Pretty Is: A Novel Read online

  “Look at those girls,” Gail said, tracing their round, smiling faces with the hot-pink talon of her index finger. “You have to tell me Carly May is cuter than every one of them. No question she could win these things without hardly even trying.”

  “Now why would she want to do that?” said Daddy, handing the brochures back to her and tugging one of my pigtails. “Carly May has a good head on her shoulders.” I was in second grade. “These girls look like a bunch of airheads. Just pretty faces, that’s all.”

  “There’s worse things to have,” said Gail.

  “Pretty is as pretty does,” Daddy said.

  I stared at the glittery, ruffled dresses the little girls were wearing—maybe airheads, maybe not; how could you tell?—and thought about what Gail had said. God, how do kids know the things they know? I remember very clearly understanding two things: one, that Gail was right when she said I was prettier than the other girls. I was only eight, but I knew this like I knew that hens laid eggs. And I sure as hell knew that, since I gathered them from the coop. I’m tempted to say no one told me, but the world must have told me, somehow.

  I also knew that Gail—much as I hated her, even then—was probably right when she said how much it mattered. Being pretty, I mean. And I knew that there was something I wanted, something big, something I couldn’t name. Something outside my present world. So I let her find me later, flipping through the brochures on my own at the kitchen table. Daddy was out.

  That was all she needed to start planning.

  Lois

  I don’t hide my past, exactly. My story did not follow me from high school to college, and I chose not to revive it. I wanted to try being a different Lois, at least publicly. Even when I wrote my dissertation on the trope of abduction in the British novel, no one but my parents and my dissertation director made the obvious connection. I have grown up, it seems, to be respectably anonymous: Lois Lonsdale, assistant professor of English, specialist in very long novels in which, according to my students, nothing happens. Stickler for the proper deployment of semicolons. Until recently, no one remembered the abduction, much less the names of the miraculously rescued girls. There have been too many girls in the news, most not so lucky; as spectators, we allow our imaginations to skitter from one tragedy to the next. Carly May and I essentially ceased to exist once our pictures disappeared from the papers; the reporters abandoned my doorstep long ago.

  Now, though, I have a new secret: I am Lucy Ledger, author of the modestly selling thriller Deep in the Woods, which is, however improbably, soon to be made into a major motion picture. The novel is loosely based on the abduction. My life has become complicated again.

  I have always liked secrets.

  I’ve been teaching Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in my class on the British novel. My plan is to get it out of the way early in the semester and then move on to the fun stuff. More fun, I mean; I admit that it’s relative. I am trying to persuade my skeptical students that Pamela is, in fact, fun. It’s an epistolary novel, of course, a novel in letters, though in a rather perverse way, as most letters in the novel never get to their intended recipients. But you could argue that it’s also a kind of horror novel, spun as a marriage plot. When Mr. B’s none-too-subtle efforts to seduce (or ravish) his young (very young!) servant fail, he abducts her, ships her off to another of his houses, and places her in the custody of his ally and conspirator, the sadistic Mrs. Jewkes. The fact that Pamela gets to marry her “master” in the end does little to mitigate the fact that she spends half of the novel imprisoned, warding off his attempts to rape her, and frequently unconscious from fear.

  But then, it’s a love story, too.

  My students tend not to buy the love story part.

  So when Sean McDougal darkens my office door one early February afternoon, I assume he is one of the disgruntled, and steel myself to deliver my speech about the importance of Pamela to this looming, cigarette-scented specter.

  But he surprises me. “I Googled you.” Sean is tall, pale, thin but also somehow soft around the edges. Sparse, wispy facial hair contributes to the effect: he is blurry. Would he be handsome if he were more kempt, less skulking? I think he might be. It’s hard to say. I have a vague sense that he reminds me of someone, though I search my memory and can’t find the source of the echo.

  He’s sitting altogether too comfortably on the other side of my desk, snow from his heavy coat melting onto my floor, a faintly malicious gleam in his pale, no-color eyes. He looks pleased with himself.

  Damn.

  Originally, I had thought adopting a pseudonym would magically secure me a double life; I had thought I could establish and defend a sharp border between Lois Lonsdale and Lucy Ledger, and shuffle between them as I pleased. My editor, Amelia Winter, swiftly disabused me of this fantasy. The first time she asked me about the backstory of my novel, I told her confidently that there was none. It’s pure invention, I said. She extended a sinewy arm, selected one of the dozens of brand-new books stacked high on her desk, and flipped through it. Glittering skyscrapers crowded the twenty-fifth-story window behind her; I still couldn’t believe my luck. My manuscript was taking on a life of its own. “The thing is,” Amelia said, scanning the pages, “it’s important for us to know. Because if there is anything—anything—it’ll come out. The Internet makes sure of that. If we know ahead of publication, we can make it work to our advantage. Otherwise, if you’ve been less than forthcoming with us, it’ll be hard for us to control the damage.” She snapped the book shut, as if she had found whatever she was looking for. “Something to think about,” she said.

  I didn’t want to think about it, but I did it anyway.

  Sean sniffles loudly, and I thrust my box of Kleenex in his direction. He ignores it. Beneath the desk I uncross my legs, bracing each flat-soled suede boot firmly against the floor. It’s my defensive stance, undetectable from the waist up. “Oh really?” Needlessly, I straighten a stack of papers on my desk. “The wonders of modern technology, yes? If only Pamela could have Googled Mr. B, that whole scandal with his pregnant mistress would have come to light much sooner, and Pamela might not have been so sympathetic.” I say this lightly, since I don’t really consider it an acceptable way of talking about the novel. I am breaking one of my own rules: there are no what-ifs in fiction, no alternate universes in which the characters might have done something other than what is on the page, where everything would have turned out differently, had they only been half as wise as we. It makes no sense, for instance, to insist that Pamela shouldn’t have agreed to marry Mr. B; Pamela matters only because that is precisely what she always does, has always done, must always do. There would be no novel, otherwise. No Pamela.

  “We didn’t get to that part of the book yet,” Sean says, his voice devoid of humor. “Don’t you want to know what I found? On the Internet?”

  I know all too well what he has probably found. When I finally came clean with Amelia, I suspected that I was only confirming what she had already discovered; apparently it didn’t require Holmesian sleuthing to trace Lucy Ledger back to Lois Lonsdale. Sean’s hands rest on my desk, red and raw, nails gnawed and not as clean as they could be. I wish he would stuff them back in his pockets; they make me queasy. Sean is no Sherlock, but it seems he’s about to prove Amelia’s point.

  I prevaricate. “If I wanted to know, I suppose I would have Googled myself.” Which I have done, of course. Doesn’t everyone? What I know is that you used to have to scroll through nine pages of obscure singers bearing my name, census data and death records, someone who still has a Myspace account, and a doggy day-care owner in Ohio, not to mention my own faculty profile and syllabi, before you came across a brief, dry item cataloging child abductions by decade. My kidnapping is listed as one of many from the midnineties. Now you need only click through four pages to discover that Lois Lonsdale is also Lucy Ledger, and from there it’s a short virtual leap to the rest of the story.

  I smile at Sean in a way that I hope is bot
h teacherly and winning, hoping to divert him from whatever unpleasant course he is set on. There’s still time to turn back, time to rethink whatever he’s about to do. His plot is still flexible, unlike Pamela’s.

  But he is not to be won. He wrote a terrible first essay, I remember. Did I give him an F or a D? Probably an F. I am trying to make sure no one thinks I am a lightweight, a pushover. I flip open my grade book. Yes, an F. Too bad.

  “It was when you were talking about Pamela and how she could marry Mr. B after what he did. I just thought there was something funny about how you talked about it.” His voice is curiously uninflected. Creepy, I begin to think. Unnerving. “Sometimes that happens to me. I get these feelings about people. So I checked you out. Do you want to guess what I found?”

  “I can just imagine,” I say drily. “I don’t suppose it was my third-place finish in the national spelling bee.”

  For the most part, I have managed to keep Lucy Ledger out of Lois Lonsdale’s everyday life. In her author photo, Lucy Ledger is smoky-eyed and edgily glamorous. She sports a leather jacket and assertive earrings. Lois Lonsdale, on the faculty Web site, peers sternly through forward-falling hair, face framed by a crisp collar emerging from her prim suit. You wouldn’t see a resemblance unless you were looking for it. We didn’t broadcast my real name when the book was published, though a handful of intrepid reviewers figured it out. My parents received a few calls from people interested in reviving the old story, and Miranda and Stephen’s disapproval of my literary venture deepened the faint chill between us. I told my department chair about the book when he hired me, but did not mention its roots in my history; he seemed to find the fact that I had written a popular novel scandalous enough and all too gladly agreed to keep it under wraps to the extent that it was possible. That part was easier than I had expected: there was minimal intersection between my worlds. I never saw a familiar face at a reading. I tried to handle most publicity long-distance; I became adept at the e-mail interview, the phone chat.

  Sean McDougal is the first real threat I have had to confront.

  After scrabbling for a moment in his backpack, he withdraws a battered paperback. It’s swollen and darkened, as if it’s been rescued from drowning—or dropped in a bathtub, more likely. “Got it used on Amazon,” Sean says. “Basically free, except for shipping.”

  It’s Deep in the Woods.

  The thought of this grubby, ill-mannered student poking around in my life—and even in my sentences—chills me. Surely it’s hardly disastrous, though. I think quickly, trying to anticipate how this terribly unappealing young man could use his discovery to hurt me.

  I really cannot imagine.

  For a fiction writer, that’s a failure, I suppose.

  Chloe

  I belong on the stage. Zed told me so (that was what we called him—like the British letter Z; we never knew his name until afterward), and I knew right away it was true. But I’ve ended up in movies. They say my face is better suited to the screen. You need a speaking face for the stage. Big eyes, a wide, expressive mouth, shadowy cheekbones, a well-defined, even prominent nose. In a way, says my agent, you’re too pretty. He doesn’t mean it as a compliment. He doesn’t even say beautiful. He says fucking pretty. And fucking pretty is perfect for certain kinds of parts in certain kinds of movies.

  The thing to understand about your character, a director once said to me, is that she’s beautiful, but she’s completely unaware of how beautiful she is. That’s why everyone falls in love with her. There’s this innocence at the core of her beauty.

  You mean stupidity? I said, laughing. He didn’t know what I meant, and proceeded to explain the whole concept to me again, as if I hadn’t been hearing it since high school, at least. She’s really pretty, but it’s like she doesn’t even know it! people would say admiringly of certain girls.

  Only then can you forgive a girl for being pretty: if she’s an idiot or a liar.

  There’s no way you can grow up in this world and not be able to look in a mirror and gauge how much you look (or don’t look) like the girls in magazines or on TV. Even if you somehow manage not to figure it out for yourself—because you’re so terribly modest or whatever—the world will tell you, just like the world will be sure to let you know if you’re ugly, or fat, or ridiculous in any way. I don’t mean people will come out and say it, necessarily (though someone will, sooner or later), just that they have ways of letting you know. You can see it in the way their eyes react to you, the way they interact with you physically.

  Unless, as I said, you’re stupid, or totally delusional. I’m sure that’s sometimes the case.

  It’s not a question of vanity, I argued with that director, knowing already that I would lose. I’m just talking about calling a spade a spade.

  He thought I was playing my character as too knowing, too self-aware. People would lose sympathy with her, he said.

  Sometimes I think we’re a whole country of hypocrites. And I’m one of them: I played it like he said, in the end. My character became some kind of cheesy male fantasy instead of a real person.

  And I still didn’t get famous.

  * * *

  I settle myself in a sunny window with a cup of tea, still in my robe, determined to read the script Martin has been nagging me about. He has told me it’s good, told me I’ll be excited, but I don’t believe him. His enthusiasm makes me nervous. I know his hopes for me are different from what they used to be, and I’m a little scared to learn what he thinks is a “great role” for me these days—a pain-in-the-ass mom in a teen comedy, maybe, or the clingy, shopaholic ex-wife in a romantic comedy about other people. Caricatures. I’m almost thirty. In actress terms, since I haven’t managed to become Nicole Kidman or Julia Roberts, that’s what I’m fit for: caricatures.

  The screenplay begins with a standoff between police and a lone gunman who has staked out a house in the woods. Two pretty preteen girls work on a jigsaw puzzle in the main room of a rustic cabin, their gazes turning anxiously to the windows. On the porch sits a man, gun in hand, gazing calmly out at the woods. The house is surrounded. As the police close in, the man ignores repeated commands from a loudspeaker outside, makes no move to come out with his hands up. The girls are frozen with fear. They are neat and clean, but oddly dressed: they wear plain, dark cotton dresses, and their long hair is long, loose, old-fashioned. They look vaguely cultish.

  There is a sudden commotion—we hear it, rather than see it—as the police descend upon the back of the house. The man lifts the gun.

  I read ten pages before I get up, go to the kitchen, and trade my tea for a bloody Mary. What I’d really like is something stiffer, but it’s technically still morning, so I compromise. Then I go back and reread the opening scene. I need to make sure I haven’t lost my mind.

  * * *

  Martin is out of his office and not answering his cell. I leave him five messages. I need to know if this is some kind of joke. I don’t see how it could be; then again, I don’t see how it could be anything else. There are differences: We were upstairs when it happened, not in the main room. There was no jigsaw puzzle; we were making costume decisions about a play we were working on. But the clothes, the hair. The cabin. The man in the Adirondack chair. My fucking story.

  It takes a lot longer than it should to realize that I would not be playing one of the kidnapped girls. No, I would be the female detective who gets too involved in the case, helps to track the girls down, becomes obsessed with the kidnapper, must confront disturbing truths from her own past, blah blah blah. That would be me. Although I should find it comforting that I have no idea who the hell this woman is and can only assume she’s totally fictional, like the jigsaw puzzle, I find it aggravating, instead. So much of the story is familiar that the discrepancies are weirdly jarring.

  The beginning is the end. The rest of the script tells the story of everything leading up to that point. Everything from the moment the first little girl gets in the man’s car, with some more lies thro
wn in.

  * * *

  Here’s my story. The story that Lois has stolen. (It has to be Lois; who else could it be?) We never stopped at motels, the man and I. We slept in the car. I dozed on and off all the time, in a sort of lazy, pleasant way. He took quick catnaps in empty parking lots, on dead-end roads, in little parks. The first time we did this, he strung a sturdy rope through my belt loop and tied it to his own wrist; if I moved, he said matter-of-factly, he’d wake up. He didn’t make it sound like a threat, though I guess on some level it was. By then I knew that he had a gun in the glove compartment. In Nebraska, everyone had guns—but this was different, a little handgun. A TV gun, I thought. I’d never before seen anything but hunting rifles.

  You never know who’s out there, or what crazy things they’ll do, he said when I saw the gun, as if he wanted to make sure I understood that the gun was not intended for me but for troublesome strangers we might meet on the road. He sounded apologetic, a little embarrassed.

  We didn’t meet anyone, though. People must have assumed we were father and daughter, if they thought about us at all, though he would have been pretty young to have a twelve-year-old. One of the things that struck me on that trip was that most people seemed awfully preoccupied. They had their own shit to deal with. I was used to the small-town busybody-ness of Arrow, and it fascinated me to see that out on the road we could drift through town after town like ghosts, and no one paid any attention to us at all.

  Glad as I was to be leaving Nebraska, I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to get anywhere else in particular. I liked watching the world flow past my rolled-down window, farmland blending into small, dusty towns, the hot wind stirring my ugly-Barbie wig. Partly I remember the trip as a succession of smells: cowshit, chicken farms, fast food, charcoal grills, freshly mowed grass, doughnut shops. Once we got stuck in a town that was having a parade, for no apparent reason, and since we couldn’t get through anyway we got out and watched, as if we belonged there. I can still smell the thick haze of cotton candy and sausage sandwiches and fried dough that made the atmosphere in the village seem like something you could eat, though you’d be sorry later.