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Chapter 46 - Beautiful
- University of Massachusetts Press
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222 H u n g ry H i l l “I’m not letting you smell my breath. You’re such a skirt,” Danny sneers and brushes by me. Although Kelly’s protests of innocence have a false ring, I can’t smell beer or whiskey on either of them. Slinking off to the back bedroom, they lift their feet and shush one another. Leaning back against the kitchen sink, I stare at the rooster clock as if it could tell me whether they had been drinking, as if it had answers for me. Mary’s sleeping is a gift, like a heavy rain putting out a brushfire. How does Danny know Mary is taking sleeping pills? Like me, Danny is playing detective nosing around at the scene of the crime. Climbing back up the stairs, I wonder what kind of a locker room putdown a “skirt” is. = 46. Beautiful As a member of the Junior Prom decorating committee, though one with limited artistic talent, I stop by the cafeteria after the student council meeting and am amazed by the transformation rolls of multicolored crepe paper make. Pastel paper roses hang from the ceiling, decorating the mirrored columns and the base of the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I, the visiting drone, compliment the buzzing worker bees and search for a suitable task. Gathering the scissors, tape, wire, and leftover crepe paper, I carry them to the secretary in the principal’s office. When my crepe paper roses are laughed at and rejected, the chair hints that there is nothing more for me to do, so I skip out and take the after school bus downtown for my appointment to have my hair done. On the fourth floor of Peerless, Bruno, Mary’s hairdresser, a miracle man who manages to keep her happy when it comes to the all-important topic of hair coloring and style, jumps to the task of creating pouf with my mass of limp, fine hair. In an hour, Bruno works his magic on me. Coiffed, sprayed, my stiff hair rubbing against the collar of my blazer, I catch myself admiring the reflection of my puff-head, half-afraid a robin might settle in it, in the window of the bus. The dress. The hair. The shoes dyed to match. When I walk into the living room, Tommy rounds the corner, stopping in the entryway to gawk at his Cinderella sister. He approaches me slowly, looks me up and down, A Memoir 223 steps back, and whispers, “Carole, you look so beautiful.” I feel the edges of an ice cube inside me softening with the “beautiful” from my shortlegged admirer, and I pat his hair, the crew cut tickling my fingers. In their white tuxedo jackets, Barry and Kevin glide up the porch stairs on patentleather shoes with Jean in the middle holding their arms. Mary takes pictures of the four of us, pretend grown-ups, in the living room with Jean’s camera. The red carnation I stick in Kevin’s lapel falls to the sidewalk on our way to the car. At work on Saturday morning, guarding the bargain tables, I file sums away in a rivulet of my brain where only I know the totals, the real figures. The prom’s sneak expenses cost me more than two weeks of work, but I will just wear the same dress and shoes to the Senior Prom. At lunch in the employee cafeteria, I look down at my knees and spot varicose veins on my legs, just like my mother had during her pregnancies. Although I stand at the bargain tables for eighteen hours a week, I am shocked that a sixteen-year-old could get black and blue pathways of varicose veins. Cruising the hosiery department for the ugly, thick support hose, I finish up my lunch break. Ugly and expensive stockings, stockings the nuns might wear, is not the way I want to spend my paycheck, so I decide to let the stockings go for now and hope the veins will disappear. Tonight, I, no longer “beautiful,” will stay at home. Although Jean and Barry have a date tonight, Kevin told me he was just too worn out from sitting at the prom. At the prom, Barry and Jean had danced, while Kevin and I had sat in an awkward silence. Back in January, Kevin and a group of seniors had decided that the minstrel was beneath them. The minstrel is scheduled...