Miss Wyoming (8 page)

Half a year after Susan's cosmetic surgery, Marilyn learned in a pageant newsletter that a judge previously unfavorable toward Susan would be on the panel at the upcoming Miss American Achiever pageant over the Memorial Day weekend at the St. Louis Civic Auditorium. Marilyn knew that this judge, Eugene Lindsay, had blackballed Susan after her performance of
Für Elise
in the talent segment of Country USA pageant at the Lee Greenwood Dinner Theater in Sevierville, Tennessee, the previous fall. After that night's events, from the other side of a freezingly air-conditioned banquette table at the Best Western lounge, Marilyn, drinking a double vodka tonic alone, had heard Lindsay's unmistakable TV-smoothened voice say: «I am so goddammed sick of these wind-up-toy midgets and their goddammed robotic renditions of Beethoven Lite. I hear them play that fucking tune so much that it feels like I'm in a purgatory engineered by whatever asswipe it is who chooses the on-hold music for the Delta Airlines ticket line.» Marilyn was taken aback neither by his language, nor the sentiment. But she was deeply surprised to hear such a blatantly truthful expression of the dark thoughts that lurked in the hearts of panel judges. She had wondered herself if Susan's
Für Elise
was maybe getting a bit thin, and by then had already initiated proceedings to have Susan perform a
Grease
medley.

Eugene Lindsay was to Marilyn an almost unbearably handsome opponent, against whom none of the other pageant moms could be rallied («Why, sugar,» said one pageant mom, torn between propriety and carnality, «I'd let that man hug me
ragged
»). Although Eugene was a weatherman in everyday life, Marilyn knew that when he died, he'd likely land himself the biggest Ford dealership in heaven. Eugene went through life like a Great Dane or a speeding ambulance, exacting the unfettered awe of whomever he passed. He did the nightly weather on an Indiana NBC affiliate, and was hooked into the pageant circuit through his wife, Renata, a mail-order-gown specialist for the generously proportioned, who also sidelined in hairpieces.

The day before the Miss American Achiever pageant, Marilyn insisted she and Susan spend the day visiting Bloomington, Indiana, Eugene Lindsay's home town. «It's research, sweetie. I want to check out Renata's store. It'll be fun.»

Soon Susan would decide her mother was out of control, but on this trip she passively flowed along with Marilyn to Bloomington, the two of them surrounded by an asteroid belt of luggage as they strode through Bloomington's Monroe County Airport, Marilyn ensuring that the little clear vinyl windows on the gown bags faced outward: «So that passersby can know they are in the presence of star magic.»

There were no cabs at the airport. A buzzing triad of fellow passengers from commuter flights stood on the taxi island pointlessly craning their necks as if, Manhattan-like, a fleet might momentarily appear. Shortly a single cab approached, and Marilyn pounced on its door handle, inflaming the triad. «Hey, lady — there's a
line
here.»

Marilyn swiveled, removed her black sunglasses the size of bread plates, looked at her accuser point-blank and charged ahead.

They checked in to their hotel, then visited Renata's nearby store, which was interesting enough. Susan thought that for somebody dealing in large-size pageant wear, Renata herself had about as much body fat as a can of Tab and three cashew nuts. Marilyn spoke with Renata, and Susan browsed through the far side of the store, which was filled to her pleasant surprise with regular craft-shop art supplies.

Later that evening, up in the hotel room, Marilyn suggested they go for a drive.

«We don't have a car, Mom.»

«I rented one while you were in the workout room.»

«Where are we going, Mom?»

«You'll see.»

«Is this something nasty again, Mom?»

«Susan!»

«Then it
is,
because you haven't said “sweetie” once yet, and whenever you fib, you drop the nice stuff.»

«Oh sweetie.»

«Too late.»

Marilyn pursed her lips and looked at her daughter, swaddled in track pants and a gray kangaroo sweater. «Well then. Come along.» Marilyn brought two pairs of gardening gloves, a box of trash bags and two flashlights. They drove out into winding residential streets of a repetitive stockbroker Tudor design, the type that, when she was younger, Susan associated with the walrus-mustached plutocrat from the Monopoly board. Now she more realistically associated this sort of neighborhood with car dealers, cute amoral boys, sweater sets, regularly scheduled meals containing the four food groups, Christmas tree lights that didn't blink, the occasional hand on the knee, cheerful pets, driveways without oil stains, women named Barbara and, apparently, weathermen for regional NBC affiliates.

«That Lindsay guy lives here?» Susan asked, looking out at a colonial with a three-car garage, as colorfully lit as an aquarium castle, surrounded by dense evergreens that absorbed noise like sonic tampons.

«Shhh!»
Marilyn had killed the car's lights the block before. «Just help me out here, sweetie.» They sidled over to the cans and Marilyn removed the lid from one. «Beautifully bagged. Like a Christmas gift. Susan — quietly now — help me lift the bag out.» The bag made a fruity, resonant fart sound against the can's inner edge as Susan hauled it out, and she laughed.

Five beautifully wrapped bags of trash made their way into the car's trunk and back seat. Marilyn squealed away from the house, with her lights out for the first, almost painful, nervous puffs of breath. «Where now?» Susan asked.

«A Wal-Mart parking lot.»

«A Wal-Mart lot? Isn't that kind of public?»

Marilyn turned on the lights. That's pre
cise
ly why we're going there. We'll look like two lady lunchbucket losers sifting through their own crap, most likely in pursuit of an eleven-cents-off coupon for house-brand bowling balls.»

And Marilyn was correct. She parked within ten stalls of the store's main entrance, and not a soul gave a second glance to the mother-daughter team purposefully ripping through deep green plastic umbilical cords and placentas like industrial midwives.

«What are we supposed to be looking for?» Susan asked.

«I'll know when I see it. One bag at a time. Spread the contents evenly on the trunk floor. Good. Now hold open your bag and I'll put things into it, piece by piece.» Marilyn hawkeyed the items, which afforded a glass-bottom boat tour of the home and lives of
la famille
Lindsay. «Bathroom,» she said, «bloody Kleenexes, three; Q-tips, two; bunion pads, four, five,
six;
prescription bottle, contents: Lindsay, Eugene, Stellazine, a hundred milligrams twice daily, no refill.»

«What's Stellazine?»

«An antipsychotic. Powerful. Diggety-dawg, this is a
keeper.
» Marilyn's elder sister, a fellow escapee from their yokel origins, was a schizophrenic who, before jumping off the I-5 bridge in downtown Portland, had been a pharmaceutical bellwether for Marilyn. «Let's go on. Disposable razor, one.»

Marilyn then found three 8-X-10s of Eugene's face, sandwiched together with a layer of Noxzema. «Dammit, why does he have to be so goddam handsome?»

Susan grabbed one of the photos and her eyes sucked him in. She felt the way she had when she won a side of beef in her high school's Christmas raffle. «He
is
good-looking, isn't he?»

«They always are, honey, they always are.»

Susan snuck the photo into her pocket, then shivered.

«You're cold, sweetie.»

«No. Yes. Sort of.»

«You sound like Miss Montana did in last month's pageant.» Marilyn laughed, and even Susan had to smile. «Only give declarative answers, sweetie.»

The next bag must have been from Renata's bathroom, a perfect bin of high-quality cosmetics, items which earned grudging admiration from Marilyn.

Next came several bags of kitchen waste: junk mail, coffee grounds, mostly unopened upscale deli containers and several cans of unpopular vegetables — beets and lima beans.

One bag remained: «Come on, Eugene! Give me what I
need.
» It was evidently office waste: dried-out pens, a typewriter's correction ribbon, opened bill envelopes from Ameritech, Chevron, PSI Energy, Indiana Gas and — «What's
this
?» Marilyn reached for an askew clump of similar-looking photocopies. She chose one at random, and began reading it aloud: « “Ignore this letter at your peril. One women in Columbus chose to ignore this and was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning a week later …” A chain letter.» Marilyn skimmed the copy. «Well and good, but why so many of them, Eugene? What the — ?» At this point her eyes saucered and her brain flipped inside her head like a circus Chihuahua. «Susan! Look! This weasel's been sending out hundreds of chain letters to dupes around the country — Canada and Mexico, too, and
look
— he always puts himself at the top of the chain on all the lists.»

Susan was young and unfamiliar with chain letters. «Yeah?»

«So even if a fraction of these suckers mail fifty bucks, he still scores big-time.»

«Let me see.» Susan read the threatening letter more carefully.

Marilyn, meanwhile, yanked out a folder cover: «KLRT-AM Radio, San Jose, California, All Talk, All the Time.» Inside the folder were printout lists of names and addresses, each crossed off. There were also folders from other cities — Toronto, Ontario; Bowling Green, Kentucky; and Schenectady, New York. «I get it — these are names and addresses of station listeners who filled out marketing cards.»

«Why them?» Susan asked.

«Think about it: if you've nailed down a file of people who enthusiastically identify with whacko call-in radio shows, it's not too much extra work to squeak a fifty out of them. Kid's play. Here, help me put these papers in neat piles. Eugene, I love you for helping dig your own grave.»

They stacked and collated their booty. Back in the car Marilyn drove to a dumpster behind a Taco Bell and said, «Chuck the leftover trash in there.» Susan took Eugene Lindsay's rebagged garbage and daintily lobbed it over the bin's rusty green rim.

At the hotel, Susan got fed up with Marilyn and her cache of papers. The TV was broken. She lay on the bed and tried to find animal shapes inside the ceiling's cottage cheese stippling. «Mom, are we with a host family or at a hotel tomorrow night?»

«A hotel, sweetie.»

«Oh.»

«You'd rather we stay with a host family?»

«Yes and no.» Yes because she got to peek into other people's lives and houses, invariably more normal than her own, and no because she'd also have to smell the host family, eat their food and have yet another host dad or host brother try to cop a feel or mistakenly enter the bathroom while she was having her shower,
and
she'd have to put a sunshine smile on everything to boot. Her mind wandered to a group of women who'd picketed the California Young Miss pageant earlier on that year in San Francisco. They'd called the pageant entrants cattle. They accused the mothers of being butchers leading sheep to slaughter. They'd worn meat bikinis. Susan smiled. She tried to imagine beef's feel on her skin, moist and pink, like the skin beneath a scab. «Mom — what did you think of those meat women in San Francisco? The ones with the flank steak bikinis.»

Marilyn drooped the papers she was holding. «Angry, empty women, Susan.» Marilyn's temples popped veins. «Did you hear me? Lost. Absolutely
lost.
No men in their lives. Hungry. Mean. I feel sorry for them. I pity them.»

«They looked like they were having fun, kinda.»

Marilyn turned on her with a ferocity that let Susan actually see that human beings have skulls beneath their faces. Marilyn mistook Susan's horror for fear of what she was saying: «No! Don't ever think that —
ever.
Do you hear me?»

«Geez, Mom, I was only joking.»

«You'll never give that type of woman any of your time of day.»

Marilyn returned to her job of cross-indexing Eugene Lindsay's mail fraud scheme, but her body was obviously now awash in stress chemicals. Susan felt like the young wolf who's just discovered the tender, delicious underbelly of the porcupine.

The next afternoon they checked in to the hotel in St. Louis, whereupon Susan stayed up in the room to read comics while Marilyn confabbed with some other pageant moms, learning that Eugene was staying alone in the same hotel because Renata was stuck in Bloomington coping with demand for the following month's Big 'n' Proud convention in Tampa, Florida. With almost no effort, Marilyn determined Eugene's room number, and shortly after she knocked on his door. He answered, clothed only in argyle socks, striped boxers and an unbuttoned oxford cloth shirt. He was holding a scotch and Marilyn could see he had little hairs bleached gold by the sun on the tops of his fingers. Marilyn knew that Eugene was used to opening doors and letting in exactly whomever he wanted
when
he wanted. He saw Marilyn and said, «What is this — some kind of joke?»

«No joke, Eugene.» She barged into his room. She took it by storm.

«What the fuck? Lady — get the fuck out of my room. Now.»

«No, Eugene.»

«Did the guys at the station set this up? Is this a gag?»

«It's no gag, Eugene, and I don't know any guys from any station.» She coquetted her head and sat with her legs crossed on the bed.

Eugene gulped his scotch. «I'm not into mutton, lady. Out.»

«Oh, Eu
gene
— you've mistaken my intentions.»

«You're a show mom, aren't you? I can always tell you show moms. You're all nuts. You're all freaks.» He poured himself a new drink.

«Is drinking a smart thing to be doing?»

«I beg your — fuck it — I'm calling the hotel cops.» He moved to the bedside phone.

«I'm not the one on Stellazine, Eugene. I'm not the one who's insane here.»

His finger froze on the phone above the zero button. «You know, lady, I ought to — »

«Oh, shut up, you talking hairdo. My name's not Lady, it's Marilyn, which doesn't mean much. What
does
mean something is that my daughter wins tomorrow's title. She's going to play
Für Elise
and it doesn't matter if Miss Iowa cures cancer on stage, or if Miss Idaho gets stigmata, my daughter wins. Period. And
you
will make sure this happens.»