Eugene glanced up at Susan on the stairs. “Good morning, sunshine. Dressed for casual Friday, I see.”
On the walls surrounding Eugene’s work area were dozens of wood and velvet plaques of clouds and sun and snow and temperatures ranging from 230 up to 120. She walked down the steps and picked up a velvet sun. “Whoo-ee! I’m all sunny today.” She noted Eugene’s flash of disapproval and placed the sun back in its correct orbit.
“Thank you,” said Eugene, who continued with his clerical chores. Susan came up close to get a better peek at his documents, backing into Eugene.
He turned around. “Can you work a copier?”
“Back on the set of Meet the Blooms, whenever the writers got pissy and superior, I used to bring script production to a halt. You know how I did it? I wrote OUT OF ORDER on a sheet of scrap paper and taped it onto the copier’s lid. All these people with IQs higher than Palm Springs temperatures, and not once did they consider challenging my paper signs.” She picked up a wooden plaque numbered 110º. “Did you ever use this one much?”
“Near the end. A few times. Once the weather got wrecked.”
“I guess you’d know.” She sat down on a stacking chair and watched Eugene. “When the show was canceled, Glenn, the head writer, loaded a commissary drinking straw with NutraSweet. Back on the set, he opened the copier’s top and blew the NutraSweet into the machine, onto the drum. Killed the machine dead. They had to throw it out. It’s like the worst thing on earth for copiers.”
“This house is a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. We’ll be having none of your white-collar sabotage during your stay here.” But he couldn’t hold back a smile.
The copier created a relaxing rhythm. Susan’s eyes glazed and her thoughts wandered. “Did your TV station can you because you were nuts?”
Eugene, sorting papers, spoke: “Nah. They didn’t can me. I was injured on the job. I took early retirement.”
“You were injured doing the nightly weather?”
“As it happened, yes. You want to know what happened? I was crushed by a Coke machine.”
“On the job?”
“In the studio, so it was insured and unionized up the ying-yang. They installed a talking Coke machine which weighed, like, a ton more than a normal mute Coke machine. So this ugly little twerp with hockey hair shakes the machine back and forth, getting a rhythm going, until a can or two pops out, and the thing toppled down on top of him and it crushed him like a piñata. I happened to be passing by and my right foot got smashed. Look . . .”
Eugene removed his sock, and Susan bent down to look at Eugene’s right foot, which, with its scars and stitches, resembled a map of Indiana divided into small, countylike chunks. “Ouch City, Arizona,” said Susan.
“You said it, baby. The kid was a goner, and I didn’t walk for maybe seven months afterward. In the meantime they brought in a new guy with a fresher, perkier smile than me, who also focus-grouped like a royal wedding. I didn’t have it in me to flog my butt around to the other stations. Too old. And if you’re old in the weather biz, you either turn into a wacky eunuch real quick, or take a hike. So I hiked.”
“Let me see your foot more closely.” She sat down. “Put it in my lap.”
Eugene turned off the copier, and silence, like solidified Lucite, filled the air. He sat on a chair opposite Susan and hoisted his leg up and dropped it into Susan’s lap.
Susan said, “Mom trained me never to say a word or a sentence without imagining that a pageant judge is out there secretly listening in. So my whole life I’ve been followed by this invisible flotilla of soap opera actresses, Chevy dealers, costume designers and TV weathermen who scan my every word. It’s a habit I can’t shake. It’s like those people whose parents made them chew food twenty times before swallowing, and so the rest of their life becomes a hell of twenties.” She looked Eugene in the eyes: “Does it hurt when I do that?” The atmosphere for Susan took on the it’s-not-really-happening aura of life’s better sex.
“No. Some of it I can’t feel at all. And some of it feels like regular touching and . . .”
Susan looked him in the eye and applied more pressure but was also more thoughtful, kneading both the bottom leathery pads and tender spots between the toes.
“I saw you that night—at the pageant. You winked. Your wink almost bruised me,” Susan confessed. Her hands locked onto his ankles. She stared him down: “I’ve been through a lot this week. I need a shower, Eugene.”
He led her up out of the basement. They reached the bathroom. Susan turned on the water, clean and hot, and in an instant they were naked and wet and all over each other like scrapping dogs. Susan felt her skin shouting with relief, as though it had been long smothered, and her insides felt like she was riding in a fast elevator. They slammed into each other, releasing unknown volumes of anger and lust and loneliness until finally the water went cold and they left the tub. Eugene opened a cupboard which contained, to Susan’s surprise, fresh towels.
A few minutes later, Susan was looking into Renata’s old closet for something to wear. “I’m going to borrow one of these Bob Mackie gowns here. I see she left her stuff behind.” There were hundreds of dresses and outfits hanging from a dry cleaner’s mechanized conveyor belt. The outfits did a dainty little jig as Susan turned the system on and off. “Boy, if Mom could see this.”
“Christ, turn that thing off. The noise is like the theme song to a show I don’t watch anymore.”
“She can’t have been that bad.”
“You used to be married, too.”
“Still am, technically. We never divorced.”
“Rock star guy. Rough stuff, I imagine.”
“Chris? Rough, yes, but stuff, no. He’s gay as a goose. I married him so he could get a green card and so I could remain close to his Catholic and very married manager Larry Mortimer.” She stopped playing with the clothing rack.
Eugene was dialing on the cordless, ordering groceries. “Oh God.”
“What?”
“You’re real,” he said.
“As opposed to . . .?”
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling fan. “I’ve got a good thing going here. My time is all my own. I don’t have to deal with . . .”
“With what?”
“With people,” Eugene spat out.
Susan looked at him. “I agree. You do have a good deal going here.”
Now they were both looking at the ceiling and holding hands. Eugene asked her, “What did the focus groups say about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. The focus groups. The ones they brought in to pick you apart so the network could figure out what makes you you.”
Susan was intrigued. “Why?”
“I’ll tell you what they said about me. Then you tell me what they said about you.”
“Okay, deal.”
“Women said, ‘What’s with his hair? Is it real? Is that his real color?’ They said, ‘Ooh, me so horny, me want humpy astronaut.’ They said, ‘I’d go metric for you, baby.’ Guys weren’t as descriptive. They just called me nothing, but once they saw my face, they knew the sports segment was over and could switch off the set.” He lit a cigarette then lay back and chuckled. “TV. Ugh.”
Susan spooned into him. The sheets felt like cool pastry marble.
She said, “Near the end they knew they had enough episodes to syndicate, so they stopped focus-grouping. But at the start I got stuff like ‘I can see the zits underneath her makeup. Can’t you guys find her a putty knife? That’s one helluva thick paper bag she’s trying to act her way out of. Her tits are like fried eggs gone all runny.’ That kind of stuff.” Their eyes caught and they both laughed.
“I’ve gotta phone in this grocery order.” Eugene punched a phone number into the cordless, and the touch-tone beeps reminded Susan of a song she used to like back in the eighties.
Chapter Eighteen
Susan had performed in shopping strips many times, and her aftern
oon 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 somebody 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, “whatthefuck 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 slit
s. “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 anywhere, 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.”
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