Pretty Ugly: A Novel (25 page)
Ray couldn’t remember the last time he’d had so much fun. It was a welcome distraction from the nagging pile of bullshit that had become his life. He even created a persona for his toothless self, a stoic simpleton named Daryl. When not at work, Ray would entertain himself by dressing in overalls purchased at Goodwill and a John Deere cap snatched from a dead patient’s hall tree—sometimes forgoing a shirt altogether—and drive around town being Daryl.
Daryl spent his nights at the Brass Ass Saloon, where he’d shoot pool with unemployed coal miners and trumpet bumper sticker politics through a fog of Busch Light and codeine. One night on the way home, he stopped by a tent revival and begged the preacher, a charismatic charlatan in a bolo tie, to cure his dyslexia. As the preacher and his followers laid hands on Daryl, he fell to his knees and pretended to speak in tongues.
“Klaatu barada nikto!”
An elderly man quickly stood up and “translated” Ray’s tongues: “I am the Lord Jesus, and I am coming soon!”
Satisfied, Ray thanked the preacher, dropped a handful of spare change and five unopened blister packs in the collection plate, and went home.
As Daryl, people expected much less from Ray, and it was everything he never knew he’d always wanted. He felt common and anonymous, and it was the most liberating feeling of his life. Finally, he understood why the world was full of so many ambitionless morons. They were the ones who had it all figured it out.
Who’s to say that going to college, getting a good job, and working yourself to death is the American dream?
Ray thought.
Maybe the goal is to have people think you’re stupid and leave you the fuck alone.
The worst part about being Daryl was that everyone assumed he could fix their cars. Because of his complete lack of mechanical ability and general misanthropy, Ray had never paid much attention to how many people he encountered every day who needed help with their vehicles. But when a guy who looks like Daryl says he knows nothing about cars, people assume he must be a criminal: the old lady in the Kroger’s parking lot who clutched her purse when Daryl said he didn’t have any jumper cables; the soccer mom who quickly rolled up the windows of her overheated minivan when he admitted he knew nothing about radiators; the preacher’s wife with the flat tire who dialed 911 and held her thumb over the Send button when it became obvious Daryl couldn’t operate a jack.
Ray realized it was time to get his teeth fixed after nearly getting several more knocked out for claiming Dale Earnhardt was not a hero.
“He drove into a wall. He didn’t die in combat,” Daryl said with a smile, exposing his jack-o’-lantern-like grin.
“You take that back, goddammit!” another toothless man screamed at him over the Brass A’s pool table, knocking a cup of dip spit onto the already stained felt. “He was America’s greatest athlete!”
“He wasn’t an athlete. He drove a fucking car in a circle,” Daryl argued. “Anything my grandmother can do is not a sport.”
When the guy swung a pool cue at Ray’s head, barely missing his recently healed lips, Ray sprinted out the door and never went back.
Implanting Ray’s new teeth was simple and uneventful, although they were nowhere near the same color as the rest of his teeth. They were the whitest teeth in his head. In fact, they were the whitest teeth Ray had ever seen. They were the color of light. Ray’s dentist claimed that over the next few weeks Ray’s diet and lifestyle would “naturally yellow” the teeth until they blended in with the rest of his smile. Ray was skeptical.
“How will they know when they’re the same color as the other ones?”
The condescending sixty-five-year-old smiled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if they start yellowing naturally, how will they know when to stop? What if they just keep yellowing until they’re the color of a banana?”
The dentist shook his head. “Because of science, son. That’s how it is now. With computers and whatnot.”
Ray had spent the last several weeks being thought of as a complete idiot, and he was tired of it, but he was also exhausted.
“Fine.” He sighed. “Whatever.”
“And,” the dentist said, laughing, “if they change too much, maybe you’ll look like one of those rappers with the gold teeth.” His face turned grave. “I can’t stand rap music. N-word this and f-word that. Black music used to be so respectful. Remember Johnny Mathis? Good stuff.”
“I don’t know any Johnny Mathis.”
“Really?” The dentist’s disappointment was practically scolding. “Do yourself a favor. Voice like an angel. And he didn’t swear at all. One of the good ones, Johnny Mathis. Anyway, if your teeth don’t change, just come back in and we’ll whiten the others to make them match. You could use a good teeth whitening anyway.”
Surprising absolutely no one, Ray’s new teeth did not naturally yellow as the dentist had promised. After repeatedly refusing to take advantage of the old man’s “once-in-alifetime deal” on teeth whitening, Ray stormed next door to a younger dentist, who explained, “The old guy probably ordered the wrong teeth on purpose so you’d buy his whitening package. He started doing that after his fourth wife sued him for divorce. I can shade these new teeth, no problem. However,” he said, looking in Ray’s mouth, “whitening wouldn’t be a
completely
bad idea.”
* * *
Courtney’s new schedule didn’t give her much alone time with Ray, which was not ideal, but “now is not the time to be thinking long term,” she confided to Britney. When she wasn’t working for Miranda, she was scouring her attic for anything of value she could sell on eBay. Digging through dusty boxes and Depression-era steamer trunks, Courtney ignored sentimentality and nostalgia and put her grandparents’ entire history up for sale. What had taken Marvin and Zola five decades to build together was now being passively fought over by faceless strangers on the Internet. Courtney’s grandmother’s antique jewelry, including her wedding ring, went for $1,100. A collector of military paraphernalia from Maryland paid $450 for Marvin’s war medals (including two Purple Hearts and a Distinguished Service Medal), his field gear, and the bloodstained uniform of a North Korean soldier Marvin had killed with a hammer (the incident that had earned him the DSM). That money, combined with what she’d earned from Miranda and whatever she could squeeze out of Ray, had lowered her tax debt to just over eight thousand dollars. It might as well have been eight million. Unless Ray left Miranda soon, or a guardian angel came out of the sky and granted her three wishes, Courtney would be homeless by Christmas.
Since becoming pregnant, Courtney had gained fifteen pounds. But instead of it all going to her belly, the weight had equally distributed itself throughout her entire body, making her look like a homesick college freshman. It wasn’t surprising considering she’d been consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand calories a day. Ray might not have been as available as she’d hoped, but Little Debbie was always there for her.
Her second meeting with Mr. Waxflower didn’t go much better than the first, ending abruptly when Courtney stormed out screaming she was going to sue him for being “a creepy asshole” and knocked a porcelain doll to the floor.
“Ray,” she insisted, “you
have got
to talk to him.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” he legitimately wanted to know.
“Didn’t you go to college?” she asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“So, there you go,” she said, winning the argument.
Pleased to be dealing with an adult, Mr. Waxflower patiently explained Courtney’s situation to Ray.
“The lien holder, in this case the county, has the right to auction off Miss Daye’s house and use the proceeds of said sale to pay her grandfather’s outstanding tax bill. Miss Daye will then receive the balance of the auction price—after fees, taxes, etc.—and the house will no longer be hers.”
“See? I told you!” she shouted at Ray. “He’s trying to take my house! Why does he want a second house? He’s not even married!” She leaned across the desk and got as close to the attorney as he would allow. “You’re not even married!”
“Jesus, Courtney, calm down!”
“How am I supposed to calm down, Ray? I’m eighteen, I’m pregnant, and I’m going to be homeless! Jesus Christ, I dropped out of school to run errands for your fucking wife! I mean, how messed up is that? I just want my house back. That’s all. Nothing else matters.” Stomping toward the door, she turned back to Mr. Waxflower. “Fuck you, weirdo.”
As the door slammed, Mr. Waxflower turned to Ray and cleared his throat. “Well,” he said in a voice dripping with insult and pity, “you certainly have
your
hands full.”
Ray glared at him for a long beat. “Fuck you, weirdo.”
After the meeting, Ray took Courtney to Dairy Queen, the good one out by the bypass, where they shared a Peanut Buster Parfait and tried to discuss their situation like grown-ups. Mindlessly stabbing the sundae with their long red plastic spoons, they just ended up rehashing the same conversations they’d had dozens of times before. She made desperate threats, and he made desperate promises, although this time their voices lacked the passion of conviction. After ten minutes they stopped speaking altogether. There was no point. Neither of them was going to change positions. Not today, anyway. Through the window they watched a group of happy teenagers pile into a beat-up ’72 Ford pickup and speed off to do something exciting and impulsive. Ray hated them. Hated their youth, their potential, their happiness. He took their joy as a personal affront. Courtney thought about her friends Britney and Kaitlin. Since dropping out of school she hadn’t seen them much. They still texted, but even that was starting to feel impersonal. She wondered if they missed her, or if they even thought about her anymore. She had never loved school, but she truly hated feeling like she was missing out on something. Ray and Courtney looked at each other and hoped one would say exactly what the other one wanted to hear, but neither said anything. After a long, uncomfortable silence, they went back to their ice cream, each secretly wishing they’d never met the other.
“The girls are beauties … but their mothers are
beasts
!”
The promos for Starr Kennedy’s reality show were the stuff of nightmares: thirty seconds of Miranda’s fight with Theresa intercut with shots of Uncle Wes’s toupee flying through the air, and not much else. An unethical editor had even added a few unnecessary bleeps implying that in addition to being violent, Miranda was a potty mouth. It was like seeing her worry journal acted out on TV.
Miranda had been working like crazy to get Brixton ready for her debut at the Chattanooga Christmas Angels Pageant and Winter Spectacular. It had been only a few months, but Miranda sorely missed the feeling of accomplishment that came with prepping for a pageant. Items were being checked off her to-do list with satisfying speed, but with only three weeks to go there was still a tremendous amount of work to be done. The last thing she needed was to be humiliated on national television.
Within hours, the promos had gone viral, inspiring dozens of tribute videos. Sorority girls with pillows stuffed under their sweatshirts pretending to be Miranda squared off against other girls wearing too much makeup. Two drag queens slap-fought each other in slow motion as Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” played over the scene. There was even an auto-tuned version of the actual audio made into a hip-hop song that got six million views on YouTube. The few seconds that didn’t feature the fight focused on Theresa screaming and crying and insulting everyone in her path, including Starr. Miranda had heard that the camera adds ten pounds, but in Theresa’s case it had the opposite effect, making her look gaunt and hollow like a rotting cigar store Indian. Maybe it was how she was lit, or maybe, Miranda thought, the camera was able to capture Theresa’s inner essence, an X-ray of her soul. Regardless of the reason, Theresa came across as a mentally unstable lunatic, and for Miranda that kind of made the whole experience worth it.
Ray first saw the video when Courtney forwarded it to him with the subject line
OMFG! WTF! LOL
. Three hours earlier he had taken two of what he thought were Xanax but turned out to be an experimental form of nitroglycerin, and his blood pressure had fallen to 80/40. He hid in a corner of the nurses’ lounge and watched the video eight times before calling his wife.
“When were you in a fight?”
Miranda sighed. She knew this conversation would happen eventually and she’d composed a brief, rational explanation that went something like, “I was protecting Bailey from a bully, and if you had been there you would have done the same thing.” But after Brixton’s birth and the new perspective it had given her, Miranda didn’t feel like she needed to defend anything. The pregnant woman in that video was a completely different person. “It was a couple months ago. At a pageant.”
“Well…” He didn’t really know what to say next. “Were you going to tell me about it?”
There was a long pause. “I don’t know. I mean, eventually, maybe, probably, but if the cameras hadn’t been there then, honestly? Probably not.”