Beauty Queens

In the morning, her mother appraised her over the orange juice. “Are you okay?”



“Yes,” Mary Lou said with irritation. Inside, her heart pounded. She wondered if some trace of last night’s episode remained.



Then there was the time with Billy. She was fourteen and he was sixteen and so sexy. Lying there beneath him, his shirt opened to reveal the broad expanse of his chest, the ripples of muscle across his stomach, she wanted him. The wanting was a physical ache. She’d pushed him onto his back and straddled him, her thighs squeezing gently against his sides. It started softly: She licked his neck. His smell undid her. She wanted more. She licked again.



“Hey, that’s usually the guy’s job,” he said as if he were joking, but she could tell there was a scold in it. Like when she took an extra helping at the dinner table and her uncle would tease, “Putting on your winter coat there?”



A minute ago, he had been doing much the same to her. Why couldn’t she answer in kind? She pressed her lips to his, tasting, enjoying, wanting. The itching in her palms began. But this time, it spread fast as a brush fire on a windy day. Her hunger was uncontrollable.



Billy’s eyes widened at the sight of her in her wild state. “What’s wrong with you?”



And Mary Lou had run away — from Billy, from the passion surging through her. She hid all night in the cornfields, crying softly in shame. When her body finally settled, somewhere around dawn, she returned home. Her mother sat at the kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee, worry etched into the lines of her face, and when she looked up to see her daughter at the kitchen door, an expression of sad understanding softened her eyes.



“It’s hard to be a woman,” she said, and poured Mary Lou a glass of milk in a Princess Pony glass. Her mother waited until Mary Lou’s tears stopped and she’d finished her snack, and as dawn’s first light pinkened the claustrophobic kitchen, she told Mary Lou about the curse that had plagued the women in her family for generations. Wild girls, they were called. Temptresses. Witches. Girls of fearless sexual appetite, who needed to run wild under the moon. The world feared them. They had to hide their desires behind a veneer of respectability.



“But I feel so much — it’s like I want to eat up the world,” Mary Lou warbled through the snot-slick tears on her upper lip. “Why is that wrong?”



Her mother cradled her softly then. “You learn to hold it back, to numb yourself to it,” she said in a bitter voice. “Until one day, the world forgets to look at you. And then it doesn’t matter anymore.”



The next morning, they’d gone to see about the ring that could contain her curse. She had taken the vows that were supposed to keep her safe from her own impulses, her own desires. Mary Lou learned to be afraid of her own body. What if it betrayed her again? Already, Billy avoided her, and hurtful gossip spread about “that wild Mary Lou.” Stinging slaps of names bit at her skin in the school hallways: Whore. Slut. Nympho. Easy. Trashy. Trampy. Not the girl you bring home to Mother. But Mary Lou didn’t really want to go home to someone’s mother. She already had one of those and, frankly, one was more than enough.



Mary Lou wore the ring faithfully. She studied the coy girls, the ones who pretended not to get the dirty joke that made Mary Lou stifle a laugh. The ones who practiced the shy, downward glance, who pretended giggly outrage when a boy made a suggestive remark, who waited to be seen and never made the first move. The ones who called other girls sluts and judged with ease. The good girls.



Occasionally, from the school bus windows, she would see other wild girls on the edges of the cornfields, running without shoes, hair unkempt. Their short skirts rode up, flashing warning lights of flesh: backs of knees, the curve of a calf, a smooth plain of thigh.



Sometimes, it was a girl just waiting for a bus, but in her eyes Mary Lou recognized the feral quality. That was a girl who wanted to race trains under the moon, a girl who liked the feel of silk stockings against her skin, the whisper promise of a boy’s neck under her lips, who did not want to wait for life to choose her but wished to do the choosing herself. It made Mary Lou ache with everything she held back.



Over a dinner of leftover veggie meatloaf, she asked her mother about these girls on the edges of life. Had they been cursed, too? They seemed okay. And their clothes were bitchin’.



“I’m not their mother,” she answered, as if that settled it.



Mary Lou’s sister, Annie, walked in then, her eyes haunted, her shirt covered in spit-up formula. Her mother gave a small nod as if to say, “You see what happens?”