Miss Wyoming (7 page)

Doris put a good face on it all. John was the constant in her life, the one thing family could neither take away nor reduce. From her perspective, the more time John spent watching TV in the apartment away from hooligans, third rails and strange men in raincoats, the better.

The year he spent in bed was certainly the longest of his life. When he was older and met other people who had accomplished great things during their stints on earth, he found that invariably, somewhere in their early youth, they had felt the experience of death or incapacity burned into them so deeply that ever afterward they gambled with all their chips, said fuck it, went for broke in the sound knowledge that wasting life is probably the biggest sin of all. John's illness made him value extremeness.

As John was on the mend from his sick year, Uncle Raitt tried to corner the U.S. silver market and bankrupted the family in a scandal that spanned forty-six states, most of Europe and parts of Asia and even, in some complex unprecedented way, Antarctica. Overnight, Doris and John were homeless. A week later Raitt hanged himself from a chandelier in Delaware. Doris felt mainly relief; she no longer had to play the family game.

Hours before the phone was disconnected, Doris made some calls. With her money stash she bought two Amtrak tickets to Los Angeles. A car picked them up at the station and drove them to Beverly Hills, where they were put up in the guesthouse of Angus McClintock, Ivan's father, a film producer who had come close to marrying Doris but didn't quite make the leap. Although there was no ring, they'd remained friendly and intimate through the years, and thus mother and son found refuge, far away from anything smacking of Delaware and lost angry families falling from the sky like a flock of burning birds.

Angus showed them around his guesthouse, a four-bedroom Spanish Mission lair, and as he handed Doris the keys, something strange happened. It was the end of the day and the sun was low on the hill. John's skin color turned a Kruggerrand gold not available in Manhattan, and the sight of him as a gilded young prince took Doris by surprise. Without thinking she said, «You know, John, I don't think you're going to be sick anymore. It's over now.»

«You think so?»

«That's right — all over. You're in the land of gold.»

«But it could come back at any moment.»

«No. It's all gone now.» Doris looked at John and then to Angus, then prayed to the effect of,
Lord, stick by me on this one.

They entered their new home.

As Susan walked away from her temporary hideout in the Galvins' house — clad in Karen Galvin's wig and sports gear — she was without credit cards, cash, a driver's license or any other link to the national economy. She touched her clean dry face, the face her mother had berated for its blank slate quality:
(«Susan,
without makeup your face looks like a sheet of typewriter paper. Next week we're getting that eyeliner tattooed, sweetie, and that's
that»).
Susan had once told her friends that being famous was like being Krazy Glued into a Bob Mackie gown, with an Emmy permanently grafted onto her right hand. But without makeup, she looked unconnected to that image. This fuzziness of identity might prove a small blessing in her new life, as it would allow her to roam freely.

Susan's first step was to revisit the crash site, where cranes were lugging the final shards of fuselage onto flatbed trucks. A chess board of police and National Guardsmen shooed away gawkers. Without bodies and popped luggage strewn about, the jet fragments resembled plaza sculptures at the feet of Manhattan bank towers.

Susan ate a chocolate energy bar and felt the warm Indian summer sun on her cheekbones. To her right she saw a burst of colors. She walked closer and found a series of impromptu shrines built of flowers, ribbons, flags, photos and teddy bears, placed by relatives and sympathizers.

All those poor souls,
thought Susan,
gone, and yet here I am, as raring to go as if I were backstage in a spaghetti-strapped evening gown waiting to play
Für Elise
for a clump of Ford dealers.
Inside a Ziploc baggie she saw a Sears photo portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Engineer, the Millers, as it turned out. Beside this lay a photo of Kelly the flight attendant who'd told Susan that 802 was her last flight before a holiday in Cancún. Someone had placed a stuffed rabbit wearing sunglasses and a bottle of Tia Maria beside it.

Susan jolted with surprise when she saw a shrine to herself — a color photocopy enlargement of an old magazine photo mounted onto brown cardboard. In the photo she was fifteen, with heavily gelled New Wavey hair, singing Devo's «Whip It» at the Clackamas Mall, Clackamas County, Oregon. In the upper-left corner was her friend Trish, playing a Casio keyboard. Susan looked at her own eyes in the picture, heavily mascaraed, and with an intensity and a naïveté that made her smile. She remembered secretly applying it in the Orange Julius bathroom. She also remembered afterward, the battle royal with her mother, who thought Susan was to be performing a medley of songs from
Grease.
Susan smiled that this funny old picture, of all the Susan Colgate images in the world, would be singled out and stuck in the middle of a damaged Ohio sorghum field as her final tribute.

There was a letter duct-taped to the bottom of the photo. At a glance, it looked to be like the ones she received in sackloads during the peak years of
Meet the Blooms,
letters that had often been postmarked U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Lompoc, or some fellow correctional facility. The letters frequently began with poems that were always sincere but almost invariably dreadful. This letter read:

Susan, my name is Randy James Montarelli and I was born on the same day as you, September 4, 1970. You were kind of a yardstick in my life. There were a lot of people like me, I think, out in the boonies who followed your life's path as if you were a sister, or maybe because you managed to escape a junky life and go on to something better. Regardless, we were always out there cheering for you. Anyway, now you're in heaven and we're still down here and I think I'm too old to find another Susan Colgate, and so life is going to be just that much harder now. I live alone (I'm not the marrying type!) but I have two dogs, Willy and Camper, and an okay job. I guess I never thought you'd go first. Somehow that felt like part of the deal. This is so stupid and all, putting these words on a sheet of paper in Magic Marker letters, when nobody's ever going to read it, anyway. I don't live in Seneca. I live in Erie, that's in Pennsylvania. I drove down here last night (4 1/2 hours!) because if I didn't, I couldn't live with myself. I'm sorry your marriage to Chris didn't work out but you were too classy for him, anyway, and I know those party hound types, and they're all flaky in the end. No offense. I always knew you'd get into movies someday, too, and it was fun seeing you in
Dynamite Bay
just this past month. Well, I could go on here, but my throat feels all tight the way it did driving down here. My friend Casey (she works in the cubicle next to me at the plant) says I make it too easy for people to take advantage of me, but I don't agree. I know sometimes it looks as if I'm getting used, but I really
do
know what's going on. I'm running out of space here. Say hello to heaven for me, and Jon-Erik Hexum, too. Did you ever meet him? He was on an old nighttime TV soap and … well … that'sanother story. Cheers to you, honey.

Your loving and loyal fan always,

Randy

1402 Chattanauqua Street

Erie, Pennsylvania

PS: I found the Wyoming license plate for you at a yard sale the day your plane crashed. I think it was a sign of some sort.

Beneath Susan's photo was the Wyoming plate, a Charlie Brown Pez dispenser with a dozen candy refills, a bottle each of shampoo and conditioner from a Marriott hotel, and a copy of
TV Guide
with the cast of
Meet the Blooms
on the cover. Susan knelt, looked both ways to ensure nobody was watching, took the letter, folded it up, slipped it into her pants pocket, and then put the shampoo and conditioner in her nylon sports bag. She walked away from the crash site, attracting not the slightest hint of suspicion from bystanders, and headed down the four-lane road in the opposite direction from the Galvins'. A bus stopped to discharge passengers and Susan got on, paying for her ticket with four quarters from the sports bag's bottom. She took a transfer and, at the bus route's end, hopped onto another bus which drove her into Toledo. She hopped off at a minimall adjoining the Maumee River, and as her feet touched the ground, she did some arithmetic and figured that if Flight 802 hadn't crashed, at that moment as she stood there in the minimall, she would have been driving to her herbalist after finishing her aerobics class in Santa Monica, then maybe heading home to see what the mail had brought, while checking her answering machine.

Her answering machine.
It was probably still connected.

Over by the Blockbuster she saw a phone booth, and once there, she saw that the video store was having a 99-cent Susan Colgate tribute. She dialed her answering system's code numbers, figuring that the odds of anybody analyzing her phone account were minute. A series of bleeps revealed that she had five calls:

«Susan, this is Dreama. I did your numbers for you and boy, is Thursday going to be a heckuva lucky day for you. As your numerologist, I advise, no, I
implore
you to rush out and buy as many lottery tickets as possible — and once you win, treat me to a new set of brakes for this heap of mine that keeps breaking down. Dinner at Chin's next Tuesday. Gimme a call.»

* «Meese
Colllllll
gate … it's Ryan from West Side Video and you're six days overdue with
The Breakfast Club
and the Hitchcock three-pack. You know how cruel we can be to those who displease us. Oh, and I saw you in
Dynamite Bay
and you were really hot. Shoot. Now I've gone outside the boundaries by saying that to a customer, but still, you
were
really hot. I'm Ryan. Say hi next time you come in.»

* A satellite beep followed by the sounds of hanging up.

* Another satellite beep followed by sounds of hanging up.

* Another satellite beep followed by,
«Sooz …»
It was Chris and another beep and his voice sounded highly drunk and highly high. «I …» In the background was muffled German and the sounds of a bar or restaurant. «You …» Something dropped with a clink on the German end. «I guess it's time for walkies, honey.» A man's voice asked Chris who he was speaking with, and he replied, «Max, in Santa Barbara.» Chris breathed for a bit and then hung up.

Susan looked out onto the river, caramel and yellow under the dissolving yellow sundown. In the near distance she heard trucks and air brakes. Music blared from cars at the lot's other end — smoking, groping teens. She took her sports bag, hopped over a small pine shrub and walked down over cracked boulders and rusty industrial fossils to the river's edge. She tested the water with her fingers — cold, the temperature of a cheapskate's swimming pool. She then stripped off all her clothes and Karen Galvin's wig — wigs usually made her scalp itchy and sweaty in any role she played — and she gently walked into the Maumee River, her toes touching mud and rock, her inner legs electrified by the chill, her armpits flinching with shock, and then finally an otter's plunge into the brown broth, emerging far out in the middle, her head periscoping the view of Toledo. A short while later she washed her hair with Randy Montarelli's shampoo, then shook it dry. She dressed and rewigged herself.

Susan walked up the bank and over to a commercial strip of fast food, car dealerships and complex traffic lights. It was now almost dark, and she was hungry, and tired of the chocolate energy bars. She strolled the sidewalk-free neighborhood as if seeing her country for the first time — the signs and cars and lights and shop fronts bigger and brighter and more powerful than they needed to be. She caught whiffs of fried chicken and diesel fumes, but having spent her only quarters, she couldn't buy food. She was starving. She walked for hours. She passed eighty Wendy's, a hundred Taco Bells, seven hundred Exxons, and then she came up on her nine hundredth McDonald's, where she decided to use the bathroom.

On the way into the restaurant she noticed a crew chief walking out a side utility door and over to a dumpster where he tossed away a large tray of fully wrapped, unsold, time-expired burgers. Susan saw her chance. She walked to the dumpster and with an agile climb reminiscent of the aerobics class she might well that moment be attending in a parallel universe, she hopped inside and crammed the sports bag with warm, wrapped cheeseburgers.
Loot.
She heard voices approaching. She quickly dropped the bag and contracted herself into a ball beneath the closed right-side door of the dumpster and listened to teenage banter:

«… gonna go over to Heather's after I lock up.»

«She still sore at you?»

«No way, man.» The second speaker threw two green waste bags into the bin, which rolled down onto Susan's feet. «I bought her a tattoo, and now she's real nice to me, like …»

Whamp!

The left lid crashed down. Susan heard a muffled conversation about women, plus the unmistakable sound of a key locking the door above her.

«Think of how gorgeous we're going to be when you wake up.»

«Mom, it's
me
doing this, not
you.
»

«Susan Colgate, I shucked a helluva lot of bunnies to correct that jaw of yours, and now is
not
the time to be ungrateful about it. Now hold on to my finger and count back from one hundred.»

Susan held on to Marilyn's finger and retro-counted: «A hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven …» and closed her eyes. When she opened them, it was to find herself inside a cool, dimly lit gray room. Marilyn was in the corner smoking exactly half a Salem, extinguishing the remains and then lighting another («Butts are coarse, dear»), all the while avoiding the more intimate questions contained in a magazine quiz about the reader's interior life. She looked up and caught Susan's now open eyes: «Oh sweetie! We look
fabulous,
» and then she rushed over to proudly beam at Susan's face, stained from within by lost and dying blood cells — blue, olive and yellow — her broken and reset jaw stitched and swaddled.

Susan touched her face, which felt disconnected to her, like a rubber Halloween mask. She found her nose was set in a splint. «My 'ose! Wha' 'appened?»

«Happy birthday! I had the doctor throw in a new nose at the same time. We're gonna look sen
sa
tional.»

«You let 'em mangle my
'ose
?» Her voice felt muffled, as though she were speaking from within a pile of carpets.

«Mangle? Hardly. You now have the nose of JenniLu Wheeler, Mrs. Arkansas America.»

«Id's …
my
'ose.» She felt nauseous. Her jaws ached.

«Don't get so exercised, sweetie.»

Susan tried to move her body, which seemed to weigh as much as a house. She'd never felt gravity's pull so strongly. Marilyn said, «We have to stay here in the recuperation room for six more hours. How do you feel?»

«Woozy. 'Eavy.»

«It's the painkillers. I had them give you a double prescription with
two
refills. You know how Don the Swan's back can act up.» Don, Susan's stepfather had, over the years, evolved into a whisky-sunburnt, perpetually incapacitated repairman.

«Don seems to be able to lift his SeaDoo and his bowling balls from the bed of his pickup 'enever he needs to.»

«Susan! We're selling the SeaDoo to move to Wyoming, or are you conveniently choosing to forget this?»

«I don't
want
to go to Wyoming,
Mom.
It was
your
idea. I'm fifteen. Like I 'ave legal say in the matter.»

Marilyn smiled. «Oh! The treachery!»

«Mom, I'm too 'ired to fight. Go get me a mirror.» Marilyn paused upon hearing this. Susan said, «I look 'at bad, huh?»

«It's not a matter of good or bad, dear. I speak from experience. You're covered in bandages. You'll look like hell no matter what.»

«Mom, just show me the stupid mirror.»

Marilyn brought a yellow-handled mirror from the coffee table. Outside in the hallway bandaged figures were being trolleyed by on gurneys. Marilyn held the mirror up for Susan to see her face.

«Ee-
yuuu.
I 'ook like a used Pampers balled up and stuffed in a trash can.»

«Such an imagination, young woman,» said Marilyn, whisking away the mirror. «In three weeks it is going to be scientifically impossible for you to take a bad picture. Do you have any idea what that means? I've already lined up a photographer to come up from Mount Hood. An ex-hippie. Ex-hippies make the best photographers. I don't know why. But they do.» She lit up a Salem. «Speaking of JenniLu Wheeler, I heard that the night before the Miss Dixie contest, her eyes puffed up from too many cocktails with a handful of senators, and they put leeches under her eyes to suck out the puffiness. I never told you that one, did I?»

«No. You 'idn't.»

«She bled like a pig for two days, and she missed the title because of it. Or so the story goes.»

«Lovely, Mom.» Susan relaxed and sunk into the mattress. A nurse stepped into the room and asked Marilyn to extinguish her cigarette.

«Excuse me, young lady, but are we in
Moscow
right now?»

«It's rules, Mrs. Colgate.»

«Where's your manager?» Marilyn asked.

«This is a hospital, not a McDonald's, Mrs. Colgate. We don't have
man
agers.»

«Mom, this is a 'ospital, not the Black Angus. Stub it out.»

«No, Susan — no, I
won't
stub it out. Not until I get an apology from this
insultress.
»

«It's rules, Mrs. Colgate.» But the nurse lost her will to push the issue, and walked away.

Marilyn took a deep victorious inhale. «I always win, don't I, Susan?»

«Yes, Mom. You always do. You're the queen of drama.»

«And that's a compliment?»

Susan decided the smartest course of action was to shut her eyes and feign sleep. It worked. Marilyn returned to her magazine's personality quiz and smoked her victory cigarette. Susan mentally flipped through a catalog of Marilyn's seamless dramas, such as the time in the changing room she spritzed a tightly aimed spray bottle of canola oil at the swimsuit of Miss Orlando Pre-Teene after a close call in the talent contest. Susan played her Beethoven
Für Elise,
but Miss Orlando had played a Bach Goldberg variation, which could sway even the most musically naïve listener in her favor. As a result of the canola oil (to which Marilyn was never linked), Miss Orlando was forced to borrow Miss Chattanooga's one-piece and lost the pageant.

Susan won a mink coat and a Waikiki weekend, both of which were exchanged for cash, and used to cover travel expenses and the household bills. The money was nice, but it was by no means the sole reason for pageantry. «Susan, there is no price tag that can be placed on accomplishment and superiority. Even if you were the richest girl on earth, do you think you could simply
buy
yourself a crown? Winners have an inner glow that cannot even be
dreamt
of in the soul of a nonwinner.»

Marilyn called the pageant business «shucking bunnies,» even though the hutches in which she once bred rabbits to raise money for gowns were long a thing of the past — since Susan integrated Barbie into her essence and began winning solidly around age seven in the Young American Lady, West Coast Division.

«Hey, sweetie, looks like rabbit pelting season sure did start today. The bunnies are hopping for their lives tonight!»

When things were good, when both Marilyn and Susan were on the road, stoked to win, their systems charged with the smell of hair products, Susan could imagine no other mother more wonderful or more giving than Marilyn, and no childhood more exotic or desirable. School was a joke. Marilyn regularly phoned in and lied that Susan was sick. In lieu of school, she made Susan read three books a week as well as take lessons in elocution, modern dance, piano, deportment and French. «School is for losers,» Marilyn told Susan after spinning another yarn about kidney infections to yet another concerned vice-principal. «Trust me on this one, sweetie — you'll never lose if you learn the tricks I'm teaching you.»

And Susan didn't lose. She reassured herself with this thought as her false sleep faded into real dreams.