Miss Wyoming (16 page)

Even the most anal of the 4A .M. bread-baking monks would be unable to compete with Eugene Lindsay's compulsion for getting his postal fraud mail-outs into the local postbox before morning pickup. Susan was drafted into this work pronto, and even when she was half a year pregnant, Eugene still had her lugging box loads of heavy documents and paper up and down the basement stairs. Susan could have cared less. For the first time in her life she felt as if there were no tightly coiled springs waiting to lurch out from beneath her skin. She felt as if she were on holiday. Added bonus: wild sex, up until the baby got too big.

«Yooj, I feel like a Cambodian peasant or something, freighting these — what
are
they?» — she looked down at the envelopes in the box she was holding — «mail-outs to the Greater Tampa, Florida, postal region. I could drop Junior into the rice paddy and be back on threshing duty the next afternoon.»

Eugene attended his Xerox 5380 console copier like a surgeon with a patient, bathed in strobes of Frankenstein green light. «Hey, sunshine, God bless Florida. All those seniors with nothing but free time and too many radio stations. They hand in their mailing addresses like they were spare change. Now let's get them up to the front door. Mush!»

When winter came, the air in the house became drier, but the daily schedule went on unchanged. In December, when Susan had realized she was pregnant, Eugene forbid her to go near the microwave oven or to drink alcohol.

Spring and summer came and went. She liked her job. She opened the daily mail, which Eugene picked up at a post-office box a few streets over. Inside the envelopes came crumpled money, sent in by superstitious radio enthusiasts whose names Eugene purchased from an old college pal who'd become a telemarketing whiz —
suckers
! Most often it consisted of two twenties and a ten, but sometimes Susan collected wads of ones and fives in dirty little clumps, likely scrounged from under the front seat of a teenager's car. What did these people want? What kind of cosmic roulette wheel did they hope to spin by responding to Eugene's fraudulent thrusts?

Susan's stomach felt as if it contained a great big ski boot that rolled around inside her. The Seneca plane crash seemed like a lifetime ago, her precrash life, a miraculous story of outrageous behavior relayed to her the morning after a drinking binge blackout. The only real reminders she had of her former days were the passing glimpses of herself on TV-reruns of old shows — as well as the image of Marilyn, now dressed like a Fifth Avenue stick insect, hair chignoned regardless of time of day or season, scrapping it out in court with the airline.

The crux of Marilyn's case was that Susan's physical remains were never found despite indisputable evidence she was on the flight (a GTE Airfone call and the testimony of four ground staffers) and that, unlike other family members of crash victims, Marilyn was alone in not having so much as a fingernail with which to memorialize her daughter.

Susan saw Marilyn royally milking the situation for all it was worth. With public sympathy on her side she was likely to win her case. Eugene would egg Susan on. «You're going to just sit and let her rake in millions on this and do nothing?» But the topic was one that made Susan turn remote, and so he stopped forcing it. To Susan, the sight of her mother on camera was too distant, too unreal to enter into.

Life in Indiana went on. Eugene ventured out to do his mailings and make minor shopping runs. Susan occasionally went along, but she was much happier cosseted away with her lifelong sexual paragon, helping with the family business. It wasn't even until her third month there that she realized she hadn't once had the urge to make a phone call.

In early September, Susan was heavily pregnant and began to grow bored and cranky. «Hormones, Eugene. I get them hot and spicy like my mother.» She told him she wanted to take the car out for a spin.

Eugene, testy after disassembling an overtaxed air conditioner in the basement, unsure if he might be able to reassemble it afterward, had no interest in joining her. A heat wave had made the basement the only cool area in the house. The floor was covered in wires and screws, one of which Susan stepped on, sharpening her own mood until it broke.

«I want to drive to the Drug Mart and get some alcohol to cool my boobs. And it'll be fun to do some makeup, slap on a wig.»

«What if you — »

«Go into labor?»

«Well,
yeah.
»

«I'll bring the cell phone.»

«Let me gas up the car then.»

«Gas up the car?»

He went around the corner from where he was rewiring the air conditioner and opened up some sliding doors to reveal several 55-gallon drums Susan hadn't seen before They'd been loaded through what appeared to be locked hatches in the ceiling above.

«What the hell are these, Eugene?»

«Gas. I panicked during the Gulf War. I stocked up.»

«Are you nuts? Keeping these in the basement?»

«Cool yer jets, sister. It's nearly all gone. You should have been here in 1991. It was like a refinery down here.»

«This stuff's been down here the whole time?»

«I only drive maybe three miles a month. So, yeah.»

«That's not the point, Eugene.»

«Go get your wig. The weather's making us both nutty. I'll gas the car.»

Susan went upstairs to disguise herself. That day she was Lee Grant in the movie
Shampoo,
complete with frosted wedge-cut wig, and a beige pantsuit of Renata's modified to fit her smaller yet pregnant body. She also chose one of Renata's many purses, filled it with a small pile of clutter, makeup and baubles — her «pursey stuff» — and looked at herself in the mirror — sporty! Feeling a tiny bit better, she went into the carport, and called down to Eugene. «I'm going, Yooj.»

«Can you pick me up some gum?»

«Gum?»

«Cinnamon Dentyne.»

«Yes, my lord.»

«Ouch!»

«What's that?»

«This goddamm wire just sparked in my hand.»

«Careful now. See you in a half hour.»

She got in the car, still slightly annoyed. The sun was almost down, but none of the day's heat had dissipated. And soon the alcohol would be an extra cooling treat. She parked at the strip mall and bought a few things at the drugstore. Her mind wandered. She thought about how soon it'd be before she'd be going there regularly for Pampers and breast pads. On impulse she bought a bottle of bourbon at the Liquor Barn next door, and then got back in the car. Sirens were flaring down the street and she heard a
boom
a few blocks away.

She turned the corner onto her block to see the lower portion of the house completely ablaze, flames shooting out the windows like water raging down a river. More fire engines arrived, as if from the sky, just as Susan saw the top half of the house collapse into the bottom half.

It was the plane crash repeated — the flames, the havoc, the unreality. She closed the car door tightly and walked toward the pyre. A fireman warned her to stay away, but she ignored him, stumbled over a fire hose and heard the firemen yelling at one another:

* «Fastest fire I've ever seen. Zero to sixty in two seconds.»

* «Almost like it was planned this way.»

* «Anyone in there?»

* «Won't know until tomorrow. Assuming there's anything left.»

* «Family?
Christ.
»

* «No. It's that old weather guy — Evan something. From back in the eighties.»

* «Before my time.»

* «Real coot. Lived alone. Collected trash, the neighbor said.»

The front facade of the house tumbled into the barbecue pit that was once home. All eyes were on the fire, none on Susan, who felt trapped and damned in some sort of sick cosmic loop as she turned around and ran back to the car.

She started the car. Already the show was ending outside — not much remained to burn. She pulled away, wanting to find a highway, any highway, crying furiously, hitting her face, bruising it in anger. She found the freeway and raced onto it. She drove with the high beams on because she knew she was now in some rarefied darkness.

Susan remembered a New Year's Eve she'd once had, back in the eighties. She'd been in Larry's Jaguar and the two of them had gotten lost on the way to a party at Joan Collins's house. They'd already gotten a late start, and then the car needed gas. They'd taken the wrong freeway exit, and the net result was that at the stroke of midnight they were on the Hollywood Freeway, one car among hundreds — millions — around the world, driving through the night, through all the great changes, through those moments when one era turns into another.

Her eyes became cosmetic blots. She couldn't see and she pulled into a gas station and washed her face in the rest room. She fumbled in her purse and cried when she found a small photo of Eugene among the other things. And then she found the folded-up letter she'd rescued from the shrine to her back at the Flight 802 crash in Seneca — Randy Montarelli of 1402 Chattanauqua Street, Erie, Pennsylvania. She went into the convenience store, full of rush-hour shoppers, stole a map and got back into the car and drove, north and then east, from Bloomington to Indianapolis to Akron to Cleveland.

Around midnight she drove into Erie, Pennsylvania, where she pulled out the map and rattled through its flaps until she found what she wanted. Then, in what turned out to be a dozen or so contractions later, she banged on the front door of Randy Montarelli's town house. He opened it wearing a cucumber facial mask, with a TV blaring in the background playing a pretaped episode of
Matlock.
The odor of popcorn filled the air like hot salty syrup. Red-eyed, Susan ripped off her wig. Her hair was sticky, her brain racing. She crossed Randy's threshold and dropped herself onto the couch where she produced, before the TV program was over, a perfect baby boy.

Randy's afghan dogs, Camper and Willy, were whimpering in the spare bedroom. Randy held the baby in his arms while Susan yelled at him to cut the umbilical cord, which he did.

«You
hag,
stop trying to change me. God
dammit,
I can't ever remember a single moment in my life when you weren't trying to twist me into something other than who I am.»

«Are you
through
yet, sweetie?»

They were in Denver for the Miss USA Teen competition. Mother and daughter were conducting their conversation through clenched teeth, mouths smiling. They were breakfasting in the Alpine Room of the Denver Marriott. It was seven-fifteen Thursday morning, at an orientation meeting and «Prayer Wake-Up with Turkey Sausage — Turkey, the Low-Fat Pork Substitute.»

Such pre-event meals were standard pageant procedure, and at them, gown lockers and keys were assigned. Susan also filled out sign-up sheets to set up a time slot for a video photo-op tour of the city of Denver, the footage to be edited into a big-screen montage and shown during the Sunday night awards ceremonies.

Meal time changes were announced, and lunch that day was to be shared with a local den of Rotarians. «So we can hook ourselves up with a fuck-buddy,» Susan laughed.

«Susan!» Marilyn slapped her daughter, who smiled, because as with most slappings, it's the struck who wins the match.

«Classy, Mom. Real swanke
roo
! I don't think anybody in the room missed it. There goes my Miss Congeniality trophy.»

«Only losers win Miss Congeniality, Susan. Aim higher.»

Since the move to Cheyenne a few months before, just after her cosmetic surgery, Susan had grown positively mutinous. She had no friends in that surprisingly flat and dusty Wyoming city, and her high school days were finally over after having received a C2 average from an exasperated McMinnville school, blissful to have Marilyn out of its hair. Susan lived her days as might the favored member of a harem, painting her toenails, foraging for snack foods and absorbing anything possible from the local library up the street, eager to broaden her world's scope and to learn of possible ways out of pageant hell: Thalidomide, the Shaker religion, witch dunking, the Yukon Territory and Ingrid Bergman.

On the drive to Denver from Cheyenne, Susan did some math in her head. She realized that counting all of her wins over the past decade, little if any money was ever fed back into improving the Colgate family's quality of life. All the loot, she figured, was cycled right back into gowns, surgery, facials, voice and singing lessons. Susan had, until that math exercise on the drive down to Denver, thought of herself as the family breadwinner, the plucky little minx who kept her family away from the destructive intrusion of social workers and the rock-bottom fate of shilling burgers at Wendy's. She now understood that in continuing the pageant circuit, she was only fueling the fire of her own pageant hell.

The Miss USA Teen pageant was a national contest, but not one that Marilyn would concede was A-list like Miss America, Miss Teen America — or even
Mrs.
America. The winner of the Miss USA Teen pageant would receive a Toyota Tercel hatchback, a faux lynx fur evening coat, $2,000 toward college tuition, and $3,500 cash, along with a gown endorsement contract.

Susan had easily clinched the Miss Wyoming Teen title, and Marilyn acted like a crow raiding another bird's nest as Susan twinkled her way through a competition that was hokey, amateur and pushover. It was essentially four car-stereo speakers, a borrowed room at the community center (the sound of basketballs from the next room punctuated the event like a random metronome) and a feedlot of tinseled yokels who knew nothing about ramp walking, cosmetics, accessorizing, stage demeanor or the correct manner of answering skill-testing questions. The question asked of Susan had been: «If you could change one thing about America, what would it be?» Marilyn knew that the easy and obvious answer would be peace and harmony, but Susan's answer, delivered in tones Marilyn found suspiciously heartfelt, was, «You know what I'd change?» A pause. «I'd like to make us all stop squabbling for just one day. I'd have citizens sit down and talk about what it means to live in this country — all of us sitting down at the world's biggest dinner table, agreeing to agree, all of us trying to find things that bring us together instead of the things that keep us apart.»

Storms of applause.

Title clinched.

Marilyn found that Susan had been difficult of late, alternately insolent, silent, crabby and apathetic. The Miss Wyoming title, rather than making Susan buoyant, merely threw her into some sort of moody teenage dungeon, and afterward each time Marilyn and Susan needed to talk about pageant business, Susan would merely roll her eyes, moo, and return to one of what was an ever growing pile of books with disturbingly uncheerful titles like
Our Bodies, Our Selves
and
Mastering Your Life.
The drive to Denver had been particularly taxing, owing to both Susan's sulkiness and to an Interstate pileup outside of Colorado Springs that left one trucker dead, six cars munched and a confetti of broiler chickens and Nike sneakers strewn across the median. The remainder of the drive was somber, and nearing the hotel, Susan seemed to have reached a decision of some sort, and cheered up once more, the way she'd been back before — back before
when
?

Marilyn watched Susan flow through that evening's pageant with a previously unseen ease. She walked like a Milanese model and held her head up high like a true Wyoming cowgirl. She was good, and Marilyn knew it and, like most show moms, kept one eye glued to her offspring, the other on the evening's quintet of semi-loser judges: the local modeling school doyenne, a drive-time FM radio jock, a disco-era Olympic gymnast, a walking hard-on from the local baseball team, his leg in a cast, and «Steffan,» a humorless local designer with a midlife-crisis ponytail. Marilyn looked at the faces of the judges, the speed and confidence with which they jotted their numerical ratings onto the score sheets, and knew Susan was a shoo-in as a finalist. Backstage during the final costume change, Marilyn couldn't help but preen: «Sweetie, you're just
killing
them out there.»

Susan removed her key from where she and many other contestants stored theirs — duct-taped to her belly just above the pubic hair so as to preclude vandalizing of gowns and accessories in the locker areas. She and Marilyn prepared the final gown. «You'll never guess
why
I'm doing so well tonight,» Susan said.

«Whatever it is, just keep on doing it.»

«You sure about that?»

«Win, sweetie, win. It's all there is.» Marilyn zipped Susan up and checked her hair. «Turn around — lint check.»

Susan turned and the overhead lights blinked: time to get back onstage. «What's tonight's secret then, sweetie?» Marilyn asked. «Let me in.»

Susan stood in the wings with the four other finalists, Miss Arizona, Miss Maine, Miss Georgia and Miss West Virginia. The stage lights glowed like the sun through a grove of leafy trees. «The reason
is,
» she said, just before the emcee called out «Miss Wyoming,» «that I no longer give a rat's ass.»

Marilyn's heart chilled. Susan went onstage. With dread, Marilyn returned to her table, where a broad assortment of now drunk show moms and show dads were clapping with near Communist precision and zest. Trish, living in Denver that summer, was along for the evening's ride. She occupied a $45 seat to Marilyn's right. She asked Marilyn if she was okay.

«Just fine, hon. Just fine.»

The emcee introduced the skill-testing-question portion of the evening's events, and asked the five finalists to enter the «Booths of Silence,» which were actually a series of plywood stalls painted robin's-egg blue, fronted with a sheet of clear Plexiglas. Inside, Whitney Houston music blared to the exclusion of all other noises — just the sort of yesteryear propping that Marilyn thought kept this particular pageant entirely B-list.

Susan was fourth out of her stall, having watched Miss Maine, Miss Georgia, and Miss Arizona come onstage before her. She left her booth, hearing the click of Plexiglas on plywood. She sashayed up to the green electrical tape strip that was her floor marker. She saw that the emcee was as handsome as Eugene Lindsay —
Why is there never a woman emceeing these things? Why is it always some variation of a Qantas pilot crossed with a Pentecostal evangelist?
His teeth, lips, Adam's apple and chin worked in symphony, and Susan heard: «Susan Colgate: A UFO lands in your back yard and a little green man pops out of it and says to you, “Hello, Earthling — please tell me about your country.” What do you tell this little green man?»

Susan thought about this question. Why would an alien even know about the concept of countries? Were countries a universal concept? Did they have countries on Betelgeuse or on Mars? She thought about what a ridiculous spot she was now in. How many times had she been in just such an artificial situation where she was put on trial with fatuous, clownlike questions like something out of the Salem witch trials? Susan looked into the emcee's eyes and she could tell he was hosting the evening's event because he needed the money. Gambling debts? An addiction to sexual novelties or to Franklin Mint collectible ceramic thimbles? What was with his hair? Was that a trace of a scar on his left eye? Oh
God,
there still remained this idiotic question to be answered. The audience was so quiet. The lighting was so bright!

Aliens
… She thought of cartoon aliens endorsing presweetened breakfast cereals. Pictures of Mexicans flashed through her head. She recalled the moods she had when she was on the road, driving to pageants — the hotel rooms and freeways and taxis and forests and grocery stores and all of the people she'd ever seen across the country, churning, scrambling and going — going
forth
— into some unknown.

She replied, «I'd tell that little green man that we're a busy country, Ken.» Marilyn safety-pinned the names of the emcees onto gowns before storing them in backstage lockers. «I'd tell him that we like getting things done here in the USA, and that we're always on the lookout for newer, better ways of doing them. And
then,
Ken» — Susan decided to speak to the emcee as a person and not a robot — «and then I'd ask the little green man if he'd take me for a ride in his UFO, and I'd say, “Take me to Detroit! Because there's tons of people there who'd like to learn from this little UFO ship of yours — because you know what? These UFOs look like a dandy new way of doing things faster and better. That's the American way.” Then, I guess, the two of us would lift off and cross this big country of ours. You might even call it a date. That's what I'd say, Ken. That's what I'd do.»

Her smile was clean, her eyes direct, and the crowd loved her.

Miss West Virginia was next. She was going to tell the little green man that the USA was a free country and that if he had a problem with that, he could leave, then and there. This was a negative reply and only garnered weak clapping, and sure enough, Miss West Virginia came in as fourth runner-up. Miss Maine was third, Miss Georgia was second runner-up and then, «In the event that Miss USA Teen is unable to fulfill her duties the first runner-up will assume those responsibilities. The first runner-up is Karissa Palewski, Miss Arizona, making Susan Colgate, the
new,
Miss USA Teen!»

A flash of kisses, flashbulbs and roses. A sash. A scepter. The previous Miss USA Teen, Miss Dawnelle Hunter, formerly Miss Florida USA Teen, emerged from the wings with a platinum tiara which she nested and pinned onto Susan's hair. From all sides came clapping, and a gentle tickle in the small of the back from Ken propelled Susan up to the front where she was to make the briefest of acceptance speeches.

Marilyn was at their table, electrified. The runners-up, or, as Marilyn would say, «the losers,» formed a sparkling multicolored backdrop behind Susan.

The floor calmed.

All was silent.

Susan wondered how to be truthful without giving offense. She said, «Thanks all of you. Thanks so much. As we know, this is an important pageant, and winning means a great deal to me.» She paused here, looking for words. «And I think one of the traits we value most in any Miss USA Teen is honesty. So it's only fair I be honest with you now.» She looked at Marilyn, and waited an extra few seconds for full impact. «The truth is that I've got my nose in the books these days — I got a C- average in high school and I
know
I can do better than that — I'm even thinking of applying for college. I simply won't have the time to fulfill my duties as Miss USA Teen. To properly give justice to the role is a full-time job and requires a girl who can give it a thousand-percent dedication.» Susan was winging it now. «It's only from winning that I can see how sacred the role of Miss USA Teen is. And so, in the spirit of truth and pageantry, with a clear head and a happy heart I pass the crown on to Karissa Palewski, Miss Arizona Teen and now, Miss USA Teen. Karissa?» She turned around and beckoned Karissa who, so recently awash in loser's hormones, failed to immediately register her bounty. «Please come forward so I can pass along my crown to you.» The sound technicians sloppily cued up Vivaldi's
Four Seasons.

Marilyn's tortured «No!» was drowned out in the applause as emcee Ken shrugged and escorted Karissa to Susan for a transfer of the tiara, sash, scepter and roses. Mission accomplished. Susan hopped efficiently off the stage and said to Marilyn, «Sorry, Mom, but this is a jailbreak. I'm no longer your prisoner.» She left the banquet room while a confused Trish, justifiably wary of Marilyn's wrath, darted after her.

A week passed in which Susan holed up at the home of Trish's aunt.

Marilyn and Don were back in Cheyenne, where Don was making pay phone calls to Susan, as he didn't want any telltale evidence of communiqués with Denver on the monthly phone bill. «I've gotta tell you, Sue, your mom's pissed as a jar of hornets on this one.»

Susan could easily imagine Don fumbling with a roll of quarters in a booth beside a shoe store. She said, «You know, Don — what
else
is new? I mean, you're married to her, I'm born to her. Neither of us has any illusions, and I just can't take her anymore. I'm out of high school now. Do you really want me hanging around the house for weeks on end with nothing to do but bask in Mom's loving glow?» There was silence on Don's end, and a cash register kachinged in the background. «I thought so. For the time being I'm here with Trish and it's a harmless enough life. I've got a job flipping dough at Pizza Slut. It's a start.»