The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (11 page)

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.

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.

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 5'6
¹¹
, 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.

Audrey knows she was never really a baby girl to Murray anyway, never a daughter. To him, Audrey was only two stumps on the end of a tulip. Her deformity, the mechanical conundrum, was all he saw. She stood as a living question mark to the quality of his genetic material. She was The Horrific, The Real, The Heartbeat of the Beast. She terrified him.

McKenna has mentioned these ideas to Audrey on a few occasions. McKenna provided evidence: For all of Audrey’s life, Murray scampered down to his dungeon whenever his nose detected strawberry shampoo in the air.

“Saintly in his patience . . . Murray’s passion and love provided more than soda pop cans to stand upon. He gave spiritual footing to the footless girl of his dreams.”

“A genteel blue-collar man—a truly Thoreauvian figure who only longed to fulfill the American Dream but whose demanding family choked each of his aspirations until they died.”

Let’s not give the authors of these quotes any free publicity by mentioning any names, nor the titles of their books.

Let’s just say that what most imbeciles have written about Murray Mapes isn’t true.

Even the non-imbeciles could never get it right.

Makes you wonder why people write anything at all.