Miss Wyoming (23 page)

Outside on the street, through the kitchen window's sheers, Susan saw a network van, and some guy beside it switching on a rumbling generator. «I wonder what those people out on the street think we're doing in here right now,» she said.

«Oh, hugging, or some sort of crap like that,» said Marilyn.

Susan thought of Eugene and Eugene Junior. A small wave of possible forgiveness lapped over her. «Mom, have you ever once, even for a fleeting moment, felt sorry for stealing my life the way you did?»

«Stealing your life?» Marilyn plunked her glass down on the counter. «Give me a break. I made you what you
are
.»

«What I am?» A small pin of hope pricked Susan's skin. Maybe she'd right now find out what it was she'd become. «You've got my full attention, Mom.
Please,
go ahead and tell me what I am.»

«You're my daughter and you're tough as nails.»

This useless reply dashed Susan's brief hope. «What a sack of crap.»

«If it weren't for me you'd be driving a minivan full of brats to a soccer game in small-town Oregon.»

«That sounds bloody marvelous. I might have wanted that.»

«Bullcrap you would have. You were made for bigger stuff. Look at you now. And look outside the window. You're getting more coverage now than an embassy bombing.»

«Is that all you care about? Coverage? What if I
did
have a bunch of kids, Mom. What if I
did
have a whole goddam Chevy Lumina vanload of squalling brats, and all of them looked just like you.»

Marilyn paused a fraction before saying,
«Kids
?
»

«And what if I never let you see them. Ever. What if I told them you were dead and they'd never know their grandma?»

«You wouldn't do that.»

«Wouldn't I?»

Don cut in, «Guys, maybe we should take a break — »

«Shut up, Donald,» said Marilyn. «Go ahead, Susan. Tell me more. What would you do to hurt me?»

Susan, suddenly aware of how well Marilyn could read her, pulled back. «All I'm saying is that I'm not over it, Mom. The money. The lawyers. Those scenes we had. The
everything.
You know that, right?»

Marilyn's index finger clickety-clicked the rim of her empty glass. «Fair enough.»

«You own the house?» Susan asked.

«The bank.»

«You're going to have to sell it now. And all those chichi outfits I can just imagine you pigging out on and buying in New York.»

«Yeah, we probably will. Make you happy?»

«It does. I lived on bulk yogurt and three-day-old vegetables for years after the show ended. Larry didn't foot the bills. He dumped me pretty quick. I don't know what would have happened if the Chris gig hadn't come up. Everybody was laughing at me behind my back, and it was you who put me through all that.»

Marilyn looked at her coldly. «Been practicing that one a long time, dear?»

Susan decided to cut it off there. «I'm going to leave,» Susan said. «The airline's going to fly me to Los Angeles.»

Susan paused and looked at Don with a question that came to her just then. «Did you ever meet Chris?»

«He's an asshole.»

Susan laughed. «Yeah, well, you're pretty well right on that score. But there's nobody can trash a hotel room as well as he can.»

Susan blew Don a kiss and then paused in front of Marilyn. She shrugged, turned around and left. It hadn't been the triumphant touché fest she'd hoped for, but not much in life ever was.

Three hours later she was back in Los Angeles; four hours later she was in Chris's house, alone; Chris was in South America. The house on Prestwick had been emptied after the crash, her things sold or given away.

In just a year, the city Susan had known was gone. Larry Mortimer had quit managing Steel Mountain weeks after Susan's crash. He'd divorced Jenna and was living with Amber in Pasadena, producing CD-ROM games for preteens. She called and left a message that she was back, and he drove over to visit her, cutting through the gaggle of press people on the street.

«Sue? Sue! It's me, Larry — open up.»

«Larry …» Susan opened the door and was stilled as always by Larry's resemblance to Eugene. But this time she'd known Eugene the man, and Larry was a pale match for Eugene's quirky, arty crustiness. Larry was … just another Hollywood manager unit. Susan found herself trying to mask the flood of emotion she was feeling for Eugene. Larry mistook this for Susan's pleasure at seeing him and came toward her in a slightly seductive manner. Susan in turn gave him the most sisterly of hugs. He asked how she was feeling and they exchanged small talk.

«How's Amber?»

«Pregnant. The show dropped her because they didn't want to fit it into the script.»

«Well, congratulations. You finally left Jenna, huh?»

«Oh, you know.»

«No, I
don't
know. Forget it. How's the band? Chris?»

«The
band
,» replied Larry, «is in physical, moral, creative and financial chaos. But then I've moved away from rock-and-roll management. Too many aneurysms every day.» Susan and Larry had migrated to the kitchen, where Larry poked around the fridge for something to eat. Neither was hungry, but it was a ritual they'd developed years before to squelch awkward moments. They talked some more about the comings and goings of various old acquaintances.

«I checked, but there's no hope in hell of you getting any, how shall we say, “back wages,” from the Steel Mountain Corporation. There's nothing there to pay you with. And by the way, you'll have to do a photo-op with Chris and sign some divorce papers. I can make it a one-stop deal. He's back from Caracas on Monday.»

«Adam Norwitz is supposed to be managing my life these days.»

«Adam's become a bigger fish since you were here. Two pilots he was connected with got picked up.»

«Life's so rich, isn't it, Larry?»

«Snippy, snippy.» Larry found a can of house-brand cola. He looked at it, paused, and asked Susan, «Can this stuff go bad?»

Susan shrugged and said, «Go nuts. Live dangerously.»

Larry opened it, poured two glasses, they toasted her return and he soon left. An hour later Dreama came over. She was deeply lonely, without a focus and was only too eager to enter the new family fold. She was given instructions to meet Randy and Eugene Junior at the airport. Randy by then had officially changed his name from Montarelli to Hexum. He and the baby moved in with Dreama that night, and would hunt for a Brady Bunch house the next day. It was all Susan could do not to abandon all her plans, run to Dreama's and inhale Eugene Junior's sweet baby smell.

Public interest in Susan's reappearance, at first blazing, died down to near nothing. Susan did nothing to encourage publicity, and at first Adam saw this as a clever device to jack up her price for an exclusive interview. But Susan rested firm, and Adam had a hard time forgiving her for blowing the chance to sell at the peak of public interest.

Susan was able to rent her old Cape Cod house from the Steel Mountain Corporation, who'd bought it after the plane crash. It was eight minutes from Eugene Junior. She landed Randy a job in a music PR office as an assistant. He used this money to rent the agreed-upon house in the Valley. The Cape Cod house existed almost purely as an elaborate ruse to deflect any possible public awareness away from Eugene Junior. Susan was still trying to think of the lowest-profile manner possible of «taking Eugene public,» but finding a solution was proving difficult, as any solution meant a media deluge.

Susan slept in her Cape Cod house at night. Otherwise it was useful only as a shell for her answering machine. It received calls, almost all from Adam Norwitz, to inform Susan of offers for the rights to tell-all cable network dramatizations of her life. These were offers she had to refuse because she publicly stood by her amnesia story, and technically she
had
no real story to tell. The only other calls were psychiatrists from around the world specializing in memory retrieval who had obtained her number on the sly. («I know it's bad form to sneak in the back door like this, but I think I can help you out, Susan Colgate.»)

«Christ, Randy, these losers think that ambushing me on my private line somehow predisposes me to like them. Whatta buncha lepers.»

Randy agreed. His job had given him a small measure of media savvy. His office handled what press remained for Steel Mountain, and he brought back reports that the band's five members had succumbed to road fatigue, catastrophic drug use, hepatitis C, assault-and-battery lawsuits, and musical irrelevance.

«My days are only a little bit starfucky. Mostly they're spent photocopying legal documents and fetching arcane health-food products from halfway across town. Starfucky's more fun.»

Susan was cutting melon wedges into zigzag shapes for a barbecue at the Brady house. «Steel Mountain's really over now, isn't it?»

«I don't want to be disloyal — they pay the bills,» said Randy, «but how much more energy is it worth to make five grizzled Liverpudlians with teeth like melting sugar crystals look like sexual and moral outlaws for kids maybe two decades younger than themselves? It's obscene past a point.»

«How's Chris doing?» Susan asked. She and Chris rarely spoke.

«My boss claims he has a few brain cells left.»

«He was the brains of the group.»

«But …»

«But what?»

«I don't know if it's the drugs or the album sales or the closet but …»

«What? Is he hitting on you?»

«No. Susan, I'm just an assistant, not like an agent or someone. But I hear his memory's like cheesecloth.»

«Coke.»

«He can afford it?»

Five weeks later Chris was jailed in Nagoya, having been caught with a picket fence of coke lines beneath his nostrils during a police raid of an after-hours club. Three grams of coke were found in his jacket pocket and the Japanese correctional system threw the key to his cell down the well. Randy caught the news on CNN on a Thursday morning shortly after his return. Within days what remained of Steel Mountain's infrastructure was dismantled, and its legal bills were staggering. Susan had until the month's end to vacate the Cape Cod decoy house. Randy lost his job and his back pay and took on another PR gig at half of his previous salary. The baby was sick a few times, and Susan squeaked him through the pay-as-you-go medical system by disguising Dreama as a Canadian tourist flashing a wad of bills that were actually the remains of Randy's savings. Dreama kicked in her numerology money, but it only went so far. There were taxes. Rent. Groceries. Phone. Dog food for Camper and Willy.

In the midst of this, Randy enrolled in a screenwriting night school course. He came to realize that his life's “narrative arc” was, like that of most everybody else in the world, cruelly and pitilessly dictated by the most mundane of financial straps and, in Randy's particular case, a troglodyte goon from a collection agency who showed up at his offices during a sales meeting, demanding either payment or return of the TV set.

And so the money ran out. Everybody was doing what they could, but Susan decided it was her turn to bring home the bacon. She arranged a lunch meeting with Adam Norwitz at the Ivy. She was going to sell her privacy.

Marilyn meandered through the Seneca crash site and remembered a movie she'd seen years before, one where the wife of a Hollywood movie executive is hacked to bits and left strewn about a lemon grove. But Seneca — this was no movie, this was the odor of burning plastics, her shin scraped from bumping into a sheared aluminum panel. This was the crackle of walkie-talkies, the wail of competing sirens. She saw a drink service trolley, little liquor bottles and all, flattened like a cardboard. She saw a Nike gym bag run over by a fire truck. She saw prescription bottles, juice cartons and exploded cans of ginger ale pressed into the Ohio soil like seeds, watered with aviation fuel and germinated by fire.

She'd been at O'Hare in Chicago, and was heading back to Cheyenne after helping organize a regional pageant in Winnetka. Inside one of the air terminal's snack bars, she'd seen crash footage with Susan's old promo shot inset in the upper left corner. Within a blink she had checked the departure screens, purchased an electronic ticket and boarded a flight to Columbus, where she rented a car. She was at the crash scene within three hours. Once there, Marilyn learned that there are no rules for crash sites. They occupy huge amounts of space in the strangest locations. Most local disaster crews are overwhelmed by the workload and are sickened by the things they see. There had been a yellow plastic tape hastily strung up around much of the site to keep away the gawkers, and Marilyn knew that the easiest way to get inside the tape without hassle was to give the impression of already having been there. To this end she smeared her face, blouse and jacket with rich Ohio soil and nimbly stepped inside, into the space where chaotic orders were barked through megaphones, past blue vinyl tarps fluttering over stacked bodies and inside the supermarket meat trucks used to refrigerate body fragments for later DNA examination.

There were any number of photographers on the scene, and one photo of Marilyn in particular, with her lost face and soiled wardrobe, made the cover of several national publications («One Mother's Loss»). Marilyn bought four dozen copies of each issue.

In Marilyn's mind, Susan was either completely intact or completely incinerated. Any point between these two extremes was intolerable, for Susan was a beauty, a result of Marilyn's own good looks and teaching. Marilyn's own pursuit of beauty had raised her out of the Ozarks of the Pacific, out of the family's Oregonian mountain shit shack, with its seven children, two of whom were alcoholic by the time Marilyn began generating memories. Hers was a beautiful-looking family, but one with a hellish ugly core, no morals, too many guns, no God to fear, reared in isolation, mostly illiterate and sticking their dicks wherever the opposition was overcome. She abandoned the shit shack at sixteen, pregnant by one of two brothers, and miscarried in a Dairy Queen bathroom after a fourteen-hour walk into McMinnville. Using one of three dollar bills she'd stolen from her father's rifle bag, she bought a banana split and marveled at the free red plastic spoon that came with it. The other two dollars she used to buy foundation at the Rexall to cover up her tear-blotched complexion. She hitchhiked out of town and got a ride with Duran, a half-Cajun drainage pipe salesman. Almost immediately he asked her to marry him, and she accepted because she had nothing else going for her, and besides, Duran was a gentleman who didn't wake her up in the middle of the night, heavy, wet and pounding. In fact, except for the first few times that produced Susan, Duran didn't touch her much, and that was just fine. Duran's love was more like worship, and he insisted Marilyn do all she could with what she had, yet he was also a pragmatist and insisted she learn a nonbeauty skill. To this end he oversaw Marilyn's two-part education of daytime courses at the Miss Eva Lorraine Institute of Cosmetology (since 1962), and night school courses in typing and office procedures, which Marilyn soaked up like a cotton ball.

Susan was born, but Duran insisted Marilyn continue with her studies, which ultimately raised her to paralegal status. «Marilyn, please stop talking and study the woman on TV.»

«I'm
tired
of watching her.»

«That is not an issue. Just keep watching.» Duran was convinced that the most useful accent a woman could use was the concise nasal telegraph of the network news goddesses, and made Marilyn watch and mimic their style.

«Durrie, why are you making me learn all of this stuff?»

«Because, Marilyn, you know I'm not going to be here forever, and please don't talk like such a heek.»

«What do you
mean
you're not going to be around? And by the way, it's hick, not heek, and please don't call me a hick.»

«I need to know you'll be able to make it on your own. The world is hard. You need skills.»

«And when am I going to be alone?»

«When you're twenty-one.»

«And then what, Durrie?»

What Duran did was leave, just as he said he would, and Marilyn accepted it without rancor and thought she had gotten good value for her time with him. As Marilyn had cultivated no friends, and had pretty well jettisoned her family, she didn't mention him again to anybody else.

But when the screen door slammed, Marilyn sensed an absence in her life as blunt and frightening as a freshly cut tree stump. And it was at this point that her enthusiasm for Susan's entry into the world of pageants was born.

Miss Eva Lorraine's primary cosmetological message was that the traits humans perceive as beautiful are those that bespeak of fertility. «Big titties mean
milk,
girls, no secret about that. Shiny hair means healthy follicles, and our eggs, girls, come from follicles just as surely as does our hair and fingernails. And so that's why we keep a buffin' and a primpin'.»

Marilyn found the message eminently scientific, and thereafter as a rule she let the pursuit of babies govern all of her future beauty decisions — push-up bras, rouge in the décolletage, cellophane rinses on her hair and, as time wore on, silicone injections to plump up some facial sagging. But the injections didn't come until long after Don Colgate entered her life, a hefty logger from Hood River. He was blown away by a looker who worked at a genuine legal office, with a daughter like a china figurine on his granny's mantelpiece.

After they got married, he insisted she quit working, and so she did. Marilyn saw this as decidedly old-fashioned thinking, but it also implied that Don wouldn't go leaving her like Duran.

It was with her conquest of Don Colgate that Marilyn obtained the final proof she needed that fertility and the proven ability to bear beautiful babies were integral to her allure and her sense of being. But then there was the issue of Don and his fertility. His sperm were dead or lazy or stupid or overheated, and he and Marilyn didn't conceive. As his sterility became more evident, so did his drinking and the number of pageants in which young Susan was entered increased. The bunny hutches behind the trailer increased, too, and it was a trailer,
never
a house, because Don just didn't seem to get promoted at the lumberyard.

Marilyn found that she could funnel her native intelligence into the world of pageants, an intelligence she was convinced she had passed on to Susan. Other pageant girls whined and screeched and pulled princess routines, but Susan sat like a hawk on one of the Interstate light posts, scanning for roadkill, watching and learning from the others. She tended to
win,
and after a point released Marilyn from the need to shuck bunnies.

Don said that some of the makeup and attire Marilyn made Susan wear was cheap and slutty. She told Don that she'd once read that girls in China have babies at the age of nine, «so if girls can have babies that early, there's nothing wrong with highlighting that capacity.»

«It's bad morals is what it is, Marilyn.»

«Don, cool your jets. Get off the pulpit.»

«Marilyn, nine-year-old girls do not wear tittie-bar stilettos.»

«Don't be so coarse. They're
evening
shoes.»

«I thought hill folk were supposed to be so wise, like the Waltons.»

The issue of morals usually quieted Marilyn, if only briefly. Knowing about morals was in no way the same thing as actually
having
them. She'd been raised in a hog pen and was lacking in ethics. Some nights she genuinely did worry about the sins of the parent being handed down to the child — her own feral upbringing overriding Susan's angelic manner. But she wouldn't speak these thoughts aloud. Instead, for example, she told Don that morals were whatever got the job done at the time. «Like those Polynesians who eat Spam.»

«The whats who eat
what
?»

«Spam. That's what Mr. Jordan, my old boss, told me. He'd read that in supermarkets down in the South Pacific they have whole
aisles
that are devoted to nothing but Spam. The Americans tried to figure out why these island people liked Spam so much, and it turns out that nothing else approximates the taste of cooked human flesh like the salty porky taste of Spam.»

Don's mouth hung open.

«We think of those jolly little Island people down there in their jolly little hula skirts and being oh so moral. But to them, cannibalism is perfectly moral, so it seems to
me,
Don Colgate, that morals are a pretty flexible little concept, so don't go getting preachy on
me.
»

But it was Marilyn whose mouth was agape while walking through the sprays of cooked human flesh at Seneca. She was asked her name by a person inside one of the many biohazard protection suits swarming the site. She replied, «Susan Colgate is my daughter. I'm her mother. Have you seen her?» Marilyn's shoes' heels had broken. She was wearing a pair of pink women's running shoes she'd found intertwined with a stereo headset a few minutes back when she'd scraped her shin.

At sunset a Gannett reporter named Sheila drove Marilyn to the local Holiday Inn and gave Marilyn her bed. Sheila filed her stories and bounced between her laptop PC, her cell phone and the TV. Marilyn called Don. He arrived the next morning. Both spent the day at the local ice rink, temporarily converted into a morgue. Skating music serenaded family members of crash victims who appraised what remains were «readable.» There were rows upon rows of limbs and torsos and shards, all covered in black vinyl tarps, arranged like 4-H projects atop plywood sheets that straddled sawhorses. Five days went by and still they found no trace of Susan. Marilyn donated blood samples for DNA testing, to help analyze those bodies too far gone for visual or dental identification. They returned to Cheyenne, their spirits fogged like wet car windows, their emotions on hold. Sheila called each day to see if an ID had been made, but no. This in itself became a story, and the local coroner, in conjunction with the airline and the civil aviation authorities, were at a total loss as to where Susan's remains might have ended up. There hadn't been enough heat for vaporization to occur, and all eyelashes and fingernail clippings within a half-mile radius had been DNA-cataloged. It was at this point that Sheila hooked up Marilyn with a prominent claims litigator, Julie Poyntz, who spent the next year winning her claim, arguing about the profound stress for family members arising from the airline's losing the
body
of a passenger, a body that might very well be in the deep freeze of some psychotic fan.

«You just don't
lose
a body, Mrs. Colgate —
Marilyn.
» It was early on in their lawyer-client relationship. «And I don't want to dwell on the possibilities of what might have become of her remains,
but …
»

«What if she's alive?» asked Marilyn.

Julie tsk-tsked. «You were
there,
Marilyn. Everybody on that flight was dead and/or severely mutilated.»

Marilyn squeaked.

«I'm sorry, Marilyn, but you can't be squeamish. Not now. We're going to win this. They know it. We know it. It's only a matter of how much and how soon. It's no compensation for losing Susan — who, I might add, was a role model for me from
Meet the Blooms —
but at least the money is
something.
»

Money was flowing into Marilyn's life from many directions at that point, and each new development, or each new recently discovered baby photo of Susan was carefully brokered with all facets of print and electronic media. She bought two new cars, a Mercedes sedan for Don, and a BMW the color of homemade cherry wine for herself. She also took out a mortgage on a Spanish mission—style house and indulged herself with clothing and jewelry, her prize being a pair of genuine Fendi wraparound sunglasses which, not five minutes after buying, she wore as she snapped arms off the fakes she'd bought years ago at a Laramie swap meet. Marilyn spent like a drunk in a casino gift shop. There was no overall scheme to her buying — she simply thrilled with the burst of power each time a piece of loot that once belonged to somebody else suddenly belonged to
her.

Yet for all this, Don and Marilyn didn't speak much about Susan, mostly because long before the crash, back in 1990 after her TV show was canceled, Susan had eliminated them from her life with a finality that approached death. Marilyn truly saw no reason why Susan should be as angry about the money as she was. Hadn't Marilyn done half the work?

They'd read of Susan's marriage to Chris in the Arts & Lifestyle section of the local weekend paper. They met Chris only once, at a midnight vigil for Susan that Marilyn had staged in a Cheyenne town square (exclusive continental European photo rights to
Paris Match,
UK rights to
Hello!
magazine, U.S. and Canadian rights to the
Star,
film and TV rights reserved, as live footage was to be inserted into a possible A&E special about Susan to begin production the following year). Marilyn and Chris hugged for the cameras, lit candles, and bowed their heads for the cameras. All the while, Chris's young fans chanted from across the square. Afterward, Chris left and didn't speak with Marilyn again. («Guess what, Don — I think Sir Frederick Rock Star is an asshole.»)

Then came Julie's phone call one morning: «Marilyn, come to New York. It's over.» When Marilyn found out the amount, she whooped with pleasure, then immediately apologized to Julie for whooping in her ear. She tried to find Don, and did, passed out in the back corner of his favorite seedy sports bar. So that afternoon she left for Manhattan without him. The next day, with Julie, she walked down the courthouse steps and spoke with the press. That afternoon she spent $28,000 while shopping on upper Madison Avenue.