Lessons from a Delmarva Poultry Princess by Laura Huey Chamberlain
Lisa is used to complying with her mother's expectations, until she meets Reilly, and things get more complicated.
Nineteen years ago my mother - the former Miss Lenore Wilson of Laurel, Delaware - was the 1963 Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess, and this is what she has to say about being a beauty queen. No matter how flawless a woman might appear, Mother says, no matter how beautiful she might be, she's bound to have a run in her stocking, cellulite underneath her girdle, or some such imperfection you can always find if you look hard enough. Nowadays, Mother operates the New You! beauty parlor in the L-shaped attachment Daddy built onto the back of our house. Daddy is a volunteer firefighter and a Blue-Ribbon grower of laying hens, and he taught me the difference between the Virginia and the loblolly pine, both of which grow in the woods behind our chicken houses. But it's Mother's lessons on beauty and the fight against imperfection that have worked their way deepest under my skin. Someday, Lisa, she used to tell me before I ran away last fall, someday we'll operate the New You! together.
My own imperfection, I knew as a little girl, was my hair. From the time I was old enough to sit in the booster seat of the beauty-parlor chair, Mother tried to tame my flaming red curls. Curls, though, is not the right word to describe the shapes my hair took. Curls bounce sweetly when a little girl plays hopscotch at recess. Curls stream behind the little girl as she soars on the playground swing, her Mary Janes pointing toward the clouds. Curls fall in delicate ringlets upon that little girl's collar. My hair? My hair was a blaze of orange spray paint against the side of a white barn, a fiery tongue of sass in a second-grade classroom where all the girls and boys raised their hands politely. It was a cosmetological scream against beauty and conformity and the status quo.
Mother, however, was not one to back down without a fight. She declared war on my hair, her weapons of choice Dippity-do, blue curlers, and a short hairstyle. Sunday mornings, before church, she'd perch me on a booster seat in her beauty parlor. She'd study the photograph I pointed to from her fashion magazine, and, with the end of her comb, she'd divide my hair into a grid. Section by section, she'd pull my hair straight, smear on the pretty-smelling gel, tuck my hair around the curlers, and pin those curlers hard against my scalp. When she was done, we'd both make faces in the mirror, Mother beautiful in her silk slip, me a space alien with my helmet of blue curlers. She'd lift me up on a stack of People magazines, adjust the hair dryer so that it angled just above my eyes, set the timer. I liked sitting under the hair dryer. I liked the deafening whir, and I liked the blowing heat that turned my cheeks and the edges of my ears pink.
But there was a problem. Mother was a one-chord beautician, and that meant that by the time she combed out my curls; by the time she shielded my eyes with the blade of her hand and sprayed my head with two coats of hairspray; by the time she twirled my chair around so I could see her creation in the mirror, my hair looked just like the hair of her regular customers. Each week I'd blink back my disappointment and hold on to my smile, but each week it was the same. No matter what movie star I'd pointed to in the fashion magazine, my hair looked like the hair of Miss Gertrude, Mother's Tuesdays-at-10:15, or the hair of Miss Hilda, or of Miss Beatrice. My poofed, unmoving hair looked just like the blue-tinted hair of almost every seventy-five-year-old woman in Laurel. Except that my hair was red - and a whole lot thicker.
By the time I was ten, I'd given up on our Sunday ritual. That was the year Mrs. Peters moved to town with her husband and two girls and established the Del'Mar Nereids - a synchronized swimming team for girls. It was strange, but from almost the first time I plunged into the pool, I knew I'd found my element. I loved the way the water swallowed me down and buoyed me up, how lovely it felt against my skin. I loved the way I could turn somersaults underwater and then propel myself into the open air. Some of the older girls said that before she moved to Delaware, Mrs. Peters had been a Weeki Wachee mermaid in Florida. I didn't know if that was true, but before long, nothing was more important to me than perfecting my split-arm sculls, mastering my eggbeater kick. For this I needed a no-nonsense hairstyle. Something I could tuck into my swimmer's cap before practice or pull tight into a bun and glaze with Knox gelatin before our Synchro performances. After years of my pleading, Mother finally let me grow my hair out. When I wasn't swimming - when I was studying or earning tip money at the shampoo sink of the New You! - I kept my hair pulled back in a tangled ponytail.
Then, one lazy Sunday afternoon last May, just after I turned 17, Mother finally tamed my hair. By accident, almost. We'd been mulling over hairstyles for the junior/senior prom, which Mother was making me attend.
"Fine!" I'd screamed at her two nights earlier, thinking the situation would take care of itself when no invitation came. "Fine! I'll go!"
But I'd underestimated Mother. Within a day, she'd lined up my date: Reilly Jackson, the trombone-playing grandson of Miss Gertrude, one of her regular customers from town. Reilly ate peanut-butter and cheese sandwiches in the cafeteria and worked at the Southern States co-op after school. His teenage mother had run off when he was two, and he lived with his father on a farm where the chicken house hadn't been painted in decades. Yes, as Mother repeatedly pointed out, Reilly was a senior. But he was also - and there was no tactful way to put this - he was also fat. Mother, however, had made up her mind, and there was no fighting her on this. I was going to the prom with Reilly Jackson.
"Let's try something loose and flowing," Mother said that afternoon, combing through my hair with her fingers. "Something that balances out your nose."
"What's wrong with my nose?" I glared at the mirror.
"Nothing's wrong with your nose, Lisa. It just needs some... balancing."
Mother washed and conditioned my hair and then started the process of drying it. Strand by strand, she pulled her brush through my hair, wagging the blow dryer over my head, humming a song. When my hair was almost dry, she studied me in the mirror, patting my head. After some thought, she plugged in a flat iron and got us two Frescas from the kitchen. For the next half hour, she worked her way through my hair, securing the swirl of unironed hair to the top of my head with a clip. The iron cooked all the moisture from my hair in little whiffs of steam, making me smell like an ironed shirt.
Finally, Mother swapped her brush for a wide-tooth comb. She took out a pair of scissors, and she began snipping at the hair around my face. By now she'd stopped her humming and she worked quickly, fluttering around my chair in a kind of excitement. She turned me to face her, smoothing the sides of my hair. She studied me hard. From a small brown bottle, she poured out a few drops of oil, rubbed her hands together, ran them through my hair.
"Unbelievable," she said, turning me to face the mirror.
I have to admit it. I was shocked. With her gels and oils and conditioners, her blow dryer and her flat iron, Mother had transformed my impossible mop into a helmet of stick-straight hair. When I ran my hand through my hair, my fingers glided through smoothly. When I tossed my head, my hair fanned out to the sides. Even my nose was transformed, strong and sharp as my cheekbones. I had been replaced by a beautiful stranger, and it felt more than a little bit weird.
The hair was just the beginning. Over the next two weeks, Mother continued my transformation. With sewing pins sticking out of her mouth, she draped me in a watery green silk that fell from one shoulder, hugged my skinny hips, and flared below my knees. She brushed my eyelashes with thick layers of mascara. Finally, she completed my ensemble, as she called it, with a shimmering pair of 4-inch stilettos.
The night of the prom, the shoes were the first thing I ditched. It was after Reilly had given me an orchid corsage and met my parents and taken me into town for pictures at his grandmother's house.
"You two look lovely," Miss Gertrude had said in town, posing Reilly and me in her front yard.
Miss Gertrude was still taking pictures when a pick-up truck pulled to the curb.
"I didn't forget!" a middle-aged man called, slamming the door. He was wearing jeans and a faded Oxford shirt.
Miss Gertrude looked at her son - Reilly's father - then continued to take pictures. "We're just about done," she said brightly.
"Don't mind me," Reilly's father said, walking toward two plastic lawn chairs.
After we were done, Reilly's father patted at the seat of the chair next to him.
"Sit down here, girl - tell me about yourself."
I didn't want to be rude. So I sat down in the chair.
"He's a quiet one, Reilly. You got to watch out for the quiet ones," Mr. Jackson laughed, leaning close to me. His breath smelled of strong mouthwash, and he had creases at the corners of his eyes.
"Now me, I'm not so quiet. You don't have to worry about me."
Reilly approached the chairs. "We need to go now, Dad," he said.
As I stood, my left heel sank into the lawn, and I stumbled back. Reilly stiffened his arm behind me, and I steadied myself.
"Watch yourself now, girl," Mr. Jackson said, popping a Tic-Tac in his mouth.
My face was suddenly hot. I gave a slight wave to Miss Gertrude and Reilly's dad, and I turned toward the Bronco.
"Sorry about that," Reilly said as we walked to the driveway.
As soon as Reilly and I were in the Bronco, I pulled off the high heels and stuffed them under the front seat. When we got to the restaurant, Reilly came around to the passenger side. "You think anyone will notice if I go in without shoes?" I asked, hiking my dress up so I could climb out of the truck. Wearing this dress was like being swaddled in green fish scales. I was afraid the dress would split open if I made any large movements.
"I don't think so," Reilly said, offering me his hand. "It's a long dress. You'll be okay. Maybe it'll help if you walk on your toes."
He was right. When I walked on my toes the dress fell just right and my body leaned forward at the just the right angle. In fact, it was turning out that Reilly wasn't such a bad date, after all. Dressed up in a tux, he was almost cute, actually - tall, and with broad shoulders that supported his weight well. And when you listened to him, he was kind and interesting and funny - all things I'd never expected from a trombone player. We ordered crab-cakes, and I told him about my upcoming Synchro competition. I nibbled at yeast rolls, and he told me about working at the Southern States Co-op.
By the time we finally arrived at the Convention Center for the prom, it was after 8 o'clock. We made our way to the punch bowl, and we tried to dance to "Stairway to Heaven."
"Are you having fun?" Reilly screamed into my ear. His hands cradled my waist loosely.
"No! I'm sorry!" I shouted back. "It's too loud!"
"Wanna go to the beach?"
I smiled, and then I nodded.
So that night, while we should have been dancing to a deafening beat at the prom, Reilly drove us to the beach. He parked in the sand and we watched the silent moon shimmer across the water. He told me how his grandmother was losing money on the chicken house and that she had been talking to land developers. I told Reilly how beautiful it felt to execute a perfectly timed lift with my Synchro team.
We'd been talking like this for an hour when he leaned over and kissed me. It was my first kiss, and I'd never felt anything so soft, so thrilling. So I let him kiss me, and kiss me some more. After a while, he pulled an old blanket from the back of the Bronco and we spread it on the beach. This time when we kissed I pulled him on top of me, just to know what it felt like to be pressed down with a boy's weight. He held my face between his hands. Then we searched for satellites and shooting stars.
"Tell me something you've never told anyone," I said after I'd seen my shooting star.
When Reilly finally spoke, he was looking at the star-blasted sky.
"When I get out of college - when I get a job - I want it to be a job where I can wear a suit."
He turned to me. "You now. Something you've never told anybody."
After a moment, I told him something I hadn't even realized myself.
"In my next life," I said, looking out over the moon-soaked ocean, "I want to come back as a mermaid."
The next morning, when I picked my prom dress up off my bedroom floor, a small shower of sand sprinkled down. Downstairs, Mother and Daddy were already eating breakfast, the police scanner hissing in the background. They were partially dressed for church, Mother in her silk slip, her hair and make-up done; Daddy wearing a freshly ironed shirt, the pants to his suit, his black church shoes. He was reading the Sunday paper, keeping the newsprint a safe distance from his shirt.
Mother poured me a cup of coffee.
"What time did you get in?" she said.
"It was late."
Daddy rose from his chair. "Lisa, do you want some orange juice, honey? Let me get you some orange juice."
My eyes were gritty with sleep and mascara. I drank a sip of the steaming coffee.
Mother leaned across the table with purpose. "Sweetheart, I want you to hear me out on this," she said. Something about her worried me, something about her eyes. They were bright, and they darted from my pajamas to my hair.
"How would you like to be the 1982 Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess?" Mother said. Her eyes sparkled.
"For Christ's sakes, Lenore!" Daddy set a glass on the counter. "Would you leave the girl alone?"
"You could do this, sweetheart," Mother said, ignoring Daddy. "I know you could. With my help, you could do this."
Daddy grabbed the newspaper and strode into the family room.
When Mother took my hand in hers, I saw that the fingernail polish on my left ring finger was chipped. "I want you to think about this, Lisa," she said softly. "You are almost a senior now, and Reilly Jackson is your first date. If you win this pageant, you could have your pick of any boy in Laurel - of any boy in Delmar, even," she said. "This could transform you, sweetheart, this could transform your whole life. Please. Think about it."
What was I to do? I couldn't say no to Mother about the pageant any more than I could tell her that I wasn't sure I wanted to study cosmetology next year, my senior year, at Sussex Vo-Tech. That I wasn't sure I wanted to work at the New You! So my lessons, as she called them, started the following Sunday. At two o'clock, after church and our Sunday lunch at the Dutch Inn, I joined Mother in the beauty parlor until four o'clock. Mostly, she gave me egg-white facials and plucked the fine blond hairs between my eyebrows. She poured hot oil on my hair and wrapped my head in a towel, then soaked my fingers in a soapy solution. Using a small wooden stick tapered at one end, she pushed back my cuticles.
"You've not been pushing back your cuticles, sweetheart. They're a mess."
"But I have, Mother!"
"No, you haven't. You have to do it every day, as soon as you get out of the pool, when they're soft."
On some Sundays, Mother worked on my posture and my stride. She watched me closely as I walked down an imaginary runway, teaching me to land on the ball of my foot, not the heel.
"Like walking on a tightrope, sweetheart," she said, lifting my head lightly. "Shoulders back, chin out."
It took us several weeks to figure out what I could do for the talent competition. I'd taken piano lessons, of course, but Mother said we needed something different - something unique - and she decided I should do a dramatic interpretation. Something from Edgar Allan Poe might work.
After about a month, Mother began coaching me for the question-and-answer competition, asking me questions she'd written down on a yellow pad. Mother agonized over each question, but it didn't take me long to figure out that all I needed were two or three responses, depending on the type of question.
"If there is one thing you could do to change the world what would it be?" That was easy - the "world-peace" question.
"Tell us a little about your goals and dreams." Still another world-peace question, this one dressed up a little. All I needed to add was a future where I could live in a foreign country and help people and achieve world peace. Like becoming a missionary or something like that.
But the easiest question of all was the question that was asked every year. This was, after all, the Delmarva Poultry Princess Pageant, and the winner of the pageant would be promoting chicken at every county fair for a year. "What is your favorite food?" My favorite food was Delmarvalous Roadside Chicken, with baked beans and corn on the cob.
"We here on the Eastern Shore are so fortunate because we have the tastiest chicken - the freshest corn - on the entire east coast!"
"Perfect, sweetheart," Mother said, putting down the legal pad. "I can hear the applause already."
Funny thing was, I really did like Delmarvalous Roadside Chicken. Mother eventually agreed that after my Sunday lessons, I could spend some time with Reilly, and over the course of the summer, that became our routine. During the two hours between my lessons and Sunday-evening church services, Reilly drove us to the intersection of Route 404 and Scott's Store Road, along the route that the tourists from Washington and Baltimore took to get to the Delaware beaches. There, on Saturdays and Sundays, volunteers from the Kiwanis Club set up oil-drum grills - huge, black contraptions that hinged open like coffins. Wearing t-shirts and ball caps, these thick-chested men mixed up tubs of apple-cider vinegar and egg, corn oil and poultry seasoning. With paintbrushes, they slathered the mixture on chicken quarters as flaccid and white as a newborn's bottom. Then, sweating under the blazing sun, they slowly grilled the chicken, turning the quarters with stainless-steel prongs, fanning the smoke away from their eyes. For $5.50 each, Reilly and I both got a Styrofoam dinner box with a chicken quarter; half an ear of corn; baked beans; a dinner roll; a pat of butter; a plastic knife and fork; a napkin; packets of salt and pepper; and a wet-wipe enclosed in a foil packet.
"I wonder if you could make this chicken yourself," I said to Reilly one afternoon in July, licking the grease off my fingers. We were sitting atop a picnic bench at Trap Pond State Park.
"Probably," Reilly said. "Hardest part would be not cooking it too fast."
"Yeah," I agreed. "Nothing worse than grilled chicken bloody at the bone."
Down the hill, a young mother pushed a stroller toward the lake. Beside her, a man in a tank top poured Coke into a baby bottle.
"How's it going with your dad?" I asked. Over the spring, Reilly's dad had started drinking again - a lot - and Reilly had been picking up the slack at the chicken house. He made sure that the feeders and the watering troughs were working properly, that the dead chickens were pitched into the composting pits, that the fans were circulating enough fresh air. This time of year, air circulation was important. Fifteen minutes without fresh air in this heat and you could lose thousands of chickens.
"Dad? He's not so good. I had to pick him up from the V.F.W. last night."
"Chickens okay?"
"Yeah, they're okay. I ran the feeders at lunch, and I'll check them again when I get back home."
Reilly stuffed the Styrofoam boxes back into the plastic bag. He tore open the wet-wipe packet and wiped the grease off his fingers. What I wanted to ask him - but what I wouldn't ask him - was what was going to happen to the chickens when he left for college in three weeks. University of Delaware was over two hours away, and even if he came home every weekend, something could happen during the week. But I wouldn't ask Reilly this question. I didn't need to. It was already too much on his mind. And while a part of me was afraid of what would happen to us as a couple when he left, another part of me was afraid that something would happen to keep Reilly from going to college. I was afraid that he would never have that job where he could wear a suit.
"Let me have that," I said, taking the wet-wipe. I swiped at my hands then gently touched Reilly's face, wiping a spot of grease from his cheek. It was after 5:30, and lapping out in front of us, the lake glittered in the low sun. Reilly and I held hands as we walked back along the path to the parking lot, the tops of the loblolly pines swaying. He tossed the bag into the back seat, and I pulled a wet-wipe packet from my skirt pocket, placing it in the console cup-holder between our seats, where we collected extra ones. There must have been five or six of them by now.
Mother and Daddy's station wagon was already in the church's parking lot when Reilly pulled in. Mother, I knew, would be waiting for me in the ladies' room. I kissed Reilly quickly on the lips, hitched my purse over my shoulder, got out of the Bronco. On my left, Deacon Acord was helping his wife out of their shiny black convertible. Deacon Acord was one of the leaders of our church, and - as mother had pointed out - a judge at the Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess pageant. He closed his wife's door and watched as Reilly pulled away, then nodded to me curtly.
Smoothing down my skirt, I hurried inside to the ladies room. Mother was touching up her lipstick, her face frozen in that bug-eyed look she always wore when she put on her make-up. From my purse, I pulled out a brush and ran it quickly through my hair. I blotted at my face with a powder compact, reapplied my lipstick.
"Everything okay?" I said into the mirror. Mother stood behind me, frowning.
"Here - spray on some of this," she said, pulling a bottle of cologne from her purse. "You smell like barbeque."
We had planned it for weeks. The Friday night before Reilly was to leave, we drove to the beach. The day had been one of those sweltering Eastern Shore days, the kind of day that wilted your clothes and unplugged your motivation. Even at nine o'clock, when Reilly picked me up, the night air was thick as pie filling.
When I climbed into the Bronco, there was a small Rite Aid bag on the passenger's seat, and a single white rose. I smelled the rose. Then, as we pulled out of the driveway, I opened the bag and pulled out a small black box of Trojans. I opened the box and spilled the packets onto my lap.
"After the cashier rang me up he winked at me," Reilly said. "Told me to have a good night."
This was more embarrassing than funny. But I was nervous, and I started laughing, and before I knew it I was laughing so hard I couldn't stop. I put my hands over my face and doubled over, the little packets of rubbers spilling down over the console between Reilly and me. When I finally caught my breath, I searched the floor and the console with my hands until I found them, stuffing them back into the Rite Aid bag. "I'm sorry," I said, wiping my eyes. I put my hand on Reilly's thigh and looked out the window, watching the dark fields spool by in the night. We rode with the windows down, the hot air blowing over us. We tried to listen to the radio, but it was hard to hear anything over the sound of the wind. So we just sat together the hour it took us to get to the beach, not talking, my hand resting on Reilly's thigh.
At the beach, after we'd found a place to park, Reilly pulled one of the little packets from the Rite Aid bag and stuffed it in his jeans. I took off my sandals and stepped down into the still-warm sand. We pulled two blankets from the back of the Bronco and we found a protected space between the dunes, flattening the grass under our blanket.
By now it was dark, and the stars sparkled high in the night sky. I pulled my sundress over my head, and I sat down.
"You sure you want to do this?" Reilly said after he'd pulled off his shirt. His shoulders and his stomach were white, his eyes intense.
I pulled at the waistband of his jeans.
Reilly fumbled around with his pants, looking for the rubber. He pulled a packet from his pocket, tore it open, fumbled with its contents.
I tried to focus on the sky, looking for Andromeda, for the Big Dipper. I made myself pay attention to the rhythmic sounds of the surf crashing down on the wet sand below the dunes. More than anything, I just wanted to get this over with, to have it be done with.
But nothing was happening.
"God damn it!" Reilly finally said.
"What's wrong?" I said, sitting up.
"It's a god-damn wet-wipe," Reilly said, tossing a foil packet to the blanket. "I picked up a god-damn wet-wipe."
He sat down beside me, his arms resting on his knees.
"I just ruined it, didn't I?" he said.
"Ruined what?" I picked up a blanket and wrapped it around myself. "I'll be right back."
When I returned, I handed Reilly a rubber. Later, I rested my head against his chest, and we studied the sky until we'd each found our satellite, our falling star. We fell asleep, and when we awoke, we pulled on our clothes. We shook the sand from the blankets and climbed into the Bronco, and it was after one o'clock before Reilly kissed me goodnight in the driveway.
When I woke up the next morning, Daddy was shaking my arm. Mother stood in her bathrobe at my bedroom door, her hand resting against the door jamb. They had been drinking coffee in the kitchen, and it had just come across the police scanner. Something had happened last night at Reilly's house, something to do with the chickens.
In less than ten minutes, Daddy and I were pulling into the lane that led to Reilly's house. Past the house - at the end of the chicken house - red and blue lights flashed. When we got to the ambulance, EMTs were bringing Reilly's father out on a gurney. Mr. Jackson had a gash at the top of his forehead, clotted with blood, and the left side of his face was covered in dried blood. He was struggling against the EMTs, who were trying to strap him down.
To our right, a policeman stood outside his cruiser, speaking into a radio that crackled with voices and static. It was the sound of those voices - that static - that suddenly unnerved me. Over the metallic crackle of the radio - over the muffled ranting of Mr. Jackson - there was too much dead air space, too much quiet. Instead of the incessant droning of the ventilation fans - instead of the squabbling of the chickens - there was silence.
When I ran into the chicken house, I knew exactly what I would find. Inside, the heat and the ammonia hit me like a wave. My lungs burned and my eyes streamed, and through a blurry haze I saw the horrific carpet of dead chickens. Thousands and thousands of suffocated chickens. A vast ribbon of white carnage that stretched from one end of the chicken house to the other.
Reilly stood in the middle of the chicken house, wearing a ball cap. He moved slowly, collecting each chicken by a taloned leg that he then transferred to his other hand where the dangling chickens formed an upside-down bouquet of feathers and beaks and glazed-over eyes. He wore no gloves, he wore no mask. His dark hair was plastered to the edges of his face with sweat.
I walked toward him, stepping around the dead chickens as best I could. He kept working, so I did the only thing I could think to do. I held my breath, I bent down, and one by one, I began picking up the dead chickens. They were surprisingly heavy, and in this heat, I knew it wouldn't be long before their joints and flesh softened into feathered pools. The stench would be overwhelming, and we wouldn't be able to breathe without a mask.
Daddy and Miss Gertrude soon joined us, Miss Gertrude wearing a purple track suit. Her lips looked paper-thin, her eyes pale. She studied the carnage around her.
"Lisa, I want you and Reilly to go up to the house and wash up," she said, finally. "Make us some coffee, would you? Or some iced tea. I'd like some iced tea. Reilly, you show her where to find it, would you?"
Reilly tossed a clump of chickens into a mound.
"Is he okay?" Reilly said, looking out across the chicken house. When he pulled off his ball cap, his damp hair remained stamped to his head.
"Do you mean what happened last night?" Miss Gertrude said, her voice tremulous. "He passed out, probably looking for a bottle stashed somewhere," she said of her son. "He hit his head. It's not a serious injury. Mostly, he was just drunk. Black-out, passed-out, drunk."
Miss Gertrude turned carefully in a half-circle, surveying the sea of dead chickens.
"But is this okay?" she continued. "That you are here? That you are standing at 8:30 in the morning in the middle of all this abominable, senseless waste? This is not okay. This is unconscionable. This is unforgivable. Please. Take Lisa up to the house, Reilly. There's nothing more we can do here."
Back at the house, Reilly and I scrubbed our hands and arms in the utility-room sink. He splashed water over his face, and I handed him a towel that had been hanging over the back of the washer. In the kitchen, I found a sauce pan and put some water on the stove to boil. I cleared off a pile of mail from the Formica table. Reilly slumped into the kitchen chair, his head in his hands.
When he started to talk, he kept his voice low, in a whisper. Last night, he said, after we drove home from the beach, he checked to make sure his father's truck was parked in the yard. It was, so he had gone to bed. This morning, though, his father wasn't in his bed, and he wasn't in the house. Instead, Reilly found him in the front room of the chicken house, unconscious, his forehead bloody against the concrete floor. His clothes had been covered in dried vomit, Reilly said. Somehow, he had turned off the electricity at the emergency breaker, probably thinking he was turning out the lights. Without ventilation, the chickens - over 20,000 of them - had suffocated in the heat.
Reilly did the only thing he could think to do. He walked back to the house, and he called the police from the kitchen. After that, he called his grandmother.
At this point, Reilly turned in his chair, and he looked at me.
"I'm never going to get out of here," he said. He pushed his hair away from his forehead, and he shook his head violently.
"I'm going to live and die in this fucking town," he continued. "Dad can't take care of these chickens, Lisa. He can't even take care of himself."
He snatched a pencil from the table and flung it side-arm across the room. It bounced off the refrigerator door with a loud crack, and it hit my ankle.
I looked down at my foot.
"There are no more chickens to take care of," I said, finally, walking away from the table.
Later, when Daddy and Miss Gertrude returned from the chicken house, I poured us glasses of iced tea while Daddy called the chicken serviceman. Miss Gertrude found some garbage bags under the sink and helped Reilly collect his clothes. She was taking him back to her house in town, she said. That afternoon, they would go to Salisbury. She would buy him a suitcase, and tomorrow, she would drive him to Newark. I could ride with them, if I wanted. He was going to college, and there would be no more discussion about it, she said as she stuffed a pair of jeans into a black plastic bag.
Before Daddy and I left, I hugged Reilly hard. As we drove away, he stood on the front porch, large and solid next to Miss Gertrude, with her fluffy blue hair, her purple track suit.
One month later, on a Friday night in September two weeks after I had started my senior year with cosmetology classes at Sussex Vo-Tech, I was crowned the 1982 Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess. Mother had been right. Winning the pageant was all about knowing where to place your feet and hands, how to tilt your head. It was about knowing beforehand what to say and never second-guessing yourself as you said it, about smiling with your teeth and your eyes, about never breaking the cool, enamel-like shell of your composure.
During the pageant, there had been one moment when I might have faltered, one second when the real me, whoever that was, might have cracked through. It was during the talent competition, as I stood in the middle of the stage and recited Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee." Half way through the poem, I looked past the spotlights and into the audience. I found the faces of Mother and Daddy, of Deacon Acord in the judges' section, as Mother had instructed. I smiled widely at Deacon Acord, and in that second I understood with great dread just how much I did not want to be Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess. I did not want to spend the next year swaddled in a dress that wouldn't let me move, in high heels that made my arches ache. I did not want to sit on the back of Deacon Acord's black convertible in the Christmas parade, all eyes on my Princess sash, my sparkling tiara. I did not want to take cosmetology classes at Sussex Vo-Tech and work at the New You! when I graduated next spring.
It wasn't too late - I could stop it right now. I could pull off my high heels, throw them into the audience, go back to my college-prep courses. That would be the end of it.
But I didn't, of course. Sitting next to Daddy, Mother was radiant. I had never seen her so beautiful. Her face beamed, and it was clear to me how happy I was making her. However much I dreaded being the 1982 Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess, I couldn't take this moment away from her.
So I continued with the poem. "And neither the angels in heaven above," I recited for her, "Nor the demons down under the sea,/Can ever dissever my soul from the soul/Of the beautiful Annabel Lee."
Next morning, as Mother happily attended to her Saturday-morning clients and Daddy worked in the chicken houses, I pulled my suitcase from under my bed. I packed enough clean underwear and clothes to last a week. I packed the orchid and the white rose from Reilly, both of which I had dried between the pages of my Bible. Then, from the red coffee can in my closet, I counted out almost three hundred dollars in shampoo tip money. It was more than enough for the bus ticket. I tore a piece of paper from the yellow legal pad, and I wrote my parents a note.
The first thing I did when I got to Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida, was to send Reilly a package. The snack bar had those little packets of wet-wipes, with pictures of Weeki Wachee mermaids stamped on one side. "Love, Mermaid Lisa," I wrote on the other side before I stuffed the packet into an envelope, addressing it to Reilly Jackson at the University of Delaware.
Three days later, I called my parents, right after my first performance as Mermaid Lisa. Once Mother knew I was all right, she wouldn't speak to me, and I don't blame her. So I talked to Daddy instead. I told him that I had lied about my age and that I had a contract to perform three shows a day, five days a week. I told him I was living with Mrs. Peters's friend - Mermaid Melinda - and her husband and two children. It was only for nine months, and after that I would go back to school or earn my GED or whatever it was he wanted me to do.
Daddy showed up three days later. He watched me perform in the mermaid show, and he ate dinner with us at Mermaid Melinda's house. The next day, before he started back to Delaware, he told me not to give up on Mother, that she just needed some time. He hugged me tight, and he said he thought it would be alright if I stayed at Weeki Wachee Springs - with Mermaid Melinda - until June.
Time goes by so fast. It's March already, but I made a deal. In June I'll go back to Delaware, at least until I finish school. After that, who knows? For better or worse, I'm beginning to think that the world is a much larger place than Reilly or I had ever imagined. Until June, though, I perform three shows a day, five days a week. I turn in slow underwater coils with the other mermaids, our movements graceful and strong. Underwater, my hair spills around my head in a fiery halo. I hear nothing but the music, I feel nothing but the warmth of the water on my skin, the power of my mermaid tail against the water. When I smile, delicate bubbles escape from the corners of my mouth. They spool upward in elegant threads until they break open at the rim of my mermaid world, like the perfect inverse of tears.
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/eDdCnR7
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My own imperfection, I knew as a little girl, was my hair. From the time I was old enough to sit in the booster seat of the beauty-parlor chair, Mother tried to tame my flaming red curls. Curls, though, is not the right word to describe the shapes my hair took. Curls bounce sweetly when a little girl plays hopscotch at recess. Curls stream behind the little girl as she soars on the playground swing, her Mary Janes pointing toward the clouds. Curls fall in delicate ringlets upon that little girl's collar. My hair? My hair was a blaze of orange spray paint against the side of a white barn, a fiery tongue of sass in a second-grade classroom where all the girls and boys raised their hands politely. It was a cosmetological scream against beauty and conformity and the status quo.
Mother, however, was not one to back down without a fight. She declared war on my hair, her weapons of choice Dippity-do, blue curlers, and a short hairstyle. Sunday mornings, before church, she'd perch me on a booster seat in her beauty parlor. She'd study the photograph I pointed to from her fashion magazine, and, with the end of her comb, she'd divide my hair into a grid. Section by section, she'd pull my hair straight, smear on the pretty-smelling gel, tuck my hair around the curlers, and pin those curlers hard against my scalp. When she was done, we'd both make faces in the mirror, Mother beautiful in her silk slip, me a space alien with my helmet of blue curlers. She'd lift me up on a stack of People magazines, adjust the hair dryer so that it angled just above my eyes, set the timer. I liked sitting under the hair dryer. I liked the deafening whir, and I liked the blowing heat that turned my cheeks and the edges of my ears pink.
But there was a problem. Mother was a one-chord beautician, and that meant that by the time she combed out my curls; by the time she shielded my eyes with the blade of her hand and sprayed my head with two coats of hairspray; by the time she twirled my chair around so I could see her creation in the mirror, my hair looked just like the hair of her regular customers. Each week I'd blink back my disappointment and hold on to my smile, but each week it was the same. No matter what movie star I'd pointed to in the fashion magazine, my hair looked like the hair of Miss Gertrude, Mother's Tuesdays-at-10:15, or the hair of Miss Hilda, or of Miss Beatrice. My poofed, unmoving hair looked just like the blue-tinted hair of almost every seventy-five-year-old woman in Laurel. Except that my hair was red - and a whole lot thicker.
By the time I was ten, I'd given up on our Sunday ritual. That was the year Mrs. Peters moved to town with her husband and two girls and established the Del'Mar Nereids - a synchronized swimming team for girls. It was strange, but from almost the first time I plunged into the pool, I knew I'd found my element. I loved the way the water swallowed me down and buoyed me up, how lovely it felt against my skin. I loved the way I could turn somersaults underwater and then propel myself into the open air. Some of the older girls said that before she moved to Delaware, Mrs. Peters had been a Weeki Wachee mermaid in Florida. I didn't know if that was true, but before long, nothing was more important to me than perfecting my split-arm sculls, mastering my eggbeater kick. For this I needed a no-nonsense hairstyle. Something I could tuck into my swimmer's cap before practice or pull tight into a bun and glaze with Knox gelatin before our Synchro performances. After years of my pleading, Mother finally let me grow my hair out. When I wasn't swimming - when I was studying or earning tip money at the shampoo sink of the New You! - I kept my hair pulled back in a tangled ponytail.
Then, one lazy Sunday afternoon last May, just after I turned 17, Mother finally tamed my hair. By accident, almost. We'd been mulling over hairstyles for the junior/senior prom, which Mother was making me attend.
"Fine!" I'd screamed at her two nights earlier, thinking the situation would take care of itself when no invitation came. "Fine! I'll go!"
But I'd underestimated Mother. Within a day, she'd lined up my date: Reilly Jackson, the trombone-playing grandson of Miss Gertrude, one of her regular customers from town. Reilly ate peanut-butter and cheese sandwiches in the cafeteria and worked at the Southern States co-op after school. His teenage mother had run off when he was two, and he lived with his father on a farm where the chicken house hadn't been painted in decades. Yes, as Mother repeatedly pointed out, Reilly was a senior. But he was also - and there was no tactful way to put this - he was also fat. Mother, however, had made up her mind, and there was no fighting her on this. I was going to the prom with Reilly Jackson.
"Let's try something loose and flowing," Mother said that afternoon, combing through my hair with her fingers. "Something that balances out your nose."
"What's wrong with my nose?" I glared at the mirror.
"Nothing's wrong with your nose, Lisa. It just needs some... balancing."
Mother washed and conditioned my hair and then started the process of drying it. Strand by strand, she pulled her brush through my hair, wagging the blow dryer over my head, humming a song. When my hair was almost dry, she studied me in the mirror, patting my head. After some thought, she plugged in a flat iron and got us two Frescas from the kitchen. For the next half hour, she worked her way through my hair, securing the swirl of unironed hair to the top of my head with a clip. The iron cooked all the moisture from my hair in little whiffs of steam, making me smell like an ironed shirt.
Finally, Mother swapped her brush for a wide-tooth comb. She took out a pair of scissors, and she began snipping at the hair around my face. By now she'd stopped her humming and she worked quickly, fluttering around my chair in a kind of excitement. She turned me to face her, smoothing the sides of my hair. She studied me hard. From a small brown bottle, she poured out a few drops of oil, rubbed her hands together, ran them through my hair.
"Unbelievable," she said, turning me to face the mirror.
I have to admit it. I was shocked. With her gels and oils and conditioners, her blow dryer and her flat iron, Mother had transformed my impossible mop into a helmet of stick-straight hair. When I ran my hand through my hair, my fingers glided through smoothly. When I tossed my head, my hair fanned out to the sides. Even my nose was transformed, strong and sharp as my cheekbones. I had been replaced by a beautiful stranger, and it felt more than a little bit weird.
The hair was just the beginning. Over the next two weeks, Mother continued my transformation. With sewing pins sticking out of her mouth, she draped me in a watery green silk that fell from one shoulder, hugged my skinny hips, and flared below my knees. She brushed my eyelashes with thick layers of mascara. Finally, she completed my ensemble, as she called it, with a shimmering pair of 4-inch stilettos.
The night of the prom, the shoes were the first thing I ditched. It was after Reilly had given me an orchid corsage and met my parents and taken me into town for pictures at his grandmother's house.
"You two look lovely," Miss Gertrude had said in town, posing Reilly and me in her front yard.
Miss Gertrude was still taking pictures when a pick-up truck pulled to the curb.
"I didn't forget!" a middle-aged man called, slamming the door. He was wearing jeans and a faded Oxford shirt.
Miss Gertrude looked at her son - Reilly's father - then continued to take pictures. "We're just about done," she said brightly.
"Don't mind me," Reilly's father said, walking toward two plastic lawn chairs.
After we were done, Reilly's father patted at the seat of the chair next to him.
"Sit down here, girl - tell me about yourself."
I didn't want to be rude. So I sat down in the chair.
"He's a quiet one, Reilly. You got to watch out for the quiet ones," Mr. Jackson laughed, leaning close to me. His breath smelled of strong mouthwash, and he had creases at the corners of his eyes.
"Now me, I'm not so quiet. You don't have to worry about me."
Reilly approached the chairs. "We need to go now, Dad," he said.
As I stood, my left heel sank into the lawn, and I stumbled back. Reilly stiffened his arm behind me, and I steadied myself.
"Watch yourself now, girl," Mr. Jackson said, popping a Tic-Tac in his mouth.
My face was suddenly hot. I gave a slight wave to Miss Gertrude and Reilly's dad, and I turned toward the Bronco.
"Sorry about that," Reilly said as we walked to the driveway.
As soon as Reilly and I were in the Bronco, I pulled off the high heels and stuffed them under the front seat. When we got to the restaurant, Reilly came around to the passenger side. "You think anyone will notice if I go in without shoes?" I asked, hiking my dress up so I could climb out of the truck. Wearing this dress was like being swaddled in green fish scales. I was afraid the dress would split open if I made any large movements.
"I don't think so," Reilly said, offering me his hand. "It's a long dress. You'll be okay. Maybe it'll help if you walk on your toes."
He was right. When I walked on my toes the dress fell just right and my body leaned forward at the just the right angle. In fact, it was turning out that Reilly wasn't such a bad date, after all. Dressed up in a tux, he was almost cute, actually - tall, and with broad shoulders that supported his weight well. And when you listened to him, he was kind and interesting and funny - all things I'd never expected from a trombone player. We ordered crab-cakes, and I told him about my upcoming Synchro competition. I nibbled at yeast rolls, and he told me about working at the Southern States Co-op.
By the time we finally arrived at the Convention Center for the prom, it was after 8 o'clock. We made our way to the punch bowl, and we tried to dance to "Stairway to Heaven."
"Are you having fun?" Reilly screamed into my ear. His hands cradled my waist loosely.
"No! I'm sorry!" I shouted back. "It's too loud!"
"Wanna go to the beach?"
I smiled, and then I nodded.
So that night, while we should have been dancing to a deafening beat at the prom, Reilly drove us to the beach. He parked in the sand and we watched the silent moon shimmer across the water. He told me how his grandmother was losing money on the chicken house and that she had been talking to land developers. I told Reilly how beautiful it felt to execute a perfectly timed lift with my Synchro team.
We'd been talking like this for an hour when he leaned over and kissed me. It was my first kiss, and I'd never felt anything so soft, so thrilling. So I let him kiss me, and kiss me some more. After a while, he pulled an old blanket from the back of the Bronco and we spread it on the beach. This time when we kissed I pulled him on top of me, just to know what it felt like to be pressed down with a boy's weight. He held my face between his hands. Then we searched for satellites and shooting stars.
"Tell me something you've never told anyone," I said after I'd seen my shooting star.
When Reilly finally spoke, he was looking at the star-blasted sky.
"When I get out of college - when I get a job - I want it to be a job where I can wear a suit."
He turned to me. "You now. Something you've never told anybody."
After a moment, I told him something I hadn't even realized myself.
"In my next life," I said, looking out over the moon-soaked ocean, "I want to come back as a mermaid."
The next morning, when I picked my prom dress up off my bedroom floor, a small shower of sand sprinkled down. Downstairs, Mother and Daddy were already eating breakfast, the police scanner hissing in the background. They were partially dressed for church, Mother in her silk slip, her hair and make-up done; Daddy wearing a freshly ironed shirt, the pants to his suit, his black church shoes. He was reading the Sunday paper, keeping the newsprint a safe distance from his shirt.
Mother poured me a cup of coffee.
"What time did you get in?" she said.
"It was late."
Daddy rose from his chair. "Lisa, do you want some orange juice, honey? Let me get you some orange juice."
My eyes were gritty with sleep and mascara. I drank a sip of the steaming coffee.
Mother leaned across the table with purpose. "Sweetheart, I want you to hear me out on this," she said. Something about her worried me, something about her eyes. They were bright, and they darted from my pajamas to my hair.
"How would you like to be the 1982 Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess?" Mother said. Her eyes sparkled.
"For Christ's sakes, Lenore!" Daddy set a glass on the counter. "Would you leave the girl alone?"
"You could do this, sweetheart," Mother said, ignoring Daddy. "I know you could. With my help, you could do this."
Daddy grabbed the newspaper and strode into the family room.
When Mother took my hand in hers, I saw that the fingernail polish on my left ring finger was chipped. "I want you to think about this, Lisa," she said softly. "You are almost a senior now, and Reilly Jackson is your first date. If you win this pageant, you could have your pick of any boy in Laurel - of any boy in Delmar, even," she said. "This could transform you, sweetheart, this could transform your whole life. Please. Think about it."
What was I to do? I couldn't say no to Mother about the pageant any more than I could tell her that I wasn't sure I wanted to study cosmetology next year, my senior year, at Sussex Vo-Tech. That I wasn't sure I wanted to work at the New You! So my lessons, as she called them, started the following Sunday. At two o'clock, after church and our Sunday lunch at the Dutch Inn, I joined Mother in the beauty parlor until four o'clock. Mostly, she gave me egg-white facials and plucked the fine blond hairs between my eyebrows. She poured hot oil on my hair and wrapped my head in a towel, then soaked my fingers in a soapy solution. Using a small wooden stick tapered at one end, she pushed back my cuticles.
"You've not been pushing back your cuticles, sweetheart. They're a mess."
"But I have, Mother!"
"No, you haven't. You have to do it every day, as soon as you get out of the pool, when they're soft."
On some Sundays, Mother worked on my posture and my stride. She watched me closely as I walked down an imaginary runway, teaching me to land on the ball of my foot, not the heel.
"Like walking on a tightrope, sweetheart," she said, lifting my head lightly. "Shoulders back, chin out."
It took us several weeks to figure out what I could do for the talent competition. I'd taken piano lessons, of course, but Mother said we needed something different - something unique - and she decided I should do a dramatic interpretation. Something from Edgar Allan Poe might work.
After about a month, Mother began coaching me for the question-and-answer competition, asking me questions she'd written down on a yellow pad. Mother agonized over each question, but it didn't take me long to figure out that all I needed were two or three responses, depending on the type of question.
"If there is one thing you could do to change the world what would it be?" That was easy - the "world-peace" question.
"Tell us a little about your goals and dreams." Still another world-peace question, this one dressed up a little. All I needed to add was a future where I could live in a foreign country and help people and achieve world peace. Like becoming a missionary or something like that.
But the easiest question of all was the question that was asked every year. This was, after all, the Delmarva Poultry Princess Pageant, and the winner of the pageant would be promoting chicken at every county fair for a year. "What is your favorite food?" My favorite food was Delmarvalous Roadside Chicken, with baked beans and corn on the cob.
"We here on the Eastern Shore are so fortunate because we have the tastiest chicken - the freshest corn - on the entire east coast!"
"Perfect, sweetheart," Mother said, putting down the legal pad. "I can hear the applause already."
Funny thing was, I really did like Delmarvalous Roadside Chicken. Mother eventually agreed that after my Sunday lessons, I could spend some time with Reilly, and over the course of the summer, that became our routine. During the two hours between my lessons and Sunday-evening church services, Reilly drove us to the intersection of Route 404 and Scott's Store Road, along the route that the tourists from Washington and Baltimore took to get to the Delaware beaches. There, on Saturdays and Sundays, volunteers from the Kiwanis Club set up oil-drum grills - huge, black contraptions that hinged open like coffins. Wearing t-shirts and ball caps, these thick-chested men mixed up tubs of apple-cider vinegar and egg, corn oil and poultry seasoning. With paintbrushes, they slathered the mixture on chicken quarters as flaccid and white as a newborn's bottom. Then, sweating under the blazing sun, they slowly grilled the chicken, turning the quarters with stainless-steel prongs, fanning the smoke away from their eyes. For $5.50 each, Reilly and I both got a Styrofoam dinner box with a chicken quarter; half an ear of corn; baked beans; a dinner roll; a pat of butter; a plastic knife and fork; a napkin; packets of salt and pepper; and a wet-wipe enclosed in a foil packet.
"I wonder if you could make this chicken yourself," I said to Reilly one afternoon in July, licking the grease off my fingers. We were sitting atop a picnic bench at Trap Pond State Park.
"Probably," Reilly said. "Hardest part would be not cooking it too fast."
"Yeah," I agreed. "Nothing worse than grilled chicken bloody at the bone."
Down the hill, a young mother pushed a stroller toward the lake. Beside her, a man in a tank top poured Coke into a baby bottle.
"How's it going with your dad?" I asked. Over the spring, Reilly's dad had started drinking again - a lot - and Reilly had been picking up the slack at the chicken house. He made sure that the feeders and the watering troughs were working properly, that the dead chickens were pitched into the composting pits, that the fans were circulating enough fresh air. This time of year, air circulation was important. Fifteen minutes without fresh air in this heat and you could lose thousands of chickens.
"Dad? He's not so good. I had to pick him up from the V.F.W. last night."
"Chickens okay?"
"Yeah, they're okay. I ran the feeders at lunch, and I'll check them again when I get back home."
Reilly stuffed the Styrofoam boxes back into the plastic bag. He tore open the wet-wipe packet and wiped the grease off his fingers. What I wanted to ask him - but what I wouldn't ask him - was what was going to happen to the chickens when he left for college in three weeks. University of Delaware was over two hours away, and even if he came home every weekend, something could happen during the week. But I wouldn't ask Reilly this question. I didn't need to. It was already too much on his mind. And while a part of me was afraid of what would happen to us as a couple when he left, another part of me was afraid that something would happen to keep Reilly from going to college. I was afraid that he would never have that job where he could wear a suit.
"Let me have that," I said, taking the wet-wipe. I swiped at my hands then gently touched Reilly's face, wiping a spot of grease from his cheek. It was after 5:30, and lapping out in front of us, the lake glittered in the low sun. Reilly and I held hands as we walked back along the path to the parking lot, the tops of the loblolly pines swaying. He tossed the bag into the back seat, and I pulled a wet-wipe packet from my skirt pocket, placing it in the console cup-holder between our seats, where we collected extra ones. There must have been five or six of them by now.
Mother and Daddy's station wagon was already in the church's parking lot when Reilly pulled in. Mother, I knew, would be waiting for me in the ladies' room. I kissed Reilly quickly on the lips, hitched my purse over my shoulder, got out of the Bronco. On my left, Deacon Acord was helping his wife out of their shiny black convertible. Deacon Acord was one of the leaders of our church, and - as mother had pointed out - a judge at the Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess pageant. He closed his wife's door and watched as Reilly pulled away, then nodded to me curtly.
Smoothing down my skirt, I hurried inside to the ladies room. Mother was touching up her lipstick, her face frozen in that bug-eyed look she always wore when she put on her make-up. From my purse, I pulled out a brush and ran it quickly through my hair. I blotted at my face with a powder compact, reapplied my lipstick.
"Everything okay?" I said into the mirror. Mother stood behind me, frowning.
"Here - spray on some of this," she said, pulling a bottle of cologne from her purse. "You smell like barbeque."
We had planned it for weeks. The Friday night before Reilly was to leave, we drove to the beach. The day had been one of those sweltering Eastern Shore days, the kind of day that wilted your clothes and unplugged your motivation. Even at nine o'clock, when Reilly picked me up, the night air was thick as pie filling.
When I climbed into the Bronco, there was a small Rite Aid bag on the passenger's seat, and a single white rose. I smelled the rose. Then, as we pulled out of the driveway, I opened the bag and pulled out a small black box of Trojans. I opened the box and spilled the packets onto my lap.
"After the cashier rang me up he winked at me," Reilly said. "Told me to have a good night."
This was more embarrassing than funny. But I was nervous, and I started laughing, and before I knew it I was laughing so hard I couldn't stop. I put my hands over my face and doubled over, the little packets of rubbers spilling down over the console between Reilly and me. When I finally caught my breath, I searched the floor and the console with my hands until I found them, stuffing them back into the Rite Aid bag. "I'm sorry," I said, wiping my eyes. I put my hand on Reilly's thigh and looked out the window, watching the dark fields spool by in the night. We rode with the windows down, the hot air blowing over us. We tried to listen to the radio, but it was hard to hear anything over the sound of the wind. So we just sat together the hour it took us to get to the beach, not talking, my hand resting on Reilly's thigh.
At the beach, after we'd found a place to park, Reilly pulled one of the little packets from the Rite Aid bag and stuffed it in his jeans. I took off my sandals and stepped down into the still-warm sand. We pulled two blankets from the back of the Bronco and we found a protected space between the dunes, flattening the grass under our blanket.
By now it was dark, and the stars sparkled high in the night sky. I pulled my sundress over my head, and I sat down.
"You sure you want to do this?" Reilly said after he'd pulled off his shirt. His shoulders and his stomach were white, his eyes intense.
I pulled at the waistband of his jeans.
Reilly fumbled around with his pants, looking for the rubber. He pulled a packet from his pocket, tore it open, fumbled with its contents.
I tried to focus on the sky, looking for Andromeda, for the Big Dipper. I made myself pay attention to the rhythmic sounds of the surf crashing down on the wet sand below the dunes. More than anything, I just wanted to get this over with, to have it be done with.
But nothing was happening.
"God damn it!" Reilly finally said.
"What's wrong?" I said, sitting up.
"It's a god-damn wet-wipe," Reilly said, tossing a foil packet to the blanket. "I picked up a god-damn wet-wipe."
He sat down beside me, his arms resting on his knees.
"I just ruined it, didn't I?" he said.
"Ruined what?" I picked up a blanket and wrapped it around myself. "I'll be right back."
When I returned, I handed Reilly a rubber. Later, I rested my head against his chest, and we studied the sky until we'd each found our satellite, our falling star. We fell asleep, and when we awoke, we pulled on our clothes. We shook the sand from the blankets and climbed into the Bronco, and it was after one o'clock before Reilly kissed me goodnight in the driveway.
When I woke up the next morning, Daddy was shaking my arm. Mother stood in her bathrobe at my bedroom door, her hand resting against the door jamb. They had been drinking coffee in the kitchen, and it had just come across the police scanner. Something had happened last night at Reilly's house, something to do with the chickens.
In less than ten minutes, Daddy and I were pulling into the lane that led to Reilly's house. Past the house - at the end of the chicken house - red and blue lights flashed. When we got to the ambulance, EMTs were bringing Reilly's father out on a gurney. Mr. Jackson had a gash at the top of his forehead, clotted with blood, and the left side of his face was covered in dried blood. He was struggling against the EMTs, who were trying to strap him down.
To our right, a policeman stood outside his cruiser, speaking into a radio that crackled with voices and static. It was the sound of those voices - that static - that suddenly unnerved me. Over the metallic crackle of the radio - over the muffled ranting of Mr. Jackson - there was too much dead air space, too much quiet. Instead of the incessant droning of the ventilation fans - instead of the squabbling of the chickens - there was silence.
When I ran into the chicken house, I knew exactly what I would find. Inside, the heat and the ammonia hit me like a wave. My lungs burned and my eyes streamed, and through a blurry haze I saw the horrific carpet of dead chickens. Thousands and thousands of suffocated chickens. A vast ribbon of white carnage that stretched from one end of the chicken house to the other.
Reilly stood in the middle of the chicken house, wearing a ball cap. He moved slowly, collecting each chicken by a taloned leg that he then transferred to his other hand where the dangling chickens formed an upside-down bouquet of feathers and beaks and glazed-over eyes. He wore no gloves, he wore no mask. His dark hair was plastered to the edges of his face with sweat.
I walked toward him, stepping around the dead chickens as best I could. He kept working, so I did the only thing I could think to do. I held my breath, I bent down, and one by one, I began picking up the dead chickens. They were surprisingly heavy, and in this heat, I knew it wouldn't be long before their joints and flesh softened into feathered pools. The stench would be overwhelming, and we wouldn't be able to breathe without a mask.
Daddy and Miss Gertrude soon joined us, Miss Gertrude wearing a purple track suit. Her lips looked paper-thin, her eyes pale. She studied the carnage around her.
"Lisa, I want you and Reilly to go up to the house and wash up," she said, finally. "Make us some coffee, would you? Or some iced tea. I'd like some iced tea. Reilly, you show her where to find it, would you?"
Reilly tossed a clump of chickens into a mound.
"Is he okay?" Reilly said, looking out across the chicken house. When he pulled off his ball cap, his damp hair remained stamped to his head.
"Do you mean what happened last night?" Miss Gertrude said, her voice tremulous. "He passed out, probably looking for a bottle stashed somewhere," she said of her son. "He hit his head. It's not a serious injury. Mostly, he was just drunk. Black-out, passed-out, drunk."
Miss Gertrude turned carefully in a half-circle, surveying the sea of dead chickens.
"But is this okay?" she continued. "That you are here? That you are standing at 8:30 in the morning in the middle of all this abominable, senseless waste? This is not okay. This is unconscionable. This is unforgivable. Please. Take Lisa up to the house, Reilly. There's nothing more we can do here."
Back at the house, Reilly and I scrubbed our hands and arms in the utility-room sink. He splashed water over his face, and I handed him a towel that had been hanging over the back of the washer. In the kitchen, I found a sauce pan and put some water on the stove to boil. I cleared off a pile of mail from the Formica table. Reilly slumped into the kitchen chair, his head in his hands.
When he started to talk, he kept his voice low, in a whisper. Last night, he said, after we drove home from the beach, he checked to make sure his father's truck was parked in the yard. It was, so he had gone to bed. This morning, though, his father wasn't in his bed, and he wasn't in the house. Instead, Reilly found him in the front room of the chicken house, unconscious, his forehead bloody against the concrete floor. His clothes had been covered in dried vomit, Reilly said. Somehow, he had turned off the electricity at the emergency breaker, probably thinking he was turning out the lights. Without ventilation, the chickens - over 20,000 of them - had suffocated in the heat.
Reilly did the only thing he could think to do. He walked back to the house, and he called the police from the kitchen. After that, he called his grandmother.
At this point, Reilly turned in his chair, and he looked at me.
"I'm never going to get out of here," he said. He pushed his hair away from his forehead, and he shook his head violently.
"I'm going to live and die in this fucking town," he continued. "Dad can't take care of these chickens, Lisa. He can't even take care of himself."
He snatched a pencil from the table and flung it side-arm across the room. It bounced off the refrigerator door with a loud crack, and it hit my ankle.
I looked down at my foot.
"There are no more chickens to take care of," I said, finally, walking away from the table.
Later, when Daddy and Miss Gertrude returned from the chicken house, I poured us glasses of iced tea while Daddy called the chicken serviceman. Miss Gertrude found some garbage bags under the sink and helped Reilly collect his clothes. She was taking him back to her house in town, she said. That afternoon, they would go to Salisbury. She would buy him a suitcase, and tomorrow, she would drive him to Newark. I could ride with them, if I wanted. He was going to college, and there would be no more discussion about it, she said as she stuffed a pair of jeans into a black plastic bag.
Before Daddy and I left, I hugged Reilly hard. As we drove away, he stood on the front porch, large and solid next to Miss Gertrude, with her fluffy blue hair, her purple track suit.
One month later, on a Friday night in September two weeks after I had started my senior year with cosmetology classes at Sussex Vo-Tech, I was crowned the 1982 Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess. Mother had been right. Winning the pageant was all about knowing where to place your feet and hands, how to tilt your head. It was about knowing beforehand what to say and never second-guessing yourself as you said it, about smiling with your teeth and your eyes, about never breaking the cool, enamel-like shell of your composure.
During the pageant, there had been one moment when I might have faltered, one second when the real me, whoever that was, might have cracked through. It was during the talent competition, as I stood in the middle of the stage and recited Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee." Half way through the poem, I looked past the spotlights and into the audience. I found the faces of Mother and Daddy, of Deacon Acord in the judges' section, as Mother had instructed. I smiled widely at Deacon Acord, and in that second I understood with great dread just how much I did not want to be Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess. I did not want to spend the next year swaddled in a dress that wouldn't let me move, in high heels that made my arches ache. I did not want to sit on the back of Deacon Acord's black convertible in the Christmas parade, all eyes on my Princess sash, my sparkling tiara. I did not want to take cosmetology classes at Sussex Vo-Tech and work at the New You! when I graduated next spring.
It wasn't too late - I could stop it right now. I could pull off my high heels, throw them into the audience, go back to my college-prep courses. That would be the end of it.
But I didn't, of course. Sitting next to Daddy, Mother was radiant. I had never seen her so beautiful. Her face beamed, and it was clear to me how happy I was making her. However much I dreaded being the 1982 Miss Delmarva Poultry Princess, I couldn't take this moment away from her.
So I continued with the poem. "And neither the angels in heaven above," I recited for her, "Nor the demons down under the sea,/Can ever dissever my soul from the soul/Of the beautiful Annabel Lee."
Next morning, as Mother happily attended to her Saturday-morning clients and Daddy worked in the chicken houses, I pulled my suitcase from under my bed. I packed enough clean underwear and clothes to last a week. I packed the orchid and the white rose from Reilly, both of which I had dried between the pages of my Bible. Then, from the red coffee can in my closet, I counted out almost three hundred dollars in shampoo tip money. It was more than enough for the bus ticket. I tore a piece of paper from the yellow legal pad, and I wrote my parents a note.
The first thing I did when I got to Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida, was to send Reilly a package. The snack bar had those little packets of wet-wipes, with pictures of Weeki Wachee mermaids stamped on one side. "Love, Mermaid Lisa," I wrote on the other side before I stuffed the packet into an envelope, addressing it to Reilly Jackson at the University of Delaware.
Three days later, I called my parents, right after my first performance as Mermaid Lisa. Once Mother knew I was all right, she wouldn't speak to me, and I don't blame her. So I talked to Daddy instead. I told him that I had lied about my age and that I had a contract to perform three shows a day, five days a week. I told him I was living with Mrs. Peters's friend - Mermaid Melinda - and her husband and two children. It was only for nine months, and after that I would go back to school or earn my GED or whatever it was he wanted me to do.
Daddy showed up three days later. He watched me perform in the mermaid show, and he ate dinner with us at Mermaid Melinda's house. The next day, before he started back to Delaware, he told me not to give up on Mother, that she just needed some time. He hugged me tight, and he said he thought it would be alright if I stayed at Weeki Wachee Springs - with Mermaid Melinda - until June.
Time goes by so fast. It's March already, but I made a deal. In June I'll go back to Delaware, at least until I finish school. After that, who knows? For better or worse, I'm beginning to think that the world is a much larger place than Reilly or I had ever imagined. Until June, though, I perform three shows a day, five days a week. I turn in slow underwater coils with the other mermaids, our movements graceful and strong. Underwater, my hair spills around my head in a fiery halo. I hear nothing but the music, I feel nothing but the warmth of the water on my skin, the power of my mermaid tail against the water. When I smile, delicate bubbles escape from the corners of my mouth. They spool upward in elegant threads until they break open at the rim of my mermaid world, like the perfect inverse of tears.
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/eDdCnR7
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