But Gwen is the one who was born for it, not me. She went to better schools, had better ideas, sounded smarter in class, looked smarter, was smarter. She cared about all the right things and hurt no one intentionally. She was perfect. If not for certain fatal events, she’d be the one giving the keynotes, and I’d still be in her shadow.
The next moment she proves it, annihilating me with a single word.
“I’ve missed you, Mac.”
Mac
1
I was born Mackenzie Claire Woods in Wheatsville, Illinois, a Chicago suburb with a historic downtown and an ice rink in the shopping mall. My father wanted to give me an old-fashioned name like Mary or Sarah, but my mother overruled him. She thought Mackenzie sounded unique.
A lot of other moms must have thought so, too, because five years later the whole kiddie pageant circuit was lousy with them. There were two in my “baby bunnies” ice-skating class, one in jazz-and-tap, and one in the baton-twirling camp my mom ran out of our backyard three summers running. To my mom, this only proved she’d picked a name worthy of a sequined sash.
Though they lasted only a few short years, the pageants loom large in my memory. Childhood, to me, is the acrid smell of Cover Girl base, the scalp-tingle of a French braid, the flash of my mother’s diamond studs as she knelt to do my makeup, the sound of my father’s hands clapping when I won the crown.
My mother trained me well, but she didn’t clap. She had her hands full with my baby sister, Lily, who had recently transformed from a babbling infant to a stiff little stranger prone to violent fits. My mom sat through my competitions waiting for Lily to go off, her features drawn so taut, you’d never believe she was the Miss Decatur, Illinois, with the brilliant smile in the framed mantelpiece pictures. Except for the earrings, they looked nothing alike.
My father, on the other hand, looked just as he had in their wedding photo, the same thick brown hair rising from a decisive hairline. When I was very young, I confusedly believed he was a writer because of the awed way my mother spoke of “his” books on the bookshelf. In fact, he had only read them, not written them; forcing other people to read them was his trade. He was a high school English teacher, though he spoke as little as possible about his job and always kept a drink within arm’s reach. Wherever he went, he seemed to have a wonderful time, which is another way of saying that if he wasn’t going to have a wonderful time, he didn’t show up. He started coming to the pageants when I started winning them.
So, I kept winning.
Until, one day when I was eight, everything changed.
* * *
The day began, as so many did back then, with baton-twirling. Mom knocked a pair of drumsticks together, five-year-old Lily clinging to her shin, while I marched through the soft grass in a phalanx of pageant hopefuls, admiring the way the sun glinted on my baton. Then I noticed my father at the kitchen window, mixing a drink.
“Mackenzie Claire!” my mom hollered. “Eyes on your baton!”
My fingers tripped, and the baton fell to the ground with a soft thump. I glanced toward the window, but my father was already drifting away.
After the lesson, my mother dragged him down to the basement to yell at him. I caught Lily’s name and mine; ten o’clock in the morning, for chrissake; and the least you could do. I turned up the TV and sat by Lily on the couch, picking the scab under my T-shirt where the rickrack on my leotard left a red welt.
My father stomped up the basement stairs and into the living room, a shoebox under his arm. “Come on, princess. We’re getting out of here.” I knew he was talking to me. He hardly ever spoke to Lily, and never called her princess.
We went to the mall. After he dropped off the box at a shoe repair place, he asked me where I wanted to go next, and I pointed at the ear-piercing kiosk I wasn’t allowed to visit until my tenth birthday, and he laughed.
“The world’s your oyster, princess.” His breath was whiskey-sweet.
When the hot spike of pain in my earlobes had dulled to a throb, we hit the food court for lunch. I pulled him toward the Hungry Panda, counting on him to forget my mother’s favorite expression, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” I was dumping soy sauce over a glistening pile of fried rice when I noticed my father staring over my shoulder.
I turned. Behind me was the carousel, a rotating gilt birthday cake I treasured from afar. Yet another thing my mother didn’t allow; there was never enough time, and the flashing lights were too much for Lily. But today was a special day, a father-daughter day. A pierced ears, Hungry Panda day. I held my breath and waited for him to ask if I’d like a ride.
“This is it,” he said softly. “Mall Chinese and a fucking calliope.”
My hopes ebbed. “What’s a cull-lie-pee?”
He blinked at me, his eyes still far away. “Calliope. Queen of the Nine Muses. Her son Orpheus brought Eurydice back from hell but lost her when he looked back. Careless fellow, Orpheus.”
I couldn’t help feeling this was some kind of test. I looked around. “Are they . . . here?”
He laughed abruptly. “It’s also a kind of pipe organ. But that one’s a synthesizer. Fake, like everything else.”
Although I had only taken a few bites of my lunch, he was clearly ready to go. He braced his palms against the table edge to scoot out his chair, but then he paused, leaning forward until I could see the little red spot in the corner of his left eye. “Listen, princess. You don’t belong here any more than I do. We were made for better things. Remember that.”
I did remember, because after he dropped me back off at home that day, we never heard from him again. He never even picked up his shoes.
* * *
With my father gone, the pageants had to stop. There was no money for them, much less for ice-skating, voice lessons, jazz-and-tap. It was only a matter of time before everything worth having, from cable TV to name-brand macaroni and cheese, disappeared from our house. My parents’ wedding photo vanished, too, along with all other pictures of my father.
And then my name was gone.
“I have to go back to work. I’ll be taking classes at night,” my mother said, putting her hands on my shoulders. “I need you to be a brave girl, Mac.”
Mac. As if she didn’t have time to say the whole thing. It stung like a slap.
But if the pageant world was over for good, at least its vague militarism had prepared me well for the role of brave girl. I attacked my new duties with zeal. Lily entered kindergarten, and every morning we marched to the bus stop together, her hot, clenched fist in my hand. After school I met her at the door of her special class and ushered her safely through the gauntlet of kids who only stopped shrieking, it seemed, to point and stare. At home, I’d make a snack and play with her wispy brown curls while we watched TV. On nights when my mom had class, I lay beside her in the dark and sang songs from commercials until she fell asleep.
Sometimes, I burned with a helpless hatred of the things that made her, and therefore us, different. Other people’s emotions affected Lily like rasps drawn over her skin, and the rocking and hand-flapping she used to comfort herself drew stares in public. Her long silences and refusal to make eye contact disquieted strangers. Then, too, her tantrums had grown more intense since our father left, and harder to predict; sometimes when we walked together to the bus, she would come to a full stop, tilt her head back, and wail, while kids hung out of the bus windows yelling obscenities. I had to stop holding her in my lap after she accidentally split my lip with her elbow during a commercial she didn’t like. We couldn’t eat out, even when the budget allowed; the one time my mom took us to Bob Evans, to celebrate her nursing job, Lily’s napkin fell off her lap and the ensuing chaos meant we had to leave before the appetizers arrived.