There’s a whole chapter in the Magnolia Court Orientation Handbook titled “Manners Befitting a Maid Upon Announcement of Selection to the Court.” It goes something like this, but not exactly like this because I’ve added a few flourishes to jack up the entertainment value:
| 1. | DO glide on air across the stage of the Bienville Civic Center, visions dancing in your head of encasing your teeny-tiny size-two body in a giant Scarlett O’Hara dress. |
Mallory Ross accomplished this task with panache as she stepped into the Winner’s Circle.
| 2. | DO NOT smirk as if there had ever been any doubt that you wouldn’t make it. You may be Ashley LaFleur, perfect little princess with loads of Daddy’s money and Mother’s good looks (thank God!), and you may think you rule the universe, which of course is why the judges announced your name first, but still. Arrogant smirks never look good on anyone, especially achievement pageant winners. |
| 3. | DO smile humbly and wave into the dark auditorium toward where your family is cheering you on, even if the rest of the audience is gaping in stunned silence. Zara Alexander aced this feat, but then she’s one hundred percent grace and elegance, so what else would you expect? |
| 4. | DO NOT remain frozen solid in Finalists’ Row as you scream inside your head, What?! Me? Whyyyyyyyy?????? |
That would be me. I violated that one.
But that was nothing compared to the rules Brandi Lyn Corey broke next:
| 5. | DO NOT let your boyfriend and his redneck buddies from the EZ Lube shout “Who let the dawgs out?” and punctuate it with air-horn blasts. |
| 6. | DO NOT play overwhelmed beauty-pageant winner by fluttering your hands in front of your face like a nervous butterfly and staggering in the direction of the Winner’s Circle (see previous graceful gliding), and most certainly… |
| 7. | DO NOT proceed to faint right in front of me, because I will be scared to death that you’re going to knock your teeth out, and I might have to jerk you up by your big blonde hair, accidentally ripping out a patch which will hurt like h-e-double toothpicks and take forever to grow back in, but you will forgive me for it because God wants us to forgive (your words, not mine), which is exactly what happened and is exactly what I did… |
Followed by all hell breaking loose.
I hate to say it, y’all, but I, Ashley Jane Fontaine Ventouras (just call me Jane. Seriously. I did not name myself!), am possibly the world’s worst Southern belle: I wouldn’t know how to bat my eyelashes at a boy if my life depended on it. There’s no way I would look a pair of panty hose in the eye on a hot summer’s day, much less put them on, even if it is the civilized thing to do. And I think I just might be the only girl born and raised below the Mason-Dixon Line who is not genetically hardwired to dream of being a beauty queen. The thought of a tuxedo-clad dinosaur singing tribute to my beauty while I parade across a stage in a cleavage-enhancing gown to claim a tiara and a sash that reads, MISS LOCAL BEAUTY CONTEST WINNER—well, I’d be lying if I didn’t say it makes me want to, um, gag. Oops, what am I saying? If the organizers of the Magnolia Pageant could hear me now, they would have my hide! They will have you know it’s an achievement pageant. That the selected girls become our fine city’s ambassadresses to the world! We don’t do tiaras, sashes, or octogenarians singing tribute to our beauty. Our girls are just as smart and knowledgeable as they can be!
Still. Never in a million billion trillion years would I have freely chosen to put myself up on any type of pageant stage, especially in front of the good people of Bienville, Alabama, the place of my birth.
But Holy Plastic Tiaras! Grandmother has been all in a tiff about how this is the family’s last chance to snatch my childhood from the jaws of tragedy before I go off to college where I will be lost to my own misguided adulthood forever. So, after a prank in April got me expelled from the latest in a long line of “veddy elite, veddy disciplined” boarding schools, she somehow convinced the man who calls himself my father not to stick me in yet another one. Cosmo actually agreed to let me come home to Bienville and finish the year with a tutor so that Grandmother could rehabilitate me into a decent young lady. And I was cool with that, relatively speaking. She had already practically raised me for a good portion of my life, and I love her to death. In fact, I would go so far as to say that she’s my favorite living relative. And Lord knows she’s tried with me. She really has. It’s not her fault I’m so incorrigible.
I will say this, though. I was dubious with a capital D about coming back to B’ville. I’d been gone for so long that I wondered if it was even possible for me to fit back in again. Five years and a series of highbrow boarding schools puts a lot of distance between a girl and the people she did seventh-grade cotillion with. I don’t want to sound like a snob, but one of the advantages of hopping from boarding school to boarding school and having an international man of business for a daddy is that I’ve gotten to do some major traveling: New York, DC, Paris, London, Athens. You name it, chances are I’ve been there. And the kids I’ve been going to school with are cut from the same cloth, not to mention the fact that many of their parents practically run the planet.
Bienville, on the other hand, is a small town and it’s got small-town values: church and family reign supreme. Folks make friends, and enemies, for life. They don’t really leave, except maybe to go to college for a few years, then they head on home to settle down and raise a family just like their forebears did. So coming back made me wonder if I even had anything in common with kids who have never been anywhere except maybe on vacation to Disney World. Sure, I was from good old B’ville, but did I belong here anymore?
Besides, Bienville is so far off the beaten track that nobody even got Internet until last year. Okay, I’m kidding, but it’s true that hardly anyone outside the Gulf Coast region had heard of it until the oil spill. And because there’s not a lot to do around these parts, the number one source of entertainment in the Bienville area is gossip. At any given moment, the average Bienvillite is either gossiping, doing something to make themselves the subject of gossip, or having something done to them that will make them the subject of gossip. The last thing in the world I wanted to be was the subject of gossip. I could hear it now:
“Did you hear? Jane Fontaine’s back in town.”
“Cecilia’s daughter? Oh, that Poor Little Orphan Girl.”
“Losing her mother at such a young age.”
“And her father! I heard he hasn’t been back to Bienville since Cecilia’s funeral…?”
“Tell me that can’t be true!”
“Swear to God! Charlotte DeVille and I were talking about it just the other day!”
“Where is Cosmo from again? France? Italy?”
“Greece.”
“That’s right. I always remember Jane’s got a different last name. I just forget what it is. So who in the world is raising that child?”
“I don’t know. She’s at her grandmother’s now.”
“Well, that’s good.”
Rinse and repeat at any church fellowship hall, mall parking lot, beauty salon, ATM line, or gas station in town.
And I was right. The first day I got back into town, the proof that the gossip mill had kicked into overdrive was as obvious as a pimple in the middle of somebody’s forehead. I popped into Piggly Wiggly just to pick up a Red Bull and was not able to get out of there without running into some Old Bienvillite who recognized me because I “was simply the spitting image of my mother,” she said (minus the big boobs, I said). Of course, she was just dying to tell me how fondly she remembered Cecilia, what a wonderful woman she was, how much she contributed to the Junior League and the Presbyterian Church and the Arts Council, how everyone still talked about what a vivacious woman she was.
Then a look of pity entered her eyes, and she said, “Tsk tsk, shame, shame, poor little lamb” or some such. All I wanted was an energy drink and instead I’d been blasted back to a past full of tragedy. What was I supposed to say? “Oh, thank you! You’re so sweet to remind me! Yes, it was horrible! Yes, I’m permanently scarred! Want to know about my first period? The time I had chicken pox? Oh, and by the way, if you and everybody else in town had really cared about Cecilia, you wouldn’t have completely abandoned her when she got sick!” I said nothing, though. Instead, I fiddled nervously with the tab on the Red Bull until it popped open, drenching me in sticky liquid, a fitting match to the tide of grief rising in my throat.
I’ll say one good thing about boarding school(s): no one knows about your deep, dark, depressing family secrets unless you tell them. Which I never did. I kept everything behind a carefully constructed wall. The subject of my mother’s death? Packed in a box and bricked behind the wall. The pain of my father’s abandonment? Ditto. The destruction of my closest friendship in the world at his hands? Well, it would take a jackhammer and a backhoe to dig that thing out.
But since I’d been back, everywhere I went, there was some version of the Piggly Wiggly conversation. I tried to shrug it off, act like it wasn’t a big deal, but I’d have to be dead myself for the Poor Little Orphan Girl thing not to get to me. Even Grandmother used it, which is exactly how she roped me into this whole Magnolia Maid business to begin with!
“Sweetness,” she said, sneaking up on me all pre-coffee and half asleep at the breakfast room table one morning. “I want you to think about trying out for the Magnolia Maids. Now, I’m not putting any pressure on you,” she insisted as I rolled my eyes so far back in my head I’m surprised I didn’t need a surgeon to pull them back out. “But it meant so much to your mother when she was a Maid and wouldn’t it be just darling if you followed in her footsteps?”
With grandmother guilt like that, combined with the fact that okay, maybe, yes, I would like to follow in my mother’s footsteps somehow… come on! What would you have done? That’s right. You, too, would have agreed to repress every grrrrrl-power fiber in your being and try out for this organization that is so old school, it requires you to wear an antebellum dress. Antebellum. Prewar. Pre–Civil War. We’re talking hoopskirts, parasols, Scarlett O’Hara batting eyelashes at Rhett and proclaiming, “Tomorrow is another day.”
Not exactly my style.
But okay, I thought, Jane, try out. Make your grandmother happy. Just do it. Kinda sorta pretend like you enjoy it and she’ll be thrilled. You don’t have to actually get on the Court. They’ll for sure never pick you anyway. After all, my application looked more like a juvenile delinquent’s rap sheet than a gleaming résumé. And I made sure that I took every precaution to look like the anti-belle. I specifically showed up at orientation looking like Taylor Momsen when everyone else was sporting their sweetest Southern belle style. I did my three-minute-history speech on a topic that was not exactly Bienville-friendly: the last slave ship to arrive in the bay in the 1800s. During my personal interview I even told the judges—all upstanding members of the chamber of commerce—that world peace was about as attainable as a date with Robert Pattinson, so what was the point in bothering?
But despite all of that, I had managed to land myself on the civic center stage, on this sultry spring night in May, following in my mother’s footsteps as a Maid. Whether I liked it or not. And I’ll be honest, it’s so not darling to be struggling under the weight of a petite yet surprisingly busty blonde—herself a shocker of a Magnolia Maid choice—while the hundreds of people jam-packing the Bienville Civic Center look on!
“Catch her!” I yelled as Brandi Lyn’s hair ripped out and she continued to fall forward. But the three other girls standing in the Winner’s Circle were too frozen with disbelief to leap to my aid.
So I lunged, tossing myself between Brandi Lyn and the stage floor. I grunted as her body slammed into me with a force that nearly toppled me. Brandi Lyn’s chin hooked over my shoulder, her big blonde hair flew in my face, blinding me, and her giant boobs were two seconds away from suffocating me. “It’s okay! I’ve got her!” I exclaimed.
But then Brandi Lyn’s feet started sliding out from under her, forcing even more of her dead weight on me. I heard massive gasps from the audience of Old Bienvillites as I pushed her up to partially standing… yet she slid lower. What, was there baby oil on her shoes or something? More gasps. These from the girls in the Winner’s Circle. Ashley could barely mask her annoyance, probably more upset that her fancy pageant was being destroyed than that a girl had fainted. Mallory looked like a deer in headlights. Zara, well, she at least moved forward to help as I pushed Brandi Lyn up again. But Brandi Lyn’s feet slid out from under her once more and then it was all over. I lost my traction and she plummeted… TAKING ME DOWN WITH HER!
Brandi Lyn and I hit the floor with a bang.
“Maid down! We’ve got a Magnolia Maid down!” Walter Murray Hill, the chamber of commerce guy who heads up the Magnolia Maids, screamed into the auditorium’s abyss. “Is there a doctor in the house? Someone please help this little lamb!”
I spit Brandi Lyn’s hair out of my mouth and pushed at her deadweight of a body. “Excuse me? Having trouble breathing here! Can you move her off me, please?”
Suddenly, my prayers were answered. A guy in an EZ Lube uniform shirt—the leader of the air-horn brigade, I’m sure—ripped Brandi Lyn off me. “JoeJoe’s here, baby, it’s all right! Baby? Oh my God, she’s dead!” He started some version of CPR that surely he got out of some hospital drama. It didn’t look legit at all.
I clambered to a sitting position. “She’s not dead.” I pointed to Brandi Lyn’s chest. “See?” Walter and JoeJoe studied her chest, which was infinitesimally rising and falling with each slow breath.
JoeJoe cradled Brandi Lyn in his arms. “Oh, thank God. Stay with me, baby, stay with me.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine, young man.” But Walter looked worried, and who could blame him, what with his esteemed pageant being all ruined? “Is there a doctor in the house?” he yelled again.
As I struggled to catch my breath, something flashed before my eyes. Not my entire life, but one specific big thing: Luke Churchville, the best friend I ever had, the boy of my seventh-grade dreams, the one who had been taken away from me… he just might be in the audience. Watching this whole insane scene play out.
Yikes. How awkward.
“Well, I think my work here is done,” I announced as I picked myself up.
Then I saw what could only be Brandi Lyn’s mother (maybe because she cried, “Brandi Lyn! Momma’s come for you, chile!”) barge onto the stage. As tiny as Brandi Lyn was, her momma was an Amazon. Giant arms, trunks for legs, even her hair managed to be bigger and blonder than Brandi Lyn’s, if that was at all possible. The woman was a tank.
And the tank was heading my way.
I had three choices: Get mowed down. Curl up in a ball and hope for the best. Or get the hell out of the way.
I got the hell out of the way.
I leapfrogged forward like we used to on the playground (which I will tell you is a lot easier when you’re five and wearing OshKosh B’gosh, instead of seventeen and constricted by a tight cocktail-dress bodice and four-inch Manolos). My maneuver was possibly the most unladylike, awkwardly bizarre performance that has ever occurred on the Bienville Civic Center stage, but it did the trick. Brandi Lyn’s momma’s foot stomped mere inches from my face, but I was safe and free. If you call landing face-first in front of hundreds of people, your dignity completely and totally demolished, “safe and free.”
Super awkward.
Next thing I knew, not one, not two, but twenty doctors ran up onstage. There were so many doctors in the house that night that if somebody elsewhere in Bienville had stubbed a toe, they would have bled to death. While the doctors argued over what was wrong with the girl and peppered Mrs. Corey and JoeJoe with questions, I took the opportunity to park myself backstage behind the rainbow flats for the upcoming production of The Wizard of Oz and light up a smoke. Yes, a smoke. Didn’t I mention earlier that I was the world’s single worst candidate for the Magnolia Court?
“Excuse me, I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in here.”
I turned to see one of the other finalists—the one I had nicknamed “the Reader” during orientation because she had had her nose stuck in a book the whole time. Now the Reader was hiding deeper in the shadows of backstage than I was. Interesting. I took a deep, lung-poisoning drag and headed her off at the pass: “I KNOW you’re not allowed to smoke in here. Hey, aren’t you the girl who was trying to sneak offstage earlier?”
The Reader blushed. “Yeah, sorry. Was that distracting?”
“Are you kidding? It was hilarious! But what’s up with that? Do you have someplace to go?”
The Reader glanced down at her hands. “I hate being onstage. I thought that if maybe I could just make it to the edge, everyone would forget I was there. I could just disappear into the darkness.”
“I take it it’s a good thing you didn’t get put on the Court then?”
The Reader nodded vigorously. “A very good thing.”
“Congratulations, then.” I stuck out my hand for a high five. “My name’s Jane, by the way.”
“I know. Our mothers were on the Friends of the Library board together.” It didn’t escape me that she said it matter-of-factly. With none of the usual Poor Little Orphan Girl pity. I took it as a good sign.
“Really? My mother knew yours?” Jeez. Mom died seven years ago, and the Reader remembered her from even before that? I barely remembered what I ate for breakfast. And if the Reader knew who I was, then I should know who she was, but I didn’t. Except… “Oh! Caroline! But didn’t you used to be…” I stopped, mortified as I realized I was on the verge of barreling into a faux pas as big as Brandi Lyn’s mother.
Caroline supplied the answer. “Thinner.”
“No, no, that’s not… Well, you look great.” Caroline shrugged and I felt like a jerk because obviously she didn’t look great—she looked great plus fifty pounds. Not that I like to judge people by their weight because I think that’s so unfair, but how do you backtrack after that? Talk about the weather?
Caroline went pale. “Oh no, I was afraid of this.”
Shoot. “Look. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just me and my big mouth.”
“No, not that. That.” She pointed toward the wings where I could just barely make out the silhouette of Walter Murray Hill getting berated by a woman I had nicknamed the “Bobbed Monster” in my head.
Caroline sighed. “I knew Mother would be furious.”
“Oh, that’s right! The Bobbed Monster… uh, Mizz Upton is your mother!” Martha Ellen Upton had introduced herself at orientation as the Official Etiquette Mistress and Head Advisor of the Magnolia Maids. She then immediately launched into a lecture on how “any girl can be a Southern belle, but Magnolia Maids are the most perfect Southern belles of all. And if you’re going to be a Magnolia Maid, we will, capital W-I-L-L, require perfection.”
Wow. No wonder poor Caroline had put on fifty pounds.
“What’s she giving old Walter a hard time for?” I asked.
But Caroline was gone. She had scurried deeper into the wings. “Her short list!” she called over her shoulder. “The judges didn’t follow her short list!”
“Short list? What’s a short list?”
Turns out that Mizz Upton wasn’t simply in charge of Magnolia perfection, she was also in charge of compiling a short list of names to recommend to the judges. Interesting. According to Caroline, Mizz Upton’s ideal candidate was a definite type. She lived in the kingdom of Old Bienville High Society, attended either First Presbyterian or First Episcopal Church, and was educated at either the St. Andrew’s Preparatory Academy or the St. Peter’s School for Girls. Her family was historically significant in the community and/or filthy rich, preferably both. Sure, a few girls from more humble beginnings did dare to try out for the organization, and Mizz Upton took a look at them, too, but without the right pedigree it was highly unlikely they would make it far up the Magnolia Maid ladder. Mizz Upton pored over all three hundred–plus applications, evaluating GPAs and extracurricular activities and reading each and every two-page personal statement that each girl wrote extolling her qualifications as a Magnolia Maid. From those, she culled a list of finalists who interviewed with the judges and delivered a three-minute speech on some aspect of Bienville history. Out of all of this she concocted a “short list” of the five most Magnolia-worthy candidates, plus a few recommendations for alternates, and handed it off to the judges. Every year for the past decade, the judges had followed her suggestions as if they had been sent down by God Himself. The new Court always consisted of five new Maids and one alternate that Mizz Upton herself had preapproved.
Until this year.
Three of the five girls the judges had just named to the Court were absolutely, positively NOT on Mizz Upton’s list. Which was why she was having a conniption fit over there with Walter Murray Hill.
“Which three? Who wasn’t on the list?” I asked.
Caroline looked away.
“Don’t worry. You won’t hurt my feelings. I know I wasn’t anywhere near her top fifty. And I’m thinking that the fainting beauty over there”—I nodded at Brandi Lyn and her tank/mother and her EZ Lube boyfriend—“wasn’t exactly A-number-one high, either. But who else?”
Caroline remained silent, as if spilling the family Magnolia Maid secrets would cause her instant death.
“Can you at least tell me who was on the superspecial, creamy-delight short list?”
Apparently, answering that question was safer, because after a moment, Caroline pointed across the stage to a group of girls in the midst of a hysteria fit bigger than Mizz Upton’s. “They were,” she said solemnly.