Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker by Kathleen Hale

Author:Kathleen Hale [Hale, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802146915
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Cricket

Miss Georgia wept as if her entire family had died. She hugged her bouquet of thorny roses and was swallowed up in a group hug by her enemies. While they worked the crown into her slightly exhausted-looking curls, like some kind of crack sniper I focused my binoculars on the contestants who didn’t even make it past the preliminaries. After a year spent preparing for the oldest beauty pageant in the nation, they had lost before the competition even began. They’d spent tonight sitting on the sidelines, smiling for hours just in case the cameras spotted them, wearing white gowns, looking like sacrificial lambs. Now they seemed euphoric, almost orgasmic, over Miss Georgia’s win—but in a poised way. The woman sitting next to me shouted to her friend, “Miss Alaska is a dog!” I caught her eye but said nothing to defend my fellow woman.

I arrived at Miss America a very different person—a principled person, the sort who would have defended Miss Alaska, who was only nineteen. But watching women parade around a stage in their bathing suits, and toss batons, and clog, which I’d never heard of prior to this event, had changed me.

And now, here’s what I thought: forty of the contestants were dogs, five were so-so, seven were hot, and I fell somewhere toward the bottom of the pack. When I came to Atlantic City, I considered myself self-confident, pretty, and young. Now, I saw my body as an assemblage of component parts, a patchwork of wrinkling imperfections in need of ironing and toning and implants and paralytic injections—anything to freeze time. I’d become so detached from my own body—from bodies in general—that on my bus ride back to New York City after the pageant, I would look out my window to see firefighters spraying a charred minivan—their boots slipping on what at first appeared to be mushy bits of orange pumpkin meat, but turned out to be the flayed remains of human flesh—and feel, basically, nothing.

But for now, I turned my attention to the stage. Ombre purple and coral-pink panels dappled with digital stars. Curtains shimmering electric blue. A cartoon mermaid’s natural environment. On stage left stood a gigantic golden statue, like the one at the Oscars. Only it looked like this one had breasts. I couldn’t really tell. My seat was pretty bad. The ladies next to me kept going on about Miss Alaska and how “that yellow bikini she wore on night one made her look like an albino dog—haha!” On the big screen, I caught a glimpse of Miss Alaska, smiling brightly like she’d won and hugging all the other losers, their heads tipped back in jubilee, teeth bared.

Primates smile to submit; if a beta meets an alpha in the wild, he shows his teeth to indicate his inferior rank. It’s called a fear grin. Sociologists say human women smile more than men because their lower social status motivates deference. They smile to indicate attentiveness to the needs, goals, and accomplishments of those who are more powerful.

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