The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo

by Darrin Doyle

  Kalamazooans were onto them. They knew these big city folks meant trouble. They knew that Audrey hated (claimed to hate) the spotlight. But all it takes is one mouth—as Sister Maximil-lian loved to say, “Loose lips sink ships.” Media crews soon discovered Audrey and attached themselves to her like barnacles. They camped on the lawn of the house she was slated to eat. The family, the Polegas, had packed their clothing and stood in the foyer ready to go stay a few months at a relative’s house (that’s the protocol that fell into place) when they noticed the sea of cameras, microphones, and stiff hair waiting outside.

  “Is she in there? Is she in there?” Seventy-five voices. A gust of perfume, choking.

  “Has she started yet?”

  “How does it feel?”

  “Aren’t you afraid she’ll swallow your children?”

  “Does she snore?”

  “Does she sleep in the nude?”

  “Is she a Satanist?”

  “Can she come to the window with a blender in her mouth? I just need one picture, dude.”

  Audrey wouldn’t eat crayon one until they all disappeared. It took three weeks for the last van to vamoose. Those news corporations have deep pockets, but no story equals no money.

  This particular episode inspired The Plan.

  The citizens of Kalamazoo have been called many things. Boring. Unadventurous. Unfashionable. Narrow-minded. Jealous (of Ann Arbor, of East Lansing, of any place with regular helpings of sunlight).

  Never have these simple, hardworking people been called geniuses. Well, let these scribblings be the first to claim it, loud and proud.

  In October of 1997, when a police cruiser’s spotlight illuminated an abashed Audrey Mapes with a four-foot section of PVC pipe protruding from her mouth, the citizens of Kalamazoo immediately recognized that they had something special. Their freak had returned. Out of all the cities in these United States, she’d chosen this one.

  Knowing that Audrey was special isn’t what made them geniuses, though. Recognizing her gift was one thing; doing something with her gift was another.

  After the national media swept into town and were laboriously swept back out, the Kalamazoo City Council met for an emergency closed-door session. Two days of round-the-clock meetings ensued, and with the help of Audrey’s agent and publicity manager, both of whom had flown in when the story broke, the council emerged with a proposal, The Mapes Initiative: For a New ’Zoo, which was presented and voted on by the citizens in a hastily or ganized election. The proposal, approved by an amazing 99.8 percent of the voters, was then ratified by the mayor.

  The first half of the legislation laid out strict ground rules for protecting Audrey from the media. It dictated a “comfort radius” of two hundred feet. It stated that no direct questions should be asked to Audrey (no such consideration for her family in Grand Rapids). The council was smart about rules regarding videotaping. They knew she preferred to eat in the dead of night, so film-ing her in action was allowed so long as reporters respected the comfort radius and didn’t disturb the neighbors with “bright lights” or “loud noises.” This made it effectively impossible to get usable shots. Additional provisions restricted the distribution of any footage or photographs without Audrey’s permission.

  One glaring omission in the Initiative—no limits were placed upon artists’ renderings of Audrey Mapes. This was Kalamazoo’s ace in the hole.

  That’s all fine and dandy. But the second half of the proposal contained the genius. Section 11.1 decreed that “Every structure and object devoured by Audrey Mapes will be re-made to resemble exactly, in as fine and minute detail as humanly possible, the original structure or object.” In other words, as Audrey ate, the city would rebuild. Once she finished one structure, the people would gather to reconstruct it. And “reconstruct” is the precise word.

  Painstaking care, for instance, would be taken to ensure that an olive green house with forest green trim would be repainted just so, using the same type of lumber, the same layout of windows, the same thickness of window glass, the same number of bricks constituting the chimney. A three-bedroom home with one-and-a-half baths and a stairwell with an oak banister would be reborn identically. Whenever possible, they would consult original blueprints. As a backup, they would take pictures of everything as documentation. If necessary, they would amass old photographs, journal entries, home movies, piles of store receipts. They would interview family and friends, home repairmen, furnace servicers, and the like.

  In the case of a business, lavatories would house an identical number and brand of toilets, sinks, hand dryers, wastebaskets. Cubicle walls from the same manufacturer would be assembled to reflect the original pattern. Meticulous measurements would be taken. Desks, computers, telephone lines, fax machines, window blinds, carpets, potted plants, water coolers—all exactly the same as before.

  Using every available resource, each new structure, inside and out, would be the structure now residing in Audrey Mapes’s bottomless belly.

  It took dedication. Teamwork. Camaraderie. Respect. Money.

  Patience. Kindness. Empathy. Compassion. Discipline. Pride. Love.

  Heart. Brains. Stomach.

  Daily life continues pretty much as normal for most citizens, except everyone you see—your coworkers, the gas station attendant, the mailman, your kids’ teachers, the congress of teenagers skateboarding in Bronson Park—looks ready to burst into song. The air is lighter, crisper. The radios play jangly pop songs around the clock.

  One night, you awake to a distant noise. A faint buzzing. Like a plane or helicopter, but more ragged, more staccato. You swat at your ear. Half-asleep, you realize that no, it’s not a fly. It’s nothing, you tell your husband. No reason to get excited. Go back to sleep.

  Two nights later, your children appear at your bedside. The digital clock reads 3:24 a.m.

  Audrey’s coming, your youngest says. Her front-tooth gap is so cute you want to smother her in kisses.

  Come here, Mom and Dad! your twelve-year-old son says. It’s true!

  Your husband throws open the window. You sit up. Your heart races. Your breath comes short and hot. You knew for months that this day would arrive, but still, now that it is here, the rush is pure and overwhelming. You clutch your daughter’s hand. Both of you are suddenly giggling. She’s coming! She’s coming!

  Up and down your street, windows are lighted. Men and women step out onto porches, pinching bathrobes at the neck. Word spreads: She has arrived.

  The next morning, unable to control your smile, you tell your coworkers the news. They make an announcement on the hospital P.A. All day, doctors, nurses, administrators, and patients—an equal mix of friends and strangers—congratulate you.

  Your children can’t concentrate on their schoolwork, but that’s okay. Chances like this come once in a lifetime. Math, spelling, science projects. You try to help, but time feels short. There’s so much to do. Soon you give them the answers, to get it out of the way.

  You spend every spare moment packing clothes and making arrangements. You’re on the phone constantly, lining up relatives and friends who can put up your family. You take photos of all your belongings, careful to document the positions of every item in the house. You are near frenzy trying to finish. You snap at your husband. He snaps back. You dig up receipts and instruction manuals so you can remember brand names and models. You call Consumers Energy, the cable company, and the phone company, approximating a shutoff date.

  Every night, the sound grows louder, until it is impossible to sleep. Your street is alive with people twenty-four hours a day. Your exhausted family huddles together under one blanket, shivering in anticipation.

  One night, the noise is deafening. It rattles the walls, drops pictures to the floor. The children tremble, clutch at your neck. “Are we going to die, Mommy? Is she going to eat us?” You try to answer, but your throat is thick with dust.

  When you awake the next day, it is a miracle. You are still alive.

  The
n your doorbell rings.

  She moved from house to house, business to business, school to school, church to church, park bench to park bench, street lamp to street lamp, stop sign to stop sign, traffic signal to traffic signal, telephone pole to telephone pole, swing set to swing set, mailbox to mailbox, parking ramp to parking ramp, picket fence to picket fence, basketball hoop to basketball hoop, fountain to fountain, church to church, library to library, viaduct to viaduct, gazebo to gazebo. Every manmade structure came down, with a few notable exceptions: Sidewalks and roads were ignored; so were vehicles (she did chomp the occasional canoe in someone’s garage, an ATV here and there); so were cemeteries.

  People were kind to Audrey. Warm and giving. They welcomed her into their homes, treated her like family, fed her, bathed her, knitted her scarves in the winter, gave her a bed where she could sleep through the day. When night fell, they ate one last meal with her, maybe played a couple games of euchre, and then left her to her business. At sunrise, exhausted and covered with soot, snow, insulation, what-have-you, she went to the next house and pressed the doorbell.

  Through 1997 and 1998, morale was high. Kalamazoo was united. Everyone felt special, everyone had a purpose. Unemployment was virtually eliminated. Construction companies were always hiring, and suppliers—for lumber, concrete, piping, wiring, paint, glass, insulation, furniture, appliances, electronics, books, CDs, toys—were swamped with orders. T-shirt companies, novelty stores, and trinket manufacturers kicked into high gear: twenty-four hours a day, they cranked out souvenirs of the momentous occasion. Shirts (My City was Swallowed and All I Got was this Lousy Shirt ); coffee mugs (Audrey Can Eat My City Anytime ); pins (Audrey for President ); baseball caps (Kalamazoo Says—EAT ME!); bumper stickers (Honk if a Gorgeous Blond Just Ate Your House ). There was the Audrey Mapes nutcracker; the Audrey Mapes lunchbox; the Audrey Mapes alarm clock; the Audrey Mapes toothpaste/toothbrush set; the Audrey Mapes Halloween Mask; the Kellogg’s breakfast cereal (Audrey-O’s with Marshmallow Homes). Orders poured in from around the globe. The city became a whirling dervish of economic activity, a parade of semis streaming in and out all day and night, every month of the year. Even in the harshest January snowstorms, construction continued. Neighbors helped neighbors. Families and friends went to live with one another; they bonded into the night over extended meals, discussing the trivialities of their lives, but also the big things—death, love, hope, fear, sanity, depression, God, the future.

  Kalamazoo became a worldwide phenomenon. The media returned, of course, mere weeks after they were first ousted, but this time, they played by the rules. After all, nobody wanted her to stop eating. Jesus, they’d be out of jobs. They treated her like a rare animal on protected national land, respecting her nocturnal feeding habits and being as minimally invasive as possible. Reporters and camera operators donned camouflage, used night vision technology, whispered into their microphones. Like nature show hosts, they caught spooky green footage of a shadowy silhouette with glowing eyes and a flowing mane of hair squatting in a corner, munching.

  This took more effort than it was worth, though. Mostly, they left her alone and stuck to capturing audio recordings of her chomping, before/after shots of buildings, and interviews with local residents. So many interviews. Suddenly, everyone’s opinion mattered. They tracked down classmates from college, cops who’d arrested her, the lady who sold her the Gatorade. They descended upon Grand Rapids and staked out the house on Moriarty Street. Getting no answers there, they located Sheenie the midwife, who was happy to discuss Audrey’s birth in sticky detail. They found North Park teachers, nurses from Doctor Burger’s office, high school boys she’d blown.

  Maybe it was all the toxins in the air. Maybe it was the general bubble of goodwill that Kalamazoo had become. What ever the case, the media used the interviews not to tell a story of freakish Audrey Mapes and her mouth but to tell a story of human beings. Of a once-depressed city, a bleak, gray, middle-American burg where smiles were once as rare as rainbows. Now, however, there was light. There was hope. Women’s Groups championed Audrey as evidence that there was nothing an unmarried broad couldn’t accomplish. Physical Disabilities support groups said the same thing about people with limb loss. B.A.B.E. (Blondes Are Better at Everything), Children of Factory Workers, Atheists Unite!, The Southpaw Society—all claimed Audrey as their own. Memberships skyrocketed. Kalamazoo had died and been resurrected. This was the triumph. This was the moral. Heaven was right here on Earth. Heaven was the mouth-breathing bag boy at the Jewel-Osco; it was the shell-shocked WWII vet at the halfway house who dressed like Uncle Sam; it was the single mother of two who’d just earned her master’s degree; it was the president of WMU; it was the out-of-work guitarist singing for two bucks a day to an empty sidewalk; it was you and me.

  Jealousy grew in other cities. They wanted to be Heaven, too. Grand Rapids was livid—Audrey wasn’t even from Kalamazoo! On Moriarty Street, hate letters filled the Mapes mailbox. The outlying communities were especially green. Portage, an adjoining suburban community, had fought for years, and recently won the right, to be recognized as an autonomous city. Now this decision was biting them in the ass, hard. They petitioned Audrey. They sent videos of their overachieving schoolchildren singing “We Are the World.” They offered money, lots of money, for Audrey to ditch Kalamazoo and eat their city instead. If she didn’t want the cash, they reasoned, she could give it to her favorite charity. Heck, they would start a charity in her name, maybe one for babies without feet? When every attempt failed, they wrote a letter to the Mayor of Kalamazoo, pleading: Let us rescind our cityhood! Absorb us back into Kalamazoo! This was all a big mistake!

  Finally, they grumbled. It’s BS, they said. Discrimination. Who does that girl think she is, anyway? They printed their own T -shirts : Portage—Too Rich For Audrey’s Blood.

  No matter how wonderfully life is treating us, it’s human nature to get antsy, to want more. Jesus understood this. He spread his miracles out. Even the sensational turns bland after a while. Supermodels can’t keep their husbands’ eyes from wandering. Professional baseball players demand raises. The flawless Jamaican beach becomes “too sandy.” That’s why Heaven is an unimaginable concept, why we envision it in childlike terms—hanging out with dead relatives, reuniting with our dogs, trading licks with Hen-drix. We envision happiness in the most generic sense, transferring our everyday, pragmatic needs and pleasures to a place with clouds for a floor. We can’t really, truly, wrap our minds around the idea of perfection. It doesn’t exist. Perfection, if we’re honest, sounds like death. At rest. It’s boring.

  A frenzy cannot be sustained. No one has the energy. The girl herself was hardly ever seen, so Audrey faded into the background. She continued grazing on the city. In fact, her pace increased dramatically, to five, ten, fifteen structures a day. The construction crews dutifully rebuilt. They had it down to a science by this point. Imagine barn-raising by Amish pill-poppers. Families, businesses, and churches dutifully moved back into their new dwellings and ordered identical versions of everything they’d lost.

  They stuck to the plan. They would remake their lives. To a person, the Kalamazooans had a vested interest in making it work. They’d voted on it, all except the children and the institutionalized—an amazing show of solidarity, an unheard-of level of support. By following the proposal to the letter, they believed there could be freshness in familiarity. Originality in a copy. New in the old. Change without change.

  Of course, they soon realized what the Mapes family already knew: Such dreams are more impossible than swallowing a city.

  Your three-year-old’s primitive drawings, the autographed photo of Ray Bolger, the deck of cards you bought in Paris when you were eighteen, love letters written to your ex-sweetheart, porno tapes you couldn’t admit to having, the half-ounce of weed in your bottom drawer, the flattened penny you placed on the tracks in 1957, the one poem you’ve ever written, penciled on a napkin.

  No one had calculated the value of
these possessions. They hadn’t thought it through. They’d been caught up in the heat of the moment. Sure, a few people undoubtedly secreted away their most cherished tokens before Audrey came calling. But most didn’t. As time passed and they settled into their “new” lives, they felt a nagging incompleteness, an unnamable sensation of loss. Something wasn’t right. They squirmed in their recliners.

  “I don’t think they gave us the same one we had before. This thing puts my ass to sleep.”

  “Honey, give it time. That old one was broken in, remember?”

  “Humph.”

  Discomfort turned to annoyance.

  When the local news went to its nightly “Audrey Watch,” they grabbed the remote. Switched to CNN. MSNBC. Fox News. On every channel, the millennium was approaching. Computers weren’t encoded properly. Y2K loomed on the horizon.

  The family gathered in front of the TV, shivering.

  56.

  In 1999, McKenna rented a car and drove to Kalamazoo. Like most Americans, she had earned her license on her sixteenth birthday. Unlike most Americans, her fourth time behind the wheel came at age twenty-seven.

  She preferred public transportation. McKenna rode the bus to the Old Kent on Plainfield where she worked as a full-time teller. The twenty-minute trip allowed her to read, think, and write before she had to turn off her mind and deal with customers for eight hours. Every day, she sat in the same bus seat—third row, left side. When someone happened to be in her spot, she took the nearest one available, but this always soured her mood and meant that she would have a bad day.

  She had worked at the bank for four years, since earning her B.A. in philosophy and English from Aquinas College. Murray had long ago stopped asking if McKenna was going to “use” her degree, as if an education was a screwdriver.

  One year ago, she’d completed her conversion to Catholicism. She and Grandma Pencil attended weekly mass together at St. Monica’s. The two were tall and lean, of identical height, with severe cheekbones. No makeup. Their shoes were low-heeled and closed-toed. They favored conservative, loose-fitting dresses, earth tones or navy blue, sometimes with a subtle floral pattern. Occasionally, they wore each other’s clothes. When entering and exiting the church, arms linked, people asked if they were mother and daughter.