Page 14 of The Accidental Beauty Queen
But it’s still hanging there between us as Ginny drifts off to sleep and I’m left in that little room with nothing but the ugly truth to keep me company.
Here’s the thing.
Every word I said to Ginny earlier was true. I despise beauty pageants. I absolutely hate them, and it’s not as though I haven’t given the whole thing a chance.
Before our mother died, when Ginny and I were just four years old, she entered both of us in a beauty pageant for children.
It wasn’t the sort of pageant where little girls wear bright red lipstick and fake teeth and huge bouffant wigs like onToddlers& Tiaras. (Those are known as “glitz” pageants, by the way.) Ours was the other variety—a “natural” beauty pageant.
Full disclosure: that’s somewhat of a misnomer. Natural pageants aren’t totally natural. They’re simply less extreme than the glitz ones. Contestants are still likely to wear lipstick and hair spray, just normal amounts of both. Inasmuch as lipstick on a four-year-old can be considered normal.
Anyway, like generations of beauty queens before her, our mom thought it would be a great idea for us to follow in her perfectly poised footsteps. Ask any woman competing for Miss America how she got involved in pageants and I guarantee that at least half of them will say their mothers were pageant girls too.
I suppose some of the moms are the scary, dominating stage mothers everyone hears about. But the majority of them are moms who did the pageant thing with their own mothers and want to continue the family tradition. It’s a special kind of sorority. Pageant girls grow into pageant moms who believe that the system instilled them with confidence, grace, and poise. And for the most part that’s true.
But there are exceptions to every rule.
News flash! I’m the exception.
My pageant experience was a disaster from start to finish. I tripped on the runway. Not a tiny little misstep either, it was a full-on face-plant. During my talent portion, I forgot the lyrics to “I’m a Little Teapot” and ran offstage, crying.
As my swan song, I peed in my pants during the Sunday-dress portion of the competition.
Need I say more?
It was a long time ago, and while my actual recollection of the mortifying experience is admittedly a little fuzzy, our mother videotaped the entire ordeal. The recording still has a place of honor on a shelf of DVDs in Dad and Susan’s living room.
Oh joy.
Needless to say, that was the end of my career as a pageant girl. If our mom had lived longer, I have no doubt that she would have encouraged me to give it another go. I’m sure she would have at least made me stick with it long enough to have a positive experience before calling it quits.
But my mother got sick shortly after my one and only pageant. Even Ginny gave it up for a while—it was like without the pageant mom, she didn’t know how to be thepageant daughter. My sister was ten before she found the black-and-white pageant photo of our mom in her Miss American Treasure crown and glittering evening gown with a bouquet of roses in her arms. She carried that picture everywhere she went until our dad finally agreed to let her enter another pageant.
And she’s been chasing that crown ever since.
I, on the other hand, found my hope in books. Books were there for me when I was a little girl, growing up without a mom. They saved me, over and over again. I was in third grade, on the afternoon of the Mother’s Day tea, one of the first times it happened. I was the only child in the class who didn’t have a mother or stepmom. My dad’s sister was supposed to come sit beside me during the event, but she got mixed up and showed up at Ginny’s classroom instead.
Sitting all alone at that table was one of the loneliest moments of my life. When my teacher realized how upset I’d become, she took me by the hand and led me to the school library. While the other kids celebrated their mothers, I spent the afternoon with Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume. Their words gave me an escape—a place where I belonged. That experience is one of the reasons I decided to become a school librarian. I want to help kids find the same kind of solace and sense of acceptance.
Ginny, however, finds that acceptance in a stranger’s applause or a judge’s score. My days spent among the stacks mean I’m not required to have a spray tan, painted fingernails, or perfectly coiffed hair. I prefer the scent of ink on paper and old library books to perfume. And while I want to see world peace happen, I’m not convinced that a real-life Barbie can hasten it by uttering those words into a microphone.
So, yes. Everything I said to Ginny is 100 percent accurate. I’m no pageant girl. I also believe that taking her place in the preliminaries would definitely be cheating, no matter how you slice it. We were brought up to be honest, and this flies in the face of everything I try to teach the kids at my school.
But I also love my sister with my whole heart. She’s my twin. My other half. As Charlotte Brontë wrote, “You know full well as I do the value of sisters’ affections. There is nothing like it in the world.”
I’m the first to admit we’ve drifted apart over the years. It was probably inevitable, considering our diverging paths. But even though I wish Ginny would spend her time on something more meaningful, I’m still there for her when it matters most.
Ginny might drive me nuts sometimes, but I’d gladly give her a kidney if she needed one. I’d do just about anything for her.
So why can’t I dothis?
Because I’m scared, that’s why.
It’s a humiliating thing to admit—so humiliating that I can’t make myself say it out loud.
While I’m fairly certain I could get through the experience without wetting myself this time, there’s definitely a part of me that’s afraid of letting my sister down. Of disappointing her. Even though we’re twins, I was born first. I’m officially two minutes older than Ginny, and this knowledge has always instilled me with a sense of responsibility, especially once our mother passed away. I was the one who cut her sandwiches into the perfect triangles she liked so much for her school lunches. I helped her with her homework. But she missed our mom’s influence the most when it came to the “girly” things, like braiding her hair or picking out her prom dress. She cried rivers of tears on our first homecoming in middle school when we were the only girls without “mums,” the traditional chrysanthemum corsages Texas is famous for. While all the other girls moved from class to class with streamers, bells, and ribbons fluttering from the enormous flowers pinned to their shirts, we were plain and unadorned. My twin was crushed.
As much as I tried, I couldn’t make up for our mother’s absence. I still can’t, especially if it involves heels and an evening dress. This pageant is the most important thing in the world to Ginny, and while I think it’s beyond silly, I’m not altogether sure I could hack it, even for a few measly days of prelims.
