Pretty Is: A Novel Read online

  He bought me cotton candy on the way back to the car, and I twirled sticky strands of it around my tongue for miles and miles, glad not to be the blond Dairy Princess who had ridden through town in a white convertible, swiveling her hand and wrist at the crowds like a useless flipper. The frozen smile fixed on her pink face could have been mine. Thank God, I thought when we were back on the road.

  You could have yelled, people said later. You could have run, you could have gone for help. Sounds like he gave you plenty of chances.

  Lois Lonsdale is the only other person in the world who knows this story.

  Lois

  “Have you ever had Sean McDougal in a class?” I ask Kate LeBlanc. I know she has; I looked at his transcript: he took a survey course with her last semester. She’s an early-Americanist, and it occurs to me now that there’s something fittingly puritanical in the creases that descend from the base of her nose to the corners of her narrow mouth, creating the illusion of a frown even when her face is neutral. I wonder if I am making a mistake. I don’t ask for help, as a rule. Kate and I sit in a corner of a downtown café, well away from the door, which keeps opening to admit blasts of winter. It’s a comfortable enough café, and the coffee isn’t bad. It’s about as cosmopolitan as this town gets. The local art on the walls is poignantly overpriced, and it never moves.

  “Once. Last semester.” Kate sips her tea, having recently eliminated coffee from her diet, as she seems eager to explain. Such arbitrary gestures of self-denial make me nervous, and so do her next words. “Why? Are you having trouble with him?” If she had said “Is he giving you trouble,” it would have been fine. But her sentence, whether consciously or not, attributes the problem to me.

  I press on, because I have to know: has Sean singled me out—which is what it feels like, and clearly what he wants me to think—or is this simply what he does? “Just a slightly creepy vibe,” I say, making it sound as casual as possible. The problem, I mean to convey, is entirely his; I am not the one who’s creepy. Nor am I the sort of paranoiac who sees creepiness everywhere, who spins the mundane into personal drama.

  “Really!” Kate widens her eyes. Her long beaded earrings tremble and shimmer, echoing her surprise. “Odd. He’s a smart kid. Quiet, certainly, but I wouldn’t have said creepy. What does he do, exactly? If you don’t mind my asking?”

  Smart? Interesting. “Well, in class, not much. I just feel his eyes sort of fixed on me; it’s unnerving. He comes to my office pretty often. Weirdly often.”

  “Yes, he’s a big fan of office hours,” says Kate. “Probably because he’s so shy about speaking in class, I always assumed. He’s more comfortable one-on-one.” Which a good teacher would understand and even encourage, she doesn’t say aloud; but it hangs in the air, all the same.

  Why is she refusing to entertain even the possibility that I’m right? What’s at stake for her? I should stop, at this point, I realize; I should change the subject to spring break, or local shopping options. I don’t. The shy, smart student she describes is not the Sean I know, and my misgivings deepen. “Yes, but—there’s something too personal about it, if you know what I mean. That’s what I meant by creepy. He seems a little too interested in my life, as opposed to my insights about eighteenth-century literature. Did you ever get that?”

  A look of something like distaste flits across Kate’s face, and she cuts me off with a sharply dismissive wave of her hand. “Oh, Lois. I wouldn’t think anything of it if I were you. Keep in mind he’s a very socially awkward kid; I don’t think he has much control over the signals he seems to be giving off. I don’t think you want to jump to conclusions, or attach too much meaning to your first impressions. You’re a new professor; this is a small school. Naturally they’re curious about you, the students. They don’t always know where the boundaries are. But I wouldn’t mistake curiosity for obsession.”

  I never said obsession; that’s her word, and it’s hostile. Appalled, I see in her eyes what she really means: Of course you assume young men are obsessed with you just because you’re pretty. What’s worse, you are vain enough to want me to admit it. You are waiting for me to say: Oh, Lois, you must know, boys will always be like that with you. Have you thought about putting your hair up, dressing more plainly? You are the sort of sick, ego-driven person who always demands praise …

  I tuck my hands around my coffee cup for warmth, though it’s rapidly cooling. Kate is wrong. I don’t care about flattery, not from my students, and certainly not from her. I do want information, even of the haziest kind; I want to know whether my suspicions are justified and whether I should be worried. But I can see from the tight lines that have formed around her mouth and the impatient tap of her foot that she’ll be no help; what’s more, I’ve turned her against me. You can’t really afford enemies in such a small department. I think of my mother, suddenly. Why don’t kids like me? I asked her once, after some elementary school social incident involving rejection. Oh, they’re probably just jealous, she said vaguely, clipping a dead rose from a bush, failing to convince me that she understood my world well enough to make such a pronouncement. Later I asked one of my therapists the same thing, and by then I really wanted an answer. What do you think? she asked, in her usual helpful way, head tilted quizzically.

  Finishing my coffee, I change the subject: I mention the snow that’s predicted for the weekend, and we sidestep into a spirited discussion of the weather. After all, I have found out what I needed to know: Sean’s behavior is specific to me; this isn’t simply his usual routine. It’s personal, and he wants something.

  The part of my mind not actively engaged in the weather conversation slips nervously into an old game from my spelling days. It’s been happening more often lately. Kate, I think. Words with a K: kaleidoscope, keratin, kamikaze. Krypton, kosher, kirtle. There are fewer than you’d think. K words are harsh and angular. They suit her, I think, draping them about her neck, fastening them to her ankles like anchors. I festoon Kate with K words. It soothes me.

  Yes, third place in the national spelling bee, as I mentioned to Sean; it’s one secret not worth keeping. It was before anyone cared: before the spelling bee movies, the television coverage, the geeky chic spelling acquired in the early 2000s. When I was ten, I saw an article in the kids’ section of the newspaper about a boy who had won a local bee. Intrigued, I read carefully through the list of words he had spelled correctly in order to win: gallantry, parsimonious, feckless, infallible, anemone, risible, psoriasis. I knew most of them; they were book words, as opposed to words people actually used in conversation. I couldn’t have pronounced half of them, but I recognized them, all the same. The others, the unfamiliar ones, imprinted themselves instantly upon my brain. I felt them do it.

  I could do that, I thought. I plunged immediately into a fantasy of victory. I was convinced, then, that I was destined for great things; it seemed unjust that my life as a fifth grader afforded so few opportunities to demonstrate this. Spelling would be a start.

  I began compiling dictionary lists, testing myself on them. I enlisted the help of my parents, who thought my pursuit odd but harmless, and of an English teacher seeking vicarious glory. I entered a regional bee and qualified for the final rounds as one of the youngest contestants. I didn’t win that year, but I did the next. By the time I was twelve, I had qualified for the national bee in Washington, D.C.

  In the end I retired early from the spelling circuit. For one thing, by the time I returned from that summer with Chloe in the Adirondacks, publicity no longer appealed to me; seeing my picture in the newspaper was no longer a thrill.

  But the words in my head were there for good.

  As I leave the café and trudge along the snowy sidewalk, I move on to the Ls.

  Lagniappe. Lachrymose. Lugubrious.

  * * *

  Even to me, my childhood looks picturesque. The rambling New England inn, the horses, the roaring fireplaces and fifteen-foot Christmas trees—you can’t deny their charm. But war-torn villa
ges on the news, where ragged, ill-nourished children play in the beautiful bombed ruins of old stone buildings, can also be picturesque. That doesn’t mean you want to live there. I don’t mean to exaggerate the hardships of my childhood; my point is that I know it is possible to be desperately unhappy in surroundings that other people might admire on a postcard.

  My parents ran an inn. The house had been in my mother’s family for generations. At its core was a squarish colonial manor, flanked by long wings that had been added later. Another addition straggled out of the back like a spare tentacle, leading out to what my mother still calls the kitchen garden. That’s where she had spent her early childhood—in the aesthetically dubious appendage at the back of the house, invisible from the road, not marring the grandeur or symmetry of the house’s lines. It was not the nicest part of the house, but it was the most practical; the small, low-ceilinged rooms were easier to heat, for one thing, and the rooms did not dwarf or disdain the comfortable modern furniture my grandparents filled it with. The rest of the house was shuttered then—unused, unheated. But my mother says that as a little girl she found passages to the long forbidden hallways, the shrouded rooms, and played there as, no doubt, two centuries of children had before her.

  Then my grandfather began to make money. Lots of money. He managed to ride the cresting wave of Hartford’s insurance industry. And the house, my mother says, eventually swarmed with men hired to restore it to its original state, until at last the whole place stood open, windows brilliant in the sunlight. The family took up residence in the main house, amid the graceful furnishings and chandeliers of another era.

  My mother inherited the house, but not enough money to maintain it; the restoration had already consumed a great deal of my grandfather’s wealth, and his increasingly extravagant habits hadn’t helped. (There was talk, my mother said, of secret card games, horse racing, expensive mistresses in the city.) She had been raised to assume that she would marry well enough to serve the house’s needs—which sounds improbably Victorian, I know. She went to Mount Holyoke; she was talented; she was groomed for more than husband-catching. But the family was prominent in local society; they mixed with other wealthy families; she dated boys who were destined to be bankers and surgeons and insurance magnates. There were expensive dresses and furs and cars and trips to the city. Horses, tennis.

  But Miranda Sheridan did not marry into that world. She married my father, who had hazily grand ambitions and no money. Like her, Stephen Lonsdale was a painter, or so he thought then. He gave it up soon after they married; my mother, on the other hand, still retreats to her studio, though she seldom shows or sells her work. Her large abstract canvases lend the living areas of the inn a museum-like quality; they are too overwhelming, my father insists, for the guest rooms. According to my mother, Stephen was seduced by the glamour of the Sheridans’ life and at the same time despised it, a sentiment he did not manage to conceal from my grandfather, who was, to all appearances, graying and stiffly respectable.

  Upon my grandfather’s death, my penniless and casually bohemian parents saw that the house would have to earn its own keep. Which it still does, admirably. They relegated themselves (and, eventually, me) to one of the wings and transformed the rest into a handsome New England inn, featured later in countless travel magazines, glossy photographs of upscale country grandeur that never look like home.

  What an amazing place to grow up! I can’t count the people who have said this to me. But imagine: The house was always full, my parents eternally occupied with the guests. From the guests streamed endless needs and desires, and it was my parents’ mission to satisfy them. I saw little of my mother and father during the day; we generally had dinner together, but though we dined late in hopes that the guests would mostly have settled in for the night, it was common to be interrupted by the bell that connected our modest quarters to the rest of the house. My parents would sigh and meet each other’s eyes across the table, mutely deciding who should go—or who had had the least to drink.

  On weekends I spent as little time at home as possible. It was then that the guests seemed most present: they lingered after their breakfast, flipped through the pages of books on the shelves, read the newspaper on the porch. They paid well for these privileges, and in theory I did not begrudge them; I was well aware that our living depended upon these well-heeled, generally mild-mannered vacationers. Yet I couldn’t help feeling displaced. Technically, the wing my family occupied was separate from the inn. But sometimes guests wandered accidentally into our kitchen, which adjoined the large main kitchen where my mother prepared gourmet country breakfasts each morning; occasionally, intrepid explorers would venture farther and find themselves in our small living room if someone had forgotten to latch the door. One small back porch, an architectural afterthought, was supposed to be exclusively ours. The guests had the wide, beautiful veranda that ran the length of the front of the house, as well as the patio out back; but sometimes, forgetting or seeking privacy, they found their way onto our porch. When people stumbled upon me, it embarrassed us both—as if they had been exposed to a mop, or a pile of dirty sheets in the middle of a hallway: something meant to remain behind the scenes. From the guests’ perspective, my parents were creators of exquisite crab and goat cheese crepes and spinners of delightful local yarns, there to supply their every need or whim. I was a prop, prettily dressed and extravagantly well behaved. This, at any rate, was my conviction, and I fueled it with the kinds of books that confirmed my childish suspicion that I was alone and misunderstood.

  I especially dreaded the guests who brought children. Young kids weren’t allowed, as a rule, but we permitted children ten and up. They were even more likely than the adults to wander into my world, to express uncensored curiosity about my status. If they were bored enough—and sometimes they were—they’d even try to pick fights, in the hope that a good round of childish insults would save them from a dull vacation of books and board games and country rambles. The children weren’t all monsters; once in a while I even formed a fleeting friendship with some lonely girl. For the most part, though, I cultivated a growing awareness that I was not entirely welcome in my own home. My parents’ hope was that eventually profits would soar and they would be able to pay people to attend to the day-to-day management and upkeep of the inn, but they hadn’t yet gotten much further than a couple of chambermaids and a groundskeeper. Like my parents—or at least my mother—I longed for the day when we would be restored to our rightful position as lords of the manor. By the time I got in the man’s car, I had begun to realize that this rosy future was more a fantasy than a solid business plan.

  If I had noticed that it had begun to rain, I might have stayed at the library that day; we lived on the outskirts of town, and it was a long walk home. As it was, a gray car pulled up to the curb just as I stepped off the stone steps of the library into a steady drizzle. I noticed that it had New York State license plates, but I thought nothing of it; those are common enough in Connecticut. I do remember feeling a vague sense of alarm as the driver rolled down his window. I think it was simply shyness, though; I was skittish at the prospect of talking to strangers, not because this stranger seemed particularly alarming. Quite the opposite, in fact: the man was pleasant looking, nicely dressed. Younger than my father, though I couldn’t have gauged by how much; he was one of those people who manage to look simultaneously old and young. As I approached the car, the girl sitting in the front seat beside the man leaned forward to see me—or perhaps to allow me to see her. I noticed immediately that she was extremely pretty. Her hair was strange, a coarse, uniformly gleaming brown, but it had the effect of making her look even more like a doll than she would have otherwise. I tried not to stare at her in fascination; she stared frankly at me.

  “We’re looking for the junior high,” said the man, his voice low and resonant, polite but with a friendly undercurrent of humor. “I wonder if you could point us in the right direction? We seem to have gotten turned around.”


  “I’ll be starting seventh grade here in the fall,” the girl added.

  “So will I,” I found myself saying. What was it about them that made me immediately comfortable, that so thoroughly disarmed me? “I’m pretty awful at giving directions,” I said apologetically, looking down the street and trying to visualize the turns they would need to take. “Okay—keep on going down this street. You see the church at the end?” I raised my arm to point, hoisting my backpack into a more secure position with my other arm as I gestured. It was raining harder; I could feel my hair getting heavier, and raindrops clung briefly to my eyelashes before trickling down my face like tears.

  “Listen,” the man interrupted. “You’re getting soaked. Why don’t you hop in. You can show us where the school is, and then we’ll take you home.”

  “Otherwise your library books will get wet,” the girl chimed in.

  I knew I could guide them to the school more easily in the car than I could explain how to get there. And I lived fairly close to school; they wouldn’t have to go too far out of their way to bring me home.

  If the man had been alone, I wouldn’t have gotten in. I’m sure of it, or as sure as it’s possible to be. I knew as well as any American child in the midnineties that it was ill-advised to accept rides from strangers. It was the presence of the girl that overcame my doubts. Her absurdly pretty face spoke to me somehow; it reassured me. This is a girl I might be friends with, I found myself thinking.