She Walks in Beauty (19 page)

“How can you eat like this and look like
that
?”
asked Sam, ordering half a Special herself.

Connors said, “I figure, a big girl like me, six feet and not half stupid, I’ve got to keep my weight up to my IQ at all times.”

“Which is what?” teased Magic. “One-ten?”

“One-fifty, and you know it. One-ten’s more like you, Miss Slim and Trim National Merit Scholar. I hate your guts.”

Magic grinned. “I like being skinny. Always have, since I was a little kid.”

“Oh, Lord.” Connors rolled her eyes. She’d heard this routine before. In fact, she finished it for Magic—“That way when they were kids, her cousin Lavert kicked her butt, she didn’t jiggle. Whereas a fleshy girl like me—”

“She jiggles in the back. She jiggles in the front. She jiggles in the—”

Harrumph.
It was the Pageant Police.

“No kidding,” said Magic, “you let one of those mean workout devils get ahold of your body two hours a day, you need something to keep your strength up.”

“Don’t lie to the nice lady. She’s homefolks,” said Connors. “You know you live on bean sprouts and whole grains.”

“Uh-huh,” said Magic, adding a chocolate malt to her order. “And crayfish étouffée and jambalaya, and I’m about to die for some beignets.”

“That’s it. I’m heading straight to New Orleans from here to get myself a decent meal,” said Sam.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Magic agreed. “A person could starve. And I do think this is the ugliest place I’ve ever been in. Town makes the projects in New Orleans look like Shangri-la.”

Behind them, the chaperones sniffed
and
harrumphed.

“Now, tell me what two girls like you who seem to have good sense as well as a fair-to-middling sense of humor are doing in this pageant,” Sam demanded.

The chaperones sniffed again and the Girlfriends laughed. “I originally got into this silly business as a joke on my mama,” said Connors. “And when I started winning money, I fairly fell in love with it. But let me start back at the beginning.”

Sam knew there was no other way for a Texan or a Southerner to begin, and by the time they were through, you’d be glad they had.

“When I was little, my daddy was a land-poor rancher trying to make a living on a spread south of San Antonio. We barely had a pot to piss in
—excuse
me, ladies. My mama used to make my dresses out of remnants from the Ben Franklin. Just like her mama made hers out of feed sacks—like those poor, pitiful little girls out there on the Boardwalk carrying those stupid shame signs. Have you seen them? Well,
anyway,
I was about ten, the natural gas got to coming in like gangbusters down on the edge of the property, any further south we’d of had to give it back to Mexico, and we moved over into Houston and tall cotton.

“First thing my mama did was take us both over to the Neiman-Marcus to the couture collections, me to the junior couture, and she said, ‘Just start bringing it out and ringing it up. You get tired of writing, bring in a relief.’

“She’d been poor her whole life, and so she had pretty much the same attitude about the disgustingly big house she had Daddy build us over in River Oaks, right down the street from Lynn Wyatt and about a stone’s throw from the River Oaks Country Club. When my friends and I got on her nerves Mama’d say, ‘You girls go on over to the club and get yourselves an orange juice.’ And so we did. We’d go suck down some $5 citrus and watch the rich ladies work on skin cancer at the pool.

“Time went on, Mama forgot where she’d come from, and she got to working on Daddy about how nothing he did was classy enough. ‘J.T., that Cadillac with that steer-horn ornament on it looks like white trash,’ she’d holler, and then order him up a black Mercedes sedan he called the Hearse. He drove it, though. But he was just biding his time, putting up with her nonsense until he could figure out something that would
really
get her goat.” Connors spread her arms wide. “This is it.”

Pageants?

Connors smiled the big smile, reminding Sam of a news filler she’d read recently:
Working Woman
magazine was advising a businesswoman to improve her telephone voice by constantly smiling when she speaks.
Say cheese.
Said it conveyed interest and energy. Talk about ought to be ashamed, that feminist rag—but then, look at Connors. She sure had plenty of energy.

“I was already through college, finished at Rice with a business degree, and Daddy and I were dabbling in the stock market, doing a few real estate deals when—well, you know what happened. Recession City. Anyway, he came in the office one day with a grin on his face and a piece of paper in his hand and said, ‘Sugar pie, there’s a little favor I want you to do me.’ Well, I’ve always been my daddy’s girl, and even though it was an application form for the Miss Blue Bonnet Pageant, which was about the silliest thing I’d ever heard of, I thought, what the heck? I wasn’t doing anything except my nails and the crossword puzzle day after day, business was so bad. I thought it’d give Daddy a giggle to see Mama’s face when I hollered out a few country and western tunes and strutted across that stage in a swimsuit, those slime-faced judges staring at my crotch. It’d be worth the humiliation.”

“Not a clue you’d win?” asked Sam.

“Are you kidding? I didn’t even know how to walk. I just galloped up there like I was a palomino in a parade hurrying up to get this thing over with so I could get back to the barn and my oats, and the next thing I knew, I was on my way to Miss Texas.”

“So how’d you take that title, given your attitude?” asked Sam. She’d learned that Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi were the biggies. The further south, the stiffer the competition.

Connors laughed. “You mean ’cause I know this is all bull-dookie? That it is not a ‘strong value’ to think you’re hot shit because you’ve got big bazooms? That winning another pageant really ain’t going to win the war on drugs or do anything to salvage crack babies, stop world hunger?”

“Exactly. If those girls work so hard, and you just—”

“Flounced myself around up there like I had good sense? I tell you, I’m not sure. Except they say, you know there’s this pageant consultant named Sally Griffin—”

“We’ve met.”

“—well, she came up to me after I won Miss Texas, and she said I was the most natural winner she’d ever seen. Like that was a style of winning. She said you’ve got your Natural, like me, your Obsessive Goal-focused, that’s your nut cases, and your Self-motivated, most girls, who work real hard and hope for the best. I told her I was a Texas woman, and we’re among the most independent women on earth. We just can’t help ourselves.”

“So why didn’t any of those other Texas women win Miss Texas?”

“Because they didn’t have bazooms as big as Connors’s,” said Magic laughed.

Connors pointed a finger back at Magic’s chest.

“Unh-uh.” Magic shook her head. “That’s not why
I
won. Honey, I am your David Duke backlash contender.”

“Explain to the nice lady,” said Texas.

“Well, those rednecks back home in Metairie and up in North Louisiana have been hollering to that Klansman David Duke who almost won governor, ‘Mr. Duke, those last three Miss Americas wuz nigger or part-nigger. When we gone have us a white Miss America again?’ Well, the two or three liberal-minded folks in the state got together, and they must have all been at the pageant, ’cause the next thing you know, here I am.”

“Not a thing to do with being pretty or talented?” said Sam.

“Nope. I’m your dark horse candidate through and through. Only black in the state pageant. Those two or three liberals said, ‘Okay, we’ll show ’em.’”

“Nothing to do with your blowing them off the stage with your act?” said Connors.

“Unh-uh. They don’t think magic’s a talent anyway. They think I’m up there doing voudou.”

“And?” Sam had seen enough of
that
with General Taylor Johnson, Lavert’s girlfriend, to know it was a possibility.

Magic just grinned.

“So what’s this Girlfriend business?” They’d called themselves that in a couple of interviews.

“We’re just kind of goofing on this whole thing. Having a good time. Fooling around,” said Connors.

“You took swimsuit. Not too shabby.”

“An accident if I ever saw one.”

“What if you win?”

“Give me a break.”

“We’re just acting like we’re in junior high school,” said Magic. “Playing dress-up, being fools.”

“This is just a big yok to you too, Magic? I don’t believe it. I bet
all
the girls say they don’t care if they win.
I’d
care if I worked that hard.”

“Well—if I made ten, it couldn’t hurt my career,” Magic admitted. “Getting the exposure on TV, come Saturday night. So I’m paying a little bit more attention to what’s going on than my friend here. ’Course, if I won, I wouldn’t turn down earning that $200,000 for personal appearances.”

“Hoping to parlay this into something bigger?”

“I don’t know if you ever noticed, but it’s not the easiest thing in the world for a black girl with a magic act to get herself booked into gigs. I’m a high-school speech teacher. I do clubs back home when I can get the work. Had a couple of weeks at the Blue Room at the Roosevelt once. But drunks are a tough audience, and most tourists in New Orleans are bound and determined to stay that way till they get back to the airport.”

Sam knew what she meant. But she wanted to get back to this winning question a minute. “Every time I’ve seen the pageant, after the winner’s announced, all the other girls crowd around and pretend they’re thrilled for her.
Were
you
happy for a winner?”

The girls stared at each other for a minute. Then Magic shrugged. “Neither one of us ever lost, not in this business. First time either of us tried, and we just sailed through.”

“Yeah, but losing in general, losing in life?” Connors said, “Don’t believe those smiles for a minute. It’s the same thing as anything else. You try real hard for something, sure you want it. Even if it’s one of your friends who gets it, are you really thrilled? Not unless you’re some kind of modern-day Christian martyr. Which
I
ain’t.”

Now,
that
was the truth. Sam had felt it herself when the journalistic prizes were handed out. And she’d done her share of winning. But you always wanted it. Everybody did. At least, everybody
she
knew. Maybe they were all competitors

These
two surely were. “Where’d y’all meet, anyway? Here?”

“Oh, no. Lord. We met at the Miss Texas Pageant,” said Connors. “Magic had already taken Louisiana, and she was doing a guest number at our pageant. After you win state, you have to give up your job or your schooling just to do all the running around to other pageants, opening up supermarkets, laying across the hoods of Jeep Cherokees, ribbon cuttings every other day, talking with the Jaycees in West Armpit, and getting yourself ready to come here.”

“Yep. You spend your time getting pretty or being pretty and smiling,” Magic agreed.

Had any of it been fun?

“Are you kidding?” said Connors. “It’s a hoot. This pageant thing’s just like men, can’t take it too seriously. And some of the other girls are kind of trippy.”

“Anybody in particular?”

The two girls looked at each other and said in chorus, “New Jersey.”

Sam couldn’t remember which one she was. “Why?”

“Just take our word. You don’t want to miss her.”

Sam made herself a note. “Now, what did you mean, the pageant’s just like men?”

“You can’t be yourself—with men or in pageants. You’d scare them to death,” said Connors.

“Avoid sudden movements of any kind,” said Magic. “Judges and men—they’re skittish and easily frightened.”

“I practice for being with men a lot,” said Connors. “Same way I practice for the pageant. I pretend I’m a soft, mysterious cat. They eat that stuff up. And I am
never
sarcastic with men.”

That
sent the two girls off into fits of laughter.

“Tell me the most interesting thing that’s happened to you since you started this pageant business.”

“Seriously?” said Magic. “I’ve already had a feature article in a couple of magazines, one in
Ebony
that got me an agent.”

Connors thought it was the people. “I make fun, but people
really have been nice. They want you to succeed, and they pull for you. It’s kind of heartwarming—I mean their hearts are in the right place even if their brains aren’t.”

“Especially when they’re millionaires,” teased Magic.

“Millionaires, Connors? Like the Donald?”

“Oh, you know. Bunch of guys own oil wells, car dealerships. There’s still
lots of
money in Texas even with the bust, some of them come sniffing around. Want to buy me another sable. Make sure I have enough Mercedes to get me from one mall to the next. No strings attached, you understand.” And if you believed that, she’d tell you another one.