Pretty

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Naming her baby Pretty had turned out to be less than prophetic. Pretty had the same dim eyes, ashen hair and vitamin-deficient pallor as her mother. Homely, sickly, dowdy—yes. Pretty—no. There really had been something in the water, people said. Lead probably. Or maybe some of those Erin-Brockovich chemicals. No one called Pretty pretty—except Pretty’s mother, Bonita.

“Pretty!” Bonita yelped through crooked, gritted teeth. She looked around at all the mean faces on the train station platform. “Come back here. Right . . . now.”

Pretty did as Pretty was told.

“People are watching you, Pretty. Don’t you attract attention to us. They’ll laugh.”

Pretty scooted behind her mother’s beige pantsuit and considered her options, tapping her left foot on slick tile. She hated it when the other children at school teased her and called her goony butt and zombie goon and goony glasses (always a goon), but she really, really, really wanted to show the world—or at least the world on the platform—the new steps she’d learned at school today.

Bonita pushed her plastic ovals back up her nose and checked her digital Casio one more time. The train was three minutes late again, and Pretty was restless as a squirrel. “Set-tle down, Pretty.”

“But, Mama!”

“Not here. You have no idea—” Bonita saw her own bloodless face in her daughter’s glasses. The world pooh-poohed mousy women; her ex-husband certainly had. “People can be so ugly, Pretty.”

The child melted back behind her mother’s beige, but just seconds later she dared to peek out at the evil onlookers. To her surprise, an elegant, young businessman in a long, black coat was smiling at her. No, wait, Pretty thought. He was dancing with his eyes.

Pretty wiggled her head.

“Set-tle down.”

At that moment, the businessman leapt into the air and landed next to Bonita in a perfect, grand plie.

“Oh my,” Bonita said and tightened her hold on Pretty’s arm.

Bystanders clapped and snorted. An ancient woman with a gloriously goitrous neck did the robot over to Pretty and shouted, “Go on, girl.”

Pretty pushed her own plastic ovals an inch up her nose, dumbly begging her mother for freedom. She was itchy to get jiggy with it.

From the left a plump goth girl vamped the length of the platform; from the right a beauty queen tumbled tiara over high-heels. A middle-aged woman with her hair-net and shopping did the bump with a Cadbury vending machine. Candy rained into the slot below.

Pretty wrenched free and spun onto stage as her mama yelled, “Get back here!” But Pretty just stuck out her lip, then her hip. She swished and she galloped; she tapped like an Egyptian. She twirled and took flight as the goth girl stabbed a hand in the air and yelled “Rock on, bitch!” The businessman flashed a perfect-ten card for her perfect-ten landing. Pretty giggled and swayed. Step ball change. A gaggle of old women thrummed on their walkers, nodding to the beat of Pretty’s sassy new grind.

“Pretty!” Bonita growled.

“Pretty!” someone shouted from far down the platform. “Pretty!” filled the tunnel as the train came in.

“Hear that, Mama? They called me pretty.”

Christopher Allen, a native of Tennessee, lives in Munich, Germany where he teaches English. His stories have appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Tough Times, Tough People, Gathering: Writers of Williamson County, Ruthless Peoples Magazine and Flash Fire 500, among others. He writes about his travels at www.imustbeoff.blogspot.com.

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