The Princesses of Iowa (25 page)

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe if it had a raccoon tail
and
an American flag?”

“You’re right. That must exist, right?”

I shrugged, laughing, as he Daniel-Boone-marched up to a store clerk and asked for the patriotic rodent section. “Raccoons aren’t rodents,” I whispered, and he quickly corrected himself. “I’m sorry,” he said to the clerk, “how embarrassing. What I mean to ask is: Can you direct me to the patriotic
small mammal
section?”

Twenty minutes later, the three of us reconvened near the front doors. I held my find behind my back, hiding it from both of them. Ethan was still wearing his coonskin hat, but he had added a bunch of American flag pins to the front, and he had a small stuffed eagle with pinch wings dangling from the end of the tail. “Points for creativity,” I said.

“Yes, but the assignment was not to
construct
the kitschiest item, but rather to find it,” Shanti said. “Fail.”

“Let’s see yours, then,” Ethan said.

“Gladly.” She eyed us. “Though I’m not sure you’re ready for this degree of awesomeness.”

“We’re ready.”

“Are you sure? Because it’s pretty awesome.”

“I think we can handle it,” Ethan said.

“If you’re sure . . .”

“Shanti!”

She whipped a T-shirt out from behind her back and draped it across her chest. “Ta-daa!” The shirt was purple with an airbrushed rainbow underneath the words
I LOVE MY IOWA GRANDMA.
Ethan and I nodded appreciatively.

“Points for the airbrushing,” I said.

“It does say Iowa,” Ethan said.

“What?” Shanti cried. “How can you two sound so blasé? Look at the craftsmanship! The hideous shade of violet! It’s perfect!”

“I don’t know, I saw a shirt over there with lipstick marks and pig faces that said ‘Hogs and Kisses from Iowa,’” I said.

“There’s one with corn wearing sunglasses that says ‘Another Iowa Tourist,’” Ethan agreed.

“Iowa Grandma is far superior to Hogs and Kisses!” Shanti shook her shirt at us. “Airbrushed rainbow! It’s kitschy
and
gay friendly!”

Two women with unnaturally tan, prematurely wrinkled smoker’s skin, dressed identically in sleeveless denim shirts and extremely tight mom jeans, gave us hostile glares as they passed, and we all cracked up. “It’s like looking into the future,” I said, and Shanti shuddered.

“No way. I am getting the hell out of here before I ever go the big-hair-tight-jeans-denim-shirt route.” She looked down at her find happily. “Though of course I am proud to be an Iowa Grandma.”

“Wouldn’t wearing that shirt signify you were the grandchild?” Ethan asked. “It seems like a grandma would buy that shirt for her grandchild. Right, Paige?”

I nodded. “I think that’s how it works.”

“Yes, but I won’t be the one wearing this shirt,” Shanti said. “You will.”

Ethan raised his eyebrows. “That depends on Paige, I think.”

“True,” I said, with my best poker face. “But I don’t know. . . .” And then I pulled my find out from behind my back. “Is this better than the grandma shirt?”

Shanti gasped and Ethan guffawed. My find was a camouflaged trucker hat with a poorly rendered picture of a flying pheasant and the words
IOWA IS BIG COCK COUNTY
emblazoned across the squishy front. “For the win!” Ethan said.

“No way,” Shanti said, but you could tell she knew she’d lost. “No, that’s just standard misogynistic frat-boy crap.”

“Points for Iowa,” Ethan said.

“Is a male pheasant even called a cock?” Shanti asked.

I nodded. “Good question. I have no idea.”

“All part of the charm,” Ethan said. “Your average ‘misogynist frat-boy crap,’ as I believe you called it, would definitely have a more standard rooster. The pheasant really elevates its regional Iowan charm.”

“Male peacocks are called cocks,” I offered. “Females are peahens.”

“There you go,” Ethan said, and then: “Wait,
county
? Don’t they mean
country
?”

“There is an Iowa County,” I said, “just to the west of Johnson.”

“There’s also an Iowa County in Wisconsin,” Shanti said. “You drive through it to get to Madison.”

“The existence of counties called Iowa is not the question here,” Ethan said. “The question is whether or not the hat should read ‘big cock
country,
’ and I would argue that it should, because ‘Blank is blank country’ is a common construction, whereas ‘Blank is blank county’ is not.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Shanti?”

She looked resigned. “Agreed.”

“Misspellings, a pheasant that may or may not actually be a cock, the word ‘Iowa,’ and camo on a trucker’s hat? It’s like the perfect storm of Iowa kitsch!” Ethan grabbed my hand and held it up above my head. “Paige wins!”

“Grandmas are way kitschier than cocks,” Shanti grumbled, but she took the hat and headed up toward the cash register.

“Tell them you want to wear it out!” Ethan called after her. She turned and gave us the middle finger. “She loves us,” Ethan said.

Shanti convinced us to buy her dinner at the sit-down restaurant inside the truck stop, the Iowa 80 Kitchen. “Best diner fries ever,” she said. “Seriously.”

“Only if you wear the hat,” Ethan said, and she grudgingly smashed it on her head, where it pushed her bangs out into little fingers around her face. The hat was horrendous, but Shanti managed to make it look edgy, even while she glowered at us in a fake sulk.

“Very Iowa hipster,” Ethan said.

“Not helping.”

“Those trucker hats were totally trendy,” I said. “Like, when we were in third grade.”

“Great.”

“What’s up, kids?” Our waitress was tall, with boxy glasses and appealingly messy curls.

“Hey, Carrie,” Shanti and Ethan said together.

“What brings you all to the 80 today?” she asked. “Nice hat, by the way.”

Shanti blushed. “Not my fault.”

“Actually, it’s all your fault,” Ethan said. “Unless (a) kidnapping us, (b) driving us halfway across the state, (c) proposing a ridiculous contest, and then (d) losing said contest somehow count as ‘not your fault.’”

Carrie laughed. “Same old, same old.”

“This is Paige,” he said. “Also kidnapped.”

Carrie’s familiarity with Ethan and Shanti reminded me that I was still an outsider, and I felt my ability to keep up with Ethan and Shanti’s banter slipping away. “Hi.”

“I feel for you,” Carrie said.

“She’s a princess!” Shanti informed her.

I shook my head. “No, I’m not.”

Shanti made her hand into a wall in front of her face and stage-whispered, “She’s going to be!”

“So you’re going for the king’s ransom?” Carrie asked.

“Nice,” Ethan said.

It was an easy joke, and I felt dumb for not thinking of it myself. “Anyway.”

“Anyway,” Carrie echoed. “What can I get you all? The usual?”

Shanti’s usual was grilled cheese, Ethan’s was a turkey burger, and they talked me out of the salad bar and into meat loaf, claiming you weren’t allowed to visit a diner and not try the meat loaf.

“Carrie was in our summer class,” Shanti explained after the waitress left.

“Class?”

“Yeah, Ethan and I both took a summer writing class at the U. That’s how we met.”

He nodded in agreement.

“Apparently she’s writing a novel that takes place in a diner, and that’s why she’s working here for the year. Then she’s going to apply to MFA programs. But over the summer she had terrible writer’s block and couldn’t write one word of her novel. Instead, she spent the summer writing poetry about famous paintings.” I must have gotten a strange look on my face, because she said quickly, “It sounds weird, probably, but some of them were really amazing. She wrote the most incredible thing about this Mark Rothko painting. I can’t even explain it, but it was one of those things that just gets stuck in your head for days, you know?”

I did know. Before I lost my nerve, I admitted, “Your story was like that for me.”

“Really?”

I nodded.

“Wow, thanks,” she said. Behind her, a long beam of light, hung with dust motes, bounced off her pheasant hat and got tangled in her dark hair, bounding through the strands until they sparkled maroon and purple. “I have to admit I’m a little surprised. I wouldn’t have pegged you for a fantasy person.”

“I’ve been surprising myself a lot lately,” I admitted. “I’m surprised to be here.”

“Why?” Ethan asked.

Shanti looked at me, and it was like I could feel her peeling away the layers, trying to see who I was beneath the veneer of perfection. “You’ve changed a lot, haven’t you? And not just from when I first knew you. Like, you seem different now from who you were at the beginning of the school year.”

Nikki had said nearly the same thing to me just a few hours ago, and yet when Shanti said it, I didn’t feel embarrassed or defensive. I felt almost
proud.
“I’m working on it,” I said.

“What were you like when Shanti first knew you?” Ethan asked.

I caught Shanti’s eye and smiled. “I was a nerd.”

“I find that hard to believe,” he said. It was neither an insult nor a compliment, the way he said it. Just a statement of fact.

“And then I was perfect,” I said. “But it was always someone else’s idea of perfect.”

Shanti nodded. “You were a magazine picture, not a person.”

“That’s a little harsh, Shan,” Ethan said.

“No, she’s right,” I said. “I wasn’t a person. I was like a walking cardboard cutout.”

Shanti picked up her coffee and looked thoughtfully at me again. “But you’re different now. I noticed it that night at the game. You were by yourself, first of all. And then you actually talked to me when I sat down. You didn’t give me the popular girl brush-off. That’s when I knew you weren’t the person everyone else — and I — thought you were.”

Seeing myself, my old self, through her eyes, I looked even worse. The girl she had just described was the girl my sister still saw: shallow, phony, basking in the attention of teachers and parents, playing perfect for them, while treating my peers with a mixture of polite disinterest and carefully disguised contempt. But Shanti also saw a side of me that no one in my family had ever witnessed: a girl who was smart enough to keep up with lightning-quick conversations, and who was sometimes even funny enough to make people laugh.

She smiled at me and I grinned back, feeling a connection between us, an unspoken understanding. “Working on it, huh?” she said, and I nodded.

Ethan opened his mouth to say something, and she held up a hand, pinching her fingers together like a clam. “We’re having a moment here,” Shanti said. “Eat your turkey burger.”

After eating, Shanti herded us to the Jeep. “We still have some daylight,” she said, nosing the Jeep out of the parking lot and back toward the highway. “I vote that we make one more stop. And since I’m driving, my vote’s the only one that matters.”

I sat shotgun, with Ethan perched in the middle of the backseat, leaning forward to talk to us. “What stop, Sarge?”

She kept her eyes on the road and smiled. “Secret.”

“Can we guess?”

“You can try.” She tugged at the brim of the hat she still wore, moving it to block the western sun.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Is it bigger than a bread box?”

“Where we’re going?”

“Yeah.”

Shanti snorted. “Um, wouldn’t it have to be? Or how could we all fit inside?”

“So it’s inside!” Ethan said.

“We could stand around it,” I said.

“Around what?”

“The bread box.”

“It’s not a bread box!” Shanti said.

“We’re really making progress here.” Ethan rubbed at his chin, and I remembered the day he’d interviewed me, playing the cub reporter. It had been only a few weeks ago, but it felt like part of another life, like the memory of a story I’d heard or a movie I’d seen. “So,” he asked, “what you’re saying is it’s bigger than a bread box?”

“Stop with the goddamn bread box!”

“Is it bigger than a
cake
box?” I asked. “Or a hatbox?”

“What about a black box . . . theater?” Ethan asked.

“A hotbox?” I asked, and Ethan laughed.

Shanti rolled her eyes. “You two are impossible.”

“-ly awesome,” Ethan finished.

“I meant annoying.”

“-ly awesome,” I said, and she laughed.

We arrived in Iowa City around six, about an hour before sunset. Shanti veered into a parking ramp, hit the brakes with gusto, turned off the Jeep, and jumped out. “I’m going to go write by the river for a while,” she announced, taking off the hat and slipping on a pair of oversize sunglasses. “You two can entertain yourselves, I trust?”

I nodded; Ethan saluted.

Without planning to, we followed Shanti to the river, where we saw her sitting with her notebook at the top of a hill overlooking the water. Ethan and I meandered along its banks, kicking at the first fallen leaves. Little kids rode past us on bikes decorated with handlebar streamers and little personalized license plates, often followed by parents on larger, undecorated bikes. Other people passed us, too: college-aged joggers with Greek letters on their shirts, middle-aged couples holding hands, conscientious rollerbladers with knee and elbow pads. Ethan told me stories from the summer, how he and Shanti had met, the day trip the class had taken to Maquoketa Caves. I told him about my summer in Paris — not interviewing taxi-driving poets, as he’d once suggested, but trying to keep the baby from crying while the Eastons fought in the next room.