by Darrin Doyle
“What’s going on there, Judy?”
“James, I’m here at The Caboose, a diner that has been a fixture in Kalamazoo for over twenty years. As you can see, there’s a crowd gathered behind me. According to the owners, these folks were in the middle of eating their breakfasts about four hours ago when a young woman walked inside the restaurant, and without even waiting to be seated, started to eat one of the chairs.”
“Judy, I need to check my earpiece. Did you say eat one of the chairs?”
“Yes, Jim. I talked to one gentleman who was enjoying a pancake stack with no butter at a nearby table, and he described hearing a loud breaking sound. He looked to his right to see this young woman with the wooden chair leg protruding from her mouth. He said it took less than five seconds for her to swallow it. ‘Like she was eating a carrot,’ he said. Jim, I’ve talked with a few other people who confirm that the woman consumed the entire chair.”
“What kind of chair are we talking about, Judy? A toy chair, like a doll house thing?”
“No, James. A regulation-sized chair, like you have at your dinner table. Solid wood, most likely some kind of tree-based wood. Put it this way, The Caboose has never replaced their original chairs, so we’re talking about an actual adult table chair. The young woman went on to eat the napkin holders, the carafes, the upholstered booths . . .”
“Judy, is this some kind of college prank? Fake props, that sort of thing?”
“Jim, that’s what the owners originally thought, but to hear the eyewitness testimony, this would’ve had to be a very professional, very well-funded hoax. People we talked to described ‘ferocious teeth,’ ‘mouthfuls of glass and metal,’ and a ‘blankness in her eyes that chilled the blood.’ Until proven otherwise, the authorities are operating under the assumption that the woman is literally eating The Caboose. As a precaution, the building has been evacuated, and police have cordoned off the perimeter to keep new patrons away. Now, we can’t tell you exactly what is going on inside, but if you listen—I don’t know if you can hear this—there is a defi-nite sound that I would describe as gnawing or chewing. If you can imagine someone munching a bowl of Grape Nuts or stale potato chips right beside your ear. It’s sort of like that. I don’t know if that’s coming through or not . . .”
“There is a grinding in the background, Judy . . .”
“We can definitely hear it out here in the parking lot. It’s been a constant background noise since our crew arrived. So again, without visual confirmation, police are operating under the assumption that the woman is still inside and is genuinely eating the restaurant.”
“Well, at least she’s being genuine.”
“What’s that, Jim?”
“Judy, what are the police doing? Do they have a plan?”
“Jim, they’ve decided to wait it out. I spoke with their captain, and his rationale is that the woman isn’t hurting anyone, except possibly herself by ingesting some sharp or corroded metals, but that if she is bound and determined to eat a few chairs and salt shakers, then they’ll go ahead and let her do what she needs to do until she gets full and incapacitated, at which time they will arrest her for destruction of private property.”
“Judy, are the owners okay with that strategy? They can’t be happy that their restaurant is being eaten, can they?”
“Surprisingly, Jim, they’re fine with it. I spoke with Claire and Bart Cooper, and they told me that this was the most attention their restaurant has gotten in twenty-three years. Bart told me, in fact, that they were already considering using this incident in future promotions—something along the lines of ‘The restaurant so good, you’ll want to eat the furniture.’ ”
36.
Audrey was arrested, but not until the The Caboose was gone—flooring, windows, booths, chairs, tables, toilets, sinks, meat slicer, conventional oven, cash register, walk-in freezer, micro wave oven, orange juice dispenser, gumball machine, newspaper dispenser, walls, ceiling—even the fiberglass sign above the front door. It took thirty-two hours. In your face, Essenalles! She was taken away in handcuffs. She didn’t resist.
The cops had counted on Audrey getting full, exhausted, or dead before she ate the whole thing. Containment was their plan, which, if you think about it, isn’t really a plan (unless you count “not dying” as a plan for living; if so, good luck to you).
Twelve officers had waited. Eagerly at first. Then patiently. Then irritatedly. Then apathetically. And finally, exhaustedly.
All the while, nothing happened. Birds chirped. Traffic rolled past. The wind carried the stink of the peppermint plant from upriver. The cops kept listening to that chewing noise emanating from the building. The unrelenting drone. It lulled them. It hypnotized them. Whenever one of them peeked into a window, they thought they saw a figure, indistinct, squatting on the floor, hunched, hands pressed to mouth, jaw working. Or maybe it was only a pile of boxes. They’d been up all night. The lighting was bad. The cops knew—had been told, anyway—that the woman was unarmed, so they just hung back and made sure she didn’t do anything like cause a fire or flip them the bird.
Most of the curious civilians (whose number peaked at forty-eight near dusk on the first day) only lasted a few hours. A few diehards hung on, camping out in sleeping bags in the parking lot. But with nothing to see, with only a grinding sound and some hearsay and speculation to fuel their curiosity, these folks went home to feed their cats before the second evening fell.
Only two uniformed KPD officers were on hand at 3:30 a.m. when Audrey Mapes finished.
Afterward, the Kalamazoo Gazette and local television news were abuzz with “The Incredible Eating Girl” for about two weeks, while she was detained for her hearing. But other than a handful of eyewitness testimonies, there was no documentation of the event, so people soon chalked it up to a stunt. Theories ranged from an ingenious Caboose promotional strategy to a performance piece for a university art class—a protest of animal slaughter, or perhaps some kind of elaborate statement for workers’ rights. The common denominator among the theories was the firm belief that this girl had not acted alone and that she certainly hadn’t eaten what they said she’d eaten. To quote twenty-year-old J. D. Poke, editorial writer for the Western Herald (Western Michigan University’s newspaper)—this part of the story was “a load of ca-ca.”
“I’m going to shut down the folks who believe the myth. There’s no way a human tooth can penetrate steel,” Poke continues, feeding the reader a logic sandwich with sarcasm spread. “Simple as that. Try it sometime and let me know how it goes!”
How could any Kalamazooan resist such pithy wisdom? The issue was solved. The girl and her fraud were forgotten.
37.
After the incident, Audrey is detained in jail. Her father is called, collect. Jab to the old guy. An attorney is appointed by the courts because Audrey can’t afford one. Bond is set at only $5,000 but is not posted. Jab to Audrey.
She spends two weeks in a holding cell while waiting to enter a guilty plea for reckless destruction of property and creating a public disturbance. During Audrey’s confinement, McKenna takes a Greyhound to Kalamazoo every other day. Sometimes Audrey comes out to talk to her. Usually, she doesn’t.
One day, she does. Tapping her sandal nervously on the concrete floor in the visitation room, McKenna asks Audrey why she doesn’t chew her way out and come home. “I’ve got the getaway bus and everything,” she says.
Audrey flashes a crooked smile. Her smiles are maps of Tunisia—jagged, desolate. “I eat myself into situations,” she says. “Not out of them. Situations are more fun.”
“Yes,” McKenna says, nodding like she always does for Audrey, eager to please. “Because what’s the alternative, right?”
“I’m looking at it,” Audrey answers. The gum in her mouth is being murdered.
McKenna blurts it out: “You shouldn’t have eaten that restaurant.” She feels the ground buzzing beneath her feet. It’s what she’s wanted to say every time she’s visited. It
’s what she has rehearsed a hundred times. Still, her voice shakes. “Now people know, Audrey. What are we going to do?”
Audrey stares. Her eyes strip McKenna naked. This isn’t love. There’s risk in love. Audrey’s malignance risks nothing, puts nothing at stake, exposes none of her own vulnerabilities. Her stare is pure and purposeless, like the desert sun, like cappuccino foam. Hot, frothy disdain. No room for salvation.
McKenna is unable to move. In the windowless room, the air is tropical. McKenna feels comforted that the security guard, an arm’s length away, could withdraw his nightstick and swat Audrey if she decides to lunge across the table and bite off McKen-na’s head.
But Audrey wouldn’t do that to her own sister, would she?
Would she?
The cop gnaws his thumbnail. Looks at it. Bites it in the same spot. Looks at it. Bites it again. The idle smirk under his moustache says he’s damn amused to be the guy—the guy!—who gets to stand guard over Kalamazoo’s biggest, dishiest news story in decades. To night, his buddies and their wives will gather around the electronic dartboard, stuffig their faces with jalapeno poppers, and ask him: What’s it like, man, what the hell is she like? Do you think she really did it ? What’s her problem, man, is she a psycho? How did she fake it, ‘cuz she couldn’t have actually done that, could she? And is it true she doesn’t have any feet? That’s fucking weird, but who gives a shit, right? She doesn’t need feet does she, she sure is hot, man, she can eat me anytime !
At Audrey’s arraignment, the bombshell:
The Caboose owners drop all charges. They’ve gotten so much free publicity! They were even mentioned in Jay Leno’s opening monologue on The To night Show ! And besides, the insurance is covering all the damages and then some, with enough to install a modern kitchen and hands-free faucets in the bathrooms.
“Your Honor,” Bart Cooper tells the judge, “We can’t in good conscience punish the girl who brought us this bounty. She is like a forest fie whose hellish destruction is an ugly but necessary pu-rifiation to allow precious new fauna to spring forth from the earth.”
His Honor accepts their wishes but wants to know one thing before Audrey is dismissed: “How, my dear, did you do it?”
She doesn’t react to the demeaning “my dear,” except for a barely perceptible clenching of her jaw. (Brave girl, spineless girl—you decide.)
Audrey’s response, channeling the soothing, emotionless tone of KITT, the Knight Rider car: “I chewed and swallowed, Your Honor.”
The judge gazes onto the sea—nay, the ocean—of chuckling faces in the courtroom. Out there, adrift, suffering from seasickness, sit Murray, Toby, and McKenna. The color of snow, all of them. They don’t understand the outside world. They want to be safe at home, far away, behind closed doors.
The judge turns to Audrey: “If you won’t divulge how you did it, will you please tell the court why you did it?”
Audrey: “I heard it was a good place to eat.”
Amid the uproarious laughter, a psychiatric evaluation is ordered.
38.
Audrey doesn’t pass. But she doesn’t fail, either. Psychiatric tests, it turns out, have something in common with our great American pastime: A tie goes to the runner. This means . . . she passes!
Audrey is unbound, unmuzzled, uncaged again. She returns to Grand Rapids, to The Cave (as she calls the house on Moriarty Street), to her family.
Things are different now, though. It’s not her choice to return. She has compromised her college career, has killed the flower of higher education before even a bud broke through the soil. Murray “won’t waste another goddamn dime” on her tuition. He yanks her from her classes.
Trust is a vase. It slips through the fingers. You regret it the moment it leaves your grip, in that breath of time before it explodes on the linoleum. Careful where you step. Use a broom. Wear shoes.
Toby and McKenna are twenty-three years old. Toby is a humorless, thick-armed, thick-necked stallion who works full time for Fast Way Moving and Storage. Each morning, he drags his hungover slab of a self out of bed, performs seventy-five pushups and one-hundred sit-ups on the carpet, then drives to McDonald’s and inhales three Egg McMuffns with Cheese, one order of Mc-Griddles and Sausage, and two orders of hash browns. Washes it down with a Supersized Coke.
He and Murray have teamed up to construct a wooden privacy fence in the backyard. Other than that, Toby has accomplished nothing in his life. Oh, yes, more body density. Bigger arms. A membership to Gold’s Gym. A steady stream of girlfriends who believe strongly in halter tops and are skilled at popping back pimples and waxing body hair.
McKenna is a full-time student at Aquinas College, in her fifth year, studying English and Religion. Her sense of humor, she tries to convince herself, remains intact, although now it’s like the world’s largest spider—the wolf spider, which peeks out of its cozy hole only when provoked, and then, bites. She has a 3.8 GPA and is trying to believe in God. One night a week, she attends catechism class. Her conversion has begun. If only her breath didn’t stink so badly, she might have friends. Or a date. But she doesn’t socialize much with other students. Sometimes a study group or a passing chat before class. That’s all. She reads novels. The characters are a form of company.
Misty wears her yellow spring dress every day. Her eyelids are sewn closed, the long sleep she always wanted. Her hands are folded atop her breast. Her cheeks are packed with sawdust. For five years, she has lived in a wooden box in the earth. Mc-Kenna thinks of her every day.
“She’s at peace,” says Grandma Pencil, licking an envelope and passing it across the table. “At rest.”
McKenna inkstamps St. Monica’s address onto the top left corner of the envelope. She gasps in surprise: “You mean my mom?”
Grandma clucks her fat tongue before thrusting it out of her mouth and lubricating another gummy strip. “There’s that cynicism again,” she says, sealing the envelope. “That was not a feature of my generation.”
She calls it cynicism. McKenna knows it’s the wolf spider. “I’m just giving you a hard time, Grams,” she says. She stamps another envelope, another invitation to Sister Maximillian’s “heavenly reception.”
Sister Max passed away in her sleep ten days ago, and now, according to Grandma, she is “at peace.” It never fails to impress McKenna that Grandma knows such things. She really does know. Somehow. After all, that’s how faith works: Somehow.
But even considering Grandma’s admirable belief, there are questions.
To be “at rest”—is this really our ultimate goal?
Congrats, Sister Max! You DID IT! You’re RESTING!
And by the way, Misty? You failed.
McKenna has asked Grandma Pencil many questions. These days, she enjoys a surfeit of opportunities to push Grandma’s buttons, all ostensibly in service of McKenna’s curiosity about Catholicism. She loves to watch Grandma squirm, loves to make her squinch her lips in rage, sip her tea before it’s cooled. After all, McKenna lives in Grandma Pencil’s thoroughly unmodern two-bedroom house. It’s a 1200-sq.ft. two-story just down the hill from Murray and Toby.
McKenna moved in five years ago, soon after Misty OD’d on a combination of antidepressants and gin.
Misty’s death. Imagine a woman walking down the street. Now imagine the skeleton vanishing from her body. The remaining skin, muscle, fat, cartilage, and arteries—once bound together and given direction and purpose by the bones—plunge to the concrete in a thunderous sploop, leaving a dense blob that can twitch but not really move. That’s what McKenna’s life turned into when her mother died.
McKenna couldn’t have seen this coming, this squishy dead weight of daily existence. In her heart, in fact, she thought her life had been like this all along. Spongy. Flat.
She didn’t realize she had a mother until she didn’t have a mother.
It’s a common mistake. It’s why we want to see ghosts. It’s why we dream.
Now imagine that woman again, walking down
the street, skeleton intact. Imagine her flesh and muscle disappearing,leaving only the bones. That’s McKenna. She’s a sight. Ninety-four pounds. Sunken eyes that bob in her skull. Veins in her temples that love the daylight. She wears baggy clothes to hide her body, although honestly, if she wanted to wear non-baggy clothes, she’d have to shop for an eleven-year-old. She’s twenty-three. She’s not anorexic. She knows she looks awful, but she can’t stop. She has tried stealing Toby’s high-calorie shakes. But liquid doesn’t do it. She needs to chew. Can’t chewing be enough?
Murray’s hair has gone white. A full beard, also white, touches the top button of his work shirt. The hearing in his right ear is effectively gone; he wears an aid. His hands are still strong, but they’re stony and cold to the touch. He’s forty-two.
He has given up inventing. There was no grand proclamation. One day, he simply cleared out the basement, hauling armfuls of scrap metal and wood, assorted scales, tubes, and saw horses, stacks of Popular Mechanics and Inventors Digest, to the curb. He even set the inventions themselves out there, for anyone to take. All of his tools, except what fit inside one small toolbox, were sold through the classifieds for a total of $1,100.
To Murray’s credit, he has tried to connect with his children since Misty’s death. The living room television, upgraded to a 16" color set, glows around the clock. He ponied up for basic cable. This gives him football, basketball, hockey, bowling—anything that might provide a bonding moment (with Toby). Not that Toby has much time to hang. He’s got a life. Murray has learned to cook asparagus and spaghetti, although he still relies mostly on Burger King and frozen dinners, and he mostly eats alone. You see, the twins aren’t children anymore. An old tree can’t reattach the apple that’s been dropped, bagged, cored, and baked into a pie.
And his baby girl isn’t a baby girl anymore. Audrey is a 5'611, 132 lb. adult woman who wears a C-cup, menstruates heavily for three days a month (spotting for two more), has had sex with three different young men, is getting ready to leave for college,and can’t wait until next year, 1996, so she can vote for Bill Clinton.