Read Online The Magician's Girl by Doris Grumbach - Free Book Online

Three years later, Miss America, formerly Miss Philadelphia, was close to the ideal, with only one half-inch difference between her hips and bust. Her picture was tacked up over the mantel of the Noon house in New Baltimore until August of the year when it was removed in anticipation of September’s new queen.
    Florence’s ambition was to serve a New York State pageant winner as a trainer, or even as a chaperon. She did not aspire to be a hostess. She knew she was ruled out because these were always local Atlantic City women whose favored positions raised them almost to nobility during the magic week of the pageant. Florence was consoled by knowing that, after years of devoted attendance, she was more than qualified to be a chaperon. Only reluctantly did she come to realize that such a responsibility, serving a candidate, utilized three months or more of the lucky lady’s year. She would have to give up her job at the hospital, which she could not afford to do.
    Always, she spoke of the candidates with familial reverence usually reserved for novices in a convent. ‘You see,’ she said to Maud, ‘you need to start with a promising girl, working with her for a year, maybe two, before she’s ready to enter. You’re with her all the time while she’s still in high school. Work on her, with her, teach her how to groom herself, every part, head to body, how to improve her best features and play down her less good ones, stand straight but not too straight, like military men.’ She glanced at her husband, who sat still in his chair, not listening, it seemed, his mind on his tin soldiers guarding their paper terrain. ‘Poise, it’s called. You teach them how to be poised.’
    â€˜I thought poise was balance or equilibrium, like being poised on the edge of a cliff, like the Charlie Chaplin cabin in The Gold Rush , or something,’ Maud said. ‘Well, I suppose that too. But it also means she holds herself, her shoulders and hips and legs and arms, standing just right every time she stops moving. Stopping in just the right pose, graceful-like, all together. What the judges give points for is called “grace of bearing.”’
    Maud felt her own round shoulders curve in further, so that her sternum ached with pressure, a living model, she hoped, of what Miss America was not, the ugliest of ugly Miss New Baltimores, fat, short, half blind, unpoised. ‘Then her clothes. It matters a lot how the swimsuit is cut for her particular figger, the color, the materials, the neckline. Then you need to worry about what your girl wears for talent night, so it shows her off well no matter what things she does, something awkward like, you know, like tap dancing or reciting Kipling’s If . Then the most important—the evening gown. That counts for an awful lot. And the gloves …’
    â€˜Gloves? They wear gloves? When?’ Maud asked. ‘Oh my yes. With the evening gown, always. When did you think?’
    Maud’s fingers were so fat that they fit best into the mittens she wore until it grew warm enough to go without them. The thought of jamming her beefy hands into long white kid gloves wrinkled only at the elbow made her arms and hands ache. ‘And her hair. That’s probably the thing I could be best at. I’ve watched it being done on girls a lot. I know how to do it different every time, for every event and appearance, all week. The trainers say they “build the hair” or “construct a style.” Not like I have it done, set, you know,’ she said, glancing at Maud’s chopped-off black hair, which tended to arrange itself into disunited strands. ‘They think of it as a structure to be built on the girl’s head. That’s very, very important.’
    Maud nodded, and pushed her oily bangs out of her eyes with the eraser end of her pencil. ‘So much for structure,’ she thought, and went on appearing to listen