A woman from a group called the Spare Ribs (which would have made us dubious if it hadn't been for Mrs. Pauling) delivered the next speech, which gave us all pause: “We have been told that femininity is being smart enough to be dumb around a man,” she said. “For me, femininity consists in being myself, in not putting myself down or my sisters down.”
I began clapping then, without having decided to, and I wasn't alone. Linda, on one side of me, and Brett, on the other, were both clapping, and Kath and Ally were as well. Even Maggie, standing in front of me, was clapping, having no real idea what she was clapping for but following my lead. And so were Jamie and Julie, and Sarah and Lacy, and J.J. and Davy and even little Mark. Kath's Anna Page was not just clapping but cheering without restraint, her hair wild around her face, her hat upside down on the pavement behind her, where it would be stepped upon by a passerby too busy staring at the fellow in the Bunny costume to see it there.
WE GATHERED AT LINDA'S the Saturday night of the Miss America Pageant that year, a few weeks after the rally in Lytton Plaza, but we didn't turn on the TV. “No Miss 46-22-36 for us tonight,” we said. We planned to enjoy a quiet evening together not watching, in part to assure Kath there would be life for her after Lee, if he divorced her, which he hadn't yet. He was, in fact, at their house that very evening, eating the dinner she had prepared as if he still lived there, which was the charade they continued to keep up.
Kath had run through the last of her savings buying school clothes even though she'd economized, letting Arselia go and serving more and more macaroni and cheese. To make ends meet, she'd accepted the first job she was offered, working for an obnoxious accountant who paid her the same $1.60 an hour we paid Arselia, but who let her go every day in time to be home when school got out. Every morning, Kath put on the skirt and hose and high heels required by office rules, saw Anna Page and Lee-Lee off to school, dropped Lacy with one of us, and went to work. When Lacy whined about being left, Kath took it all on her own shoulders, too. She acted as if her job were a fabulous opportunity rather than the sheer drudge it was, and she never once hinted that she was only working so that Lacy could still have her favorite Lorna Doone cookies and Anna Page could wear patent leather shoes.
You had to admire Kath for that, for never allowing her children a glimpse of what a rat their daddy was. You had to wonder why you'd spend a whole evening admiring Miss Kentucky just because she wore gowns well when no one was admiring the kind of woman Kath was. All that carefully tended beauty, all that apparent faultlessness? You couldn't imagine those girls could be from struggling families, that they might have to work to send their brothers to college, that their husbands might abandon them. You couldn't imagine they would ever find themselves childless, or with lumps in their breasts, or with scars or fears they might need gloves to protect against. They were feminine, beautiful, and so you imagined their lives were all debutante balls and trust funds, that they awoke looking as beautiful as they appeared on the pageant stage, that they would never want for anything, or ever doubt themselves.
No pageant this year, we'd decided. Kath didn't need to stack herself up to Miss Kentucky. None of us did. We would spend the evening together admiring each other instead.
We poured our usuals that evening—gin and tonics, vodka gimlets, sidecars—and we nibbled (long gone were the days when no one would dip the first chip). Ally had brought something that looked like poppy-seed rolls, though not quite. “Rajgira, that's what the seeds are,” she said. “The Royal Grain. My mother-in-law sent them. The seeds, not the rolls. They're supposed to give me strength—to carry a baby to term, she means. Although Jim's not sure that baking them into rolls is quite what his mom had in mind.” She washed a bite of roll down with her vodka gimlet and grinned. “Much less serving them with alcohol.”
We compared mothers-in-law, then, granting Ally's the Most Meddling from the Farthest Distance Award (although the rajgira rolls, with the crusty, nutty-tasting grain sprinkled on top, were actually quite good). Kath's mom-in-law took a close second, while mine came in dead last; Danny's mother was forever saying I was the best thing that ever happened to her son. And when we'd exhausted that subject, we moved on to what kinds of mothers-in-law we would be ourselves when our children married, and what kinds of spouses we hoped they would find. It wasn't long, though, before the conversation turned to the pageant we were determinedly not watching. It's true, I'm afraid. We couldn't help ourselves.
The rules had changed that year, so that nonwhites could participate. How could we not talk about that? Miss Iowa, Cheryl Browne, was competing as the first black contestant. We wondered what it would be like to be a black woman in America—these were the days when George Wallace, who thought blacks should be denied the vote, was the seventh most admired man in America—and how one black woman in a field of fifty could possibly change things. We wondered how it would feel to be her, and whether some of the judges wouldn't refuse to vote for her even if they thought she was the most beautiful and talented. We decided any judge who didn't think black women should participate wouldn't see any black woman as beautiful enough to win. We decided Cheryl Browne ought to win because for her to be named Miss Iowa she had to be super beautiful and super talented. We didn't really believe she could win, but we hoped she would.