Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [70]
Taffeta sat in the passenger’s seat, dressed in a terry cloth tracksuit. Momma had spun her hair into Shirley Temple corkscrew curls, with a white orchid pinned above her ear. Her makeup looked airbrushed on. Momma had ordered her to keep her face as expressionless as possible so she wouldn’t crack her artificial splendor.
Momma wore the shimmery gold junk shop gown she’d saved for years. She drove with white-knuckled tension. All day she’d been in her worst form, rocketing around the house, hollering at my sister and me, drinking mug after mug of burnt-smelling black coffee. The caffeine only fueled her nervous prattling, which increased until her brain seemed to rupture and she could hardly articulate a complete sentence.
“Road’s shit,” she said at one point. “Taxes wasted.”
And later, “What to do about butt glue?”
Butt glue? Clearly, she’d gone insane.
We arrived in Benton, the county seat, a little after six. Benton—named for the mines, of course—wasn’t much larger than Washokey, but it had the courthouse and a tiny Wild West museum. Momma swung Taffeta out of the car and set her down. She opened my door and leaned over me.
“Dress,” she ordered. “Duffel.”
After a short pause, I handed her Taffeta’s dress and the wheelie duffel bag overstuffed with pageant gear. Before I could climb out myself, Momma slammed the door. I watched her speed off with the dress slung over her shoulder, her bag bumbling over the asphalt, and Taffeta hurrying to catch up.
I buckled my feet into the stupid strappy heels and slid out of the car. My dress was too short. Paired with my skinny legs, it made me feel like a stork. Plus the heels chafed me in sixteen places. They made a clopping sound as I crossed the parking lot.
I stared at the piece of paper taped to the back door of the Benton High School cafeteria: Authorized Personnel Only. Then I pushed inside.
Backstage, dozens of little girls and their mothers churned through a fun house of mirrors and lights. Dressing tables were littered with makeup, blow dryers, spangled fragments of costumes. Mothers screeched to be heard over the commotion. Several little girls were wailing, their mouths shaped like figure eights. The space stank like a putrid fruit salad, coconut-pineapple mousse and strawberry-champagne lotion. I almost preferred the smoky beery reek of Solomon’s. All the sights and sounds and smells whooshed to the bottom of my stomach, giving me an ominous sense of déjà vu.
It couldn’t have been this bad. I would have remembered.
I risked a few steps into the hot-packed space. Immediately, a red-haired woman towing a little girl shoved past me. Her doughy breasts blobbed from her emerald dress. She held them in with one red-taloned hand as she stopped and leaned over the little girl.
“Hold still,” she ordered.
The girl stuck out her lips in an exaggerated pout and the woman smeared them with scarlet. When I blinked, the color seemed to linger behind my closed eyelids.
As I searched for my mother and sister, I overheard snatches of conversation:
“Mommy, it’s too tight! It squeezes my ribs.”
“I wanted to put Vaseline on her teeth, but it makes her sick to her stomach. Or at least, that’s what she says. Some kids’ll say anything. I read on the net …”
“Lovely, Erica, lovely! Just like that!”
“Remember to smile like you adore them—even if you have to pretend.”
I passed a tiny blond girl kneeling on a chair, in a dress so puffy and stiff with netting it seemed to exhale around her. With her elbows on a dressing table, she made faces in the mirror, batting her eyelashes, while one woman teased her hair and another sprayed it with a purple can of hair spray.
I passed a girl a few years younger than me balancing a baby on her hip while her mother practiced dance moves with small identical-twin brunettes.
I nearly crashed into a woman scolding a sobbing little girl, who kept pleading, “No, Mommy. Please, Mommy, not that song,” while her mother repeated, “It’s been printed in the program, DeeDee! We can’t change it now.”
As I navigated the confusion, I tried to shake