Miss Wyoming

Chapter Eighteen

Susan had performed in shopping strips many times, and her afternoon stint at the Clackamas County Mall was by no means unusual. In fact, as opposed to pageant judges, she found the overwhelmingly geriatric mall crowds emotionally invisible, and performing before them neither chancy nor stressful, her only stings arising from the occasional heckling teen or a stray leering pensioner. Once in Olympia, Washington, mall security had removed an old lech who'd been wanking listlessly down by the left speaker bank, like a zoo gorilla resigned to a sterile caged fate. Susan thought it was funny, but hadn't quite understood what it was he'd actually been doing. She'd told both her mother and the mall cops she thought he'd been «shaking a donut,» which made the cops snort and Marilyn screech. When the cops briefly left the office, Susan had said, «Mom, please don't go filing another lawsuit. Not over this. Just let it go.»

«Young lady, who knows what harm that man did to you.»

«What harm?»

«It'll be years before you even know, sweetie.»

«Mom — no lawsuit. I'm sick of your suing people all the time. It's my birthday. Make it my present, okay?»

Marilyn's face froze but then immediately thawed. «I'll just keep on shucking bunnies to help pay the rent. I suppose some body has to work in this world.»

At the Clackamas Mall it had been arranged for Susan to perform a Grease medley, her routine that somehow dovetailed with the mall's Campaign for Drug-Free Kids. Susan's friend Trish had just turned sixteen, and drove Susan up to the mall from McMinnville. Marilyn was to follow shortly, after stopping to meet with a seamstress in Beaverton to go over Susan's autumn look.

Susan and Trish parked, hooked up with their mall contact, and then crammed themselves into the Orange Julius bathroom where Susan's poodle skirt remained untouched within its paper Nordstrom's bag. From a gym bag, she and Trish removed black jumpsuits and thin red leather ties. Both combed their hair into spikes and applied gel and heavy mascara, then headed backstage. Susan's name was called, and the two climbed up onto the carpeted plywood risers. They walked like robotic mimes, Trish to her Casio keyboard, Susan to center stage. To the bored and distracted mall audience they might just as well have been dressed as Valkyries or elm trees, but Susan felt for the first time a surge of power.

Trish hit the opening notes, at which point Susan lifted a riding crop she'd borrowed from one of Don's army buddies. She began to crack the whip in time with the rhythmic nonsense of «Whip It,» a by-then-stale new wave anthem. For the first time, Susan didn't feel like a circus seal onstage. Trish kept the synthesizer loud, and Susan could feel all other times she'd been onstage drop away — those years she'd been trussed and gussied up, barking for fish in front of Marilyn and every pageant judge on earth, joylessly enacting her moves like a stewardess demonstrating the use of an oxygen mask.

But now — the faces — Susan was seeing genuine reactions: mouths dropped wide open, mothers whisking away children — and at the back, the cool kids who normally mooned her and pelted her with Jelly Tots, watching without malice.

Suddenly the speaker squawked and moaned, and Susan turned around to see Marilyn ripping color-coded jacks from the backs of the Marshall amps while a mall technician lamely protested the ravaging. Heads in the audience shifted as if they were a field of wheat, in the direction where Susan now turned, glaring like a raven.

«What the hell are you doing, Mom?»

Marilyn plucked out more jacks, and her face muscles tensed like a dishrag in the process of being squeezed.

Susan cracked the riding crop at Marilyn, where it burned Marilyn's hands, a crimson plastic index fingernail jumping away like a cricket. «Mom, stop it! Stop!»

Marilyn grabbed the crop's end and yanked it away from Susan. She looked to be rabid and scrambled up over the 2-X-6 trusses and onto the stage. Susan turned to her audience. She was raging. «Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a big hand for» — she paused as Marilyn raised herself awkwardly, like a horse from thick mud — «my overenthusiastic mother.»

The audience smelled blood and clapped with gusto as Marilyn cuffed Susan on the neck. Three hooligans over by the Sock Shoppe shouted meows, at which point Susan went momentarily deaf from Marilyn's blow. Time stopped for her. She was lifted up and out of herself, and she felt aware for the first time that her mother didn't own her the way she owned the Corvair or the fridge. In fact, Susan realized Marilyn had no more ownership of her than she did of the Space Needle or Mount Hood. Marilyn's connection was sentimental if Susan chose it to be that way, or business, which made some sense, but no longer was Marilyn able to treat Susan like a slammed car door every time she lost control.

Marilyn looked in Susan's eyes, realized she'd blown it and would never regain her advantage. This sent her into a larger swivet, but its ferocity now didn't faze Susan. She now knew the deal.

Marilyn lunged at her daughter, enraged, but Susan looked back at her and with a gentle smile said, «Sorry, Mom, you're thirty seconds too late. You're not going to get me — not this time.»

Marilyn's arms went around Susan's chest, half as if to strangle her, half for support. The clapping stopped and Trish ran over. «Mrs. Colgate,please. »

«You backstabbing little whore,» she shouted at Trish.

«Mom!»

«She doesn't mean it,» Trish said, trying to wedge Marilyn and Susan apart. «We've got to get her off the stage.»

Mall security arrived. Susan and Trish stood locked in place as two beefy men used all their might to keep Marilyn away from Susan.

«Come with us, ma'am.»

«No.»

Susan said pragmatically, «Guys, let's get her into an office or something. She's jagging on diet pills. She needs a cool dark place.»

«Traitor,» Marilyn hissed.

Susan grabbed her mother's handbag. She and Trish followed Marilyn into an office, where Susan made her mother swallow some downers. She phoned Don to tell him they'd be late. Trish left at Susan's asking, and Susan drove her mother home to McMinnville. Dinner was take-out Chinese, and they all went to bed early.

The next day was sunny and unseasonably hot for April, and Susan sat on the back lawn, suntanning her face between the two inner faces of a Bee Gees double album covered in aluminum foil. Marilyn beetled about between the car and the yard, planting multiple flats of petunias, daisies and white alyssum. This struck Susan as odd, but not unusual. The previous year, Don's workers' comp kicked in and the family had upgraded from a trailer to a house, albeit a small, weed-cloaked and rain-rotted house. But living in a genuine house seemed to satisfy Marilyn, who didn't give much thought to interior design, exclaiming only how thrilled she was not to have to disguise axles with rhododendron shrubs.

Susan continued sunning herself, and in midafternoon she came in for iced tea and found Marilyn holding Don's hunting knife, a big honker from one of Karlsruhe's most sadistic factories. She was using it to carve notches into the wood of the door frame between the kitchen and the TV room — dozens of slits at various intervals ranging from thigh height up to her shoulders.

Susan said nothing.

Marilyn took a Bic pen and a pencil and began writing names and dates beside the slits «Brian 12/16/78, Caitlin 5/3/79, Allison 7/14/80,» and so forth.

Don came in from the front hallway, his hands black with SeaDoo crankcase oil. «Mare,» he said, «whatthe fuck are you doing to the door frame?»

«Raising the price of the house, honey.»

Don and Susan exchanged looks.

«Don't think I can't see the two of you exchanging concerned looks.» Before her the mythical young Brian had broken the five-foot mark.

Don reached for his hunting knife, saying, «Gimme that.»

But Marilyn flinched away, then swiveled around like a Shark versus a Jet. «Like fuck I will.» Susan and Don were stunned. «We're leaving this little sugar shack, kids, but before we do, I have to raise its value.» She continued carving slits. «Studies have shown that the price of any home can be raised by a consistent ten percent or more by simply planting about a hundred dollars' worth of annual flowers.» Allison reached four feet eight. «Flowers make a home feel lived in. Loved. So do growth charts. Growth charts indicate happiness, pride, devotion and stick-to-itiveness. Adds 5K to the asking price.»

«And where might we be moving?» asked Don.

«Wyoming, you cretin. Cheyenne, Wyoming.»

«Oh, Mom — not that again.»

«Yes,that, again. Houses are cheaper there. We'll have a guest bedroom and three bathrooms. And you, sweetie, can represent an entire state in the nationals. Only a handful of people live there. The competition's nil.Fifty-one gorgeous contestants and only one will win. Who will replace Susan Colgate as the next Miss USA? »

«We're not moving nowhere,» Don said.

«We're not moving any where, honey, and yes we are. This house is in my name, so off we go.»

«She's loony today,» Don said to Susan. «Leave her be.»

Susan went back to her tanning, and assumed the mania would pass. Later on, up in her room, she heard the normal clinks and clatters of dinner preparation below. Marilyn called Susan and Don to the table, and the tone of the night seemed altogether normal. Too normal. At that point, their ears roared and the house shook like a car driving over a speed bump. Susan's water glass tipped over and a framed photo fell from a wall. The three stood up — all was silent save for a faint hiss coming from the kitchen.

They walked through the newly scratched door frame to see a manhole-sized gape through the ceiling, and another one directly beneath it in the floor between the stove and the fridge. Don looked down: «Jesus H. Christ — it's a meteorite.»

Susan and Marilyn peered down at the blue-brown boulder that lay on the cracked concrete beside the deep freeze containing Don's venison from the previous fall. Don raced down the stairs, looked at the boulder and then looked up, speechless. The two women ran down to join him.

«It's a miracle,» said Marilyn. «We've been spared. It's a sign from the Lord above that we are on the correct path, an omen to fill us with respect.» She fell to her knees and prayed as she had once before when visiting her kin back in the mountains. Susan looked more closely at the boulder. «Hey — it's melting, or something.»

«Holy shit,» said Don, «it's shit. »

It was a frozen ball of shit, accidentally discharged from the hull of an Philippine Airlines flight from Chicago to Manila, which paid for the new house in Cheyenne. Don called it «the shitsicle.» The airline settled swiftly and quietly. Within six weeks they were living in Cheyenne.