back. I wished he would take my hand.

“Do they have buildings this tall in Houston?” I asked.

“Not quite,” he said.

We rode the elevator to the 103rd floor, the Skydeck. It was like being in space and looking down. Last night's rain had disappeared; the sky was as blue as toothpaste, cloudless, vast. Below, the skyscrapers that had seemed so tall from the street looked like building blocks, and all of Chicago stretching out in all directions like a city made of Legos.

“It doesn't look real from this high up,” I said. “It looks like a picture of a city.”

“Look,” Dan said, pointing. “Navy Pier!”

It was so different from up here: gray roofs on a tiny spit of land, your eyes drawn to the endless lake. I couldn't even see the Ferris wheel. Something I would dream about, but invisible from the air.

At first I was afraid to stand on the Ledge. There were four of them: glass boxes that extended from the side of the building. But when Heidi and Dan climbed out into one, I felt like a baby, being afraid.

“You won't catch me out there, either,” Uncle Bread said. “No one's going to blame you for wanting to keep both feet on an actual floor.”

“But I
don't
want that,” I said. It sounded like whining, but still I couldn't move.

“Wow! Oh, my God!
Wow,”
Dan was saying, peering between his feet, through the glass to the faraway street below, and I thought, Which would be better: feeling safe and disappointed in myself, or getting to see
that?

I climbed out onto the glass floor, my legs wobbly with fear, and looked down. The street below was clogged with cars, small trucks, yellow taxis. It ran along the river, a sludgy green. A short ways off, a freeway curled over and under itself like smoke. Looking down felt like flying, maybe. Or maybe like being dead and watching the earth from a cloud. Was that what my daddy saw? Did he watch me from wherever he was? Could he pick me out?

“Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn't it?” Heidi said, and even though she couldn't possibly have known what I was thinking, it made me nervous, made me wonder if something was showing on my face that I didn't mean to be there.

 

We were hungry again. After getting chili dogs, we caught a bus to the zoo in Lincoln Park. “I've never been to a zoo,” I said, afraid I was looking like a hick again, but all Dan said was, “The snakes are my favorites,” and Uncle Bread said, “I have an affinity for the great apes,” which made Heidi laugh loudly and kiss him on the shoulder.

I loved the animals at the zoo, but I had a nervous feeling as we stood outside their cages, waiting for them to wake up, eat, wrestle, pace. “I wish they were in the forest, where they belong,” I said to Uncle Bread as we stood with a small crowd of people in front of the gorilla enclosure, watching a sleeping silverback.

“There are poachers in the wild,” he said. “They're safe here.”

But it didn't make me feel any better. “It's like everyone wants to be entertained,” I said. “How can they just live if they're supposed to be putting on a show?”

“They
are
living,” he said. “This is all they know.”

The old gorilla stretched and rolled himself up to a sitting position. He met my gaze and then, bored, turned his silvery back.

 

The zoo closed at 4:30, which gave us just enough time to take a train out to the airport. Dan's mom was paying for him to fly home. “Lucky! ” I'd said, but Dan had shrugged. “I flew to New York a couple of times with my grandparents,” he said. “It's no big deal.” I hardened my heart a little, thinking,
See? He doesn't get you. He's just some boy.
I knew it was a lie I was telling myself.

At the airport, Uncle Bread and Heidi went off to find the bathrooms, leaving Dan and me in the check-in line.
Our only time alone,
I thought, and, as if he read my mind, he set his duffel bag on the floor and grabbed my hand. “I don't want to go,” he said, pushing his bag with his foot as the line inched forward. “I don't want to leave.”

“I know.”

“ Leave
you.
I don't want to leave
you
.”

I nodded. “Maybe you can visit. And you've got my e-mail address.”

“You know that won't happen. The visiting part.”

I knew. I wanted to think it might be true, though.

“We can play chess online, if you want,” he said. “There are programs.”

“I'd like that,” I said, even though I wouldn't really, because it wasn't romantic. I could play chess with anyone.

I stood with him while he checked his bag and got his ticket and seat assignment. Then we had to say goodbye for real: only passengers could go through the gate.

“Where's your uncle?” he asked, craning his neck.

“I think they're letting us say goodbye.”

He took both my hands, made himself look me in the eyes. “You've probably kissed other guys,” he said. It was really a question he was asking.

I felt myself blush and decided that would be my answer.

“I ... I...” He blushed, too, a dull red stain spreading down his neck, making me want to put my lips there, to feel the warmth that way. But I didn't. It would just make everything harder.

“I know,” I said.

“I won't forget. Ever.”

I smiled. “I never spent the night on the floor of a movie theater before.”

“I won't forget that, either.”

“It was—” But I didn't want to try to put it in words, how I thought I would think about that night forever, maybe walking down the aisle at my wedding, maybe as I sat up in the middle of the night, trying to get my baby to sleep in her crib. It was the night everything changed, was made clear, the night I knew how to fix things, what to do. “Great,” I said. “It was great.”

“It's probably the only time I'll ever do
that,”
he said. “Both of us, probably.”

Then he kissed me goodbye and it was like all that time on the Ferris wheel: the world dropping away to nothing, spinning.

 

Uncle Bread put me on the bus early the next morning.

“Are we all right? You and me?” he asked.

“I'm still mad,” I said. “But yes.”

“I'm so sorry, Liv,” he said. “I'll always be sorry for that.”

“Not so mad anymore,” I said.

He kneeled down in front of me as though I were a little kid. He hugged me. I laid my head on his shoulder, smelling his coat, taking in an easy breath, filling my lungs with loving him and being only a hint of angry.

“You tell Jane to behave herself,” he said.

“She will. It'll be okay.”

“You tell her I'm right there with you. And if she won't let you stop doing pageants, I'm going to come down there and kick the shit out of her.”

“Just come,” I said.

“You know I'm kidding about kicking the shit out of her, right?”

I knew. “I just don't want anybody to be angry anymore,” I said. “I want you guys to like each other.”

He looked at me. “Liv—”

“All right, all right.
Get along,
then.”

He hugged me again. “That's your bus,” he said as the voice on the loudspeaker announced the gate.

“So? Are you coming?” I asked.

He smiled. “How about next summer? Camping at Table Rock?”

“That would be good,” I said, smiling back.

When he stood up, he asked, “You all right, doing this alone?”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly anxious to get on with it.

He stood with me as I waited in the line to board. I hoped that Elroy would be the driver, but the new guy's nametag said
REX
. Uncle Bread said to him, “This young lady is going as far as Luthers Bridge. Will you keep an eye on her, please?” which made me cringe, because I didn't want Rex thinking he was supposed to be a babysitter.

But Rex said, “Sure thing,” and smiled as I climbed the stairs and found a seat by the window.

I looked down at Uncle Bread, who mouthed, “I love you, Jammie,” and I rolled my eyes, but inside I was so glad. I couldn't ask him to call me the old name, but his doing it on his own was just what I wanted, exactly right.

 

The bus made its way south through fields of brown corn, through rain that speckled the window, through bad traffic in St. Louis and again on the interstate, past a jackknifed big rig. I thought of Daddy bleeding by the side of the road, dying alone. So many things made him come to mind. Semis in rest-stop parking lots. Telephone linemen in plaid work shirts. At the Burger King in Rolla, a man bought a plain hamburger for his little boy and it made me wonder if Daddy would have liked a boy more.

I thought,
My life is full of holes.
And also,
Do you ever get over anything?

Late in the afternoon, when I knew she'd be out of school and at the barn, I called Imogene. She picked up on the first ring. “Oh, my God! ” she said. “Where are you?”

“Coming home.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said, and I could hear her breathe out, relieved.

“You've been gone, like, forever!”

“Four days.”

“Yeah, but I couldn't call,” she said. “It made it seem longer. I have so much to tell you!” And she launched right into her stories. She had a fight with the barn manager, who screwed up the farrier appointment. She ate lunch with Brianna Loomis, who was nice except for having some hormone problem that made her grow too much hair on her forearms. “What did you do?” she asked.

It was too much to explain all at once. “I've been in Chicago. We went to the zoo.”

She laughed. “You liar.”

“I'm not lying.”

“There
was
a boy,” she said, and I laughed, too, because it was so nice to be gotten, and also because laughing covers up crying better than just saying nothing.

 

We pulled into Luthers Bridge in the dark, but I could see Mama standing outside the station beneath a street lamp, her enormous shadow like a puddle at her feet. She wore an unzipped parka, and I could see her fanny pack under it, belted around her middle. I didn't see a single person in Chicago with a fanny pack. Something else from the past, like her dry, permed hair, her hot pink lipstick for special occasions.

When I stepped down off the bus, she didn't move, just stood where she was, letting me come to her. She played with the zipper on the fanny pack, giving herself something to do. When I got close, she said, “You don't know what I been through,” and when I said, “I'm sorry,” she grabbed me into a fierce hug and said, “Don't say you're sorry, Olivia Jane, for something so bad.”

“But I am sorry,” I said, crushed into her chest.

“I don't want you thinking that's enough for what you did,” she said.

Even after the bus pulled away, back out to the interstate, she was still hugging me, not finished even when the attendant turned off the lamp, not caring about the cold or being alone on the empty platform.

 

In the car, she turned the key, and over the blast of heater air, she said, “All you're doing from now on is going to school. And coming home right after.”

“I know.”

“And nothing else, except Miss Denise and Mrs. Drucker.”

After a minute, I said, “I'm not going to Mrs. Drucker's.”

“Olivia Jane—”

“I'm not,” I said.

There was a long pause. Then she said, “So you think this is how it's going to be? You telling me things and me rolling over, saying, ‘That's fine, Olivia Jane'?”

“Not about everything.”

I watched the town roll by: the locked-up shops, Ed's Place with its
OPEN
and
MILLER LITE
blue neon signs, the houses curtained against the night, everything ragged and small and known.

“So I suppose you think you're not doing Prettiest Doll? All that work, all that money down the drain?”

“I'm doing it. I didn't say I wasn't doing it.”

“You did in your note.”

I'd forgotten. “I am doing it,” I said. “Not because of the money, though.”

I didn't look in her direction, but I could see her smile a little, knowing she had Prettiest Doll to look forward to.

“They seen you dance a hundred times,” she said. “You probably can't win if you dance.”

Now I didn't say anything. Her words hung between us in the dark car, which was just starting to get warm as we pulled up to the curb at home.

THE next two weeks were mostly a blur. I had homework to make up: French vocabulary work sheets and reading “The Ransom of Red Chief” and finding the volume of a bunch of prisms and cylinders. Mrs. Fogelson said I couldn't make up the work in her class because the kids had finished their Boston Tea Party videos. She said I could make a presentation about Chicago to the class instead.

Every day, I came home after school and practiced for the pageant: walking, twirling, smiling, posing. Remembering to make eye contact and look over my shoulder and hold my hands out and pointed down and say “Yes, ma'am” and “Thank you, ma'am.”

Mama came up with practice interview questions. I answered “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and “Who is your best friend?” and “If you could spend the day doing anything at all, what would it be?” “What's your favorite subject in school?” and “What's your favorite animal?” and “If you spent the day with your mama, what would the two of you do?”